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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

#421

Post by Muromec »

danpalmer wrote: post #366
Muromec wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not fraud is difficult to do, it's difficult to do so without people noticing. The problem of r-country is not that fraud is not discovered, they problem is they are not capable to course-correct (in general, but in regards to having elections specifically)

It's also very difficult to scale. For one voting site you might need a few people to force it, plus a few more counting the votes. For thousands of sites you need many thousands of people. Versus e-voting where may conceivably manage to swing the vote with a handful of people.

That's not difficult to scale if you already are a nation-state actor.

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

#422

Post by ryandrake »

spaqin wrote: post #407
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when the "right" person shows up, how do we know they're the right person? That prompts an investigation. The “right” person casts an affidavit ballot and the police and courts investigate. If the count is close, the loser usually sure to recount and verify, and any of these incidents then become political kindling. It doesn’t happen because it isn’t worth it individually and difficult to coördinate en masse.

As someone who has lived outside of United States, I find it incredibly baffling, alongside the lack of national ID. Lack of such simple verification makes the potential investigations much more harder than they have to be.

It's a trade-off that many USA states make willingly. Citizens have the right to vote, period^. It's not a "right to vote but only if you have an ID." Requiring an ID to vote, to me, is as ridiculous as requiring an ID to speak or practice a religion.

[^] except for the case of felony disenfranchisement laws, which I personally believe are a travesty

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

#423

Post by Muromec »

WalterBright wrote: post #394
Muromec wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... For each election, I have to register anew and the agency in charge has a backoffice is cross-checking this against... something? I guess they would first look if I was voting the last time? What if my birth certificate or whatever is from a different place. Do they assume I'm not risking using a forgery over politics (it's a fair assumption I would say)?

My original birth certificate was old and had decayed, so I wanted a new one. I googled "how do I get a copy of my birth certificate", followed the instructions, and received a brand new certificate. (I was a bit concerned because the hospital I was born in had been razed and the whole area redeveloped 50 years ago, but there was no problem.) A couple weeks ago I went to the nearest DMV and got a RealID. It took 15 m…

>The DMV people and the people in the passport office are very helpful in how to get the necessary proof.

That's nice and matches my obviously-not-north-american experience. Have you considered that you are not the target audience of the voter suppression because of something ?

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

#424

Post by Muromec »

yellowapple wrote: post #395
Muromec wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... For each election, I have to register anew and the agency in charge has a backoffice is cross-checking this against... something? I guess they would first look if I was voting the last time? What if my birth certificate or whatever is from a different place. Do they assume I'm not risking using a forgery over politics (it's a fair assumption I would say)?

> For each election, I have to register anew No. You register once and that applies to all future elections (at least until you update your registration for whatever reason, e.g. because you changed addresses). > and the agency in charge has a backoffice is cross-checking this against... something? Against the state's voter registration database, usually maintained by that state's Secretary of State or equivalent. >…

>If it's from somewhere outside the US, then you ain't eligible to vote anyway unless you've gone through the process of becoming a naturalized citizen

It's nitpicking, but you can be a citizen by birth without either having a birth certificate from a country you are citizen of and without naturalizing, but you will have some other document in that case too.

>Against the state's voter registration database, usually maintained by that state's Secretary of State or equivalent.

Isn't it circular? To be in the database you are checked against the database?

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

#425

Post by JumpCrisscross »

spaqin wrote: post #407
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when the "right" person shows up, how do we know they're the right person? That prompts an investigation. The “right” person casts an affidavit ballot and the police and courts investigate. If the count is close, the loser usually sure to recount and verify, and any of these incidents then become political kindling. It doesn’t happen because it isn’t worth it individually and difficult to coördinate en masse.

As someone who has lived outside of United States, I find it incredibly baffling, alongside the lack of national ID. Lack of such simple verification makes the potential investigations much more harder than they have to be.

> Lack of such simple verification makes the potential investigations much more harder than they have to be

This can be argued for any hindrance to bureaucracy. On the balance you get a much more robust system, with fewer centralized fail-safes.

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

#426

Post by max51 »

Muromec wrote: post #363
PoignardAzur wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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. The systemic failure is not in a voting system in this case, unfortunately.

Then why did it happen 3 elections in a row?!

We had front-page news about how the election was "hacked by Russia" and trump cheated for over a year after his first win in 2016 (let's not pretend that keyword was chosen accidentally); They tried to put him in jail for it. In 2020, trump did the exact same thing and went even farther with it. And in 2024, the DNC tried again to claim cheating happened.

How many cycle of this BS do we need to go through before we accept that elections need to be done properly and safely?

The entire point of a democracy is that elected leaders get their legitimacy and their acting power from the certainty that it was voted by the population. Not everyone will agree with their ideas, but the majority do and we all agree to follow their lead because that's what the population want. If the vote is compromised, everything falls apart.

If the "will of the people" turn into the "will of an intern at Dominion who fucked with the code and rigged the election" or "the will of Pakistani hacker", it breaks the entire system.

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

#427

Post by xorcist »

hootz wrote: post #284
bdamm wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada also uses hand counted paper ballots and it works great. There's no need to make large-scale voting electronic, and I'd never trust it without major social institutions in place that can provide the kind of oversight we have with good old paper ballots.

Brazil uses fully electronic voting and it works great.

That's perhaps not the best example of a stable democracy. Lots of people in Brazil mistrust the voting system, and they were pretty close to a coup d'etat after their last election, with polticians thrown in jail and so on.

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

#428

Post by max51 »

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…

>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

If it's counted electronically from the database, the piece of paper is completely worthless. Unless you can get the entire voting population to give you their paper and then count them, you will never know if the count is right. If a hacker switched 15% of the vote from one party to another, how could you tell from a piece of paper that tells you who you voted for?

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

#429

Post by max51 »

mattashii wrote: post #285
realo wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have 100% paper voting in Canada. We vote during the day... polls close in the evening... A few hours later we have the results. Hand counted, for the entire country. What is the difference?

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 o…

The US has roughly 10x more population than Canada. The solution is really simple, just hire 10x more humans to manage the vote counting.

Paper voting worked for thousands of years and was at the core of the foundation of this country.

There is no need to compromise the results of the election just to scale in a slightly more efficient way. If you need 10x more people because the volume is 10x higher, just hire 10x more people.

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

#430

Post by swiftcoder »

drstewart wrote: post #131
swiftcoder wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nearly every country in the world requires proof of citizenship to vote. How is the rest of the world dealing with this problem? Most of those nations have a mandatory national ID, so everyone already has proof of citizenship. The US and UK are very much outliers in having vocal and successful resistance to the implementation of a national ID card.

>Most of those nations have a mandatory national ID And what are the fees for these IDs, something you conveniently are leaving out (hint: mostly not free)?

> And what are the fees for these IDs, something you conveniently are leaving out (hint: mostly not free)?

Not far from free? It costs €12 to obtain a Spanish DNI, and the fee is waiver for low income, or folks with lots of kids

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