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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

#461

Post by saulpw »

8bitsrule wrote: post #408
mjevans wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The filled out ballot is intended to be fully anonymous. It is then slipped into a security sleeve to make it harder to read within the envelope. The envelope is sealed and signed by the citizen. Security is provided by the envelope which is the attestation that the citizen cast their ballot. Offhand, the county voting office is likely required to retain the ballot as part of the state/federal records. I haven't chec…

>The envelope is sealed and signed by the citizen. Alas, the signature must reasonably match one on file (from somewhere ... presumably a state ID) or the ballot may be rejected. Since human signatures can vary wildly for reasons, this non-deterministic feature requires a human guess for -each- ballot. No mechanism to dispute that decision.

Mine has been disputed several times (because it changed due to name change and wasn't updated). There is a very clear mechanism to dispute that decision, and in fact that's why they ask for your phone number and/or email on the envelope--so when they want to dispute it, they have a way of contact for you to do what's necessary to make the ballot count (provisionally, only if the race is close enough for your vote to matter).

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

#462

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

alistairSH wrote: post #165
Joker_vD wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. So you go to other stations, duh. It's called "carousel voting" [0], if done on a large, organized scale. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting

Limit voters to one polling location. Problem solved. That's what we do in the US. You are assigned a polling location based on your home address. You can't vote anywhere else. If you try, they turn you away. You can do a provisional ballot (for people who recently moved, and poll data isn't updated, etc) and they validate your ID/address/etc later.

> You are assigned a polling location based on your home address. You can't vote anywhere else. If you try, they turn you away

And this is a way to disrupt and tilt elections.

see: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/chao...

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

#463

Post by lesuorac »

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.

> Versus e-voting where may conceivably manage to swing the vote with a handful of people.

No the thing you're missing is that the ballots are always electronically counted. Sure, at the very low level they'll manually count each ballot but the sums are then provided to different people electronically who then report the combined total sum.

But also a handful of people can just remove registered voters to have the same effect.

The fraud is easy to scale though because it if you win local offices you can use that to control state offices which you can then uses to control federal offices.

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

#464

Post by NekkoDroid »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #372
alistairSH wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's inconsistent between states. I'm in VA and an ID is required. Despite being a bleeding heart liberal, I'm ok with that safe-guard (despite much of the left being against the notion). I'd also prefer an actual national ID (not the half-baked RealID programs, which some states still haven't adopted).

It's not really "much of the left" that is against it, just the loudest voices. Pew research says [1 sorry for the ugly URL] Support for photo ID requirements also remains widespread in both parties. More than nine-in-ten Republicans (95%) and about seven-in-ten Democrats (71%) favor requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/08/22/majori…

I am p sure a lot of those that aren't for it aren't for it because of access to said ID is gated behind money (or unreasonably out of the way), which would need to be fixed first.

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

#465

Post by something765478 »

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…

If the paper vote is the source of truth, then the database just seems unnecessary.

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

#466

Post by grosswait »

phailhaus wrote: post #460
grosswait wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a high bar of proof if it is already required? Edit: and already met

How many documents can be used to prove your citizenship? How many times do people have to go back to the DMV because they forgot something or another? Now imagine that everyone has one shot to get that right on voting day.

That’s not how this would work in practice. You get an id that proves citizenship once. So one day at the dmv, Not every Election Day.

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

#467

Post by 986aignan »

jjmarr wrote: post #87
dmos62 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should care how much maths and encryption you use [0][1], because this is not only possible, but there are multiple approaches. [0] https://satoss.uni.lu/members/jun/papers/CSR13.pdf [1] https://fc16.ifca.ai/voting/papers/ABBT16.pdf

More important than lack of voter fraud is proving to the population a lack of voter fraud.

The Rivest methods in the CSR13 paper - ThreeBallot, VAV, and Twin - seem to be relatively simple. Not directly applicable to online voting, though, but perhaps they would be simple enough to prove to the people that regular voting has no voter fraud?

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

#468

Post by WalterBright »

Muromec wrote: post #423
WalterBright wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Please elucidate what something is?

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

#469

Post by WalterBright »

tdeck wrote: post #458
WalterBright wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once the ballot is removed from the envelope, it is just a sheet of paper with votes on it. There's no name, serial number, or signature on it. Hence "stuffing" in more ballots cannot be detected. Printing the ballots on security paper will not eliminate this risk, but it will make it much harder. I don't know if there is an auditable "chain of custody" of ballots from mailbox to the counting center. The fraud here w…

> Hence "stuffing" in more ballots cannot be detected. The whole envelope opening and ballot counting process is recorded and streamed live from multiple angles. https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/elections/about-us/security-a...

That sounds good. But it doesn't account for the ballot from your mail box to the processing center. Nor does it check citizenship & residency status. Ballot harvesting is also legal and takes place in Washington state.

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

#470

Post by peterfirefly »

lesuorac wrote: post #463
danpalmer wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Versus e-voting where may conceivably manage to swing the vote with a handful of people. No the thing you're missing is that the ballots are always electronically counted. Sure, at the very low level they'll manually count each ballot but the sums are then provided to different people electronically who then report the combined total sum. But also a handful of people can just remove registered voters to have the sa…

They are counted by hand in Denmark. We used to post the results on physical paper at the voting site afterwards + have them published for the entire country (including a list of the votes at each voting site) in the national papers.

If the local results anywhere were different from those published in the papers, people would notice. If they were different in different papers, or in different parts of the country, people would notice.

We have, unfortunately, switched to a list on a website instead of in the papers :(

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