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

One of the reasons The Netherlands abandoned voting machines was because of electromagnetic emissions that could be read tens of meters away.

There are such efforts. It’s still a bandaid on the systemic problems.

Possibly, ballot sheet size?

The national elections in NLD have a single ballot in the whole country, with 10+ parties who each get a column of their candidates on the ballot, and with one box for each of the candidates. In these elections for the 150 seats of parliament, often there are 200+ candidates listed total. As a result, the ballot sheets need to be quite large and so are quite far into the 'unwieldy' part of the handling spectrum.

This size issue also complicates verification and counting, because you have to verify that of all checkboxes, exactly one is filled in, and sorting/counting needs to do this for practically every ballot.

There has been some experimenting with changing the ballot to a 'party' and 'list number' ballot, where you fill in the party of your chosen candidate together with their number on the party list, but AFAIK that has not (yet?) been approved for wider use.

> How would you even know?

The people who have claimed for decades that there is rampant cheating have spent years and millions of dollars and have found so little that it actually proves the case against their claims. Further, it has been shown that what sounds like reasonable checking ends up preventing 100-200 legitimate votes for every one illegal vote prevented.

HN guidelines say not to get political, but it is hard to avoid in this case because it is one party which is claiming widespread voter fraud. Let's start with a simple case. Tell me which of these facts is not true:

    * Donald Trump has claimed and continued to claim millions of illegal votes have been made against him, including millions by illegal aliens. The same claim, perhaps not using such large numbers, has been widely and frequently repeated by conservative media

    * Donald Trump became president in 2017 and had the might and resources of the full federal government to root out voter fraud

    * Donald Trump aggressively prosecutes his self-interests, and millions of illegal votes against him would be against his self-interest

    * As president, it is not just in his personal interest but is part of his duty to ensure voting is fair

    * Trump appointed Kris Kobach (more on him later), the AG of Kansas, to form a commission to get to the bottom of the rampant voter fraud

    * Nothing of note was produced by the commission ... it just kind of petered out

One must conclude one of three things:

    (1) Trump was negligent in his duties by not investigating the issue

    (2) Trump or his subordinates were incompetent in their investigation of the issue

    (3) Voter fraud is not common. I'll leave it to speculation whether this was an honest mistake on the part of conservatives or if they were lying for political gain

Read the wikipedia article about these issues relative to Kobach. Even before Trump, he was banging the drum as Sec of State for Kansas, claiming he knew of more than a hundred cases and asked for special powers to find the thousands of cases he knew were happening in Kansas. He was given authorization to do that investigation. How did it turn out? Start reading here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Kobach#Voter_fraud_claims

Quoting a bit of it:

> At that time, he "said he had identified more than 100 possible cases of double voting." Testifying during hearings on the bill, questioned by Rep. John Carmichael, Kobach was unable to cite a single other state that gives its secretary of state such authority.[153] By February 7, 2017, Kobach had filed nine cases and obtained six convictions. All were regarding cases of double voting; none would have been prevented by voter ID laws.[154][104][155] One case was dropped while two more remained pending. All six convictions involved older citizens, including four white Republican men and one woman, who were unaware that they had done anything wrong.

The rest of it is similar, and all confirmed only that voter fraud is rare. But worse than that is his tactics, which have been adopted by many states, disenfranchises 100x more legal voters than illegal voters it catches. And statistically, it disenfranchises Democrats in far greater proportion than Republican voters (35% vs 23% of the affected voters).

Here is another useful quote, along with a citation, on this topic from that same wikipedia entry:

> A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.[156]

> If your system takes longer than that, it's a bad system.

Why?

> which can take effect more or less immediately.

In our jurisdictions they're usually reserved. Courts can be used to challenge laws as unconstitutional. And you typically want a bright line implementation date that everyone can see coming.