The Dangers of Moving All of Democracy Online | Hacker News Reader

The Dangers of Moving All of Democracy Online

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61 pointsajaviaad31 comments

"Until we can secure digital voting systems, we shouldn't use them."

Someone, please remind me again, why do we need digital voting systems? For the convenience of getting the results a couple of hours earlier? To save the climate? To eliminate recounts? Because using paper ballots feels too archaic for our high-tech modern society?

People tend to speak about electronic voting as a settled matter. I must have missed the debate.

>>Someone, please remind me again, why do we need digital voting systems?

We don't. Mail-In ballots are pretty good in my opinion. Plus it doesn't have the risk of a single hacker corrupting the outcome. You can always just recount them.

A good voting system isn't only resistant to "hacking", it's also understood and trusted by the people.

It's easy to imagine how a society that trusts a computer voting system they don't understand can go bad, even if that voting system is initially good.

Reason we use electronic voting machines since the 90s in India:

(1) The problem of booth capturing. In a massive population, law and order is a unique challenge that most of the western countries do not face. Local goons used easily get hold of a lot of ballots and mass vote in 5 minutes and then run away before the law arrived. EVMs are made in such a way that every button press needs about 45 seconds to a minute after which you can vote again.

(2) The problem of illegal votes. Button based voting is precise. No chance of illegal votes.

(3) The problem of counting votes correctly from such a massive population. The chance of making mistakes is a lot higher and this is a unique problem that the west have never handled.

> The convenience of getting results a couple of hours earlier

Its actually a matter of many days here. The window for corruption is too high. And there are too many human vectors who can be compromised by bribes. EVMs just throw all of that out of the window.

(4) I will just mention environmental factors, although its not my main point. More population = more paper. We have 1 National Election, about 29 State Elections (28 states, 1 NCT), 1000s of municipal elections, and 10s of thousands Village headman elections!

This means some kind of elections all year round are always ongoing!

> And there are too many human vectors who can be compromised by bribes

Those bribable humans will be just as bribable when they're working in an electronic voting system. Just that instead of tampering with ballots, now all they have to do is change a number in a database table.

Same argument for online crime. Some election manager will demand the machines be put online, and someone perhaps half-way across the world will find a vunlerability.

Electronic voting is not a secure system without -- at the absolute minimum -- an auditable paper record. The computer expands the attack surface dramatically.

There is a paper record though called VVPAT, and the machines are not connected to the network.

There's a lot to unpack in your comment. I disagree that the western world either hasn't faced or isn't currently facing the above issues.

Conventional efforts to strengthen voter enfranchisement address many of the points without the added stakes.

I don't see how the threats of underlying issues of crime and corruption are mitigated by making voting electronic. If thugs prey on voting stations and voters, it seems there are more apparent options available sans the added inherent risks to the voting system itself.

India faced a lot of instances of booth capturing, where the lines of the police and security services were spread too thin by the sheer population count that was voting.

About 1,00,00,00,000 people voting together between thousands of political parties and candidates! I am not wrong when I say that the west has never faced this.

Why not have a machine then, which could make this task scalable and easier to manage?

>>Local goons used easily get hold of a lot of ballots and mass vote in 5 minutes and then run away before the law arrived.

Without knowing anything about your country I think that by going digital you've just made the goon's job easier. They just need to bribe whomever is in charge of the electronic machine.

So, suppose the electronic machine runs a program, which doesn't allow adding arbitrary votes at will. How bribing an operator would help goons to disrupt the voting?

(Can we sort of prove there is no cryptographic solution to a good list of problems with online voting?)

Because it would increase turnout!

I'm against digital voting systems for security reasons too, but hypothetically if that problem were solved, the increased turnout would be a good thing.

>increased turnout would be a good thing

I'm not for disenfranchisement, but I don't automatically buy into this premise.

If anything, increased turnout has corresponded to increased partisan rhetoric and fear based motivations to vote.

The so-called swing-voters (or swing-participants) are (imho with no proof to back this up) generally the groups that are most likely to be influenced by misleading attack ads, Russian bots, or any other form of social engineering/manipulation.

Participation in elections is good, but only if it's for the right reasons... otherwise it becomes like any other targeted meaningless metric.

Artificial barriers/inconveniences to voting should be removed, but that doesn't mean it should be completely effortless to vote.

Some level of proof-of-effort is not a bad thing, imo.

Would it?

The groups that have trouble turning out - because they're poor, working two jobs, got no car, got poor public transport because they live in the bad side of town, they speak a minority language - those are the same groups that are likely to find digital stuff inaccessible.

It's often targeted at young voters, because they're "tech savy" so we should "speak their language". Despite the vast majority not being poor and having lots of free time they can't be bothered to vote today, why would this change anything?

I don't think it would solve the problem for everyone in those groups, but it would for some. I'd be very surprised if it didn't move the needle.

Also, there's another group that seems to have trouble turning out, and finds digital stuff perfectly accessible: young people.

Strengthening voter enfranchisement is a commendable cause, but moving from accessible to effortless in order to cater to people reasonably able but insufficiently motivated is an awful reason to jeopardize the stakes of not just electronic but outright online voting.

Is it jeopardizing voting process if college students wont have unnecessary obstacles to voting?

