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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

This supports my long held belief that one of the best thing we could do for improving vote administration is convincing the public to be patient with results.

There's no particular reason everyone needs to know the results of a competitive state-wide race the same night the polls close, yet we are making all kinds of security and other tradeoffs to support this as a goal.

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Just do it like the Germans where there are no more voting machines, just paper ballots, and you have the election result within a few hours.

There is really no reason for voting machines at all.

Indeed touchscreen voting machines have well documented security flaws, but the article mentions optical-scan machines by ES&S. That is, machines that scan paper ballots. Paper ballots would be reviewed by humans during recounts, or if doubts arise over the tallies, but maybe not if election officials have no reason to be doubtful.

Schneier agrees, almost word for word.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/11/the_problem_w...

This requires convincing the press to treat the results as something we don't need to know immediately, which goes against their fundamental nature. Good luck.

The press is only giving people what they want

This had never occurred to me, but in hindsight it's really obvious. I'll start socializing this idea among people I know.

What are you even talking about? People on Hacker News should be pushing for blockchain voting. You are on a tech news site, where you can post in real-time, but we are supposed to "trust" a corrupt political institution to have people count our votes, with only about 100 opportunities for someone to compromise the process along the way.

No thanks... I'll take my real-time information to make sure that my vote was counted correctly. They can use my SSN for credit worthiness and to offer me money, but they can't use a cryptographic hash to help record my vote?

The average reader here has a much better understanding of the shortcomings of technology than the general public -- particularly with regards to how much of what is perceived as being secure really isn’t at all.

I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure"blockchains"/whatever the applications run on them isn't necessarily a perfectly secure solution either -- not that such a thing exists.

Still probably 100x more secure the paper ballots counted by an easily corruptible social process, than a mathematical equation that is auditable by the entire world.

Maybe? In general, the advantage that paper ballots has is the primary threat is an unethical human. The potential for widespread tampering is low but the chances it happens at all is high. Compromising an application is (hopefully) difficult to do, but has huge implications. From what I know now, I prefer the former risk, but I’d be open to being convinced otherwise. I’m pretty skeptical of a global audit process of a mathematical equation working well in real life.

Firstly, "easily corruptible" just isn't currently true in most western countries. Also the question with blockchain is how you manage identidies and audit it while still having it be anonymous and really easy to use. It's not that you can't solve these problems but to my knowledge solving them requires tradeoffs that make the security situation much less of a simple win

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