And a favorite Phrack article on the same topic - Internet Voting: A Requiem for the Dream [1]
Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
251–260 of 532 posts
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#252I live in an economy where people vote with pencils on paper in cardboard booths and at scalable cost, it just works. Obviously the cost also has to scale linearly for the 200+m voter economies, and time becomes a factor, but for community acceptance I still think paper and pen/pencil beats machine hands down. (this is Australia. we have compulsory attendance at voting booths for eligible citizens, you can spoil your…
I've heard great things about the way that India votes. It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.
Maybe, but the election ink stuff feels a bit overboard.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem, as I understand it, is that if you can prove to yourself that your vote was counted right, you can also prove it to the guy with the sledgehammer next to you saying "it would be a shame if something happened to your family, so prove how you voted"...
Such a weird argument. I've never met anybody with a sledgehammer threatening votes. Feels like a willfully absurd excuse to avoid having an audit trail in elections.
Then you haven’t lived under a dictatorship. It might not be a sledgehammer, but breaking voter secrecy and pressuring people to vote the “right” way is very much a thing.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#254Earlier 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.
> We can't "move back", it's where we are. vote by mail (and similar ballot harvesting, bulk ballot dropoffs with hazy chain-of-custody as from a nursing homes and immigrant communities) are new, based on paper, and open to abuse. It's not where we were. traditional absentee balloting was a small scale thing used by college students, military personnel, etc. and if it was messed up, it was not likely to change outcom…
So the question(s) to ask are:
1. why did absentee voting/vote by mail expand? What was the claimed intention and purpose? What has been the actual result (and based on what evidence) ?
2. who has an interest in underming confidence in vote by mail and why? What evidence do they offer that it actually is a problem?
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to trust the voting place/ballot receiver in all cases. Like, after they take your name, you need to make sure that they aren't secretly associating your name with the ballot you are filling in. Likewise, if you vote by mail, you need to make sure that they aren't associating your identity on the envelope with the anonymous ballot inside the envelope.
This is a solved problem for in-person voting with indentical ballots and self-depositing into sealed ballot boxes. It is an unsolvable problem for mail in voting, which is why it should be prohibited in most cases.
It’s also a solved problem for mail in.
Double envelope systems, observable counting systems and standardized ballots that can checked for non uniqueness before voting are how they do it.
People have thought hard about this, and it has worked fine for may states for decades now.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many people spend time making their selections on the computer, then compare every single selection on the print out? Deniers could say the computer randomly prints votes to skew in certain candidate/party direction knowing not everyone would catch it. all it would take is one person saying their printed ballot does not match their specific selection, and the whole thing would become chaos.
We agree. Don't use computers. Scantron is only there to get a fast count for the news agencies. Manual counting of physical paper ballots would still be done anyway.
To manually count by hand every ballot would mean not finding out a complete tally well until after Jan 20. When election day and inauguration day was selected, the number of ballots to count were a mere fraction of today's count.
Manually counting votes is so error prone that I'd have less confidence in it than a scantron type of ballot. At this point, I'm more in favor of giving each voter a ball/bead/chip to drop into a bucket for each position on the ballot. After checking in, you go to each position to receive your one token. If you don't visit a position, you do not get a token to pass to someone else. Tallying the votes could be as quick as weighing the bucket as the weight of the bucket/token will be known. Each election can change size/weight/color of tokens to be unique. If the weights total an irrational weight, it would be deemed suspect and a hand sort of the tokens can be done to find the odd token.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#257I live in an economy where people vote with pencils on paper in cardboard booths and at scalable cost, it just works. Obviously the cost also has to scale linearly for the 200+m voter economies, and time becomes a factor, but for community acceptance I still think paper and pen/pencil beats machine hands down. (this is Australia. we have compulsory attendance at voting booths for eligible citizens, you can spoil your…
Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen. the counting is done by simple photoelectronic tabulators and there is a built-in, human readable record that can be checked by hand. It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect. i hate the idea of using internet voting. I also don’t trust the electronic voting booths where the whole action is virtual or the older mechanical systems with the chads. Just a pen and paper is sufficient.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the wrong perspective. The minute votes go into the mail system there is no way to know just how many mail-in votes might be subject to fraud. In other words, your characterization has no basis in evidence. Note that I am not asserting that massive fraud has been committed anywhere. That statement would be as impossible to support with evidence as yours. The only thing you can state with absolute certainty is…
> There's also nothing to prevent bad actors from destroying ballots in large quantities. Around here (WA state), you can check to see if your ballot was received and accepted. If a bad actor destroys ballots in large quantities on their way to voters, many voters will notice and complain. If a bad actor destroys ballots in large quantities on their way to to the counting facility, some voters are likely to notice an…
No one has trouble getting an ID. You need an ID to drive, to work, to open a bank account, to buy liquor or tobacco, etc. The idea that someone can’t get an ID is absolute nonsense.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#259Electronic processes are way to easy to rig one way or the other.:
Tom Scott: Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs
Sure, there are ways to cheat with paper votes too. But counting paper ballots should always be open to watch for voters interested in observing the process. And voting should be done in secret, disallowing photos, to make it hard to "prove" the vote to possible buyers.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously. A key part of India's system is the Elector's Photo Identity Card (EPIC), required to cast ballots. Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously.
>Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously. The flip side is even more true. If someone is claiming they care about election integrity and isn't willing to pair that with funding of an equivalent ID system that is both free and easy for voters to acquire, they don't actually care about election integrity.
This needs to be said loudly from the rooftops.
If your voter ID system isn’t 100% free and absolutely effortless for voters to obtain, it’s a badly disguised vote suppression scheme.
It’s pretty much always a vote suppression scheme.