81–90 of 237 posts
Electronic voting is a bad idea and I'd be suspicious on anyone trying to promote it. How can you know that even if the source code for the voting machine is open, the voting machine is running the exact same source code? How can you know nobody has tampered the code the instance is running? I'm glad my country is still running on paper ballots and glad we require voter ID.
To protect voting, use paper ballots.
Valid ID should also be required. With paper ballots how do we guarantee those with a right to vote who cannot travel to a secure voting location have the ability to do so?
ID requirements are frequently used in order to deny voting to people who are poor or otherwise find it difficult to get particular documents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My country doesn't require voter ID at all, other than confirming a few details and most studies here has shown that requiring ID didn't cut down on fraud. For me it's important that the barrier to voting is as low as possible, and we don't have a governement issued ID that is free.
That should be solved by issuing a free government ID, not by compromising and creating a giant loophole when potentially citizens of other countries can vote in your election and there is no way to verify that.
Electronic voting is a bad idea and I'd be suspicious on anyone trying to promote it. How can you know that even if the source code for the voting machine is open, the voting machine is running the exact same source code? How can you know nobody has tampered the code the instance is running? I'm glad my country is still running on paper ballots and glad we require voter ID.
To say a machine hasn't been hacked is trying to prove a negative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where is the good old Anonymous when we need them? We need a high-profile hack of some local elections to drive that point home. Something done completely for teh lulz, leading to a result so absurd the elections would have to be redone.
At defcon this year they had a bunch of the popular electronic voting booths set up, and they were all hacked within 6 hours. A big problem is having physical access to the booth. All of the hacks involve picking a lock.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trick is that you don't just have to convince somebody (a security expert) that the system is trustworthy, you have to convince everyone (voters) that the system is trustworthy. Anything more complicated than paper ballots counted in public will leave room for doubt.
Paper ballots leave a lot of room for doubt in my mind. How you can you recount the ballots and come up with a different number? This shouldn't be possible, but it happens all the time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_recount Thinking out loud here, how about a blockchain based solution? Each user gets a new address, and that address is printed on a receipt after you vote. This way you can verify your vote a…
Short of some very very clever cryptography, you really, really don't want to be able to verify your individual vote, because that means you can verify it to others - the entire point of this process is to avoid coercion, or else there's much simpler solutions. (Pull everyone into the polling station at once and have a show of hands, for example.) You want to verify that one ballot was given to each person registered to vote, and that all votes were counted correctly, but you don't want to verify that an individual person's vote was counted correctly.
How it will work: A person gets this device in the voting center enters/gets his voter ID, does the voting (anonymously), presses the read-only lock and throws it into the bin. After all the voting these device are scanned and voting data is retrieved. A voting database is populated in each center in a transparent way, to prevent tampering (several parties can be allowed to read this data separately and then all data variants can be compared against each other, just in case). After consensus on the voting data, each voting center sends the results for counting. And the voting is completed.
In the end, these devices are reset and the cycle continues.
Well, I'm sure that there must be some problems when voting the aforementioned way. But I guess it could work out, with some modifications.
EDIT: Grammar.
Electronic voting is a bad idea and I'd be suspicious on anyone trying to promote it. How can you know that even if the source code for the voting machine is open, the voting machine is running the exact same source code? How can you know nobody has tampered the code the instance is running? I'm glad my country is still running on paper ballots and glad we require voter ID.
The vote processing chain is lengthy, it is inevitable that a computer system will be inserted somewhere in that chain. Right now the push is to have these systems right at the front, facing the voter, but that isn't the only time the votes are processed electronically. In my district we vote by coloring in little circles with a #2 pencil, we then feed that directly into an electronic machine that tallies the results…
How can you be sure about that?
> With so many links in the chain, it's my opinion that it's unreasonable to expect them all to be processed by people. It won't scale and I'm not convinced that it's that much safer anyway.
The point is that if you are not convinced, you can go and observe the process. The point is to remove as much trust as possible. The point is not to just have some human in the loop, but to make sure that people who distrust each other can personally make sure that the correct procedure is being followed.
> It would be my preference that the pieces of the system that perform this processing are backed with open source software.
The problem is that you have no way to verify that what is actually processing your vote is the open source software that you hope it is.
See also Ken Thompson's classic "reflections on trusting trust":
https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...
> At the very least, if there is a case where tampering is suspected, officials of the court can compare the software on the machine with the software in the repository.
No, they can't. The only way to check what software is running on the computer is to use software that is running on the computer, which is thus also suspect. That is, short of decapping each and every chip in the one computer that you are trying to check and extracting all the circuitry and all storage bits in it.
> As painful as it is, I think we all need to trust the state, to some degree, to do the jobs that are the responsibility of the state.
But ensuring trustworthiness of elections is not one of those. Elections are the anchor that all the other trust that we put into democratically elected governments is anchored at, it's the one lever that we have to remove governments that turn out to not be trustworthy. You cannot trust the government to remove itself in case you want to have it replaced.
> Once the votes have been tallied for a district, isn't it possible to tamper with them as they are transmitted up the chain to the next link in the processing?
If the election is run properly: No.
Represenatives from each party will be observing the election process at every polling station, and the general public can usually also observe if they wish to, from opening until the votes are counted. Also, election results should generally be published broken down by polling station, so each of the observers can check that what they observed at their polling station actually matched what went into the total.
There is absolutely no place for trust in elections.
Electronic voting is a bad idea and I'd be suspicious on anyone trying to promote it. How can you know that even if the source code for the voting machine is open, the voting machine is running the exact same source code? How can you know nobody has tampered the code the instance is running? I'm glad my country is still running on paper ballots and glad we require voter ID.
Came here to say that. Transparent voting boxes, ballots in envelopes, manual redundant counting done by people, usually voter who were nicely asked if they can come help back in the evening. That's what we use in France, you get the official result a few hours after the closing of the voting stations. The whole process is watchable, from the sealing of the box the morning to the count in the end and parties send obs…