Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by charcircuit » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 4:05 AM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #44

DJBunnies wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verifiable in this context means I can verify my vote was tallied correctly.

Receipt-freeness (i.e., a secret ballot) is usually the desired property. Yes, a lot of people like you state they desire verifiable votes. But that's where you need to respond to the points the person above you is making: how is such a system not also susceptible to coercion and bribery? (However you would verify your vote, imagine the person who is coercing you is just standing over your shoulder with threat of for…

>An example might be an abusive husband who does not want to allow their wife to vote freely/against him

This is an edge cases which could be made illegal. If someone forces someone else to vote you could hang them.

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

#282

Post by creata » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 4:06 AM UTC

elbasti wrote: post #206

blharr wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the critique. Nobody has ever made these claims. I don't mean this as an ad hominem, but was this comment generated with AI or something?

You'll find those claims in sibling comments to yours, so they are clearly pretty real! (At the time of writing this comment there's a sibling claiming that the comment cannot possibly understand this POV because they are not "an American POC.")

The specific comment by popalchemist you're referring to is actually fine (they're talking about voter suppression, which is a problem in the US), and isn't at all one of the claims that hintymad says people are making.

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

#283

Post by charcircuit » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 4:07 AM UTC

iamnothere wrote: post #131

nerocap wrote: post #119

If we can’t create a secure online voting system why do we use it for passports, banking, medical records, drivers licenses, criminal and law record keeping. This is just an attempt at control using the majority of cases that most websites and applications are insecure. If enough effort and time is invested of course we can create a fairly robust and secure voting system.

Errors in these other areas are typically reversible without undermining trust in electoral processes, leading to (in the worst case) wide scale violence and death. We use the internet for too much, more systems should be airgapped. It’s a miracle that there hasn’t been a tragedy yet from a hack of critical infrastructure. Even things like water treatment and energy systems can be vulnerable: https://www.cnbc.com/202…

Elections are reversible too. A recount can reverse an election.

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

#284

Post by KPGv2 » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 4:07 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #268

golem14 wrote: post #142

Earlier 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"...

Proving that you voted is different than proving you voted for a specific candidate. In fact, the one isn't nearly as big of a privacy concern (if any at all). I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me the former could be done with some XOR scheme, but proving that both you voted and your vote counted for a specific candidate while keeping that a secret is a much more difficult task

> proving that both you voted and your vote counted for a specific candidate while keeping that a secret is a much more difficult task

Just have a code show the truth (for you to verify) and a second code to show a lie (in case of threats).

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

#285

Post by parentheses » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 4:08 AM UTC

The problem is that nothing is immutable about computing. Software itself is mutable. So is data. The transferability of software makes hardware mutable also.

It seems like pen and paper is currently the best verifiable and immutable voting approach.

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

#286

Post by charcircuit » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 4:09 AM UTC

lacunary wrote: post #265

charcircuit wrote: post #262

>Voters should not be able to prove to anyone else how they voted – the technical term is “receipt-free” – otherwise an attacker could build an automated system of mass vote-buying via the internet. But receipt-free E2E-VIV systems are complicated and counterintuitive for people to use. This can easily solved be done via letting people forge receipts. Then anyone can forge a vote to give to someone offering to buy th…

then it's not a proof of who you voted for

You would know which would be the real one and which you forged. Obviously when checking that your vote was properly counted you wouldn't use a forged one.

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

#287

Post by parentheses » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 4:09 AM UTC

With the recent success of AI, I feel the more insidious issue is preventing the use of AI in reading paper ballots. There's a lot of room to engineer bias.

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

#288

Post by godelski » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 4:10 AM UTC

KPGv2 wrote: post #284

godelski wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proving that you voted is different than proving you voted for a specific candidate. In fact, the one isn't nearly as big of a privacy concern (if any at all). I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me the former could be done with some XOR scheme, but proving that both you voted and your vote counted for a specific candidate while keeping that a secret is a much more difficult task

> proving that both you voted and your vote counted for a specific candidate while keeping that a secret is a much more difficult task Just have a code show the truth (for you to verify) and a second code to show a lie (in case of threats).

Sure. But if you talk about anything from a high enough level it's trivial. The hard part is actually implementing that.

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

#289

Post by xp84 » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 4:11 AM UTC

ggm wrote: post #3

I 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…

At this point the main problem here is one of trust either way. Most Americans, of any party affiliation, believe that one party’s officials are presiding over a vast conspiracy to steal every election. The Left thinks the GOP is intimidating real citizens who happen to be immigrants from voting by trying to pass laws for proof of identity, and the Right thinks Democrats are trucking in illegals to stuff the ballot box, or that some random voting machine company is systematically rigging every vote. All these positions are presented without evidence.

Then both parties think that if their party’s guy isn’t in charge of the election itself, that the vote counting itself is being faked. Of course, these concerns only ever come out when their preferred party loses.

Mix internet voting into this, and the average person’s utter cluelessness about computers, and no amount of fancy crypto, blockchain, etc. would ever convince any American that their party lost fair and square. “The new online voting system was rigged!”

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

#290

Post by themafia » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 4:12 AM UTC

parentheses wrote: post #285

The problem is that nothing is immutable about computing. Software itself is mutable. So is data. The transferability of software makes hardware mutable also. It seems like pen and paper is currently the best verifiable and immutable voting approach.

> The problem is that nothing is immutable about computing.

That's why we have checksums. We've used computing to put people on different astronomical bodies. There is a way, but it comes with a huge cost. Cryptocurrency strongly hints towards a way to make internet voting viable.

> It seems like pen and paper is currently the best verifiable and immutable voting approach.

The simplest answer is usually the best, but then you shouldn't constrain voting to a single day otherwise it disadvantages large swaths of the population.