10 ms·

This is a bit of a tangent but I think reports like these strengthen the argument against electronic voting. There's basically no way of building a secure elect

This is a bit of a tangent but I think reports like these strengthen the argument against electronic voting. There's basically no way of building a secure electronic voting system that can beat the security and auditability properties of old school pen and paper voting.

rdedev 4y ago
Does having a paper trail generated exactly after voting help? This is the system that's followed in India. I tried to think of ways it could fail but it seemed pretty fool proof as far as I can think. I'm pretty sure I might have missed some corner case
- Lukineus 4y ago
  If you're going to have a paper trail for an electronic system, then why not just use the paper system? It's like there's a pro-electronic movement that's looking for every excuse to move to electronic... Ok, so we go electronic. We put in all these extra checks and balances to account for it's downsides. It runs well. People start questioning the need for the checks and balances, since it's so full-proof. So we remove the checks and balances. <anakin-fun-begins.gif> <shocked-pikachu.gif> For the people that complain about the staffing requirements for a paper-based election: it's a feature, not a bug. The sheer number of people involved make it virtually impossible to rig an election.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    I presume costs (wages vs computers) are a significant factor.
  - rdedev 4y ago
    In India at least there is a lot of votes to manually count. Electronic just makes things smoother. As for people questioning the need I didn't hear anyone raising the during the last election I followed. Besides I'm pretty sure either the election commission of India or the various opposition parties will point out the problems with having just electronic vote records. As far as electronic voting with paper trail goes I see it as just a normal paper based voting system with an automated counting system that can be easily verified
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    > "For the people that complain about the staffing requirements for a paper-based election: it's a feature, not a bug. The sheer number of people involved make it virtually impossible to rig an election." There are two ways to rig an election. The first is miscounting or changing votes but I think the other is the real risk and likely dates to the very first time we as a species ever started having votes by anonymous ballot: ballot stuffing. If, at any time in counting process, an individual could successfully insert a single valid but fabricated ballot into the process, the entire system is vulnerable. And the number of votes required to change elections tends to be shockingly low. In the 2020 election, more than 155 million people voted, but the outcome of the presidential election itself was decided by a total of less than 43,000 votes [1]. That's a margin of victory of 0.03%. So a system that was 99.9% accurate at ensuring that each ballot was completely legitimate would be insufficient. [1] - https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/10/wapo-the-gop-came-within-90000-votes-of-controlling-congress-and-keeping-the-white-house-n2584521 https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/10/wapo-the-...
    - arlort 4y ago
      > If, at any time in counting process, an individual could successfully insert a single valid but fabricated ballot into the process This varies by jurisdiction obviously, but where I'm from the procedure for counting must be done in an area which the public can access and it begins with a single person taking ballots out of the box one by one and giving it to a chain of 2-3 other people. This way you can count how many ballots were taken out of the box and check with the totals at the end And obviously the box is always in the presence of observers from various stakeholders > less than 43,000 votes Unless you can predict where these tiny margins will manifest with perfect accuracy you'd need to add a lot more fake votes, or at least have thousands of conspirators ready to add them at a moment's notice, that's ridiculously hard to organize discreetly
    - Lukineus 4y ago
      Here in Australia, ballots are (initially) counted at the place they were cast. Every ballot issued has a corresponding (but unlinkable) person on the roll (electors are crossed off the roll prior to a ballot being issued). The count of names crossed corresponds to the number of ballots issued which will correspond to the number of ballots counted at the end of the day. Virtually impossible to "insert" a ballot as then your final count would exceed ballots issued. As the count is completed at the polling place, of which there are multiple per electorate, the total number of votes is substantially lower than 43,000 even, and so the % accuracy is much higher. No publicised figure (that I know of) for how many "missing" ballots there can be before questions are raised, but I suspect its in the single digit range. Ballots are generally counted a couple of times but, even more if there's any ballots missing.
