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lev99

How would you hack a paper ballot?

You see your choices in paper.

You place the paper in a ballot box.

The ballot box is watched by people on both sides.

The ballot box is sealed and transparently transported to a counting facility.

The ballot counting is observed by people on both sides.

The counting facility counts the ballots twice, with both counts having to agree. The counts are communicated to a central tallying location.

The counts for each counting facility and the total are publicly communicated.

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The most important feature of a paper ballot is that the general populace can read them, and understand how they work. The worst feature of any electronic-only voting system is that the general populace cannot verify that they work. This is a bad thing even in the case where no hacking occurred, since it reduces trust in the validity of the outcome by anyone who dislikes the result.

The general populace can't really verify the results of paper ballots either, that would mean letting anyone who wanted to do their own manual counts of all ballots.

https://www.eac.gov/voters/become-a-poll-worker/

A poll worker isn't the general public, though, that's still a limited number of privileged individuals. The general public would be literally anyone off the street.

And a single poll worker still wouldn't be able to verify all of the votes in an election. There's still an insurmountable trust issue where most of the public has to accept the results from what amounts to a black box, which paper ballots don't entirely solve.

> A poll worker isn't the general public, though, that's still a limited number of privileged individuals. The general public would be literally anyone off the street.

In Australia we have observers for the counting process and every party or candidate can send representatives. Political parties are practically begging for volunteers in this role. We also have a much more complex preferential voting system but the manual counting process still shows results 30-60 minutes after polls close in all but the tightest races.

> And a single poll worker still wouldn't be able to verify all of the votes in an election.

Anyone cheating would have to involve a huge number of people around the country and the people watching those people. Getting elected legitimately would be far easier.

In France, anyone can show up and participate to the manual counting.

It is done onsite so there is no risk of tempering.

If you wanted, you could stand next to the transparent ballot box the entire day and then count yourself.

The results are available a couple hours later. I can't think of any downside.

They can verify the results of their individual vote on their paper ballot. They cannot do that with an electronic system.

Unless it's a situation like 2000, and the infamous "hanging chad" issue. It sure looks like you voted, but whoops your ballot just isn't counted because of a physical failure.

I really think a hybrid solution is the best option.

You vote electronically on a machine and it prints a paper vote.

You verify the paper vote is what you entered and then place it in the ballot box.

The machine can give an "unverified" counts in real-time to tally up results.

The votes can be verified later on using the manual method of counting paper votes. These can be cross-checked with what the machine has said.

I prefer the paper first, scan into box and then it is electronic.

Makes it fairly easy to identify a box and verify if needed and identity a possible suspect machine and etc.

I does the best job of preserving the voter's clear choices made by them, filtered by nobody.

How quickly we forget the year 2000. Between butterfly ballots, "lost boxes of votes" and general tom-foolery an entire presidential election was stolen.

The current system is broken, and it seems like folly to stick your head in the sand and reject all attempts to fix it.

> How would you hack a paper ballot?

Right, we started to have rigged elections after eletronic voting. /s

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