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/states-make-harder...

If polling stations are not in fact accessible, then the criticism doesn't apply: strengthening voter enfranchisement is commendable.

Define accessible?

If polling stations are closed, strategically, and people cannot afford the time/money to vote, or wait to vote, are they truly accessible?

Mail-in is a different situation, so I am not considering this.

Otherwise, I agree with much of your thought.

If you could vote through any 'device', the transportation, time, and money (depending on how the device aspect works) arguments would largely be moot.

Define minority language people? Spanish (primary) speakers in the US are more tech savvy than maybe we're giving them credit for.

Will they find a basic (/old/cheap) smartphone more inaccessible than voting in person? A smartphone is pretty necessary these days, and basic ones are often free on cheap plans.

I do remember a few years ago reading (I think it was in freakonomics) that this isn't actually a guarantee. Some places that have postal voting as the primary form of voting have actually seen a decrease in participation. After an initial boost based on novelty, it now being easier to do also makes it easier to put off. Having a week or two to fill in and then post the form allows for a lot of "I'll do it tomorrow" until you can't, you missed the cutoff. If it can increase turnout great, but making something easier doesn't inherently mean an uptake in participation.

As an extra method on top of existing options it would probably help, but then you lose a lot of the other suggested benefits around faster counting and etc. which require it to be the only form of voting.

There's a distinction between enfranchisement and motivation. The former is fundamental to democracy, proportional to its health, and in my opinion, a duty. The latter is a cultural and a political challenge.

I don't think the two should be equated or conflated.

Yes there is a distinction between the two, but in this scenario they both needed to be considered. If you are making it more accessible to vote and that leads to a decrease in voter turnout is that a good thing? The claim of the GP was that online voting would increase voter turnout. If you only consider enfranchisement sure it would, you are making it easier to vote. But put in the wider and cultural political context of a given country my argument is that the GP's claim, that more people would vote, isn't guaranteed.

Agreed.

I think a lot of people assume that digital voting will obviously lead to re-enfranchisement of certain groups and better turn out from other groups of potential voters. It's a noble goal, but dangerous to assume that outcome is likely.

I'm all for easier access to the polls. I've heard great things about Oregon and a few other states that make broad use of vote-by-mail (with a paper ballot). Yes, that has it's own issues, but my understanding is those issues pale in comparison to the upside of easy access. Failing that, I'd love to see voting day made a holiday or moved to a weekend.

And I loathe efforts from certain groups within the US to make voting more difficult. Removing polling places, reduced hours, voter ID laws (lacking substantial proof that fraud is a problem).

Despite our vote-by-mail ability (which is nice, don't get me wrong), our voter turnout for primary elections has hovered around 50% or lower since the 1960s [0], with a few exceptions of course.

General elections see much higher turnout [1], often hitting into 80% or more, but generally staying in the 70s.

[0] https://sos.oregon.gov/elections/Documents/Voter-Turnout-His...

[1] https://sos.oregon.gov/elections/Documents/Voter_Turnout_His...

The fact that voter turnout is greater for high profile elections and lower otherwise suggests that turnout is not limited by the method of voting but more by voter engagement. Switching to online voting would not change that.

In-person and mail-in voting, at least in the USA, is already quite insecure. Its amazing to me that with all the consternation about Russian bots influencing our elections we would even consider moving them online without strongly bolstering the level of identity verification. However, the argument has been that authenticating voter identity is racist and disenfranchises poor voters. I dont see how these two thoughts can possibly be resolved in a way that gives everyone confidence in the election outcome, so trying to do seems like a recipe for violent protests. I am not looking forward to the aftermath of this election if the voting mechanisms are changed.

Yes, in person and main in voting are insecure. The thing they are though is secure at SCALE. If you hack a digital system, it is trivial to cast thousands or millions of votes. If is very very hard to mobilize the same number of humans and go to the polls with someone else's name. Especially, if they have already voted. The same with paper; the scheme is revealed quickly when 10K mail in votes show up for voters who already voted and in one big batch of mail. It is easy to detect. Digitally, you can hide behind VPNs, etc. and we'd have to build systems to detect fraud here that we don't have. Additionally, it is easier to hack the backend and just manipulate the database for some system that was likely outsourced to a company on a government kickback.

If you had 20 agents each in 20 cities, dropping off, say, 20 ballots per day each in 20 different mailboxes for 20 days, thats 20^5 or 3.2 million votes with 400 agents. That certainly seems plausable for a state actor or large NGO and seems difficult to detect. The difficulty would be either "harvesting" the unfilled ballots undetected or reproducing ones with the correct digital signature (I assume the barcodes on the mail-in ballots are unique, securely generated, and authenticate the recipient), which again would not be implausable for a state actor or large NGO with agents in the right place, the biggest saving grace being that different states have different systems. However, with national popular vote, you just need to crack 1 state system to skew the popular vote.

> easy to destabilize public confidence in voting outcomes

The last few years of politics in the US has highlighted for me how brittle electoral democracy really is, and how important the public's presumption of fair elections is to the system functioning.

Those of us who work in the software industry and know how the sausage is made should consider using our voices and experience to share with family and friends just how buggy software is in the real world, and how inevitable problems are, both due to malice and simple mistakes.

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