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Comment by curried_haskell | Hacker News Reader

Your comparisons overlook a major difference between the paradigms of paper and digital ballots. It's the same problem with autonomous cars. An unsafe car can cause a single crash. An unsafe autonomous car program could crash every car everywhere all at once. And with the current state of software development, we KNOW that these softwares are vulnerable.

With paper ballots, it's not easy to tamper with the entire vote. You need a huge, widespread effort. Or your country is so fucked that your government ignores the vote and makes up some numbers. Everybody knows it's fraudulent, but nobody can do anything about it.

With electronic ballots, it's suddenly trivially easy for just a tiny handful rogue elements to stealthily forge every vote without anyone even realizing there was fraud.

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>With electronic ballots, it's suddenly trivially easy for just a tiny handful rogue elements to stealthily forge every vote without anyone even realizing there was fraud.

We already have technology that, so far, is pretty much tamper proof that could easily be adapted for online voting. I would be highly skeptical/distrustful of any centralized voting system, but if there was a open ledger voting system that uses a blockchain, well I would be all for that as it would be extremely hard to tamper with, arguable harder to tamper with than with paper ballots.

I agree.

And a receipt that shows my vote was counted as part of the final results.

I think you underestimate the sophistication needed to tamper with paper ballots. There's certainly a "boots on the ground" requirement for tampering, but the knowledge requirements are trivial compared to crypto attacks.

The physical chain of custody can be guaranteed with paper ballots. Yes, you can burn ballots, or stuff the box, but if you're minding the store, someone would notice.

Source: former poll judge, inspector.

I defer to your expertise but did you ever work in third-world countries? (To use the phrase as a proxy for inadequate political/physical infrastructure)

To use the engineering aphorism, just because it can be done doesn't mean it is done. I'm curious about how physical security/verification works in that environment vs a hypothetical crypto solution.

Observing third world elections is on my bucket list.

Election and voting chicanery happens plenty in the USA. No need to look abroad. Merely lifting the floor here would be transformative.

The silver lining from the oversteer triggered by Gore v Bush 2000 is that HAVA did lead to greater federal involvement in our locally administered elections. eg Election Assistance Commission http://eac.gov is now fairly proactive.

re "vs a hypothetical crypto solution"

Estonia's online voting system hasn't faired well under scrutiny.

If you've worked in third-world countries, you should realize that elections are a human problem determined by societal attitudes. Electoral fraud is not a technical problem.

Knowledge isn't really going to be an issue for the parties most likely to try to swing elections, many of which are state-level actors.

The thing about the crudeness of methods used to tamper with paper ballots is that it's also similarly trivial for a bunch of volunteers including members of all different parties involved in the election to spot, and in many cases trivial to reverse.

Knowledge is not the problem. In fact, knowledge is a trivial problem because with electronic ballots, you only need a single guy with the right knowledge and he can compromise the entire election.

The old way, you need an entire army of idiots.

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