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Comment by liberte82 | Hacker News Reader

The best benefit I've heard about paper voting is the mechanism by which trust in the count is ensured.

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.

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No, it would not require a large conspiracy to pull off. With electronic voting, a single highly skilled engineer could rig an election without needing any accomplices at all. That is why it's terrifying.

A paper ballot system is just as terribly ineffective as electronic voting. Look at Russia. They have a paper voting system as well.

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.

> A paper ballot system is just as terribly ineffective as electronic voting. Look at Russia. They have a paper voting system as well.

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.

You didn't respond to any of the logic in the comments above.

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.

If the civil society infrastructure doesn't exist to secure free elections with paper balloting, then you're not really living in a democracy anyway, and you've got bigger issues to deal with.

Driving is unsafe. I could drive right into a tree!

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.

That's more a problem with the system surrounding the paper ballot than the paper system itself. Switch to an electronic means in those countries won't remove the fixing problem just make it harder to see because the fix will happen before election day instead of the day of.

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.

Another major benefit of this is that the things that makes it trustable are very easy to understand.

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!

In another electronic voting thread last week, I had a highly upvoted comment describing the Minnesota paper voting system (credentials: I have been a MN election judge). Part of the beauty is that it's so easy to understand. You see all these interlocking checks, and how they work to make large-scale manipulation/fraud impossible.

I don't think my mom knows what a blockchain is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17735324 I assume this comment

Yes, that one.

>With electronic voting, the counting is done by machines and the mechanism is obfuscated and unverifiable.

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?

The ability to make your own vote public is a bug, not a feature: It allows people to demand you to show them that you voted "correctly", whether for straight out vote sales, or plain old intimidation from a group. A pastor/union boss that can be sure that a bunch of people really went to vote, and voted they way they want, is pretty powerful. At some point you make the "voluntary" part of giving away your hash to not be so voluntary, as only traitors would keep it quiet.

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.

Example: I usually do not vote in the party primaries in my state, because the party that primary voters selected is public. Mostly, I don't want to get tagged by Big Data as having a political affiliation.

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.

So would it be impossible to make a system that would allow a person to lie if needed and also prove that their vote was wrongly assigned if needed? I've seen cryptographic solutions to things that seem as impossible initially (like having a system verify you know your password without ever telling the system your password and without the system ever knowing what your password is), so I wouldn't be so quick to write off a potential solution to this problem.

How do you verify that the machine is running the same source code?

Its being debated whether ballot selfies should be allowed or not, because it is protected by free speech or because it violates current laws about voter bullying. So a system that allows third-party verification of an individuals vote is probably against the law, at least currently.

Overall, well put, and those points are tough to discount.

> 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?

The hard parts of voting systems are keeping 1 ratios 1 of voter and vote and preserving individual voter anonymity. Blockchains don't solve either problem better than paper, and if you're not careful you end up introducing subtle new voting problems (you should not be able to prove who you voted for -- _even_ if you hold a special credential) and shiny new operational problems like key distribution. All of this is at best a ton of risk for ostensibly very little benefit; at worst, your democracy is now owned by some rando with an Android 0day.

Okay, let's start with the idea that it isn't ridiculous. For the sake of argument, let's say a blockchain-based voting system could be as verifiable as paper.

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?

It makes voting faster and less expensive (practically free). That means you could have the public voting at arbitrary frequency. You could imagine a system where the public is voting every month, week, or day on what the country should do next.

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.

This is assuming that the system would be inherently trustworthy and trustable with no human oversight. I have a nagging suspicion that over time this system would still settle in a state where we have just as many humans involved in ensuring everything is kosher as we have now, but compounded with a system that is less transparent for someone who is blockchain illiterate.

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.

I haven't heard of a "practically free" blockchain yet, though.

Because your vote also needs to be private to the point where a third-party can't verify that a vote belongs to you.

To prevent selling of votes, or forced votes via blackmail.

Thanks. That’s the answer I was looking for. I guess there would be no way to verify privately.

There's ways. A memorized "secret" that would be put on the ballot in addition to your vote could be used for you to verify a checksum.

The main issue is the hardware, and added complexity. But these are interesting problems that should be talked about.

There are a large number of technical issues with blockchain voting. The thing about public key cryptography is that it is easy to create a new identity. But in a voting system you need to trust that each voter is a citizen and that they only vote once. This means that public keys of the citizens need to be securely collected by a government authority (for example your local DMV).

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.

Sorry to be there guy: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2030:_Voting_Soft...

That still counts as "done by machines".

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