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Comment by nixos | Hacker News Reader

>engineering a secure Internet voting system which maintains these attributes is a difficult problem.

It's not a hard problem, it's an _impossible_ problem.

If there's any security hole between the BIOS, CPU, firmware, OS, app, a state-sponsored attacker will get it.

The US got into air-gapped systems. You think China (or Russia, Iran, ISIS, Europe, Anonymous, you name it) won't break in?

And what do you do if you discover that there was external vote manipulation? Hold re-elections?

And how easy is it for someone to delete, say, a couple thousand votes in a strategic state? It's hard to physically do it without evidence and a conspiracy, but if a hacker (or a simple bug) gets in, all bets are off.

That's why the paper-trail is so important

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If you apply zero-trust (as you are here), then its also _impossible_ to assure all those attributes are present in the current voting system. So I see no harm in attempting to solve for "better" or even "equal but more convenient" than the current. -Which does not technically rule out _some form_ of internet voting.

current voting systems actually work very well with zero-trust.

- You enter into the voting booth with your ballot and cross off your preferred candidate or party. No trust needed.

- You fold it together and put it into a ballot box. No trust needed.

- The ballot box is sealed and driven to a counting station. This is done under supervision of all stakeholders, meaning that cheating is extremely hard because your political adversary is present.

- The ballot boxes are unsealed and the votes are counted. Note that the votes are counted by all stake holders (typically one or more people from each party) making it hard to cheat.

- The final vote is passed on.

None of the above steps require trust in any one person or entity, and the probability of cheating (if the procedure is done correctly) is quite low. If there is some anomaly the votes are saved so they can be counted again.

Literally, all of those trusts in that scenario are with 'people' which are indeed quite easy to corrupt (or fail without awareness). Possibly more so than potential crypto and chain/ledger based systems.

And again if "probability is low" is the bar, then we can surely keep _exploring_ Internet voting systems without engendering rejection as academicly 'impossible' for the whole concept.

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