The votes made up less than 4 percent of those cast in Basel-Stadt and would not have changed any results
Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
441–450 of 501 posts
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#442I 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…
Australia has a system where you are anonymous and can prove that you only voted once: You have to be registered and must vote within your electorate, so your name appears on a certified list for that electorate and each voting location has that list. When you vote, they strike your name from the list. After the election, the lists from these locations are compared. Anyone who votes twice has their name struck twice,…
How does that prove that you only voted once? If I know someone's name and address (and by extension their electorate) I can rock up and vote as as many as I want.
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why?
One of the main goals of an electoral system is to ensure that the population trusts that their views are fairly represented. The reason that paper voting is so good in this regard is that everybody can fully understand the entire process. It is so very, very simple. And if you need proof, you can go see the counting for yourself. The issue with electronic voting is that there is far greater complexity. There are man…
Some counter-arguments:
- We already trust computers to run our markets, banks, cars, energy infrastructure, etc. Is a computer popularly untrustworthy?
- Do low-tech physical ballot systems offer good guarantees? See 2024 Russian elections [0], for an extreme counter-example.
I'd say cryptography or smart algorithms can go a long way in upholding certain invariants, but you need some infrastructure for that: e.g. key pairs per voter and a trustless counting system. If you can't get that, then you're relying on the good will of others: in some cases it's the volunteer counters, in others it's whoever deploys and operates the trust-based black box e-voting system. I think that cryptocurrencies alone should be proof to anyone observant that a trustless voting system is doable, though I'm honestly surprised by this thread, because it alludes to the opposite.
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/03/20/t...
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#444I 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…
Swiss vote one-time private key comes in the same envelope as your certificate of eligibility and ballots for postal votes.
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#445Earlier 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…
>obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens. I do not think it is that straightforward. Making it more accessible makes it possible for people with less skin in the game able to vote. Imagine how invested someone who owns several properties and businesses in a city is and how much they care about the success of the city compared to some other person who is just rent…
Yes I think anyone under twice charcircuits net worth is unworthy to vote and should be debarred from voting.
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#446The 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…
The other advantage in physical voting is that so many people are needed to participate in the process. The probability of aligned bad actors goes down significantly when the voting process is a civic responsibility shared by volunteers who monitor each other. It's not perfect but public participation adds to the legitimacy of the process itself.
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
I have to seriously disagree on the particulars, here.
The Russia allegations ranged from "Russia hacked DNC servers/accounts to interfer in favor of Donald Trump" (demonstrably true in several instances) to "Russia hacked voting machines" (very probably false). And then in 2024 the DNC quickly accepted election results.
By comparison, Donald Trump still claims that he legitimately won the 2020 elections, the majority of his base still believes it, Fox News spent years spreading that message even though their own journalists thought it was bullshit, etc.
I maintain that this is a systemic problem and a better system would not have given Trump the leeway to do this, but let's not pretend it's a bipartisan issue.
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.]
The UK gets it done within 24 hours with very few miscounts and even fewer miscounts that matter. And is there good data on the relative costs?
Sorry, I don't have further data on this. It's going to be a subjective judgement either way.
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
And this was hard won. US history is riddled with examples where the bureaucracy of voting was explicitly used to disenfranchise rightful voters by governmental officials that wanted to keep their power over the marginalized. The skepticism is earned.
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#450eVoting 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 importantly, you want your system to be bulletproof before it's audited. By the time you're talking about audits, the populists have already started flooding the zone.
The system should be so obviously secure that any person walking into a poll station should intuitively understand, seeing the poll workers, why fraud would be very hard to perform, so that when their favourite populist candidate loses and claims fraud, they think "that doesn't make sense".
If the voter needs to read technical documentation to understand why the populist is wrong, it's already too late.