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

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

#191

Voting is not a monolithic process. It's actually a combination of 3 things: - 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.…

>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. If that's gaming the system, what even is the point of voting?

People can be taught to recognize when they're being duped.

This may be a bit tinfoil hatty of me, but I think the whole anti-woke thing is a ploy to interfere with that kind of education.

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

#192
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the most cursory research into mail-in voting shows a number of safeguards designed into the process; one summary can be found at https://responsivegov.org/research/why-mail-ballots-are-secu... . Instances of mail based voting fraud are extremely rare despite the extremely high motivation of some actors (such as the current US federal leadership) to find any evidence to the contrary.

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A literal "X" is an accepted signature. As-is initials, and printing vs. cursive[1]. A signature is not a way to verify identity.

[1] https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/elections-code/elec-sect-3019/

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

#193
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the most cursory research into mail-in voting shows a number of safeguards designed into the process; one summary can be found at https://responsivegov.org/research/why-mail-ballots-are-secu... . Instances of mail based voting fraud are extremely rare despite the extremely high motivation of some actors (such as the current US federal leadership) to find any evidence to the contrary.

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You don't think those 8 people you stole votes from might ask some questions? This is a self-correcting problem, as evidenced by the fact that the few voting fraud cases that do happen (generally nutbag conservatives convinced they are 'balancing out' fraud by commiting it) are usually quickly found and prosecuted l.

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

#195

It’s not that it’s impossible - it’s that the established players are already questionable. And any new entry would require more than any simple company could provide. Heavy investment and collateral is required. Our livelihoods are increasingly (almost entirely) digital and endure great efforts to abuse. But banking and/or retail operate on a different spectrum. For one they make money. The costs associated allowing…

Prediction: In 2026 the Trump administration will attempt to ban all other forms of voting and will claim that it is in the interests of election security, because the Democrats can't be trusted to count votes (remember the 2020 election was "stolen"?), so we need to mandate all votes be counted electronically using some sketchy electronic voting system, which a company that is very politically friendly to Trump just so happens to be ready to provide. It will get immediately shot down in several courts but it will take months to resolve all the lawsuits, and SCOTUS won't hear the case. This will cause the election to be held in some places but not others, and overall delay final vote tally by several months. Some kind of data breach will occur but details will not be reported. Neither party will trust the election results but won't go so far as to call fraud lest public trust in the system completely unravel.

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

#196

Voting is not a monolithic process. It's actually a combination of 3 things: - 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.…

What I failed to understand is why only in the US the voting procedure is so controversial. Want paper vote? That's racism. Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting? That's definitely racism. It's funny that the US criticized that EU countries were getting less democratic. Well, at least those countries have a much more sane voting process.

I don't understand the critique. Nobody has ever made these claims.

I don't mean this as an ad hominem, but was this comment generated with AI or something?

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US overwhelmingly uses paper voting (often paired with electronic tabulation). We can't "move back", it's where we are. Electronic tabulation introduces little risk when the ballots are paper.

>Electronic tabulation introduces little risk when the ballots are paper. Do European and other first world countries favor electronic tabulation? Is it possible that introduction of all electronic factors reduce trust?

Good data is hard to come by, but from a brief survey electronic precinct tabulation (the most common system in the US) is also in at least partial use in Canada, Mexico, India, the Phillipines, and Russia, and a laundry list of smaller countries.

Now, you might contend that this is not a list of first-world countries exactly (but rather I sampled the largest countries). You must keep in mind that the use of electronic tabulation in the United States is mostly a response to the very limited budget on which elections are carried out; electronic tabulation is much less expensive than significantly increasing staffing. As a result, globally, electronic tabulation tends to be most common in poorer countries or countries with newer election systems, while hand tabulation is most common in wealthier countries with long-established election procedures.

For this reason, the countries you might go to for comparison (like France and Germany) have largely manual election processes that have often seen few changes since the Second World War.

The Help America Vote Act (2002) had a de facto effect of making the United States a country with much newer election processes, as HAVA requires strict accessibility measures that most European election systems do not meet (e.g. unassisted voting for blind and deaf people). Most US election systems didn't meet them either, in 2002, so almost the entire country had to design new election processes over a fairly short span of time and on a shoestring budget. Understandably, election administrators leaned on automation to make that possible.

It's also important to understand that because of the US tradition of special-purpose mill levies and elected independent boards (like school boards), the average US ballot has significantly more questions than the average European ballot. This further increases the cost and complexity of hand tabulation, even ruling out entirely the "optimized" hand tabulation methods used in France and Ireland.

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

#198
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Person who shows up to vote is legally allowed to vote 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.

In a lot of places, it's a photo ID. Usually that required a birth certificate to get, and often a few more pieces of corroborating information to make it harder.

Without a root of trust though, how much good is that? When I needed a copy of my birth certificate to get a CA driver's license, I just sent my home state $10-$20 and pinky promised that I was me. Getting utility bills or whatever delivered to your favorite name isn't hard either. It's cheap and easy to bootstrap your way into somebody's identity.

Maybe the payout isn't worth it, but (a) empirically, people seem to be willing to spend a lot more than that per vote if necessary, and (b) it's not substantially harder or riskier to do that than to risk prison voting for a dead person or whatever else some fraudster might cook up; if we think this is an important system which people are trying to rig then the proposed cure just keeps honest people honest.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do both like we do here in GA. You vote on a computer, it prints out a piece of paper, you walk the paper over to some kind of scanner, and then it is deposited into a giant trash can. (maybe they keep the paper records, idk) - these are the dominion systems. (memories..) When I lived in NYC there was a giant lever you got to use - it was pretty fun - but positioning the actual paper was kind of tricky. I think…

Minnesota has a better system. You fill in a paper ballot using a pen, and the paper ballot gets optically scanned. Besides avoiding any issues (real or imagined) with touchscreens, it makes it extremely cheap to stand up more polling places with more booths, since only one tabulator is needed; the booths themselves can just be little standing tables with privacy protectors.

>Minnesota has a better system. You fill in a paper ballot using a pen, and the paper ballot gets optically scanned.

>Besides avoiding any issues (real or imagined) with touchscreens,

Wait... I don't think these are the complaints being made against internet voting at all. The problem is with a computer counting and reporting it, right? Centralized, less transparent, etc.

I dont view writing my vote on paper and scanning it to be paper voting if it's just immediately fed into a computer.

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

#200
post #5

The most important feature of public elections is trust. Efficiency is one of the least important feature. When we moved away from paper voting with public oversight of counting to electronic voting we significantly deteriorated trust, we made it significantly easier for a hostile government to fake votes, all for marginal improvements in efficiency which don't actually matter. Moving to internet voting will further…

The US overwhelmingly uses paper voting (often paired with electronic tabulation). We can't "move back", it's where we are. Electronic tabulation introduces little risk when the ballots are paper.

As we learned from Dominion... depends who manufactures the machine.
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