Electronic gambling devices are intensely code reviewed. It's the law. Why not electronic voting machines?
That said, paper ballots and hand counting are the answer for secure and accurate vote counts.
I imagine that it is very hard to convince someone that was elected with electronic voting machines that there is a problem with electronic voting machines.
Hand counts aren't particularly accurate. Change that to paper ballots counted by optical scanners with some clever ballot design using cryptographic techniques to allow voters to verify that their vote was included correctly in the count and to allow independent third party auditing of the results, and then you have a secure and accurate system.
One way to do that is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
Citation? Hand counts are as accurate as you want them to be. Just keep counting.
The problem with any form of voting that allows you to verify your vote was counted correctly, is that anyone can verify you voted 'correctly'.
The only way to ensure a fair election is to vote by paper ballot and have the count executed by anyone who wants to participate.
That's not correct. There are several systems that let you verify your ballot was included in the count and the count is correct, which together show that your vote was counted correctly, without letting anyone verify who specifically you voted for. See Punchscan, Prêt à Voter, and Scantegrity II for examples.
Look at the research literature under end to end auditable voting systems [1] for more on this topic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
Pen and paper.
With simple hand counted paper ballots, the voter has no way of knowing that the chain of custody of their ballot was not compromised.
By enhancing the paper ballots with cryptographic techniques, we can make it so that lapses in the chain of custody do not allow tampering with the election results. We can make it so we only need observers from all parties observing at specific places in the process, which is much more practical. We can make it so the voter can know that their vote did it make it into the total and it was counted correctly. We can make it so we can have a fast machine count, but still have a paper trail that supports a hand recount, and we can do this in a way that allows outside independent checking of the machine count.
Put another way: the way you protect against the subversion or deception of very few humans is to build a system that by design requires very many humans to be involved.
> In a large election it is a big challenge to ensure that independent observers from all parties are present every place someone could potentially tamper with ballots in storage or in transit between the time they are cast (especially in jurisdictions where polls are open a long time) and are counted and the count is folded into the overall total.
Australia has done it this way for most of a century.
It's easy. Candidates are highly motivated to provide scrutineers because they distrust each other. And the rules require scrutineers to be present and cross-sign to assemble or open ballot boxes.
> With simple hand counted paper ballots, the voter has no way of knowing that the chain of custody of their ballot was not compromised.
With a software solution, no voter has a way of knowing if their vote and everyone else's vote has been counted correctly, unless ... you do verification by hand.
Seriously.
Pen and paper. It works. It's safe at scale. Everyone understands it. The US is not a special case.
It's actually pretty easy: Count the ballots at the polling place immediately after the polls close. That leaves no opportunity to leave them unguarded. Publish the results of each place so everyone can reproduce how they are summed up.
In that case, there is a simple way to do it. Just publish a list of all ballets (by random ID) and their matching votes (by another random ID). No math needed.
If similar review and certification was required, states would throw their hands up at the cost and just opt for optically scanned paper ballots.
One reason could be if the people who would legislate on this benefit when voting machines don't work properly?
There's an article[0] with a powerful quote on the subject: "There is no one election in the United States, there are thousands of independent elections. ... They’re run with their own policies, and their own processes, and, frankly, in a lot of ways, their own vocabulary."
Machines are usually bought by local jurisdictions. Some states cover the costs for all elections; some for only some elections; over 6 cover nothing. In any case, local jurisdictions are faced with a conundrum: do we spend money for something that's used only a couple days a year, or fund more immediately beneficial programs (roads, aid programs, etc.)? Budgets can't even keep up with replacing equipment, let alone thorough code and security reviews. Assuming the administrators even recognize what kind of work needs done. It's outside their experience, and when you start considering the kind of attack vectors that freaking nation states can literally create, even the best efforts of well-intentioned election officials are going to be wholly insufficient. And when nation states that are willing to put in the effort are the threat you're protecting against, everything changes.
Individual states are unlikely to try and setup the kind of review that you're looking at. Or--possibly--even realize that they need to. It's expensive, and the people they're relying on to inform them about these matters are often the people selling the machines. Worse, you're looking at at least 50 separate efforts to secure voting machines. They may, or may not, somehow wind up coordinating with each other. The federal government could, but states guard their control over elections fiercely: just look at how almost all of them told the Obama administration to go pound sand when DHS warned them of potential hacking attempts.
Unless there's a major, undeniable breach, I don't expect much to change anytime soon in most states. Even then, we'll probably see a shift to paper ballots rather than the sort of hideously expensive expenditures needed for the sort of rigorous IT security efforts we now know are necessary for electronic voting in the current threat environment. Otherwise, we'll be lucky to see piecemeal incremental improvements when individual states get around to them.
0. https://www.propublica.org/article/election-security-a-high-...