Nearly every demonstration of voting machine hacking has required unrestricted physical access to the machine and tools/keys.
Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.
Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.
For that to be any consolation, we’d have to unconditionally trust those who have physical access to the machine and tools/keys.
Such trust is not necessary with paper ballots because they can always be hand-counted with supervision from both sides of a disputed election.
A vote count given by an electronic machine has no such auditability.
> Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.
“Hacking” a stack of paper, e.g. ballot stuffing or destroying ballots, is something people can see happen. It’s not impossible, but it is very difficult to do out in the open with security cameras and the public there to watch. Not to say it doesn’t happen, but you tend to make a much bigger mess doing it.
That assumes they aren't replaced at some point. For a nation-level election this is probably too difficult to significantly influence an election but at even a state level it's relatively doable with a little coercion and/or carefully placed individuals even in 2019 in the United States.
You also have the option to do voter impersonation in states without voting ID laws, again this would mostly only work at a more local level.
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud documents 1052 CONVICTIONS of voter fraud in the United States with 1,216 proven instances.
Outside of the United States there are all sorts of examples, including standing out the polling places with force to let people know vote our way or we'll shoot you.
Have you never heard of bribes or threats? It happens with juries, I imagine it happens with poling places, and I imagine some of those convictions involved exactly that.
If you've reached a point where you are willing to tamper with an election, greasing some palms or finding something to threaten key people with is not going to make you lose a single wink of sleep or have any mental reservations or other hesitations. People like money, like a lot, and if you haven't the funds to bribe them with the 21st century offers a horde easily discoverable information about people and those close to them.
Also, with presidential elections in 2018, there were no prior notifications and the government didn't know who was going to become an observer before the voting day, which was nice.
Sadly, you cannot become an observer by yourself, I don't like that.
I haven't heard about bribes or threats, but there were cases when an observer was taken away by police for allegedly being too loud and obstructing the voting. In recent elections, independent observers used a Telegram chat for coordination, so that they could ask for consultation or ask someone else to come to the polling station if something happened.
In Russia fraud is usually committed by election staff who often are public school employees, social care or government workers, people who are paid by the government. And typically they prefer to falsify results when there is no observers, they don't want to appear in Youtube videos.
Of course, in other countries the situation may be different.
The Russian Revolution established a control-freak government that hated freedom; Lenin was a self-annointed genius. The USSR failed because the incentives were misaligned.
My grandparents immigrated from Russia when their parents saw the pogroms in the 1890s. Using scapegoats, promising free stuff, and fear mongering is over 100 year tradition. Emotion and anecdotes over data.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/world/europe/moscow-prote...
But this allows us to see what measures to ensure transparency work in such circumstances and what don't. We see that independent observers and paper voting at polling stations help to prevent fraud and electronic voting would be completely opaque and uncontrollable.
I'm sorry to report that I feel your government is at war with my country.
Holy whataboutism. Yes Russia is a far cry from a healthy democracy but that has no bearing in any way on paper ballots. You seem to have just changed the subject entirely.
A successful voting process both accurately counts the votes, and is trusted by the people. Computers can count, but they are not seen as trustworthy by the people. Paper is more understandable and trustworthy. Even as a computer programmer I'm not sure I can trust electronic voting.
Thus, even in the absence of any actual hacks or fraud, electronic voting is inferior at a primary objective of the voting system, being understandable and perceived as trustworthy.
Unlike electronic voting, paper ballots are much more difficult to manipulate. If a voter has marked a box for candidate X, you cannot change it or ignore it if there are observers. An observer can verify that voting goes according to the rules and votes are counted properly. The most popular way to "hack" paper voting is to organise groups of people and ride them on a bus from one polling station to other so that they can vote multiple times, but it is more difficult to do, and easier to spot than simply replace the firmware in a voting machine.
In the case with an electronic machine, you cannot see what's happening inside.
You have the option to mail in your vote or to vote in an advance poll, but these options close a week before the main poll, so if your name appears on the list at your polling station, they're pretty confident you haven't voted yet.
Assuming there is no external IO such as USB or Ethernet, someone would have to disassemble the machine and solder a programming header in order to re-flash the device.
> to disassemble the machine
Is it that difficult?
Hack paper ballots: bribe the multiple people, including representatives from each party who cares to send one, to look the other way while you steal a box full of paper ballots and substitute your own.
It’s not impossible, but it’s much harder to mess with paper ballots at scale and much easier to secure them.
No they arent. You need one guy with physical access to to a machine, at any time, to screw an election, with manual counting you need everyone in the room conspiring to rig the election during the voting hours. With the possibility to volunteer to count votes and publishing the voting numbers for each voting station, you just dont get those situations.
I know its an unpopular statement, but having a democratic election is not a new problem to solve. Most western countries do it just fine. This is not a problem with the concept of paper ballots but a absurdly broken system.
How can you trust that the machine will behave as you expect in a "real world" setting, when the results truly count?
IMHO, the biggest risk from electronic voting machines isn't some rando swinging the elections with their 1337 haxx0r skills: the biggest risk is that the machines basically come "pre-hacked" from the factory - either intentionally, or unintentionally (bugs happen).
So simple, so effective.