UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

Almost certainly the only one doing it well and at scale

This is why in liberal democracies the process of casting and counting votes is usually done in the presence of at least representatives of the candidates running and more usually whoever wants to attend them

You'd need total complicity in every single polling station to cheat without raising alarms

In electronic/internet voting, unless there is a paper trail which can be counted in the same manner as manual voting, all you need is government officials to tweak the code/the hardware being used. Are you going to let every candidate audit every single machine independently? Unlikely since that is, in and of itself, a security risk

> where the officials just threw out paper ballots

And since they had to physically remove material evidence we were able to get videos of it happening. Plugging an USB while the machine is in the warehouse or in the middle of voting can be done a lot more discreetly

> counting is left to individuals which will commit voter fraud

Which is why counting is usually done with supervision

The system in India works, but it works because it reduces the entire process to a paper ballot. Ultimately the security guarantees of the Indian elections are identical to the security guarantees of the traditional paper ballot system

The digital component is limited to easing the logistics of getting the first results of the election in a timely manner

Which is about the extent to which you should trust electronic voting

One reason is efficiency, if you have the machines counting you get results faster and then you can audit only a random sample of machines records and get statistical guarantees of the election integrity. (The machine can't know before that it will be audited so if you test thousands of machines and find no discrepancy it's highly unlikely a significant portion of the others did cheat)

A second is that it allows one more level of trust. With a paper ballot you have to trust that the poll workers are going to notice/stop/not help ballot stuffing etc. In most cases that's a good enough guarantee, but with voting machines you can also trust the people who programmed audited it

If the poll workers are trustworthy, because of the paper trail, you don't have to trust the auditers of the machines, but if you don't trust the poll workers then you can gain a modicum of trust from the auditers

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/12/06/how-elect...

This link talks about the benefits in the indian election, specifically a software lock on the amount of votes per minute that can be cast

It also shows that in 2013 they audited "only" 20k machines out of almost millions yet found no discrepancy. Statistically that's probably good enough if the choice of machines audited was random

One last way it might be useful, though this is an abstract scenario, is if you want to deploy a more complicated to count voting system to large areas. In some voting systems counting can't be done in parallel, you need to do one round of counting, wait for everyone else and then do a second round and so on.

Similarly some voting systems might benefit from a digitized interface (for instance ballots in austria look like this: https://cdn1.vienna.at/2013/09/zettel.jpg and there are systems which would lead to even larger forms) which outputs a paper trail with only the actual information the voter inputed (in the case of the ballot I showed it'd pretty much just show a party name and a list of candidate names)

In these cases a machine outputting an auditable digital model of the votes cast would greatly simplify counting procedures. You could have every polling station just publish a signed file with the votes in their station and everyone could run the election algorithm

The votes can then be audited same as in the indian system

This varies by jurisdiction obviously, but where I'm from the procedure for counting must be done in an area which the public can access and it begins with a single person taking ballots out of the box one by one and giving it to a chain of 2-3 other people.

This way you can count how many ballots were taken out of the box and check with the totals at the end

And obviously the box is always in the presence of observers from various stakeholders

> less than 43,000 votes

Unless you can predict where these tiny margins will manifest with perfect accuracy you'd need to add a lot more fake votes, or at least have thousands of conspirators ready to add them at a moment's notice, that's ridiculously hard to organize discreetly

> It also shows that in 2013 they audited "only" 20k machines out of almost millions yet found no discrepancy. Statistically that's probably good enough if the choice of machines audited was random

So how do you protect against the corrupt actor manipulating every machine except the percent that will be checked?

> With a paper ballot you have to trust that the poll workers are going to notice/stop/not help ballot stuffing etc

There's a simple and straight forward solution: Have people from opposing political parties count the vote and check each others result. If you have members of the far left, far right and everything in between sitting there, checking each others results, theres about a 0% chance any vote will be miscounted.

> In these cases a machine outputting an auditable digital model of the votes cast would greatly simplify counting procedures. You could have every polling station just publish a signed file with the votes in their station and everyone could run the election algorithm

There is no difference between a machine publishing the counted votes and the poll workers publishing the counted votes, is there?