  - arlort 4y ago
    > then why not just use the paper system? One reason is efficiency, if you have the machines counting you get results faster and then you can audit only a random sample of machines records and get statistical guarantees of the election integrity. (The machine can't know before that it will be audited so if you test thousands of machines and find no discrepancy it's highly unlikely a significant portion of the others did cheat) A second is that it allows one more level of trust. With a paper ballot you have to trust that the poll workers are going to notice/stop/not help ballot stuffing etc. In most cases that's a good enough guarantee, but with voting machines you can also trust the people who programmed audited it If the poll workers are trustworthy, because of the paper trail, you don't have to trust the auditers of the machines, but if you don't trust the poll workers then you can gain a modicum of trust from the auditers https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/12/06/how-electronic-voting-machines-have-improved-indias-democracy/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/12/06/how-elect... This link talks about the benefits in the indian election, specifically a software lock on the amount of votes per minute that can be cast It also shows that in 2013 they audited "only" 20k machines out of almost millions yet found no discrepancy. Statistically that's probably good enough if the choice of machines audited was random One last way it might be useful, though this is an abstract scenario, is if you want to deploy a more complicated to count voting system to large areas. In some voting systems counting can't be done in parallel, you need to do one round of counting, wait for everyone else and then do a second round and so on. Similarly some voting systems might benefit from a digitized interface (for instance ballots in austria look like this: https://cdn1.vienna.at/2013/09/zettel.jpg https://cdn1.vienna.at/2013/09/zettel.jpg and there are systems which would lead to even larger forms) which outputs a paper trail with only the actual information the voter inputed (in the case of the ballot I showed it'd pretty much just show a party name and a list of candidate names) In these cases a machine outputting an auditable digital model of the votes cast would greatly simplify counting procedures. You could have every polling station just publish a signed file with the votes in their station and everyone could run the election algorithm The votes can then be audited same as in the indian system
    - f1refly 4y ago
      > The machine can't know before that it will be audited so if you test thousands of machines and find no discrepancy it's highly unlikely a significant portion of the others did cheat > It also shows that in 2013 they audited "only" 20k machines out of almost millions yet found no discrepancy. Statistically that's probably good enough if the choice of machines audited was random So how do you protect against the corrupt actor manipulating every machine except the percent that will be checked? > With a paper ballot you have to trust that the poll workers are going to notice/stop/not help ballot stuffing etc There's a simple and straight forward solution: Have people from opposing political parties count the vote and check each others result. If you have members of the far left, far right and everything in between sitting there, checking each others results, theres about a 0% chance any vote will be miscounted. > In these cases a machine outputting an auditable digital model of the votes cast would greatly simplify counting procedures. You could have every polling station just publish a signed file with the votes in their station and everyone could run the election algorithm There is no difference between a machine publishing the counted votes and the poll workers publishing the counted votes, is there?
slim 4y ago
these hacks can influence politicians after they've been voted in. If anything direct rigging of a vote is more transparent : people can notice if the vote goes against common sense.
Spellman 4y ago
Generally a lot of voting security experts advocate for paper ballots with electronic counting. It is very robust, efficient, has great fallback, and lots of systems available to keep secure.
- Lukineus 4y ago
  The issue is verification - how do you verify the elctronic count was accurate? And if you're going to manually count it to verify the electronic count, then why have the electronic count in the first place?
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    Because the results can be statistically verified with sampling rather than a full manual recount?
  - uoaei 4y ago
    A small, statistically representative sample of the paper ballots are counted by hand and compared against the electronic count. If discrepancy arises, a more thorough audit is performed.
    - bogomipz 4y ago
      Interesting, makes sense. Is this actually the recommended resolution process by the vendors as well or is this something that needs to be approved and adopted by each voting precinct?
