What's wrong with electronic ballots? If we can have a secure and audit-able banking system (and every other aspect of our lifes), surely we can have the same for voting?
There's one major requirement in voting systems that throws a huge wrench in everything, anonymity. In order to prevent vote buying and coercion voters can't be tied to specific votes. So any system that allows a person to check that their vote got counted for their candidate isn't workable because that violates the anonymity requirement.
There's a million reasons that votes change as they're counted and recounted. For one in some states absentee ballots can be postmarked up to the day of the election so they can trickle in for a while after the day of. Another is machine breakdowns and just mistakes as the complete numbers are gathered.
There are several other major problems with their system [0], but I think they should at least get credit for their approach.
First of all, you can't observe the counting project, and now if somebody want to mess with the results, it becomes super easy to do so.
Electronic voting is a great opportunity for dictatorship.
And we know they do, because it's trivial to observe. Without paper it would be totally opaque, you would just have a raw number and nothing else.
The US requires that once you leave the polling station you must not be able to prove to anyone how you voted.
That's a big part of the advantage of paper ballots. The cost of subversion is high because more people need to be in on any conspiracy to subvert the system. More conspirators means more and more incentive to defect against co-conspirators.
Electronic systems do not scale subversion cost with electorate size. But they do scale the payoff of subversion.
1. Assume that there are enough high-powered actors to want to rig an election
2. Note that confirmed case of a rigged election happens through paper absentee ballots
3. Note that there are very few known cases of a rigged election happening through electronic voting machines.
4. One probable conclusion is that election rigging is possible and undetectable through electronic voting machines.
People who work with computers understand their limitations. But the average person on the street doesn't seem to see them the same way. They think computers equal modernization equal reliability. True or not, if you want to voting system to be a political reality, you'd have to change public opinion, and we've spent more than a decade trying to but haven't gotten that done.
To play devil's advocate...
Paper is just a medium. With apologies to Claude Shannon, critical properties of information are best ensured through secure protocols, not by picking a particular medium.
E.g., if the property you want is security, encryption is more provably secure than invisible ink. The properly encrypted message can be stored on paper, radio, magnets, or neurons, it doesn't matter.
The properties we want from ballots are somewhat uncommon and therefore very unintuitive. They are still properties of information. Availability and deniability simultaneously? (So you can personally confirm, but never provably sell your vote).
We could design a cryptographic protocol to meet those unique design goals. But not using paper alone, because the math would be too hard.
Paper appears to guarantee availability and privacy, just as invisible ink appears to guarantee security. In practice, each often fall short. Ballot boxes disappear. Absentee ballots travel through the postal system, which is a bit like blasting one unencrypted UDP packet and hoping for the best. No individual can take their paper ballot and later confirm how it was counted.
You could do these things with electrons though. It would require some fast math, like almost all useful protocols in information theory.
The swiss Post organized recently a public review (with awards to identify bugs - see another older thread on HN) for the software that they'll try to launch.
On one hand the swiss Post's solution would allow me to actively check if my vote was part of the total, which I think is absolutely fantastic.
On the other hand I did access the source repository of the new potential voting system <with sparkling eyes expecting something "special"> but I didn't even start digging into it as soon as I saw that it was written in Java.
I thought that such a software, which is the foundation to the future of a nation (voting system), would have as its foundation 1) a language that leaves very little room for technical and functional bugs (e.g. something used in the aerospace industry?), 2) would be structured using an extremely well-known-for-its-reliability workflow-engine and 3) was submitted to testing covering basically ALL possible combinations at ALL levels (not just e.g. "10000 cycles of randomness" but all possible input-values, for all layers).
When I saw that it was written in Java (nothing against Java - same thing for e.g. C/C++) I immediately gave up because, even if that SW is made to be absolutely unhackable >>now<<, this won't be true anymore starting from the next releases as the $ and "attention" will inevitably be reduced more and more and the whole tower will start to crumble.
Summarized: I'd like such a system, but I would need it to implemented in an extremely strict way that is able to survive times of low budgets and/or bad employees and/or bad management and/or of course corruption, which is when coincidentally a stable solution would be needed the most.
I usually (have to) choose between dark- or light-grey when I vote, but in this case, to replace the current system, it's one of the rare occasions for which I would need a "pure white" solution :)
Paper ballot operational complexity scales linearly with the size of the electorate, which makes them adequately scalable for any practical use. (There's maybe an issue with using paper ballots for some esoteric election methods, because of how operational complexity scales with number of candidates for some type of tallying, but absent a decision that use of one of those methods is desirable that's immaterial.)
Australia holds elections this way and has done so for a century. Scaling has not been an issue. Neither has transparency.
Repudiation, verification etc..
I suggest this technology is part of a 'pro democracy' agenda, as opposed to some kind of existential need within the US.
The tech might ostensibly be destined for S. America, Africa and parts of Asia.
The opposite is true, for example Russian government is actively pushing for electronic voting at the moment. No more videos like this [1], only the number "your dictator got 70% of people's votes"
Paper voting isn't perfect.