Remember Zip Disks? These Election Departments Do
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Who the hell was buying new systems in 2002 that relied on Zip disks? Have them taken out back and shot. If they're dead, dig them up, kill them again. By 2002, most of us had figured out the unreliability of Zip disks, and the industry had pretty much moved on by then. Except the people selling voting systems, apparently.
(For the youngsters, I'd guess that the use of Zip disks took a pretty good nose dive around the end of the 90s. By 2002, the only users left should have been those with an existing investment in Iomega's removable disk system.)
There was not previously a huge market for voting machines and the three or four existing vendors sucked. The law had strict requirements about making the machines available to people with disabilities, but not so much to say about security or reliability or robustness of the platform.
Cheaper, too.
I think it was quickly obsoleted by CD-Rs and CD-RWs, though during its short lifespan on my desk, I feel like I enjoyed using it (then again I was a young teenager, so I definitely didn't push the technology into revealing its faults at all)
And much easier to expand to more polling stations as you don't need any voting machines on site. Just paper and a secure box to put it in.
Do I think this kind of thing happens? No. But encryption could be used to make the trust of voting even better, if done correctly. This would allow secrecy of votes, the ability to verify the validity of a vote without seeing who they voted for, and the ability to bundle the votes together and hash them, for example.
Paper scales great, until you need to collect and retain it.
To do any of those across a state you are looking at at LEAST a few hundred people. Nation wide? Thousands. In a perfect world.
With electronic voting, all it takes is one person at some point in the chain, or at best a handful of people.
The only real problem is a technological problem, like a bug or improper use of encryption. Especially if you're only trying to validate the results, and not trying to have secrecy. Each person signs / records the hash of the votes they're validating is. Combine those hashes together and sign that to validate at higher levels, or use something more fancy. It would be obvious if something got changed due to malice or fraud.
What would this one person do exactly to sabotage the system?
We as a species can't even write a secure SSL implementation, and you think that we would be able to write a bulletproof voting cryptosystem that can be used by every single person?
But even aside from that, what happens when a person loses their key? Are they disenfranchised for life? If there's a way to regenerate keys, what is stopping someone from regenerating a few extra every now and then and voting with them? How do people without a PC vote? Remember, voting isn't like a website or application. 100% of people need to have the ability to vote. If your system disenfranchises even one person who should legally be able to vote, it can't work.
Paper is near perfect already. It takes a monumental amount of resources (and one hell of a literal paper trail) to sway a paper vote in any meaningful way. It's easy to count (you already vote in small counties and districts, just count them there and pass the numbers up the chain), and it's fairly quick (the US counts the votes for the presidential election by the end of the night! That's crazy!)
With an electronic system, you need people to audit it. That means that only developers would be able to vet the voting system. Your "average joe" wouldn't be able to verify if his vote was cast, he would need to rely on others. And what percentage of developers know encryption well enough to be able to safely audit a cryptosystem? 10%? 1%? That's a hell of a lot of power to be putting in a small group of people's hands.
With paper, anyone can verify. Any language, any "economic class", the illiterate, anyone. You can walk down and sit next to the ballot box in your district, and watch that thing all damn day. You can count along with everyone else at the end of the day, and you can sleep well knowing your vote was counted, as you watched it, and you can do the math yourself and make sure of it.
Paper works.
But yes, I think such a system could be developed. And yes, I think the results could be audited. We have code running nuclear facilities, fighter jets, and other sensitive parts of our government.
In terms of how easy it is, just look at how hard it was to get recounts of votes, not to mention the 'hanging chad' situation, where people were arguing over what the paper votes were. Even the UI on the paper is very important to the whole experience to not confuse the person.
Right now your average joe isn't able to verify if their vote is cast on paper I believe. You have the number on your ballot, as least in nevada on a receipt, but validating that (or at least in a meaningful way, seeing the paper) is almost impossible.
For local elections and non federal elections, I think the system would be easier to mess with, due to the fewer number of people involved in the system.
Overall I'm not saying paper is bad, or that tech would be easier - voting is incredibly complicated. But I think it's entirely possible to design a good system. Personally I think the mail-in ballot systems are the best, but of course I'd like to have some way of checking on that, which isn't easy.
And just to clarify, "validating" your vote is very simple. You just need to watch the box all day. You can (at least in my area) arrive at the opening of polls, inspect the ballot box, watch it get locked, then sit there and watch that thing all day. You could have 10 people, 100 people, all on different "sides" all watching the same box. Then when it comes time to count, you count along.
By being there the whole time, you validate with your own eyes that nobody stuffed the box, and that every vote was counted.
Sure, there are "attacks" that can be made against that, but they are very complicated and risky, and again even if you pull them off, you've just "hacked" a single district in a single county in a single state. You'll need a LOT of those to win an election, and not a single person involved can ever speak of it.
It might be that electronic voting would allow voting from many places, and hence alleviate the problem. But I'm guessing there will still be restriction of polling booth locations to make it inconvenient for some people to vote.
Yeah. Okay, dude.
s/can't even/can't be bothered to/
If Google dumped a billion dollars into creating a secure encryption library, I'm sure the result would be pretty good.
One of the biggest problems with the current US political climate right now is apathy in my opinion. And needing people to not only vote but also design, test, and implement a new voting system seems like a lot of work for an already disinterested population.
You can have both, signing and vote secrecy using blind signatures (or other similar constructions).
See also https://www.quaxio.com/simple_auditable_anonymous_voting_sch...
Ballot collection and retention scales great. We have trucks and warehouses as part of the regular economy.
The cryptographic properties you mention seem nice, but no-one has implemented them.
Paper is also great for anonymity, cost and consistency.
But the day I burned my first CD-R a few years later in the mid-1990s, I felt like a god among mortals. Zip disks were mostly obsolete after that.
I went for the Zip drive and used it as basically an external harddisk. For the computer I had at the time (a 68K Mac), it was actually perfectly performant as a harddisk replacement - I had one disk of games, one disk of Office, etc.
In contrast, ZIP disks were fast, scratch proof, reusable.
If you work in IT, a huge percentage of your knowledge (much like the above) becomes redundant with every year that passes. I think this is true more for IT than any other industry.
I feel old.
I was an early adopter :(
I suspect that an electromechanical system that records votes onto a medium that can be easily interfaced with technology du jour (and audited by humans when necessary) would have an expensive but long lived set of components that deal with the large numbers of voting actions, and then the ticker tape (e.g.) output can be read with a device that plugs into an off the shelf computer