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    Do a manual count for a random sample plus all tight races and in case of any suspicions or challenges.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    Spot checks are good enough in such a case; if you manually count 1% of the votes and the margin of error is negligible, the electronic count is sound. If there's too many errors / differences, stop using the electronic counting and just count by hand. I mean it's not exactly rocket science.
DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
I’ve always wondered they we’ll get the cyberpunk future we envisioned when people decide physical media is the sweet spot between paper/written representation and digital media. Like old cdrom style discs that can only possibly be write-once, and the provenance of the data on it depends on the physical presence of the media itself. Not that I’m necessarily advocating for it. Just they seems like a plausible future.
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  For voting integrity, the vote that is saved needs to be human-readable (the voter should be able to make sure that the digital part of the machine didn't change their vote), so digital storage is right out.
kromem 4y ago
Yeah, not like there's any sort of transparent way to audit a public chain of data blocks representing votes associated with an anonymous certificates that would allow end users (verified with registration cards and authorized with their mobile device biometrics) to check their votes were recorded correctly and for 3rd parties to easily audit the vote totals. That's a problem that hasn't been solved at all by the current applications of cryptography. Even if my computer gets hacked, as long as I can trivially search my "confirmation id" from another device to ensure it's what I cast, I'm going to see if it was or wasn't tampered with. Having public records of votes on a per vote basis with multiple layers of cryptographic signatures at each stage of processing them would be a world of improvement over the current system, both client side and server side attacks considered.
- Diggsey 4y ago
  > verified with registration cards and authorized with their mobile device biometrics What does "verified" even mean here? At the end of the day, you need to convert it to some cryptographic key, and then that key is vulnerable to attack: either it's kept in the voting machine, in which case the machines themselves are a single point of failure, or else it's given to voters, in which case their insecure phones, computers, etc are easily compromised to get the keys. Checking your votes doesn't help: a significant number of people do not vote. An attacker can submit votes on behalf of those people using their keys and noone will know, and even if you find someone who claimed that they didn't vote, how would you ever prove it either way? The advantage of a physical system is that there is no single point of failure: changing the overall election result requires a physical presence at multiple polling locations. All electronic voting solutions are intrinsically worse in that respect.
- ben-schaaf 4y ago
  Being able to easily validate what individual people voted for is exactly the opposite of what you want in a voting system, as it make vote buying/selling trivial. I suggest looking into the huge list of previous electoral fraud for all the different kind of attacks that need to be defended against: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud
i67vw3 4y ago
I do not think so (my opinion, I may be wrong here). Paper ballots (pen and paper) are susceptible to more rigging. Government officials can directly change the results by deliberately miscounting the results. It is seen in many countries where corruption is very high in the election commission. In these places, elected candidates, voters, 'pro-democracy' individuals advocate for electronic voting (Electronic Voting Machine, EVM.) Recently, we saw the images and videos from the recent Belarus Lukashenk elections, where the officials just threw out paper ballots. In Pakistan, to curb voter fraud by paper ballots the previous Imran Khan (PTI) Government tried to install electronic voting equipments at locations particularly in rural areas where voter fraud was at a really high rate. The ruling Government can use its state power to influence the outcome of elections. By pen and paper, the actual voting happens in a 'democratic way', but, the counting is left to individuals which will commit voter fraud. Whereas, in electronic voting, 'Code Is Law, every single vote is counted properly. To curb the cons/disadvantages of electronic voting, which are a.) The underlying code can be tweaked by the ruling government to give them an advantage in the counting. b.) Voter fraud can be committed by abusing the actual hardware of the voting machine. To solve this particular problem, the Election Commission of India (ECI) recently tried to bring some new changes. It majorly includes, having paper proof along with electronic proof called as VVPAT (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail). The way it happens is:- When you cast your vote to a candidate 'C', the machine will print a slip with the proof of your vote to candiate 'C'. So, if the opposition party alleges that voter fraud happened with the tampering of EVM, the election commission (or an independent third party, or the opposition candidate himself on his own) can then do a recount based on the VVPAT slips and cross-check the results per booth (per EVM).
