Hacker News Reader

Comment by thepete2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm really glad Germany's supreme court (BVerfG) banned electronic voting ([0]) with the common sense reasoning that elections have to be understood by everyone, not just computer experts.

[0] https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2009/wahlcomputer-urteil-bverf...

View on HN

Electronic voting is a great example of evolving mentality in herds on HN.

Five years ago HN was filled with people foaming at the mouth, "We should have all electronic voting! There's no reason not to!"

Today, the pendulum has swung the other way, and people are clamoring for paper ballots, my guess is because we've learned to no longer blindly trust technology.

Voting is one of the few fields where the HN mindset isn't automatically technology=better.

I was here 5 years ago, and IIRC most peeps have always been deeply skeptical and critical of electronic voting. If there was a push in that direction it would have been because of the "hanging chad" problem in Florida during the 2000 election fight between Gore and Bush 2. No doubt that's why so many states have gone electronic (and because it's a relatively rare chance to get an easy "state upgrading to better tech" win for officials).

> not just computer experts.

Which is itself misleading - no living expert understands a computer system end to end, from silicon to microcode to code and compiler, not to mention the massive chain that went into making the code running on the machines.

That's all assuming the black box the expert is looking at is the same one he thinks he understands, and no chip- [1] or compiler-level [2] vulnerabilities were inserted, or the whole thing wasn't simply replaced with an identical-looking device.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/adding_backdo...

[2] https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html

Same press release in english: https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2009/wahlcomputer-urteil-bverf...

thanks. how absent-minded of me to not link to that one

I wish Canada would adopt some of that common sense.

Alas, common sense is an uncommon virtue.

....we use paper ballots in Canada. What are you referring to?

When I last voted (most recent federal election), my ballot was fed through an electronic reader of some sort on its way into the ballot box, no doubt an electronic vote counter.

Huh, interesting. I’m in Montreal and we dropped them into boxes through a slot, same as before.

I wonder if you had a pilot? Afaik, elections canada runs things the same way all around the country.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com