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Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

theregister.com

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Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#211

Post by throwaway5752 »

sonofhans wrote: post #207
ninalanyon wrote: post #201

Why is everyone so obsessed with automating voting? It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.

Control. If you can centralize all voting results in a single place you can control distribution of them. If you are the only entity able to read the results then everyone else has to take your word for it. Paper ballots with physical marks are easy to track and recount. Digital paper trails are ephemeral. Whom does this benefit? The people counting the ballots.

As the article notes, the Swiss do both. The normal system is a paper ballot based system. This was for secure e-voting for those unable to use paper ballots.

The separate question, of why people are obsessed with it - implicitly in the United States - is a separate question.

sonofhans - to reply to your follow up here, I mostly agree with you. But I would soften it to say it is a tool that can be used for good or bad ends, and I felt the Swiss were using it more towards good ends. But I agreed that the ability to misuse it is intrinsic.

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#212

Post by mulmen »

dolni wrote: post #49
stetrain wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That being said, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens. This is where such arguments tend to get stuck in the US. If you require proof of citizenship, but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expen…

> but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expensive Where in the US do you find it's difficult for people to get an ID? Where is it not? What percentage of the population has an ID in a place where it's difficult to get one vs somewhere it is easier? What constitutes an ID being expensive? Nearly every country in the world requires proof of citizenship to vote. How…

> Where in the US do you find it's difficult for people to get an ID?

Minority and poor areas.

> Where is it not?

White and affluent areas.

This isn’t hypothetical. Voter suppression is as American as apple pie.

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#213

Post by natebc »

pseudalopex wrote: post #140
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess most people don't have a proof of citizenship handy. This would get even worse if the effort to get rid of birthright citizenship succeeds, how would you even prove you are a citizen? This would be less of a problem if the US had some sort of national ID issued by right, but we don't, and the same people pushing for requiring ID for voting would be against creating one. They hate the idea of a national…

> My state does all elections by mail now. How would this even work? Trump told Congress to ban most mail ballots. > All this is on top of the fact that elections are run by the states, not the national government. Would such a law even be constitutional? Experts said no. But this Supreme Court surprised experts before. And the constitution said Congress could decide elections of Congress. They have the power. They n…

It's not really up to Trump or Congress though is it?

Elections are run by the several states.

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#214

Post by sonofhans »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #211
sonofhans wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Control. If you can centralize all voting results in a single place you can control distribution of them. If you are the only entity able to read the results then everyone else has to take your word for it. Paper ballots with physical marks are easy to track and recount. Digital paper trails are ephemeral. Whom does this benefit? The people counting the ballots.

As the article notes, the Swiss do both. The normal system is a paper ballot based system. This was for secure e-voting for those unable to use paper ballots. The separate question, of why people are obsessed with it - implicitly in the United States - is a separate question. sonofhans - to reply to your follow up here, I mostly agree with you. But I would soften it to say it is a tool that can be used for good or ba…

You are suggesting that it is a separate question. I am suggesting that it is not.

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#215

Post by CaptWillard »

jfengel wrote: post #148
buckle8017 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sure. And the weak evidence still isn't powerful, because so much effort had to be expended to gain it. If cheating were widespread it would have been detected much more easily. Instead, efforts to clean up the voter rolls never cause people to get caught. But they do cause many legitimate voters to lose the ability to vote.

> If cheating were widespread it would have been detected much more easily.

This is a ridiculous assertion.

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#217

Post by ge96 »

ninalanyon wrote: post #201

Why is everyone so obsessed with automating voting? It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.

I'm still annoyed in the US I can't just show up and vote. The one time I wanted to vote "sorry you're not registered" like what? I'm a citizen just let me vote, oh well. And I was too late to register at the time.

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#218

Post by UltraSane »

ninalanyon wrote: post #201

Why is everyone so obsessed with automating voting? It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.

Every vote should be a separate piece of paper. My preferred voting method are the fill in the bubble sheets that get scanned as they go into the locked box. They automate the vote count but can be manually counted if needed.

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#219

Post by eqvinox »

ninalanyon wrote: post #202
eqvinox wrote: post #163

sigh This is why you do parallel paper/electronic voting. Fill it out electronically, it prints a receipt (maybe including a QR code), you mail the receipt (along with the 'classic' absentee voting stuff, i.e. double envelope, proof of eligibility to vote in the outer envelope.) Oh and as a side effect it can be audited very nicely.

If you are doing paper voting why bother with voting machines at all? What's the benefit?

Immediate results without miscounts and at far lower cost. Given some confidence into the system, you'd only audit the paper ballots stochastically for a randomly chosen, say, 5% of election districts each time.

[Whether that's worth it, I'll not make a statement on.]

Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

#220

Post by fireflash38 »

beautiful_apple wrote: post #41
ritzaco wrote: post #12

I don't care how much maths and encryption you use, you can't get out of the fact that things can be anonymous (no one can know how you voted) or verifiable (people can prove that you only voted once) but not both. - Switzerland usually gets around this by knowing where everyone lives and mailing them a piece of paper 'something you have' - South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your fingernail I've read qui…

You can have e-voting systems that protect ballot secrecy and are verifiable. You can use homomorphic encryption or mixnets to prove that: 1) all valid votes were counted 2) no invalid votes were added 3) the totals for each candidate is correct And you can do that without providing proof of who any particular voter voted for. A few such systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting https://www.belenios.org/ A…

If it's a completely binary choice of "election was valid" and "election was invalid" without any partial verifications of results, I think it's still a massive step back.

By which I mean: paper ballots have problems. But a fault in a handful of ballots doesn't mean the rest of the ballots need to get tossed out.

I do not believe that a system managed by humans can be faultless.

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