181–190 of 207 posts
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The order has to be random or you can trace votes to individuals if you keep the order in which they voted.
In some voting systems (eg, the UK's), this is a feature, not a bug. Ballot serials are recorded against electoral register entries, and the courts have de-anonymized ballots in a few cases.
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A former co-worker of mine wrote software for voting machines in Brazil. He described to me a few reasons why electronic voting machines are important. To be honest I forget the majority, but one story that stuck with me: One common scheme electronic voting machines help prevent is forced votes. A bad guy gets their hand on a single empty ballot and writes the name of the candidate he wants to win on it. He then come…
Voter coercion is something to be concerned about but the scenario you describe won't keep me up at night. The number one problem is it's hard to scale up to a level that would actually sway an election. It only takes one hero to call the police while they're at the polling station or after their family is released and the sequence is broken. There's no need for the victim to actually submit the pre-filled ballot, th…
Doesn't scale is a concept that only developers and entrepreneurs understand. Sadly, that makes it an invalid argument for the other 98% of the population.
E-Voting can be easily solved with ID cards combined with something similar to the blockchain so that you can verify your vote if you need to. The technology is there but I don't think there is any incentive to make it happen. The only problem that I can see is that we cannot be certain that any e-voting technology will survive future information security research and as a result the design needs to factor continuous…
E-Voting can be easily solved with ID cards combined with something similar to the blockchain so that you can verify your vote if you need to. The technology is there but I don't think there is any incentive to make it happen. The only problem that I can see is that we cannot be certain that any e-voting technology will survive future information security research and as a result the design needs to factor continuous…
The problem is that if you can verify your vote you can be coerced into voting in a certain way. There would need to be some sort of plausible deniability built in.
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All good points, maybe there could be one testing machine per area or zipcode instead of one per room. People wouldn't know which voting booth would be tested. If the test pass potential false positive are still there, but you at least a quantifiable bit of error catching and restricted scoping. Cost still up for sure, but maybe people wouldn't mind paying a bit more instead of 100% for trust in the system. Would pro…
I don't think we can prevent fraud, the best we can do is source voting machines according to a spec from multiple vendors, and source software from multiple vendors as well, and do independent inspections of both by multiple 3rd parties. It would be a significant undertaking to compromise everything. With a paper vote, you place trust in those who collect, store and, count, and you can always recount if needed. With…
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I forget the statistical term but after the fact, you can't go back and say "look at this, only 107K votes determined the outcome" because you can always find such explanations post hoc. I tried to search but couldn't find the discussion but one example is how couples use this type of fallacy to "prove" their love was fated. Typically on the day the fated couple met there were a number of unusual events or circumstan…
So perhaps one can only practicably rig close elections.
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Yes but that is not the point. You can also add votes to electronic voting by just allowing someone to cast more votes at it. But the difference is that with paper voting, you as a single actor can only influence one voting booth, while as a hacker, you can manipulated thousands of voting machines. So the influence of a single actor could be much bigger. Furthermore, while you can manipulate a paper ballot, you can o…
>> ...with paper voting, you as a single actor can only influence one voting booth, while as a hacker, you can manipulated thousands of voting machines. That depends where the person is. The people managing the process, those doing the counting, have plenty of opportunity for large manipulations. There are safeguards, but the possibility remains and must be accounted for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A former co-worker of mine wrote software for voting machines in Brazil. He described to me a few reasons why electronic voting machines are important. To be honest I forget the majority, but one story that stuck with me: One common scheme electronic voting machines help prevent is forced votes. A bad guy gets their hand on a single empty ballot and writes the name of the candidate he wants to win on it. He then come…
Bad guy is easily defeated. "I'm sorry, I've accidentally spoiled my ballot and marked the wrong candidate, may I have a new one to fill?" Bad guy's ballot goes in the trash, you fill the spare new one, you still have the original blank one to hand back to him. Bad guy wasted his time.