If the past is any indication, there will almost certainly be a lot of comments on this article proposing complicated schemes for making electronic voting secure and verifiable. Consider when evaluating these schemes whether there is any benefit or upside at all over good old fashioned unhackable paper.
With paper voting, all votes are counted by several people, with oversight and random recounts. It is _possible_ to cheat, but it would require a local conspiracy for a limited number of votes.
With electronic voting, the counting is done by machines and the mechanism is obfuscated and unverifiable. If it's working correctly, it should be perfect; but if the machines were hacked, it could be done through a network and the impacts could be massive. It would require a large conspiracy to pull off, but the number of votes that could be affected could change an election.
So in summary: paper voting = higher chance of small irregularities, with limited impact; electronic voting = lower chance of massive irregularities with election changing consequences. In paper voting, the trust is distributed, while in electronic voting, it is centralized.
I know in other poorer nations thugs just straight stuff the ballots with votes, some even steal the box, some set it on fire, and it can be in general a complete shit show.
What is simply required is a publicly available audit of elections, where any citizen can verify for themselves the outcome of their local results.
If corruption is widespread at all levels of society no system will work.
> I know in other poorer nations thugs just straight stuff the ballots with votes, some even steal the box, some set it on fire, and it can be in general a complete shit show.
And you know that this happens because you need a shit show to mess election at that level. With electronic voting, you will not even notice.
Paper voting is inefficient and is what it makes it hard to break. You need a lot of manpower to alter an election. If you can alter the election result with manpower, the system that you use does not matter anymore.
Yes, you need some minimum of civil society infrastructure for paper ballots to be categorically more secure than electronic ballots.
But the article is about the US. In the US, paper is simply safer.
Yeah, well, don't drive into trees then.
Well-designed, verifiable, auditable paper ballot systems already exist in the US. In many states, the paper-based ballot process is completely safe and reliable. For those states that struggle, the correct solution is to look to the states that don't struggle, and imitate them.
It's not just the paper system it's that the paper system can be monitored by representatives of each party, there's no good way to do that with an electronic system that doesn't at least create a separate paper record of the vote that's counted separately.
If someone asks "why should I trust this count is correct" you can say "well these are the people that counted the votes - these are the people who watched (selected by parties A, B and C) and here's some video of it all happening".
That's a lot more comprehensible than "well, do you know what a blockchain is?".
Being trustable is great - but it also needs to be trusted!
I don't think my mom knows what a blockchain is.
Can someone explain why I am ignorant here: Is it not just feasible to open source and open access everything with only obfuscating voter identity as a hash? That way people can voluntarily make public their votes for third-party investigation?
Note: I'm not saying this is better than paper voting. But if voting is to be electronic then this seems like the best model?
In many environments, secret votes and public votes lead to different outcomes: requests to make regularly public votes secret is not that uncommon in elections for private groups: Everyone knows that there's a big percentage of people that want to vote in an unpopular way, and suddenly either an old leader is ousted, or a very corrupt choice is made.
So no, the ability to voluntarily make your own vote public and verifiable is a dealbreaker for elections in a modern state.
These combine with "at will" employment such that I could be fired for voting in the "wrong" primary for my company, with no laws broken. I'm not saying it has ever happened, but it could. Murphy's Law provides the rest.
In the general election, the only public information is whether I voted or not. So I vote as I please. I can still be fired for wearing only the minimum required amount of flair, but at least that's not interfering with democracy.
Public votes can also be sold. If you say you'll pay me $X if I vote for Y, making the Y vote public means they buyer can know that they got what they paid for.
> With electronic voting, the counting is done by machines and the mechanism is obfuscated and unverifiable.
Could a blockchain not address that with public/private keys? Why is this ridiculous?
So what problem does it solve? What does the blockchain accomplish that a paper ballot does not? And what are the costs in terms of user interface and voter education, relative to paper?
I'm not saying this would be good necessarily, only that such a technology would enable fast, frequent, continuous control distributed across the population. Such a country would be very different from anything that exists today.
Assuming that voting would become effectively free, the second point does sound quite intriguing. It's the sort of direct democracy that is practiced by some countries (e.g. Switzerland). It does require a certain level of voter education though - so people look at the longer term. Otherwise you'll never push through an initiative that raises taxes for example.
To prevent selling of votes, or forced votes via blackmail.
The main issue is the hardware, and added complexity. But these are interesting problems that should be talked about.
Plus we would need culture changes around key management, so that non-tech-literate people can create and protect keys. Which means the people would need some standard for secure hardware to generate keys and sign ballots. Which means we'd need some government standard for "trusted hardware", and that would quickly become an attack vector.
Only after all of that would it be possible for the government to trust votes via public key cryptography. And as Jacob says, the important thing is that the _public_ has trust in the vote, regardless of what government officials believe.
First, that requires a new Constitution, throwing out our existing representative democracy and starting over with a new model.
Second, not everyone agrees direct democracy is a good idea. Adding a layer of focused expertise in the form of representation is arguably a very good thing.
There are all sorts of changes that wouldn't require a new constitution, just likely an amendment. They're unlikely to happen though, as our current representative democracy would need to voluntarily give up some of their power.
>Second, not everyone agrees direct democracy is a good idea. Adding a layer of focused expertise in the form of representation is arguably a very good thing
There is a massive amount of room between a pure direct democracy and our current system. Our two party system removes any semblance of Democratic choice on issues the parties agree on.
For this to be true, you need a majority of the population to be well informed voters, which just isn't true. I'd be surprised if 25% of American's knew about a US bomb blowing up a bus of schoolchildren recently, and doubt a strong majority would support that bombing. Yet my vote does not matter on the issue.
Not saying it's a bad idea. Questioning whether you're contradicting yourself.
Not really, even on some highly salient issues. Universal public health care has had majority public support most of the time since the early 1990s, but the Democratic Party has opposed it (in favor of various complex public/private schemes with insurance companies front and center) as has the Republican Party.
It's even less true in issues that are of extreme interest to a narrow group and low public salience.
Other than that, what I have seen in representative democracies (and authoritarian states) worldwide have never sparked the "expertise" feeling in me.
When these experts are bought and sold by corporations who write the laws to benefit themselves and hurt the people who voted for said representatives, the system is utterly broken.
Just because there is no immediate benefit doesn't mean there won't one day be benefit. Initial versions of many forms of technology were near useless and only became better after refinement. Just look at how useless the original electric cars were. But electronic voting, if someone could make it safe and secure, could have benefits we can't recognize.
The risk is implementing an incomplete system and the very likely possibility that any government attempt will be very lacking (and often filled with the standard amount of corrupt in similar large IT projects). I would not support removing the paper process currently, but I would support development going into electronic voting so that one day the technology will be mature enough for us to see benefits that current paper voting can't provide.
A few examples of what may one day be possible is massively lowering the cost to vote (for many poor people getting a few hours off of work to go vote ends up costing them far more than they value their vote being worth), making it possible to do voting a more regular event which would allow more direct democratic versions of government, the ability to have something we can trust more than slips of paper that have to be hand tallied (current systems are far less trustable, but future systems may be able to become more trustable than paper).
I think regardless of if paper or digital is used, we need an anonymous verification method. i.e. I can confirm that my vote was cast and tallied for X candidate. And if you got your whole community together, you could prove there are no injected or altered votes.
The receipt of a vote could be a UUID that you can then use later to verify your vote, for instance.
I agree with you, but let's not kid ourselves.
"Vote early, vote often" did not originate with electronic voting. Paper systems are hackable as well.