Why Electronic Voting Is a Bad Idea – Computerphile [video]

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26 points·Audiophilip··6 comments

TL;DR - all the reasons that make computers efficient makes efficient corruption more possible.

i.e. the inefficiency of the manual, physical process is a feature--being harder to corrupt/DDoS.

Well, the problem is that you have to verify the entire voting process and electronics makes it harder for voters to verify the process. Thus, your voting system should be as simple as possible. A symbol on a piece of paper is the simplest verifiable system possible. The only thing that might be simpler is if the ballot card already had your choices printed on it. E.g. a voting machine only prints out a receipt of your vote and the receipt is then counted.

The gold standard is Australian Ballot -- private voting, public counting -- cast at poll sites, immediately tabulated when polls close, then results posted publicly.

Just a TLDR. There is so much more. Election administration is pretty involved.

Electronic voting breaks the Austalian Ballot in two ways.

Whereas a ballot box protects voter privacy by being a secure one-way hash (physical shuffle), all electronic systems record the order ballots are issued then cast (necessary for auditing).

Electronic voting also obliterates the physical chain of custody.

FWIW, to protect privacy, postal ballot processing has to properly batch (by precinct) before opening. Your jurisdiction probably doesn't do this, due to cost and timeliness.

From 2014

Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea (Dec 2019): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

And it is even more applicable today than it was then.

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