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Comment by dandelany | Hacker News Reader

I don't know that we're opposed to it in theory, it's just that every single implementation thus far has been terrifically bad. Making the code open source would go a long way, I think, as would establishing open working groups to establish security standards. I may be an optimist, but I do believe that theoretically (at least information-theoretically[1]), it can be done well.

[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Information-theoreticall...

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It's also fairly easy for us techies to grasp the hacking of computer systems. But we often forget how insecure and error prone paper systems can also be:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJfj9ySYg0Q

Massive voter fraud could be happening every election - it's pretty easy to vote fraudulently and there is almost no way to find out after the fact (I've done it unintentionally). For whatever reason, we are insanely afraid of hackers pushing an election over the edge, and yet we don't even ask for photo ID at the voting booth.

We're more concerned about electronic voting because it lowers the effort and manpower needed to defraud immensely.

And more likely, in a close election the election can be stolen by a minimal change, which will probably go undetected.

I voted on Saturday (Australian election). No id required, 100% paper votes, all counted by hand (as far as I'm aware) and we normally have a result within a few hours of polls in the West closing.

Seems to work very well, but I guess one advantage we have is that none of the parties here are worth cheating for.

Might also help that Australia's population is about 22M. The USA are at 308M and India is 1180M - hand-counting ballots might just be a bigger problem with those kinds of numbers involved.

Can't see why it would be. That kind of thing parallelizes really well.

Granted, oversight would likely thin a bit.

Germany has 80 m, and hand-counting works well. It does seem to be easy to parallelize.

I do not. As long as the hardware has been in possession of untrusted parties (and polling place workers do not count as trusted) any software solution can be compromised.

I'm not convinced that any method will ever be 100% foolproof, but I think it can be improved immensely, and if we could limit the inaccuracies/fraud to always be less than those incurred by a traditional paper ballot[1], I think I'd approve.

In regards to your comment regarding untrusted parties handling the hardware, here are a few counterpoints:

- We already trust polling place workers with paper ballots, the possibility for fraud already exists.

- The potential for fraud from any one polling place can be limited by implementing a system which makes it impossible (or very very difficult) to spoof the location from which a vote was cast, and ensuring that the number of votes cast per polling place is within an expected range.

- Such a system could also include a paper receipt with an ID number on it. A voter could plug this "tracking number" in on a trusted website (ie. vote.gov) and confirm that their name is associated with their preferred candidates, but not allow them to change these choices. This would go a long way towards identifying fraudulent activity when/if it occurs.

[1] Though figuring out how to quantify this is anybody's guess.

"We already trust polling place workers with paper ballots, the possibility for fraud already exists."

I don't know about the US, but here in Germany _anyone_ can watch the whole process including the counting of the votes.

So it is possible for me to check up on my polling place.

With the current paper ballot system you need a lot of people to cheat significantly. With voting computers you need only a really tiny number of people to steal an election.

Is it not the case in the US that representatives of each party supervise the counting of the ballots? Pretty sure that's how it works locally; though elections are state-governed so I guess there could be some variation.

Having representatives of each party overseeing the process should serve to keep any monkey business in check. Though when people are involved, there's always a chance for corruption.

You can't let people look up their vote or their employers, spouse, etc, could force them to vote for preferred candidates. Ron Rivest has a system to make it verifiable and deniable (Three ballot system). There are others.

Rivest has the right idea in terms of thinking about this cryptographically... But the Three Ballot system would be an absolute mess :-P Remember hanging chads? Try telling people that to vote against a candidate, they have to mark them on one of three ballots...

Usability is a big problem with election systems. Making something anonymous, auditable, fraud resistant, affordable, etc and simultaneously make it usable more or less by everyone is tough.

They recently used a system called Scantegrity in Takoma Park, MD (Rivest also collaborated here). I've been meaning to look up the usability conclusions on this one, but I don't remember seeing much in the way of problems at the time.

Certainly we trust the polling workers with paper ballots, and fraud exists there, but IMHO the ease of electronic fraud is much greater than the ease of paper ballot fraud. I'm thinking of the work involved with ballot stuffing - you basically can turn it into a "one click" operation.

(Speaking only of the US voting system)

I don't think that is necessarily true. Perhaps a public key scheme could be derived that would enable everybody to verify the votes on their home PC.

The challenge is to allow for anonymous voting. I don't think it is necessarily a problem that is impossible to solve. Practical solutions are also a challenge.

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