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Comment by throwaway936482 | Hacker News Reader

Nope, it's an idiotic idea. In the UK we have an ENTIRELY manual process, no ridiculous voting machines, butterfly ballots or hanging chads and no OCR machines. Just marking a box with a cross, sticking it in a box and then a load of volunteers physically counting the votes while representatives of the parties and anyone else who wants to wander in watches. Postal votes are treated the same and counted at the same time in the same place. The system literally couldn't be simpler or less corruptible. There is no need for anything more complicated because the system works and can be understood by a five year old.

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How many contests do you have on your ballot? Here's a sample ballot from Alameda County, California in 2018 (starting on page 12 going to page 25). That wasn't a presidential year, so this is a bit on the low side. https://www.acgov.org/rovapps/vig/236/38.pdf

Manual counts aren't practical in the US because our ballots can be crazy long with tons of contests and candidates. It would be very error-prone to do this manually.

1. If there is more than 1 contest going on at a time you have more than 1 ballot. Again this is a simple solution to a dumb problem, you have poorly designed ballots.

The ballots are designed to accomodate the governments we have in place. We can't easily change the structure of national, state, and local governments. In California, one-ballot-per-contest would mean a voter would get a stack of up to 75 ballots on a presidential year.

Whereas currently they get a multi page document. Seriously, as logistical problems go, print separate ballots is really not a hard one and would cut down on the number if people who accidentally vote for the wrong candidate for the wrong thing. Counting may take longer. It may stretch over a few days. Well, fine. Count the presidential ballots first, announce the results and move on down the list until you get to the dog catcher.

I'm not sure then what urgent problem you're trying to solve that warrants the cost of errors introduced by the manual counting of huge amounts of paper ballots. It would also be a logistical nightmare getting reams of paper to voters and getting them back and tracking them; at my polling place, we have to make sure that the number of ballots we issued out equals the number reported by the scanner (plus the number of spoiled ballots voters returned to us for disposal). I'm just pointing out that cost.

If you don't trust the tabulating machines, we have mechanisms to check them at scale. Basically, randomly sample the paper ballots and check them against the machine results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit

If you don't trust the people running elections, you should know that polling places in the US are run by community volunteers. Literally anyone who's a registered voter can participate and see how the sausage is made. In fact, there's a shortage of these folks, so boards of election are thrilled to get more people participating.

This system relies on tens of millions of people trusting a few thousand people not to have been bribed. Seems entirely corruptible and you have no idea whether it has been corrupted or not. You're just left hoping it hasn't been.

A system based on math, software, and publicly available data would be accessible to independent audit and verification. And could still be backed by a physical system as well, for added security.

Citizens would be much better off not having to trust and be able to verify.

Oddly, even most people that work in technology are incredibly pessimistic about solving technical problems.But anyone doubts that internet voting will be commonplace and incredibly secure in the future is a level beyond pessimistic. The only open questions are when and how.

Nope, it relies on me being able to go to my local church Hall and watch the ballots being counted or take part in the count myself. All the parties in the election send their own representatives along to watch over the ballot and they also keep a running total. It is a process that I can verify is being carried out correct with my own eyes. Saying "citizens would be much better off not having to trust and be able to verify" In an e voting situation is just wrong, since I can verify the current process by going and watching it or taking part in it, whereas in magical block chain land I am losing the ability to verify because i am replacing a simple process with one that relies me to trust a bunch of code written by and understood by probably a few dozen people. This requires much more trust than the current situation.

You can only observe a single ballot counting location, while there are hundreds or thousands to observe. Someone could be bribing people in dozens or hundreds of locations and there are lots of tricks to pull.

You're not really verifying much at all by watching the counting process. It's really just a false sense of security. You actually have no idea if all the ballots are being counted, if they're all real ballots, or if some have been tampered with, etc.

There are millions of programmers in the world, any number of them could decide to audit the code, and if they discover flaw, everyone could be told in an instant. There could be huge security bounties to incentive audits. We trust math and software to maintain all of civilization but for some reason it's impossible to make it work for voting? That seems incredibly unlikely.

Again, I can be one of the people doing the counting. Not being funny but if you have an already corrupt electoral system then your government is not going to adopt your magical, totally secure, block chain based, bug free system. They're going to adopt a compromised, proprietary, back doored e voting solution say "look, magical block chain verification as recommended by geeks" and then attack / arrest / kill anyone who questions it's veracity. You're trying to solve a social problem, a corrupt government, with a technological solution that the government itself will undermine or reject. On the other hand you can run free and fair elections by leveraging the powers of observers and volunteers in a war zone or with a corrupt government using paper, pens, boxes and locks.

The whole point is that the people doing the counting are working together but from opposing parties/candidates.

Everyone is watching you, if you try to influence the process the police will (and have done) come down like a sack of bricks.

We also (used to) trust OpenSSL... We thought speculative execution was safe too. Paper is easy, paper is cheap. KISS

> A system based on math, software, and publicly available data would be accessible to independent audit and verification.

So instead of trusting a few thousands (several thousands, in reality) and a system where you can literally walk in the place where they are counting votes and observe them, you'd rather trust a few tens of people to write the software and audit it? How does that follow?

And this doesn't even take into account the fact that a voting system, as it was mentioned, should be understood by the people voting. Good luck explaining to people what the software and the hardware are doing.

> ...you'd rather trust a few tens of people to write the software and audit it?

Of course not. All of the software should be open source, with multiple independent implementations, test suites, etc. And the data should be open to analysis by any number of people while preserving people's right to privacy (this is one of the hard parts).

Most people have no any idea how electronic voting machines work today, so why does it matter if laymen understand the internet voting system?

The point is that anyone that is willing and able could verify for themselves that the system does work as intended. Not that most people will actually put in the effort. Most will rely on trusting experts, but anyone is free to verify.

With paper ballots and a handful of officials involved, there is no way for a voter to verify anything, they are forced to rely on trust alone.

This is bull. You can be one of the people who does the counting or you can watch it take place. There should be no electronic voting machines involved, that's the whole point of having a manual system. That allows basically anyone who wants to, including a hypothetical five year old, to verify that the system is working as intended. Your system relies on me going out and getting a PhD in cryptography to verify that the system is working as intended. Your system requires basically everyone to rely on trust, a well designed manual system requires basically no one to rely on trust. I know which one I'd prefer.

You're trusting that all the ballots are present, that no fake ballots have been added, and none have been tampered with, that the officials are all acting in good faith, aren't making mistakes, haven't been bribed, etc.

Do you really think paper ballots have not been used to rig elections? Because that's absurd given the current situation in Belarus and the long history of ballot tampering going back thousands of years.

Paper ballot counting is security theater. A system based on math and software could be provably secure.

Of course paper ballots can be undermined. The point is that you can easily tell that they have been undermined by the big burly blokes following people into polling stations and threatening you if you don't vote for the preferred candidate, or the ballot boxes turning up in the swamp. You're asking us to trust a magic algorithm that, as I pointed out in another comment, is likely to be proprietary and back doored to hell and back because it is controlled and implemented by the sort of government that rigs elections. This opens up the possibility of subtle, undetectable election tampering, which is much harder to do with a properly run manual system that everyone can understand and participate in.

You rely on "magic" algorithms every time you fly in an airplane or drive a car. Because they're not "magic" at all but based in reality, on math and science.

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