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Comment by d-z-m | Hacker News Reader

> > Like any internet voting system, it has inherent security vulnerabilities: if there are malicious insiders, they can corrupt the vote count

Malicious insiders can always corrupt the vote count. This isn't unique to e-voting systems.

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The difference here is that they can do it with few people or alone, possibly hard do detect, and most importartly, at scale. Attacks on paper voting require many people in differet locations, can be re-counted, an they don't scale.

Exactly this. Paper voting has some really great properties, like being easy to understand, easy to administer, easy to examine after the fact, and hard to attack at scale or at a distance. It's not perfect, but as the National Academies of Sciences found in its review of election security research [1], it's the best option we've currently got.

Security is a "better than" game. Just because option X isn't perfect doesn't mean X isn't a worthwhile solution given all other alternatives.

[1] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/25120/interactive...

> it's the best option we've currently got.

And if everyone continues with the kind of sentiment prevalent in this thread that's likely the best we're ever going to get.

I don't understand how people are completely fine with having their thousands and millions of dollars handled electronically but when it comes to something trivial as voting, they suddenly put on their tinfoil hats and say computers are insecure.

Because banks have financial incentives in keeping your transactions secure, and even then errors happen all the freaking time.

Government do not have this incentive, and how do you recover from errors once malicious actors have gained power ?

Because government handled billions and has armies? Sometimes even nuclear weapons. Does your bank habe that?

I think in the future, whenever elections are lost, blaming the electronic voting system is just too easy a scapegoat.

And, for any politician who does that... I can't say they are completely making stuff up. It might just be better if we acknowledge and accept that old technology isn't bad. Windows XP is perfectly fine for controlling CNCs and medical devices to this day, as long as it's not connected to the internet. Probably better for it actually, because it won't restart to install an update with modern Windows. I'm not in favor of "new for the sake of new."

But you wouldn't need to attack the paper voting; you can just attack the electronic reporting of a paper vote. That said, I'm pretty sure the issue is just that Fox News et al convinced a large portion of US that the election isn't secure while it actually was so it's just a perception problem and not a real problem.

Related [1] where the DNC refused to use correct caucus results and instead insisted on using the incorrect computations as they were a "legal document".

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/14/us/politics/i...

I agree, it's more easy to do at scale with e-voting. I wonder if you could mitigate this by having(in the US at least), county-local voting portals which are independently managed, and then collated into some larger vote bucket for state/federal elections.

The idea with a "count" in a British election is that so many people from all the different parties are wandering around (both counting by hand and observing) that it's difficult to get up to any funny business.

There is obviously always a gap but I'm not aware of anything practical being pulled off with such a system

E-voting generally replaces tens of thousands of often randomly picked volunteers that watch both the containers with the votes and each other. Messing with that takes a lot more than just flipping a bit in software.

People could already find information in libraries so we never needed Google.

One word: scale.

Google came after Ask Jeeves, Altavista, Yahoo,...

As for finding information on Google, maybe 20 years ago that was true, now I find mostly ad sponsored results.

I had thought about including an additional sentence in my comment that admitted that attacks on e-voting would scale more easily, but decided against it.

I'm taking issue with the way the article implies the insider threat problem is unique to an e-voting system.

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