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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

#101

Post by autoexec »

velcrovan wrote: post #67
liveoneggs wrote: post #37

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.

This really is the best way to do it. Scantron gives fast results and you get a paper physical record which shows the actual ballot exactly as it was presented to the voter along with what their vote was.

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

#102

Post by pa7ch »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #75
maxerickson wrote: post #41

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?

Risk limiting audits are why this work. You physically sample ballots at random. The number you sample grows as the gap in the electronic tally shrinks to reach high confidence the election was tabulated correctly.

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

#103

Post by sjm-lbm »

velcrovan wrote: post #67
liveoneggs wrote: post #37

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.

This was common in Texas, but becomes challenging when one polling place serves voters that might have different elections to vote for - say, at a polling place on the line between two school districts or something like that. You can't just print one sheet of paper, and it to everyone, and call it a day. Toss in a few different jurisdictions that don't directly overlay each other, and the number of combinations become nontrivial.

(the machines used in Texas vary by county, in my county we use Hart InterCivic machines that are touchscreen but produce a paper trail - honestly I think it works well)

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

#104

Post by seanmcdirmid »

phanimahesh wrote: post #92
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard great things about the way that India votes. It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.

Very. Every voter is guaranteed a booth nearby ( https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/5/8/an-election-booth... Also https://www.reuters.com/world/india/family-remote-himalayas-...

As a kid living in Vicksburg MS in the late 80s, this is what irked me about in person voting. We lived in county but in a fairly dense suburban area with some biggish apartments nearby (SFH was mostly white, the apartments were mostly black). Our polling site was way out in the boonies, somewhere you could never get to without driving for 45 minutes...I was shocked when my dad took me with him.

There was really no good reason for that, unless they were really against a certain segment of the population voting (a lot of people in the apartments didn't have cars, or were too busy to go so far to vote).

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

#105

Post by cael450 »

plagiarist wrote: post #86
xmprt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should move back to paper voting. We already use paper voting. If you mean go back to a time before voting machines, then I fear that would actually reduce trust because the amount of tabulation errors, data entry, and spoilt ballots would skyrocket. The only people who are increasing doubt in voting machine are the same people who are trying to disenfranchise voters and not accepting the results of past electio…

They did start a recount! IIRC SCOTUS, at that time already taken over by partisans, illegally ruled to force the original results on us instead of correctly ruling for all FL districts to use the same methodology when performing the tallies.

Yeah. The Republicans blatantly sabotaged the recount and everyone shrugged and moved on.

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

#106

Post by burnt-resistor »

randomcatuser wrote: post #56

what about crypto voting schemes? zero knowledge and all that if we assume the user connection is secure (ie, about as secure as banking), can we have secure internet voting?

Not exactly. Centralized transactions on a blockchain ledger using hierarchical aggregation of tiers of voting collection points where each municipality includes their digital signature. And receipts for all voters that are easily verifiable against a publicly-readable ledger.

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

#107

Post by dstroot »

gpt5 wrote: 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…

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, auditable voting system. Do I believe any of the current vendors have done that? NO. But I believe it could be done.

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

#108

Post by pfisch »

gpt5 wrote: 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 only thing seriously reducing trust in elections is anti-democratic politicians who will ALWAYS find a convenient reason to claim the election is rigged, and many of their followers will believe and propagate that lie to create distrust in the election.

There is really nothing we can do to satisfy these people except create some kind of structure they demand which will somehow be made to heavily lean in their favor. That is what will satisfy them. Nothing else will.

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

#109

Post by autoexec »

dbcurtis wrote: post #21
gpt5 wrote: 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…

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.

> 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.

Why should you be forced to trust that what you're shown is also what was being counted? The paper record should be the actual ballot itself, with your actual vote on it.

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

#110

Post by jpollock »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #66
jpollock wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet voting needs to be anonymous and non demonstrable. Internet money needs to be the opposite, and reversible through the courts.

>Internet voting needs to be anonymous and non demonstrable Why? Honestly Internet voting would improve overall turnout, which seems more important. And we probably could accomplish anonymity with some clever cryptography.

Anonymity keeps the government from locking you up if you vote the wrong way. Non-demonstrable keeps you from selling your vote to your boss.

That is why you typically show id, get a ballot and there is no relationship between the two.

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