Fearful of Hacking, Dutch Will Count Ballots by Hand

This is due to a Dutch ethical hacker (Sijmen Ruwhof) investigating the way that our elections work. He had posted a great research document [0] that showed how bad our current system was. Two days later, we're back to paper.

Thanks Sijmen :)

[0] https://sijmen.ruwhof.net/weblog/1166-how-to-hack-the-upcomi...

I live in Contra Costa County, California. When my wife and I went to vote during the election, my wife's name "had a problem". A lady came out with a binder to compare to the roll where people sign before grabbing their forms. I got my forms, but my wife was told she had to take an absentee ballot because her name was not in the binder, but was on the roll list. Her name was highlighted in the list on the roll that I signed, just above my name. My name was not highlighted and I was allowed to sign the roll and then get my ballot to vote. I only saw a few pages of the roll, but there were at least three people highlighted on the two pages that were open to signing. The other pages definitely had highlighted entries and my comment to my wife was something along the lines of "why is a substantial number of people highlighted?" when we first walked up.

After a bit of back and forth, someone in charge agreed to let her vote given she was in the roll book, which is the "truth" of who can vote and who cannot. One lady was still somewhat insistent she be given an absentee ballot. I'm still wondering about it today given all the claims around "hacking".

In France we count all ballots by hand.

As every ballot station count only his ballots, it's quick.

For a presidential election, maybe 30 minutes.

The counting is done by the citizens, so no (easy) frauds are possible.

All ballots are visible, the process is transparent, no suspicion.

I personally think that a 30min delay to get the election results is worth the wait.

I participated in the experimental deployment of digital ballot box in a rich north Italian region, during regional elections.

The system worked, and worked well. But overall, it was a failure. Putting the digital in something as simple as voting, just increase the risks at all levels: security, deployment, rechecking, etc.

Pen and paper it's just so much better: simple, cost-effective, safe and understandable by anyone.

The article confuses two things. First there is voting by paper ballot and manually counting them. We have been doing that for about nine years now. Second is aggregating the votes from all the polling stations, this used to be done with software, but with this decision it will be done manually. The immediate reason for this is an investigation into the security of that software which concluded that it was not safe, and the resulting media attention.

It is yet unclear what "manual aggregation" exactly means. Electronic calculators and Excel were suggested.

We only every needed technology to make sure ballots get encoded correctly.

We could do that with open source software, commodity PCs and card punch machines and readers.

Then validating that your choices were encoded correctly would be easier. So would counting.

You could count at the voting location to get fast results and recount once the ballots arrive at the central office to confirm that the reported count was correct.

You could keep the initial counts at the polling place. Then later compare those numbers with the second count's to confirm that nothing happened to the ballots.

You also should have a unique number on each ballot that you can later use to look up how your ballot was recorded.

None of this should require advanced technology, new inventions or secrecy.

At least they interviewed a computer scientist. I was amazed in 2001 and have continued to be amazed at "civilians'" (i.e. those not in the industry) faith in all things electronic.

I remember this also from when I was on the school board. The parents and the administration were eager to augment the young kids' curriculum with "technology skills" -- by which they meant Word and Powerpoint. The only opposition was from board members and parents in the computing industry.

Of course now my teenager doesn't even use those tools and had to learn actual technical skills on his own. None of those kids learned anything about what a computer is, or even what "technology" is.

Some more context: https://sijmen.ruwhof.net/weblog/1166-how-to-hack-the-upcomi...

There are options beyond "hand counting" and "computer software."

IBM was founded, way back when, on what were basically electrical (but not electronic!) census-punch-card-tabulating machines. One could use a similar, or slightly improved, design just as easily, along with correspondent electrical "polling machines" that are essentially a grid of buttons hooked up to pre-patterned card punches.

The whole design could be done by one or two electrical + mechanical engineers in a couple of days (based on previous designs whose patents have long expired) and then given months of testing.

This is total, total aside. But having been in vote counting centres for hours on end during elections here in Ireland. You really feel the democratic process (also how badly educated some people are about how to fill out something basic like a ballot). A shift to digital methods would really change that, and it's something I will miss. Sometimes, tradition, like Prime Ministers Question time in the UK, is something that has important effects worth keeping. You really see the democracy in action!

Learning from the mistakes of others is a good thing.

Though counting by hand has it's own issues (waves at Florida)

Can someone eli5 how an entire country that includes (big-fat assumption here) n > 0 computer scientist(s) is "fearful of hacking."

Are we really at this point giving up on technology and becoming luddites?