Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

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Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#531

Post by dstroot » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 9:55 PM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #123

dstroot wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose I'm an optimist. I believe it is possible to create a secure online voting system. My life savings might be held at Fidelity, Merrill, or elsewhere, my banking is online, 90% of my shopping is online and it all has "good enough" security. Plus most banks seem to be well behind the state of the art in security. I believe with the technologies we have available today, we could create a secure, immutable, audi…

Elections in most countries involve tens of thousands of volunteers for running ballot stations and counting votes. That is a feature, not a problem to be solved. It means that there are tens of thousands of eyes that can spot things going wrong at every level. Any effort to make voting simpler and more efficient reduces the number of people directly involved in the system. Efficiency is a problem even if the system…

I find that argument lacking. Each of those people is also a potential weak link or even an adversary from a security standpoint. Would I rather have 10,000 weak links or one software system with rigorous testing and logging?

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#532

Post by dstroot » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 10:00 PM UTC

anon291 wrote: post #340

dstroot wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose I'm an optimist. I believe it is possible to create a secure online voting system. My life savings might be held at Fidelity, Merrill, or elsewhere, my banking is online, 90% of my shopping is online and it all has "good enough" security. Plus most banks seem to be well behind the state of the art in security. I believe with the technologies we have available today, we could create a secure, immutable, audi…

It's of course possible. In fact electronic voting could be safer. The issue is that voting has nothing to do with technical details of safety and everything to do with trust. If your electorate doesn't understand modular arithmetic, then there's no point to electronic voting.

"trust" is a fuzzy concept - people use iMessage and have no concept of how it's architected or how it works. But they trust it. Why? because trust is something that is transferable. If you trust me, and I tell you iMessage is safe then you have a high likelihood of trusting iMessage. If this is reinforced by other people you trust, even better. There would be ways to create a voting system in the open, and have it validated by third parties. If you've ever bought stock it's because underlying the transaction, and auditor has certified their financials...

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