The importance of post-build audits: Do you know what you ship?
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Voting can be assisted by digital technologies, but should not be impinged upon by them.
Having an auditable trail, with paper, means that when the lights go out, the count can still go on.
Always remember, none of this works without the grid. We have built extremely fragile, frangible society upon a highly specious assumption: that up (or down) always means on ..
In order to manipulate this, you would need the entire polling place staff to be in on the conspiracy, and they would need to cook up numbers and ballots that all match. All to mess with an election at a precinct with no more than ~1500 registered voters. Where those voters are likely of the same political persuasion as the poll workers themselves. High cost, low reward.
To manipulate paper votes you need to have presence in enough voting booths and influence the votes there.
With paper it might be easier to sneak in a handful of fraudulous votes, but it will be near impossible to commit fraud at a scale that influences the elections. With software it is harder to get that access (although the article shows that one mistake by a dev can make getting access a matter of one hour...), but much easier to then commit election influencing fraud.
The fact that you do not recall any fraud either means it didn't happen (let's hope for the best) or didn't get detected. The latter is obviously very scary.
There's btw more problems with online voting specifically. It's impossible to guarantee the secret of voting. This is not an issue when voting electronically in voting booths.
Videos - https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs?si=INtv6_sr7_V5oxh7 (3 years old) & https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI?si=vwx5xpqX3i1SVqVN (8 years old).
(Maybe excluding the “use electronic machines for quick results and have paper votes to for a slower, “official” result” argument.)
In Brazil, each voting machine is sealed off, air gapped. The only attack vector is in transit, when the votes for each machine are being transmitted to the regional electoral center, which then announces its results for the region. So it is possible to scale an attack if you somehow had the actor had access to the data in transit and was able to decode, tamper and sign the results again before reaching the regions servers. This for each region.
So yeah, while it is possible, I don't think this scales as well as people would think. No election in Brazil had any proof of tampering up to this day. Take that as you may, you can attack me personally, you can question the government's data, you can put in check how we even audit the system, but in decades of the system there isn't any hard evidence of large scale compromise of the electoral system.
Having said all that, I think all this talk serves more as a smoke screen for more pressing issues of large scale social manipulation through social media and fake news. My question then is why would anyone in their right mind attempt to compromise the electoral system itself if it is so much more effective to just manipulate public opinion by jeopardising traditional media trust, flooding message systems with fake news sources, use prominent political figures to spread anti-democratic ideas and leverage social media algorithms to radicalize voters?
Anything that doesn't do that (even electronic counting of paper ballots) cannot be trusted.
Electronic voting systems are generally an attempt to get something faster and cheaper.
What are you trying to say? I can read this as either 'humans are trustworthy', or 'humans are corrupt'.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/politics/mail-in-voting...
Meanwhile, Spain uses exclusively paper ballots, counted by ordinary citizens who were randomly selected for "election board duty" in their local voting sector (akin to jury duty in the US), and easily finishes counting more than 99% of the votes cast before midnight on the day of the vote. You can go to bed and expect no major upsets when counting is finished, other than the occasional swing of a single seat from one party to another when the d'Hondt assignment was very close.
And this is all for a country of 48 million people (23% more than California), counting votes to fill a 350-seat Congress composed of 50 multiple-seat constituencies of varying size, from 37 to 2 (plus 2 FPTP seats), as well as 208 Senate seats which are voted by check-box selection.
It is truly baffling how some US states manage to take so long to finish counting a handful of FPTP positions in federal elections: 1 president, a couple dozen representatives, and 2 senators.
Futher, there are sometimes absentee ballots that can arrive up to a week or more after election day.
As implemented nearly everywhere that is not fully auditable. I have no way of verifying that my particular ballot was actually included and counted correctly.
We can do much better, while still staying with paper ballots, as shown by some of the proposed system in this article [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
I think there's a really serious communications challenge to a system based on sophisticated cryptography. It's hard to explain and get people to trust it.
It has existed for several years. Paper optical scan ballots, augmented by some printing using a special ink and a special marker used to mark them when voting, with some clever cryptography going into what to print on the ballots with that special ink.
See:
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...
Like, totally open society, man. If you can't stand and cast your vote among your peers in a public and 100% open form/manner, you're not doing your job, citizen.
Change my mind ..
And when I step into the booth, I can say "last time I voted, I got fired for voting" and it'll be on the record, too.
I mean, this is all a theoretical, but lets play it out.
Given that, you're left with needing to argue that the societal benefits of non-secret voting would outweigh the harms of voting-based discrimination. To me, that doesn't seem like a close call, but I'm open to the counter-argument.
Because actually a lot of people might argue that not having this, in the first place, is why our societies are so easily corruptible.
The open society dogma, and I admit this is just a thought experiment, might very much include the fact that, when someones rights are abused, it doesn't just get lost in the noise.
Being able to vote - and address grievances for which I require government support - seems to me to be a way to complete the vote as a proper transaction, between the individual and the state.
Right now, you vote and get nothing back - well, you get the assumption that your government is still going to be, relative to the last one, livable (or else you'd be a refugee and potentially pursuing statelessness..) - but when you use your Vote Statement as a way of communicating something public - per your own free will and agency (and thus right) - this is also a responsibility that must be addressed by the next administration .. giving your vote even more relevance to the incumbents and challengers, alike ..
I'll have to bow out of this convo at this point I think as we seem to be talking past each other, or at any rate you seem to be talking about something different than what I thought we were discussing.
With this function, a vote not only becomes a static erg towards ones favoured party - but a way for the future government to a) be sure it was voted in without corruption, and b) address any corruption occuring during that process, based on open, public, verifiable data.
Yes, this is just theoretical, and thanks for the time anyway .. it was just a thought experiment.
We'll make sure to check the public logs, hence you forget, which I'm sure you won't, right, Jimmy?
We could of course save us both the trouble. I"ve got your mail in ballot papers right here. Just sign on the dotted line and we'll post them for you, no biggy.
You enter the booth, the light goes on, anything you want to say will be recorded for posterity by the state, for the public sphere, and you state who you support. Its an open public record, and therefore also the right place to let the government know that you are under duress and need assistance with exercising your right to vote.
So it goes more like, "I'm Jimmy, and I'm being forced to vote for Madam X, I want my government to address this grievance", and so it does.
I mean, the point of this theoretical is to realize that we have the mafia shit-storm we have right now, because things are secret.
That secret veil, once removed and turned instead into 15-minutes of fame for everyone, because its your right to do so, means you're gonna have a lot more people interested in voting, buddy.
No matter how many chumps Madam X has on the payroll.
If it can be determined - by treating open, free and immutable communication as a public utility - that a significant set of voters made statements about corruption, or if this moment of protection of communication were available to whistleblowers .. we would have the forum we need to root out corruption.
Open. Publicly. Transparently.