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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

How do you do "bipartisan counting" and validation in an all digital voting system? Reading the same digital information twice, doesn't verify it.

If you have paper ballots, sure, but the US does not have paper ballots in some states and won't by the next national election. And even if they did (as many do), few states have a uniform system of random vote audits.

So I'm not sure what you're referring to with this:

> There are enough checks in the system (bipartisan counting and validation committees) that a pure digital compromise of an election that would not be flagged and detected is very small.

I literally read the Diebold Voting machine source code (and tabulator) that was leaked (twice). There's nothing remotely like that in there. There's no facility to do that. And while most of those are now retired, there's similar machines that work exactly the same way still in usage.

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> US does not have paper ballots and won't by the next national election

This isn't true universally, in fact, fair to say it is rarely true [1]. Often the vote is tabulated electronically, but there is always a bipartisan committee overseeing random re-tabulations and recounts as a matter of course. In the process of rolling up results, there are cross-checks with voter rolls that make certain types of ballot stuffing infeasible (that is, an attack would have to be a read/modify/write).

There are also state departments that are tasked with overseeing the general quality of elections that will spot outliers and investigate. It's always possible that corruption or partisan efforts will bypass scrutiny (and there have been several iffy cases of precincts in previous election cycles) but that has been a problem even pre-electronic equipment.

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...

EDIT: the parent post has been modified to be slightly less aggressive in its claims, including limiting the scope to "some states". Also added "And even if they did (as many do), few states have a uniform system of random vote audits", but can easily be refuted [2].

[2] http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/post-el...

I would really appreciate if my county actually did random re-tabulation or integrity checks on my electronic/paper record ballot.

I'm a fan of "Risk Limiting Audits" which is a type of post-election integrity check. It's required by law in a few states.

Washington state does this. Random precincts are post-election audited by matching the electronic count with hand counted ballots, this is done before the counts can be certified.

there are a few states on there that are "DRE w/o paper trail" which is "pure digital voting".

Some of those states are now, or will become swing states. As we saw in 2016, where the presidential race was decided on a 400k margin of error across 3 states, it doesn't take much.

I don't see any swing states on that list -- the pure DRE w/o paper trail states are Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina, none of which are swing states, and all of which are being actively challenged.

The non-pure ones (that is, paper + DRE w/o paper trail) only include one swing state, Pennsylvania, which is switching to paper ballots for the next election cycle.

So I guess voting machines pose a hypothetical threat, if they were adopted more broadly, but the opposite is the trend.

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