Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea

Tom Scott still has the best argument against e-voting IMO [1]. Briefly: an election only counts if everybody can believe the results. Making an expert level understanding of CS a requirement to verify your voting system means that Joe Q. Average who doesn't hold a PhD (or maybe even a college degree) has to rely on spooky experts telling him what to believe. If I were in his shoes then I would have no confidence that I participated in a fair and valid election. We kind of live in a bubble here on HN where most people are sort of in the tech space and could take a weekend or two to understand blockchain. I think its easy to forget that most people don't have the required background to learn it easily (or would want to use up their time to understand it). I almost have a PhD in the hard sciences and I don't fully understand the finer details of block chain. I think I would have to write my own implementation to fully appreciate it. Simplicity and the ability to explain the system to every American is a requirement of any voting system. [1] [this video]

It's not about it being compulsory, but the system being unverifiable end-to-end and any criticism of that being laughed at. If you put it into business terms, would you trust an employee or vendor who told you that everything was alright, did not allow you to perform checks and audits and mocked both your and external partners concerns [0] about it? I don't think so. If the government is indeed for the people and not vice versa, then this is not acceptable. [0] [this video] Tom Scott's video about e-voting. Funniest rebuttal I saw on Estonian social media was that we are secure, since he is talking about e-voting, but we have i-voting. So I guess once we will call it c-voting, it will be even better...?

I think you're missing a few things: Votes should never be identifiable and the count should be verifiable. First of all: using somewhat public things like SSN, "numbers in your street address" and a credit card number is a terrible idea. All of those have been leaked and are present on things you present to identify yourself or pay. Also requiring a credit card or home to vote would almost certainly be unconstitutional. Getting a "receipt" is also problematic: You should never be able to prove you voted A over B or vice versa since that opens up ways to intimidate people to vote one way and coerce them to prove it. I'm not saying it's impossible but there are so many problems with electronic voting that I don't even know where to start. At least with physical ballots we can manually recount if we need. And that's before we even start talking about how current systems are basically swiss cheese for hacks, just look at the voting village for the last couple of defcons. Related (and amusing) links: [link] [this video] [link]

Yeah, electronic voting is essentially like having a person in the voting booth that you have to tell your vote and trust that they will tally it correctly. [1] It doesn't matter whether voting machines are actually secure, they probably mostly are right now, but whether a layperson can have faith in the system. Paper voting is very secure if you involve people from opposing parties in the process and attacks are not very scalable. Most people can think of and understand mitigations for certain kinds of attacks. And if paper voting is too expensive for your country, you have bigger issues. [2] [1] [this video] [2] That said, I don't see how secure electronic voting can possibly be cheaper than paper voting. For voting machines to be secure, you have to manufacture them in a very audited manner, with little to no foreign sourcing of parts, you can't leave the machines unattended for long periods of time (aka, reusing them between elections is probably a no-go) and you have to build them in manner that is secure against voters tampering with them in their private booth.

> By looking at the receipts printed by the ballot machines. Let's the clear, you're not really "recounting" the ballots at that point. If the machine is compromised - and we're discussing a situation in which we know CCTV was removed and people were then shot - you have no real idea if the receipt corresponds to the voter's original intent. Or, indeed, if all the receipts from all the voters make it as far as the recount (?) > Ballot machines print either a final tally at the end of the day, or print every single vote and automatically drop it into a physical ballot, depending on the threat model of the country in question. How is reprinting the final automated tally supposed to represent a "recount" of the original automated tally? > Either way the you have partial or total recount. You really don't. Bits of paper and Mark I eyeballs all the way. As Tom Scott puts it, "The key point is not is that paper voting is perfect - it isn't - but attacks against it don't scale well"[0]. [0] Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea: [this video]