- arlort 4y ago
  > can directly change the results by deliberately miscounting the results This is why in liberal democracies the process of casting and counting votes is usually done in the presence of at least representatives of the candidates running and more usually whoever wants to attend them You'd need total complicity in every single polling station to cheat without raising alarms In electronic/internet voting, unless there is a paper trail which can be counted in the same manner as manual voting, all you need is government officials to tweak the code/the hardware being used. Are you going to let every candidate audit every single machine independently? Unlikely since that is, in and of itself, a security risk > where the officials just threw out paper ballots And since they had to physically remove material evidence we were able to get videos of it happening. Plugging an USB while the machine is in the warehouse or in the middle of voting can be done a lot more discreetly > counting is left to individuals which will commit voter fraud Which is why counting is usually done with supervision The system in India works, but it works because it reduces the entire process to a paper ballot. Ultimately the security guarantees of the Indian elections are identical to the security guarantees of the traditional paper ballot system The digital component is limited to easing the logistics of getting the first results of the election in a timely manner Which is about the extent to which you should trust electronic voting
cyberei 4y ago
Plus, even with some absolutely secure digital voting system, there's no way you could explain it to most people. A huge advantage of paper voting is that everyone can understand it works and how it can be attacked. Otherwise it's going to be even easier to claim the system is rigged or foreign hackers manipulated the vote or whatever, to undermine trust.
skobovm 4y ago
There’s actually a pretty interesting approach in which: voters can see that their vote counted, everyone can tally anonymous votes, and it is resistant to DoS https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RR14b.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RR14b.pdf Of course, the real problem would be explaining to the general population that this works. Great in theory, but will never pan out
- gorgoiler 4y ago
  If you can verify your vote, how do you stop threats or bribery being used to buy votes? Show me your receipt saying you voted for Big Ron and I’ll give you a fiver and/or won’t hit you in the knees with a spanner.
  - skobovm 4y ago
    Big Ron can ask you to take a picture of the paper ballot as well, so regardless of mechanism you’re in a pretty sticky situation. It’s not a perfect system, but I would personally find it comforting knowing that I could verify that my vote counted and that I could independently confirm the election results Edit: haven’t read the paper in a while, but IIRC you can see that the vote counted without revealing details of who you voted for. They definitely would have covered this case
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Big Ron can ask you to take a picture of the paper ballot as well, You can take a picture of a marked paper ballot, trade it in for a fresh one (original is destroyed) and mark the new one differently and turn it in. A ballot picture doesn't prove the ballot was cast and counted, a receipt that identifies the voted candidate does.
    - gorgoiler 4y ago
      Camera bans are strictly enforced in polling stations.
      - 4y ago
Vladimof 4y ago
We would need some voting system where each person can verify that their vote was properly counted, something like this: secure end-to-end verifiable e-voting system using zero knowledge based blockchain: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/466.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/466.pdf
- yyyk 4y ago
  We should never consider any voting system that is not simple to the point of being almost-trivial. Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating which are enough to create massive instability - even when they are provably false. We see this even with the current election systems! Since there's no simple way to explain 'blockchain' to non-tech people, any voting system using it is irrelevant - and will end up discarded like nearly all the other attempts invoking blockchain hype.
  - Vladimof 4y ago
    > Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating The zero-knowledge proof avoids that... Even with paper ballots, there's no way to verify that your vote was counted.... as far as I know
    - yyyk 4y ago
      The zero-knowledge proof avoids true accusations of a particular type of cheating. However, the biggest problem is humans, not machines. An election system must be ELI5able, or we can expect a fair amount of instability regardless of truth.
      - Vladimof 4y ago
        There are plenty of ELI5 explanations of zero-knowledge proofs

