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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> One objective of voting systems is to prevent vote-selling.

Yes. Do we have a full list of requirements for voting systems?

I don't have a list, but one that is especially important when thinking about digital voting systems:

  a voting system has to produce agreeable consent

Part of this agreeable consent is of course the goal to achieve a result that represents the intentions of those voting. But another part is that the way in which this result was achieved is transparent to all. You could then still be the sore loser, and pretend the vote was manipulated, when in fact it wasn't, but e.g. with paper ballots it would be very hard to insert fake votes or supress/manipulate real ones. As soon as digital machines enter the game this becomes very hard to proof to the layperson. And think about it this way: the person you have to proof it to might be unwilling to understand because they lost the election.

Points that come to my mind:

- anonymity (nobody should be able to find out how one individual voted)

- ability to produce agreeable consent (achieved through transparency of the process and observers from all parties involved)

- produces fair results

- values correctness over speed (better slow and correct than fast and incorrect)

- values traceability over speed (better slow and traceable than fast and untraceable)

- discourages vote selling (anonymity is one way to achieve this)

- availability (voting should be as easy as possible, otherwise hurdles will be used to control voting behaviour)

- transparent information (there should be transparent information on what the vote is about and what the choices mean)

I very much agree with your points, except for one point:

> As soon as digital machines enter the game this becomes very hard to proof to the layperson.

This is not hard to prove just to laypeople, it is hard to prove to anyone at all. I doubt for example Linus Torvalds could prove to himself beyond reasonable doubt that a digital voting system has produced the correct result.

Hah good point. Espiecially in practise. Because I could imagine a systems that are provably correct in principle, but when you start to imagine on which hardware, on which OS, with which network stack etc all of this would be running, then proving the whole stack of turtles down to the processor would take the lives of multiple CS-post graduates for one such machine alone. And even they would have to conclude something among the lines of "yeah we are reasonably sure it worked as intended, but there is not enough time to explain this to anybody, so you have to trust us".

I think you have the same problem with a system where votes are counted by hand.

Nope - you can personally go and check how votes are counted, verify the final tallies yourself etc. All parties that participated in the vote send one or a few people to all voting precincts, and each of them can carry on parallel votes, make sure votes and tallies are safe on the way to bigger centers etc.

Of course, it's not possible for literally every citizen to this themselves, but since citizens already have to trust the party they are voting for to some extent (otherwise, why care about the election?), this works out very well in practice, especially if you add a few citizens organizations and international organizations in the mix monitoring as well.

Electronic voting is orders of magnitude more complex, even in simple centralized schemes. In more decentralized schemes, it becomes completely, hopelessly intractable to ensure validity unless you chose to blindly trust hardware and base software (microcode, BIOS, disk firmware etc.). And the same argument about trust above doesn't apply here, as it's not your preferred party's representatives that have created the hardware etc.

This is why electronic voting is unconstitutional in some jurisdictions - Germany, at least.

> - discourages vote selling (anonymity is one way to achieve this)

Maybe more general: It should be infeasible to perform fraud. Ideally the infeasibility should scale exponentially with the size of the election.

Ah yeah I forgot. The (monetary, personal, logistical, time) cost of doing fraud has to be as high as possible.

This would be another point where digital solutions usually turn out far worse than traditional paper ballots. If you can hack one machine you potentially could manipulate many ballots. If you hack the manufacturer of the machine you potentially get many machines – and this could be done by a single person with the right information and skillset.

That makes a digital attack feasible for a nation-state-attacker, of which there are certainly some (and maybe more in the future).

Paper being slow, cumbersome, material-intesive is not a bug, it is a feature.

It turns out that if you write down on the list of requirements that you would want from a voting system in order for it to be fair, the no deterministic voting system is fair. This is known as Arrow's theorem (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theo...).

Interestingly Arrow's theorem doesn't apply to randomized voting systems. In particular, the system of picking a random voter to decide the election satisfies (probabilistically) every standard notion of fairness.

I think that would covered under non-dictatorship but I see the appeal.

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