Vote should be in person at a designated place, based on a census.
There's absolutely no justification (or excuse) for anything else.
It is much better to have less votes than to allow any avenues for manufacturing the results.
Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
331–340 of 532 posts
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if there's a way to make forging work. You can't forge a new ballot, because ballot IDs are necessarily public, and are cryptographically tied to a voter ID in order to ensure votes are valid and that everybody only votes once. But it seems like nothing is stopping you from looking up ballots at random until you find the votes you want, and then claiming that was your vote. And if someone else got paid f…
You don't forge a ballot. You are forging the proof of your vote.
[deleted]
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#333I 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…
That seems common sense. It’s wild that this is an extremist position in the US now.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Hand counts are kind of obnoxious but they can't be beat for transparency. There's no reason it has to be done at once either. Ideally people would be able to vote over several days and counting can start right away.
Balls/tokens aren't a bad idea either though, but it sounds like people pocketing a ball/token would force a manual count even if they kept them since the total weight of all buckets combined would be off. I'd also worry about people bringing in heavier or lighter balls/tokens but the bigger risk would be poll workers handing out heavier or lighter balls/tokens to specific people (or types of people) because it'd be easier to make sure the weights would add up in the end.
Maybe we could force everyone to vote at every position (which should have an abstain option) then have the machine check the weight of every ball/token as it was inserted, and verify that one but only one was inserted, before it fell into the selected bucket?
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#335I live in Spain, and we have paper-based elections. Similar to what I've read from other comments, in our system, people are randomly selected to participate in oversight and counting. Different actors in the elections are able to oversee the process and count. Counts are performed by the randomly selected people and sent to headquarters from the site itself. Then, each ballot box count is available for display right after the counts are completed. Ballots are transported by the police to a safe location in case a recount is needed or randomly selected.
I'm leaving out other measures and details, but you get the general idea.
I used to flirt with the idea of a digital voting system, but now I clearly see that it is a problem of scale. It's very difficult to interfere with an election at scale when many independent actors and parallel flows are in place. This is what provides the system with its trustworthiness.
However, I think fraud is moved elsewhere (with campaign funding, fake news, and other methods...), but that's a whole different topic
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Australia really uses erasable pencil markings to vote? I would feel much better if they required ink.
Yes, and the reasons are outlined by the Australian Electoral Commission, the independent body that runs Australian elections (see the first FAQ)[0]. There are scrutineers that watch counting happen at the booth once polls close, and who also see and hear the numbers get phoned into HQ. HQ has more scrutineers from all parties checking both postal votes and recounts. If anything doesn't match up it gets flagged. I th…
> If anything doesn't match up it gets flagged. I think that the ability of every party to watch votes themselves means that trust is increased, and they have skin in the game (if they didn't object at the booth why not!?).
I mean the same is true in the United States. One of the key issues with the 2020 election was footage from several jurisdictions where the public was physically blocked from viewing the counting by election officials literally holding up giant white boards. The optics of that were extremely bad.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I’d like to respectfully challenge you on this. There is no chance anyone can ever create an effortless-to-get ID. Even if it was like the census where they sent someone to your house repeatedly to try to find you, take your picture and print an ID on the spot, it wouldn’t be effortless because you might not know where your passport or birth certificate are. Some people probably are so badly organized and/or ignorant…
> By the way, a state ID costs $15 in Mississippi and $9 for “eligible people” in California.
If it costs a penny and is a requirement to vote, it is an unconstitutional poll tax.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#338The 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 most important feature of public elections is trust. Agreed. However, in some states, such as California, mail-in voting has become the default. What's used to verify identity and integrity? Your signature from your voter's affidavit of registration, a signature from any past voter form, or literally an "X"[1]. Your signature doesn't even need to match, it just must have "similar characteristics". You can print…
I volunteered at Fairview development center in Costa Mesa CA, which is a place where dozens of disabled residents lived. These people could not talk, move, etc. They were essentially quadriplegics; mentally completely not there; etc. I was a high school student helping move residents to Sunday service and back and doing activities with them (volunteer hours). I clearly remember seeing nurses and others mark ballots of residents that were in no fit state to vote (unable to communicate at all; those who could were often not mentally competent enough to make their own medical decisions, let alone decide who to vote for). I don't think anyone cares to be totally honest. I was shocked the residents even got absentee ballots. Of course, competent adults should be able to vote, but at the point where you're essentially a child mentally? I mean ... how can anyone possibly figure it out. I did lodge a complaint, but nothing came of it.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mostly agree, but we don’t have to give up the benefits of direct digital tabulation for quick results. I would like a paper audit trail. Print my ballot-as-cast for on a paper roll that scrolls by under a window. I can verify it before leaving the voting booth. Recounts and challenges can be a computer scan of the paper roll. None of this is hard. Costs a bit more, but buys trust in the system.
You don't necessarily need any sort of electronic counting for quick results. Federal elections in Australia are usually called late on the voting day and I imagine the same is true for other countries that are paper-only.
Oh but you see in America, it takes us more than three weeks to count ballots.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#340The 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…
I suppose I'm an optimist. I believe it is possible to create a secure online voting system. My life savings might be held at Fidelity, Merrill, or elsewhere, my banking is online, 90% of my shopping is online and it all has "good enough" security. Plus most banks seem to be well behind the state of the art in security. I believe with the technologies we have available today, we could create a secure, immutable, audi…
It's of course possible. In fact electronic voting could be safer. The issue is that voting has nothing to do with technical details of safety and everything to do with trust. If your electorate doesn't understand modular arithmetic, then there's no point to electronic voting.