rdedev 4y ago

Does having a paper trail generated exactly after voting help? This is the system that's followed in India. I tried to think of ways it could fail but it seemed pretty fool proof as far as I can think. I'm pretty sure I might have missed some corner case

Lukineus 4y ago
If you're going to have a paper trail for an electronic system, then why not just use the paper system? It's like there's a pro-electronic movement that's looking for every excuse to move to electronic... Ok, so we go electronic. We put in all these extra checks and balances to account for it's downsides. It runs well. People start questioning the need for the checks and balances, since it's so full-proof. So we remove the checks and balances. <anakin-fun-begins.gif> <shocked-pikachu.gif> For the people that complain about the staffing requirements for a paper-based election: it's a feature, not a bug. The sheer number of people involved make it virtually impossible to rig an election.
- uoaei 4y ago
  I presume costs (wages vs computers) are a significant factor.
- rdedev 4y ago
  In India at least there is a lot of votes to manually count. Electronic just makes things smoother. As for people questioning the need I didn't hear anyone raising the during the last election I followed. Besides I'm pretty sure either the election commission of India or the various opposition parties will point out the problems with having just electronic vote records. As far as electronic voting with paper trail goes I see it as just a normal paper based voting system with an automated counting system that can be easily verified
- somenameforme 4y ago
  > "For the people that complain about the staffing requirements for a paper-based election: it's a feature, not a bug. The sheer number of people involved make it virtually impossible to rig an election." There are two ways to rig an election. The first is miscounting or changing votes but I think the other is the real risk and likely dates to the very first time we as a species ever started having votes by anonymous ballot: ballot stuffing. If, at any time in counting process, an individual could successfully insert a single valid but fabricated ballot into the process, the entire system is vulnerable. And the number of votes required to change elections tends to be shockingly low. In the 2020 election, more than 155 million people voted, but the outcome of the presidential election itself was decided by a total of less than 43,000 votes [1]. That's a margin of victory of 0.03%. So a system that was 99.9% accurate at ensuring that each ballot was completely legitimate would be insufficient. [1] - https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/10/wapo-the-gop-came-within-90000-votes-of-controlling-congress-and-keeping-the-white-house-n2584521 https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/10/wapo-the-...
  - arlort 4y ago
    > If, at any time in counting process, an individual could successfully insert a single valid but fabricated ballot into the process This varies by jurisdiction obviously, but where I'm from the procedure for counting must be done in an area which the public can access and it begins with a single person taking ballots out of the box one by one and giving it to a chain of 2-3 other people. This way you can count how many ballots were taken out of the box and check with the totals at the end And obviously the box is always in the presence of observers from various stakeholders > less than 43,000 votes Unless you can predict where these tiny margins will manifest with perfect accuracy you'd need to add a lot more fake votes, or at least have thousands of conspirators ready to add them at a moment's notice, that's ridiculously hard to organize discreetly
  - Lukineus 4y ago
    Here in Australia, ballots are (initially) counted at the place they were cast. Every ballot issued has a corresponding (but unlinkable) person on the roll (electors are crossed off the roll prior to a ballot being issued). The count of names crossed corresponds to the number of ballots issued which will correspond to the number of ballots counted at the end of the day. Virtually impossible to "insert" a ballot as then your final count would exceed ballots issued. As the count is completed at the polling place, of which there are multiple per electorate, the total number of votes is substantially lower than 43,000 even, and so the % accuracy is much higher. No publicised figure (that I know of) for how many "missing" ballots there can be before questions are raised, but I suspect its in the single digit range. Ballots are generally counted a couple of times but, even more if there's any ballots missing.
- arlort 4y ago
  > then why not just use the paper system? One reason is efficiency, if you have the machines counting you get results faster and then you can audit only a random sample of machines records and get statistical guarantees of the election integrity. (The machine can't know before that it will be audited so if you test thousands of machines and find no discrepancy it's highly unlikely a significant portion of the others did cheat) A second is that it allows one more level of trust. With a paper ballot you have to trust that the poll workers are going to notice/stop/not help ballot stuffing etc. In most cases that's a good enough guarantee, but with voting machines you can also trust the people who programmed audited it If the poll workers are trustworthy, because of the paper trail, you don't have to trust the auditers of the machines, but if you don't trust the poll workers then you can gain a modicum of trust from the auditers https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/12/06/how-electronic-voting-machines-have-improved-indias-democracy/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/12/06/how-elect... This link talks about the benefits in the indian election, specifically a software lock on the amount of votes per minute that can be cast It also shows that in 2013 they audited "only" 20k machines out of almost millions yet found no discrepancy. Statistically that's probably good enough if the choice of machines audited was random One last way it might be useful, though this is an abstract scenario, is if you want to deploy a more complicated to count voting system to large areas. In some voting systems counting can't be done in parallel, you need to do one round of counting, wait for everyone else and then do a second round and so on. Similarly some voting systems might benefit from a digitized interface (for instance ballots in austria look like this: https://cdn1.vienna.at/2013/09/zettel.jpg https://cdn1.vienna.at/2013/09/zettel.jpg and there are systems which would lead to even larger forms) which outputs a paper trail with only the actual information the voter inputed (in the case of the ballot I showed it'd pretty much just show a party name and a list of candidate names) In these cases a machine outputting an auditable digital model of the votes cast would greatly simplify counting procedures. You could have every polling station just publish a signed file with the votes in their station and everyone could run the election algorithm The votes can then be audited same as in the indian system
  - f1refly 4y ago
    > The machine can't know before that it will be audited so if you test thousands of machines and find no discrepancy it's highly unlikely a significant portion of the others did cheat > It also shows that in 2013 they audited "only" 20k machines out of almost millions yet found no discrepancy. Statistically that's probably good enough if the choice of machines audited was random So how do you protect against the corrupt actor manipulating every machine except the percent that will be checked? > With a paper ballot you have to trust that the poll workers are going to notice/stop/not help ballot stuffing etc There's a simple and straight forward solution: Have people from opposing political parties count the vote and check each others result. If you have members of the far left, far right and everything in between sitting there, checking each others results, theres about a 0% chance any vote will be miscounted. > In these cases a machine outputting an auditable digital model of the votes cast would greatly simplify counting procedures. You could have every polling station just publish a signed file with the votes in their station and everyone could run the election algorithm There is no difference between a machine publishing the counted votes and the poll workers publishing the counted votes, is there?

slim 4y ago

these hacks can influence politicians after they've been voted in. If anything direct rigging of a vote is more transparent : people can notice if the vote goes against common sense.

