Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

Hackers get into people's bank accounts, medical records, etc. all the time. We know that these systems are massively insecure. Also, none of those things are kept secret from everyone involved. Your bank gets to know how much you paid for something. Your doctor gets to know what your xray showed. The judge can see what court documents you filed. There are a lot of eyes on that data and trails to catch problems. Nobody is allowed to know how you vote. It's a very different problem than the online submission of bank transactions and court records.

There are also robust systems for correcting the record when something goes wrong. Sadly still not enough in place to protect the people whose data gets stolen or leaked, but that's another topic.

How does that work though? What's the root of trust identifying me as me to a government who, at most, has a written record somewhere of my birth, and definitely not enough information to tie that to any particular face or body.

https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57152/why-isnt-...

- How votes are cast

- How votes are counted

- How votes are custodied

In order for an election to be trusted, all three steps must be transparent and auditable.

Electronic voting makes all three steps almost absolutely opaque.

Here's how Mexico solves this. We may have many problems, but "people trust the vote count" is not one of them:

1. Everyone votes, on paper, in their local polling station. The polling station is manned by volunteers from the neighborhood, and all political parties have an observer at the station.

2. Once the polling station closes, votes are counted in the station, by the neighborhood volunteers, and the counts are observed by the political party observers.

3. Vote counts are then sent electronically to a central system. They are also written on paper and the paper is displayed outside the poll both for a week.

The central system does the total count, but the results from each poll station are downloadable (to verify that the net count matches), and every poll station's results are queryable (so any voter can compare the vote counts displayed on paper outside the station to the online results).

Because the counting is distributed, results are available night-of in most cases.

Elections like this can be gamed, but the gaming becomes an exercise in coercing people to vote counter to their preference, not "hacking" the system.

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Edit: Some people are confused about what I mean by "coerced." Coerced in this case means "forced to vote in some way."

The typical way this is done is as follows:

- The "coercer" obtains a blank ballot (for example, by entering the ballot box and hiding the ballot away).

- The blank ballot is then filled out in some way outside the poll station.

- A person is given the pre-filled ballot and threatened to cast it, which they will prove by returning a blank ballot.

- Rinse and repeat.

This mode of cheating is called the "revolving door" for obvious reasons.