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

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

#341

Post by PoignardAzur »

jfengel wrote: post #111
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…

The USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well. Despite countless hours and lawsuits dedicated to finding people who voted more than once, only a handful of cases have actually turned up. It's not that there are no checks. You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. To vote more than once you'd have to pre…

> The USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well.

No, no, no. January 6 is a systemic failure.

The purpose of a voting system is to select the most popular candidate in a way that is so far beyond doubt that a populist loser can't claim the results are wrong without alienating his base.

Even leaving aside the whole "Trump doesn't care if his lies are credible" thing, the US system works very poorly there. Mail-in voting, drive-in voting, voting machines, they leave room for suspicion, no matter how confident the people running the system are.

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

#342

Post by mulmen »

nobrains wrote: post #245

It was a pilot. Isn't this (kinda) good news that this "bug" was caught and now the next iteration will be closer to the intended behavior?

I propose voting by shooting ballots. It seems dangerous at first but every negligent discharge strengthens democracy.

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

#343

Post by pseudalopex »

natebc wrote: post #301
pseudalopex wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I edited my comment. But before you replied I thought. Congress can decide elections of Congress.

Ah, yeah, I see now that I've refreshed. Yes, it will get tricky with the current Supremes. Hopefully the signs we're seeing around Obstruction and Contempt in the federal courts lately indicate the _maybe_ the Judiciary is finding it's backbone. I don't have much hope for Congress doing the same.

> Yes, it will get tricky with the current Supremes. Hopefully the signs we're seeing around Obstruction and Contempt in the federal courts lately indicate the _maybe_ the Judiciary is finding it's backbone.

How could the Supreme Court justify Congress could not decide elections of Congress?

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

#344

Post by Vvector »

Paper ballots are a must. Vote on a touchscreen, then have the terminal print out a voter-verifiable paper ballot that can also be machine counted.

Make the ballot printout layout a standard format. Then machines from multiple vendors can verify the counts on a subset of the ballots. And as a last resort, the ballots can be hand counted as well.

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

#345

Post by XCSme »

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…

Blockchain!

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

#346

Post by jeffrallen »

atoav wrote: post #18
zoobab wrote: post #6

eVoting cannot be understood and audited by normal citizens, not even by nerdy ones. It's just good for the trash.

It is not even about understanding. It is about how easy it is to distrust it. Contrary to what nerds think, the goal of elections isn't to get bulletproof results by mathematical standards. The goal is to create agreeable consent among those who voted. A good election system is one where even sworn enemies can begrudgingly agree on the result. A paper ballot system has the advantage that it can be monitored by any g…

More bluntly, the purpose of an election is to convince the loser not to send his supporters out on the street protesting.

The problem with e-voting is that it gives the losers an infinite number of things to complain about and challenge the election.

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

#347

Post by stevenwoo »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #298
t0mas88 wrote: post #261

While this sounds like it allowed remote voting, it's interesting that some places (e.g. The Netherlands) went back to 100% paper instead of voting machines. That causes counting to take quite some time, with estimates/interim counts in between. I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database. That…

> The database is the instant answer at election closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers as confirmation that nothing weird happened. You are misunderstanding "who to trust". The source of trust in a paper vote election is your party's representative + independent election observers. You believe them that they were sitting at the polling station all day, watching both the voting and counting…

The poster is also trusting the database provider, database admin, the voting machine provider, the voting machine maintenance person, etc in an electronic voting machine since they implied this by saying database. Manual paper counts with multiple counters and multiple counts that resolve differences are hard to top when each set of counters is adversarial. In spite of that one thing I thought might be useful and point of failure if electronic voting were allowed is from Venezuela of all places. Each precinct printed an initial tally, the opposition collected most of them and claimed they were cheated. They might have had a fair election up until the voting machines were summed up at a central location -it appears the ruling party cheated when adding up the precincts. https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-election-maduro-machado...

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

#348

Post by qotgalaxy »

rayiner wrote: post #290
tasty_freeze wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I’m not saying we have widespread voter fraud. My gut feeling is that we don’t. But I’m a very trusting person. I always believe people when they ask for money on the street because their car broke down. I don’t know how you can confidently say there isn’t meaningful voter fraud. How would you even verify past elections? You can point to millions spent on commissions and lawyers, but those can’t go back and generate…

[dead]

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

#349

Post by lesuorac »

everfrustrated wrote: post #302

The biggest advantage physical voting has it is follows human-scaling laws. Which often is a problem (inefficient) but for voting this is a massive benefit for one particular reason - due to lack of automation any fraud doesn't also benefit from the same automation so has to be large scale and widely distributed for it to be impactful (the fraud has to be distributed to the humans involved). Which isn't to say that i…

Isn't the advantageous fraud easy to do?

Sheriff monitors the ballot box (ex. Jimmy Carter's opponent).

Only allow loyalists to count the result (and then report w/e you want; ex. Russia).

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

#350

Post by stubish »

Vvector wrote: post #344

Paper ballots are a must. Vote on a touchscreen, then have the terminal print out a voter-verifiable paper ballot that can also be machine counted. Make the ballot printout layout a standard format. Then machines from multiple vendors can verify the counts on a subset of the ballots. And as a last resort, the ballots can be hand counted as well.

This is an eVoting system - not at a ballot box. There is no printer. And even if there was, a similar problem can occur if you lose the keys. And you need keys because the printout cannot be voter verifiable, or you enable the various forms of vote fraud that anonymous ballot boxes were introduced to stop.
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