Spellman 4y ago

Generally a lot of voting security experts advocate for paper ballots with electronic counting. It is very robust, efficient, has great fallback, and lots of systems available to keep secure.

Lukineus 4y ago
The issue is verification - how do you verify the elctronic count was accurate? And if you're going to manually count it to verify the electronic count, then why have the electronic count in the first place?
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  Because the results can be statistically verified with sampling rather than a full manual recount?
- uoaei 4y ago
  A small, statistically representative sample of the paper ballots are counted by hand and compared against the electronic count. If discrepancy arises, a more thorough audit is performed.
  - bogomipz 4y ago
    Interesting, makes sense. Is this actually the recommended resolution process by the vendors as well or is this something that needs to be approved and adopted by each voting precinct?
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Do a manual count for a random sample plus all tight races and in case of any suspicions or challenges.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Spot checks are good enough in such a case; if you manually count 1% of the votes and the margin of error is negligible, the electronic count is sound. If there's too many errors / differences, stop using the electronic counting and just count by hand. I mean it's not exactly rocket science.

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago

I’ve always wondered they we’ll get the cyberpunk future we envisioned when people decide physical media is the sweet spot between paper/written representation and digital media. Like old cdrom style discs that can only possibly be write-once, and the provenance of the data on it depends on the physical presence of the media itself. Not that I’m necessarily advocating for it. Just they seems like a plausible future.

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
For voting integrity, the vote that is saved needs to be human-readable (the voter should be able to make sure that the digital part of the machine didn't change their vote), so digital storage is right out.

kromem 4y ago

Yeah, not like there's any sort of transparent way to audit a public chain of data blocks representing votes associated with an anonymous certificates that would allow end users (verified with registration cards and authorized with their mobile device biometrics) to check their votes were recorded correctly and for 3rd parties to easily audit the vote totals. That's a problem that hasn't been solved at all by the current applications of cryptography. Even if my computer gets hacked, as long as I can trivially search my "confirmation id" from another device to ensure it's what I cast, I'm going to see if it was or wasn't tampered with. Having public records of votes on a per vote basis with multiple layers of cryptographic signatures at each stage of processing them would be a world of improvement over the current system, both client side and server side attacks considered.

Diggsey 4y ago
> verified with registration cards and authorized with their mobile device biometrics What does "verified" even mean here? At the end of the day, you need to convert it to some cryptographic key, and then that key is vulnerable to attack: either it's kept in the voting machine, in which case the machines themselves are a single point of failure, or else it's given to voters, in which case their insecure phones, computers, etc are easily compromised to get the keys. Checking your votes doesn't help: a significant number of people do not vote. An attacker can submit votes on behalf of those people using their keys and noone will know, and even if you find someone who claimed that they didn't vote, how would you ever prove it either way? The advantage of a physical system is that there is no single point of failure: changing the overall election result requires a physical presence at multiple polling locations. All electronic voting solutions are intrinsically worse in that respect.
ben-schaaf 4y ago
Being able to easily validate what individual people voted for is exactly the opposite of what you want in a voting system, as it make vote buying/selling trivial. I suggest looking into the huge list of previous electoral fraud for all the different kind of attacks that need to be defended against: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud

i67vw3 4y ago

I do not think so (my opinion, I may be wrong here). Paper ballots (pen and paper) are susceptible to more rigging. Government officials can directly change the results by deliberately miscounting the results. It is seen in many countries where corruption is very high in the election commission. In these places, elected candidates, voters, 'pro-democracy' individuals advocate for electronic voting (Electronic Voting Machine, EVM.) Recently, we saw the images and videos from the recent Belarus Lukashenk elections, where the officials just threw out paper ballots. In Pakistan, to curb voter fraud by paper ballots the previous Imran Khan (PTI) Government tried to install electronic voting equipments at locations particularly in rural areas where voter fraud was at a really high rate. The ruling Government can use its state power to influence the outcome of elections. By pen and paper, the actual voting happens in a 'democratic way', but, the counting is left to individuals which will commit voter fraud. Whereas, in electronic voting, 'Code Is Law, every single vote is counted properly. To curb the cons/disadvantages of electronic voting, which are a.) The underlying code can be tweaked by the ruling government to give them an advantage in the counting. b.) Voter fraud can be committed by abusing the actual hardware of the voting machine. To solve this particular problem, the Election Commission of India (ECI) recently tried to bring some new changes. It majorly includes, having paper proof along with electronic proof called as VVPAT (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail). The way it happens is:- When you cast your vote to a candidate 'C', the machine will print a slip with the proof of your vote to candiate 'C'. So, if the opposition party alleges that voter fraud happened with the tampering of EVM, the election commission (or an independent third party, or the opposition candidate himself on his own) can then do a recount based on the VVPAT slips and cross-check the results per booth (per EVM).

