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Comment by Avenger42 | Hacker News Reader

> Were voting machines hacked? No.

It's been more than 10 years since researchers showed that voting machines were hackable, and I have yet to see any visible progress down the path of "make voting machines less hackable / more transparent". All it would honestly take is a requirement that all voting machines print out a receipt of the vote. Then you could drop that into a box on your way out, and someone counts those votes to make sure they line up with what the database says the final vote was.

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I don't get why the US has to make it so complicated. The UK has a similar first past the post system. All votes are crosses on paper ballots, counted by hand overnight. Works fine.

This is how we do it in New Hampshire. It works fine here too.

Perhaps the problem is scale? New Hampshire is one of the smaller states, and the UK is obviously quite a bit less populous than the US.

Or perhas it's just a need for instant gratification. There's a reason New Hampshire was one of the last states to be called this year.

Shouldn't really make a difference. Just add more counters. Counting votes is perfectly parallelizable.

(1) Resources ought to scale with size.

(2) I would imagine that you'd go with the database on election night, but in days following, verify the paper votes as convenient.

I'm sure you used to count votes manually before computers existed.

> All it would honestly take is a requirement that all voting machines print out a receipt of the vote.

I'm not sure if this would actually help, what should happen in the event that somebody claims the printed ticket disagrees with their vote? Especially considering the vote itself should remain secret in many countries.

I'm not sure how it works elsewhere (I'm in Texas), but when I voted in November, they gave me a 4-digit number to enter when I first walked up to the machine. If I told them "this receipt doesn't match the ballot I cast", I suppose they could type my 4-digit number into the computer and say "delete this ballot", feed the receipt into a shredder, and then give me a new 4-digit number to try again. They wouldn't need to see what my receipt says to do that.

But you could very easily forge a receipt to commit fraud,* so there would have to be some kind of biometric or cryptographic security.

*Possibly in conjunction with targeting precincts that heavily favor one party, or individual voters registered with a specific party.

Yes, you probably could. Local person votes twice, 5 people commit fraud type stuff is incredibly hard to prevent and probably happens every election. As long as it requires X people to move X votes fraudulently, I would say we are going to be OK. Can you move a local election in a small town via this method? Probably, but our election system has defense in depth (recounts, election judges, polling, every-knows-everyone, voting receipts, etc. etc) so this isn't exactly easy.

It becomes a problem when 1-10 people can change the outcome of a district+ size voting block. "Hacking a voting machine" falls into this category. If 1-10 people can change a Red state to Blue via any method, that is what we should be concerned about. Again, defense in depth applies here. They would have to do many things perfectly AND get lucky for this to even be a possibility (no recounts, no voting machine inspection, no election judges intuition, etc. etc. etc.)

If my crazy uncle wants to vote twice, eh go ahead. Its difficult to do, takes a medium amount of effort and might work or might not.

2 out of 10 voters use machines that don't have a paper trail like you suggest.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/paperless-pennsylvania-c...

You get a receipt that show your vote. After veryfying the vote, You physically and manually put the receipt in the ballot box as with manual voting.

The physical receipts are the legally valid votes and can be counted with leisure in the days after the election. The electronic copy can be used for fast aggregation and to give instant results at the end of the voting day.

Actually the biggest problem at this point is that measures to detect hacking of any kind are severely lacking.

>All it would honestly take is a requirement that all voting machines print out a receipt of the vote. Then you could drop that into a box on your way out, and someone counts those votes to make sure they line up with what the database says the final vote was.

That would work, but sounds like a very expensive way to achieve the same level of functionality as a red pencil.

You'd have to guarantee that every person who votes puts their receipt in a box.

An even easier way is that you fill out a paper ballot and place it into a machine. The machine counts scans the ballot and counts it, but the ballot is still retained for handcounting if necessary.

> that voting machines were hackable,

After CIA and NSA leaks we found pretty much anything with a chip and an OS is hackable. The question is what can one do with that info.

Initially after elections I understood "election was hacked" to mean there is clear evidence of FSB or GRU intelligence officers hiding around the bushes in Wisconsin with laptops and usb keys, taking out guards and rooting voting machine. We haven't seen a single instance of that.

DNC, and Hillary's questionably illegal server were hacked. Probably by any state actor who wasn't a complete dummy. But that's pretty far from what the initial implications where.

I am still waiting for some solid "Russians hacked our election" evidence. Thought this was finally it. But there is more waiting needed it seems...

This is a bit like the WMD story and Iraq war. Still waiting to find that large WMD warehouse to justify trillions spend on that war...

"in Wisconsin"

Wisconsin has unhackable optical scantron 80s/90s voting technology.

Its unhackable because the votes are electronically counted and reported after the polls close in minutes, hours at most, then the physical paper ballots can be slowly and methodically counted and compared to the electronic counts. You could probably stick an eprom in there that reports 2e32-1 votes for Hillary or whatever, but that "hacked" result isn't going to last more than an hour, maybe a day at most.

> Initially after elections I understood "election was hacked" to mean there is clear evidence of FSB or GRU intelligence officers hiding around the bushes in Wisconsin with laptops and usb keys, taking out guards and rooting voting machine. We haven't seen a single instance of that.

You may have understood it to be that way, but it was not portrayed in that light. It was hacked in the same sense as "growth hacking" and hacking of non-voting machines.

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