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Comment by drusepth | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: how is <secretly using different software or hardware in the machine> different from <someone secretly switching or altering ballots> in our current system?

If we can't trust checks and balances saying, "Your vote will be counted properly here", how do we trust any of it?

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The process you described would require a group of humans to conspire together and carry out voter fraud. Which is not only illegal (and thus carries high risk on an individual level), but probably difficult to pull off without anyone finding out about it. Compare that to totally opaque code running on a system only a very few select people will ever get to observe. Not only that, the average person may not even be able to spot malicious code even if they were given the opportunity to stare right at it. It would be pretty hard not to notice someone dumping ballots or stuffing ballot boxes if you were observing a counting room, even with no prior knowledge of the process.

The sheer volume of fraudulent paper ballots needed, combined with manual partial counts to ensure automated scanner accuracy has ensured the security of paper based voting compared to alternatives.

The difference is that paper ballot voting can be easily introspected, whereas computers cannot. In many countries with paper ballots, the entire process from setting up the urns to counting the results is entirely done in public, usually with members of different parties being present. If you want to make sure that your vote is not tampered with, you can show up in the morning to see that the urn is empty, cast your vote, and watch the urn until it is opened in the evening and the votes are counted.

Because the paper ballot system is audited live by all participating entities. The box that you put your ballot into is watched continuously by a member of your political party, by one state official and by a member of the at least one opposing party. Once the votes are in, then the two party people watch while the state official's team counts all votes and writes down the total. At this point they can take a picture of the final tally and send to party membership.

To mess with the election, you have to turn all three persons mentioned above, who all have conflicting interests [1]. And then do this for a significant fraction of the voting centers in one constituency to change the overall result. It's almost impossible to do this to any appreciable degree.

What more, explaining the above to regular people is as easy as repeating the above paragraph to them. As long as people trust that their party member's are not double crossing them, they will trust the process.

[1] the person of the opposing party might have ethics, so it's not given that they will just agree to blatant vote manipulation.

Simply have all citizens be able to inspect the process? Where I live the political parties generally take that role since they are the stakeholders and they can request recounts if they see anything weird going on.

And even though we do manual counting we get a preliminary election result the same night, simply by having adequately sized voting districts and then everything is recounted a couple of times for the final certified result.

That's technically true also in my country (Spain), but if you talk with polling station presidents they will tell you there's a lot of allowed fraud and fake votes. Usually, they're not evil, but if you sum up one here and another... My friend had to invent two votes because they were missing in the ballot box, the political parties there agreed to do that like if it was normal. He was also very angry because there was no anonymous vote, he couldn't put all parties in the secret rooms, so you were only able to vote for some parties in public and not so anonymous rooms.

They all seem like small things, but you sum up... This year we had the most fragmented political spectrum and small differences make big changes. In Leon, a polling station made a mistake and put the votes for a party in a different row. Nobody there noticed the mistake except the far-right party Vox. One simple polling station mistake changes the mayor of the city because they were enough votes.

Another problem I see is the mail vote. Mail vote is extremely popular in Spain (4-5% of total votes) and it's very easy to manipulate, not able to be inspected.

because the cost of the attack is very different at the scale required to influence the outcome. thus electronic voting is less secure.

There's many techniques and practices of creating trust and more resilient election processes:

0. international independent observers following the entire chains-of-custody of votes and the tallying process

1. vote as did the Greeks or Googlers' for their lunch: place a physical token in the particular container for a given candidate, and then weigh them and measure their volume. There's no hanging chads or ambiguity.

2. place non-partisan, professionals with integrity in-charge of and with elections

3. seek a wide pool of volunteers, and randomly assign them

4. randomized double/triple/quad verify chain-of-custody at key activity steps to reduce chances of many types of impropriety

5. transparency: lots of public live video streams of election process areas as it's occurring

Pretty much everyone, given the opportunity, is capable of noticing a switch or modification of paper ballots.

Very few, even when given all the opportunities in the world, are capable of determining if something is wrong in the software or hardware in the machine.

The difference is between having to trust a small group of people who have to be trusted to be experts, vs trusting that the average of random groups of people will be good enough to minimize fraud.

One requires drastically more joules and seconds.

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