arlort 4y ago
> can directly change the results by deliberately miscounting the results This is why in liberal democracies the process of casting and counting votes is usually done in the presence of at least representatives of the candidates running and more usually whoever wants to attend them You'd need total complicity in every single polling station to cheat without raising alarms In electronic/internet voting, unless there is a paper trail which can be counted in the same manner as manual voting, all you need is government officials to tweak the code/the hardware being used. Are you going to let every candidate audit every single machine independently? Unlikely since that is, in and of itself, a security risk > where the officials just threw out paper ballots And since they had to physically remove material evidence we were able to get videos of it happening. Plugging an USB while the machine is in the warehouse or in the middle of voting can be done a lot more discreetly > counting is left to individuals which will commit voter fraud Which is why counting is usually done with supervision The system in India works, but it works because it reduces the entire process to a paper ballot. Ultimately the security guarantees of the Indian elections are identical to the security guarantees of the traditional paper ballot system The digital component is limited to easing the logistics of getting the first results of the election in a timely manner Which is about the extent to which you should trust electronic voting

cyberei 4y ago

Plus, even with some absolutely secure digital voting system, there's no way you could explain it to most people. A huge advantage of paper voting is that everyone can understand it works and how it can be attacked. Otherwise it's going to be even easier to claim the system is rigged or foreign hackers manipulated the vote or whatever, to undermine trust.

skobovm 4y ago

There’s actually a pretty interesting approach in which: voters can see that their vote counted, everyone can tally anonymous votes, and it is resistant to DoS https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RR14b.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RR14b.pdf Of course, the real problem would be explaining to the general population that this works. Great in theory, but will never pan out

gorgoiler 4y ago
If you can verify your vote, how do you stop threats or bribery being used to buy votes? Show me your receipt saying you voted for Big Ron and I’ll give you a fiver and/or won’t hit you in the knees with a spanner.
- skobovm 4y ago
  Big Ron can ask you to take a picture of the paper ballot as well, so regardless of mechanism you’re in a pretty sticky situation. It’s not a perfect system, but I would personally find it comforting knowing that I could verify that my vote counted and that I could independently confirm the election results Edit: haven’t read the paper in a while, but IIRC you can see that the vote counted without revealing details of who you voted for. They definitely would have covered this case
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Big Ron can ask you to take a picture of the paper ballot as well, You can take a picture of a marked paper ballot, trade it in for a fresh one (original is destroyed) and mark the new one differently and turn it in. A ballot picture doesn't prove the ballot was cast and counted, a receipt that identifies the voted candidate does.
  - gorgoiler 4y ago
    Camera bans are strictly enforced in polling stations.
    - 4y ago

Vladimof 4y ago

We would need some voting system where each person can verify that their vote was properly counted, something like this: secure end-to-end verifiable e-voting system using zero knowledge based blockchain: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/466.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/466.pdf

yyyk 4y ago
We should never consider any voting system that is not simple to the point of being almost-trivial. Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating which are enough to create massive instability - even when they are provably false. We see this even with the current election systems! Since there's no simple way to explain 'blockchain' to non-tech people, any voting system using it is irrelevant - and will end up discarded like nearly all the other attempts invoking blockchain hype.
- Vladimof 4y ago
  > Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating The zero-knowledge proof avoids that... Even with paper ballots, there's no way to verify that your vote was counted.... as far as I know
  - yyyk 4y ago
    The zero-knowledge proof avoids true accusations of a particular type of cheating. However, the biggest problem is humans, not machines. An election system must be ELI5able, or we can expect a fair amount of instability regardless of truth.
    - Vladimof 4y ago
      There are plenty of ELI5 explanations of zero-knowledge proofs