Hacker News Reader

Comment by PrimeDirective | Hacker News Reader

How do you know they don't change your physical ballots?

Because the count is done by representatives of each party together and each of them won't let the others steal for their side.

The characteristics of paper elections are well understood and can be shown to be sound very easily to any common citizen. The massive attack surface of electronic elections is poorly understood even by technical people. It's a massive amount of complexity and expense for exactly zero gain.

I the UK system each party has monitors who observe the count and also get involved in any disputes.

You can inspect and watch the ballots.

What is stopping The Public from watching electronic ballots just as equally as electronic ballots?

If I wanted to see paper ballots, how is that different from wanting to see electronic ballots? I'm not confident that I could successfully petition Government for paper ballots just as much as I could sue a given contractor for same electronic records.

If I want, I can go down to my polling place before it opens, inspect all the boxes to be empty, watch as people put their ballots in, then watch as the boxes are emptied and the ballots counted. If I'm not allowed to do all this, I can't trust the vote unless I trust the people that administered it.

Electronic voting always requires trust in the administrators.

> watch as people put their ballots in

This is not allowed in many jurisdictions. You can watch the before and after part easily, though.

When someone writes something on a piece of paper, puts that piece of paper in a box, and later I see someone reopens that piece of paper then I can be reasonably confident I see whatever the original person wrote on the piece of paper.

I have no such confidence in electronic messages. Unless they're plaintext.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com