And Nepal elected its current interim prime minsiter using Discord, apparently...
I came here to mention this. At the end of the day it's a circle of trust that keeps things moving in a positive direction
Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
351–360 of 532 posts
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#352Earlier 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 […] $9 for “eligible people” in California.
A state ID is not required to register to vote in CA[1]. (The requirement is CA ID number or last-four-of-SSN or a third complicated way, but I'm assuming ID or SSN is attainable for nigh everyone eligible.)
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a town in Alabama that skipped elections for 60 years; they'd just hand it off to a buddy. Someone finally registered to run and won by default, so ten days later they had a secret do-over to avoid a Black mayor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newbern,_Alabama#Mayoral_dispu...
Hadn't heard about that one. Fascinating. Especially since the Black mayor then challenged the secret do-over, won, as was reinstated as mayor. Then the next year there was an actual election for the first time in over 60 years, and the Black mayor won reelection 66 to 26. Not 66% to 26%, 66 votes to 26 votes . Which just goes to show what a small town that was. P.S. Population of that town in 2020, according to the…
Now here's the kicker - he resigned! Apparently he doesn't really live in the town and wasn't eligible to run for mayor after all.
https://www.al.com/news/2026/01/first-black-mayor-of-alabama...
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
it seems like encoded receipts are a simple solution for electronic auditability. Voter registry is used to generate traceable but anonymous keys Used when voting Votes are electronically counted. Voters can check their votes against the count Third parties can check vote counts against the anonymized registry
It depends on what "Voters can check their votes" means since you have to make sure that nobody can take a receipt to see which way someone (including themselves) voted. You're also still stuck trusting that what your receipt said matches what actually got counted. The best paper record is the actual ballot you yourself marked and turned in. It shows exactly what the ballot said and it shows what your selection was.…
I think there's nothing wrong with giving people a way to check that their vote was counted for the party or person they intended.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#355Hey all, coauthor here. Interesting to see it on Hacker News. I'm a professor in Georgia Tech's CS dept that works on problems related to security, privacy, and public policy. (CV: https://mikespecter.com/ ) Happy to answer any questions you all have.
Have you had a look at the Swiss post e-voting system and how it deals with verification?
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#356I 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 me…
>Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen.
>It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect.
Vote-by-mail creates unnecessary opportunities for cheating, irregularities, and all sorts of foolishness. If you can fill in the bubbles, you could theoretically fill them in for other people. People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times. You don't even need a valid signature; states allow witnesses to vouch. Ballot boxes get vandalized. Ballot harvesting is rampant. There's so many problems. It's for the same reason universities don't allow take-home exams.
Vote-by-mail states are open targets for mockery (and rightfully so) as it routinely takes days or weeks to count all the ballots and declare a winner. Third-world backwaters can do it in the same night. This is a solved problem.
Whenever vote-by-mail is criticized, people get really upset. How do you think the other states do it? The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water. Most states allow early voting for weeks. If you can find time to visit a post office or ballot box, you can certainly go to the library or a church basement for the 5 minutes it takes to fill in the bubbles, stick it in the machine and you absolutely know it's counted. And results will be available election night.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#357I 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…
> it just works
The biggest reason "it just works" is that the Australian Electoral Commission, the organisation that sets electoral boundaries and runs the election, is independent of the government. Other reasons are compulsory voting and preferential voting. In my mind, it is these three things that keep Australia's democracy relatively healthy.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#358Earlier 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"...
By that logic we have to get rid of mail-in voting as well because there could always be a sledgehammer guy standing next to someone in their own home.
By that logic we should require DNA testing because, you never know, someone might go to a polling place and lie about their name and have a fake ID too.
You never can be too careful!
Also, maybe someone inside will take their ballot from them.
IMHO this voting thing is too risky. We should just go back to having a ruling family /s
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#359So my internet banking is secure for my funds, but internet voting is not for my vote. Right... OK, we got the message.
Internet banking has security breaches and errors more often than you might think, it is just much easier to track down and retroactively fix any problems. The problem with elections is retroactively fixing a voting problem doesn't always happen and some of the most powerful people and groups have interests in preventing it and the common people have little real recourse when the cards come down other than rioting and potentially insurrection before they know the true results.
Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some do think so, but there is also a material difference in needing to be intimidated at the time of the vote being cast vs any point in the future as well.
For me the problem with mail-in votes is that they are (in many jurisdictions) allowed to come in long after the in-person voting is closed, and the preliminary results are annouced. So it creates the space for manipulations, where you count the in-person votes first, and, if the score is close, then a week after the election day half a million of mail-in votes mysteriously comes in and swings the vote one way or ano…
The postmark must be on or before voting day. I cannot fathom how people have bought into this idea that they can be sent after the preliminary voting has happened.