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Comment by Gravityloss | Hacker News Reader

Why would elections have to involve machines, nevermind computers?

I have studied, worked with and spent free time with computers a lot, for many decades, and I think I know quite a lot more about them than the average parliament member or other representatives. I have also worked as a volunteer at a voting place so I know at least partially how voting works, and which safeguard processes it includes.

I do not find computers useful for the voting process. I find them very detrimental to trust, and practically impossible to safeguard for voting. I strongly oppose using computers in anything in the critical path related to voting.

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Paper ballots are just as easy to manipulate. Computers+blockchain should be the future of voting. Verifiable votes are something that paper ballots will always lack, and the computers could bring that to the table. However, this would make vote buying so much easier, so it probably wouldn't work for most developing countries.

Paper votes are difficult to manipulate on a massive scale.

You can stuff some ballot boxes and turn a polling station. But to do the same across the country to rig the election? At this point your country probably has worse problems and they won't even bother counting votes, but announce wholly fabricated numbers.

With electronic voting, it becomes trivially easy for a single hacker to falsify the entire election in one fell swoop.

>on a massive scale.

Usually you can't to manipulate elections "on a massive" scale to win, regardless of the format of the ballot. If the polls are 50/30 and the 30 ends up winning the elections, it will always be too obvious. Elections are usually stolen on the margins, look at most apparently-rigged-but-not-obviously elections in history.

>At this point your country probably has worse problems and they won't even bother counting ballots, but announce wholly fabricated numbers.

And yes, usually, when an election rigging scandal comes up, the country has more serious problems than vote manipulation.

>With electronic voting, it becomes trivially easy for a single hacker to falsify the entire election in one fell swoop.

But yes, I wouldn't say "trivially easy", but yeah, a lone wolf would never be able to falsify paper vote elections.

The CCC (Chaos Computer Club) did analyse voting machines. I have only found the original german version: https://www.ccc.de/system/uploads/105/original/nedapReport54... The gist is: voting machines suck. And blockchain is useless, if anonymity is necessary.

I don't want my vote to be recorded on a blockchain. Nobody shall be allowed to track down how I voted.

There is nothing simpler than voting with a pen. Everybody understands how it works and everybody is able to do it anonymously. There is no risk of exposure and massive scale manipulations. Every computer system that aims to guarantee the same, is massively complicated.

Random-sample verified paper balloting is probably the hardest to hack system there is, and is super simple which matters in an election -- not only must the election be secure but everyone needs to trust that it is.

How would you make votes verifiable and still have them be anonymous? The anonymous voting made possible with paper ballots is a killer feature from my point of view.

Once you go to the voting booth you get assigned a random private/public key pair. To ensure that the key pair is actually random you could let the voter create a seed.

This way, only you know the public key, and you can check that your vote did indeed end up with the candidate you voted for. You may disclose your public key if you wish to do so.

I would trust a scantron style ballot over any manual or digital alternative.

Quick, simple, proven and it leaves a verifiable paper trail.

I'm not sure why the article has such a strong focus on voting machines given that German elections stopped using them completely (it was barely used anyway) in 2009 after a decision of the Federal Constitutional Court in favor of paper ballots.

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