Comment by athenot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by athenot | Hacker News Reader

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Voting machines are a solution in search of a problem.

The whole point of automation is to save on labor, at the cost of simplicity. Machines are excellent at handling complexity that some experts can come up with and can execute it reasonably well. Except that this is precisely the opposite of what's desired in an election.

Voting is one situation where it is DESIREABLE to have many people manually involved in a simple process. Auditing voting machines requires a pretty in-depth knowledge of information systems and experience with a lot of edge cases.

Proprietary voting machines only make auditing worse, basically hiding all flaws behind a curtain of marketing and legal threats. Over 95% of the citizens have no way of auditing the integrity of the results and have to put blind faith in for-profit corporations who are (1) disincentivized from disclosing flaws and (2) do not suffer penalties when security flaws are found to be present by researchers.

In a paper scheme, it takes more human effort to tally an election, but every citizen can participate in that process, and the others can safely observe and easily understand what's going on. The only downside is that it may take a few hours instead of seconds. But latency is infinitely preferable over opacity and potential inaccuracy.

I used to think e-voting would be OK if there was a requirement to use open-source voting software but even that is problematic. As a software engineer, it would be my pride to be able to help, however that would still be depriving non-software people from the ability to participate in the process, and I feel that is wrong. Now that my focus at work is on building resilient systems, I believe paper is the way to go, especially considering one of the other requirements is secrecy.

Probably nit-picky but I feel it's worth pointing out and it supports your point:

> Over 95% of the citizens have no way of auditing the integrity of the results and have to put blind faith in for-profit corporations who are (1) disincentivized from disclosing flaws and (2) do not suffer penalties when security flaws are found to be present by researchers.

It is WELL UNDER 5%, I would be surprised if quality security engineers constitute 0.1% of the population.

0.1 percent of the United States population would still be 325,700 people, assuming I'm getting the right numbers from Google.

> Voting machines are a solution in search of a problem.

Voting machines are pretty crap, but they can and occasionally do solve some real problems.

Voting machines can help visually disabled people vote without human assistance and potential vote manipulation. Although that's not super helpful when it often makes systematic vote manipulation easier.

Voting machines can make it much easier to handle giving eligible voters the proper ballots if they show up at a precinct other than their home precinct; which enables things like pooled early voting locations and show up at any polling place in the county. It can be a lot easier to show up during voting hours to vote somewhere near work or school or on your way than somewhere near your house; but most elections have a mix of national, state, and local issues to vote on, and districts are not always well aligned. In the 2016 Presidential election, Santa Clara County had 247 different types of ballots.

We use paper ballots here and somehow managed to make them accessible without necessarily using machines. https://www.elections.on.ca/en/voting-in-ontario/accessible-...

Paper plus optical scan is probably the best thing going: Quick tallies, on-the-spot verification, complete paper trail.

Sure, you can hack the optical scan machines, but if you do, a double-check of paper ballots will quickly show the problem.

> Voting machines are a solution in search of a problem.

Not really. If done properly they would allow faster and cheaper vote counting, a more secure audit trail and the ability for voters to verify that their vote was recorded properly.

But they do seem to be one of those things where the government is happy to just hand out bags of money to rubbish vendors and then wonder why it doesn't work. Reminds me of the NHS digitisation fiasco.

Those are just some assertions you made, most of which are considered "wrong" by experts who have spent time in this domain.

> cheaper

You realize we get to use volunteer labor here.

> more audit

That's broadly dissented unless you presume a given-by-god form of "done properly" and no-true-scotsman your way out of any constructive discussion.

> ability for voters to verify their vote

ALSO broadly dissented or at best extremely nontrivial. Blinded cryptographic operations are the territory you're talking about if you want to be in the ballpark of correct, and while the theory exists, the practice is again... not a given. I'm not even sure the theory is fully available for this domain.

Remember, one of the core concepts in a functional democracy is a secret ballot. This is essential to avoiding Some Very Nice People hovering just outside the polling place to make sure everyone in the area voted "correctly".

"Secret" means not only can the government not find out how you voted, but you can't prove who you voted for either. Both are extremely important.

If you can prove who you voted for you can collect a payment for voting a particular way. I can't believe people keep advocating for "proof" systems without recognizing this fatal flaw.

I am not advocating a system that allows you to prove to others how you voted. That would be stupid.

But it is pretty easy to have a system that lets you verify to yourself that your vote was recorded correctly.

How are those two different? How can you prove to yourself and yet not to others?

> Blinded cryptographic operations are the territory you're talking about

No I am not. It is simple really - when you vote you get some kind of a receipt with a vote ID on it. And on the screen it tells you an easy-to-remember number (for example 0-9). When you want to verify your vote you go online and check that the verification digit matches.

You still can't prove to anyone else how you voted (unless you take a photo, but that is true already and is a reason taking photos is banned).

Not sure where "here" is, but everybody working the polls in California is paid, and there are a lot of us, so it isn't "cheaper" because of that. See my comment below.

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