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Comment by pluto_modadic | Hacker News Reader

scanned paper ballots. simple, fast, auditable. humans are WAY more error prone than computers at counting.

Seriously. The amount of suspicion for computerized scanning and counting systems here is surprising.

I realize state of the art, modern, high-performance systems are incredibly complex... but that doesn't mean all systems have to be incredibly complex.

Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and reliable, easily moreso than humans.

And critically, it's feasible to perform attestation on electronic systems: something that's completely impossible with humans. You have no idea if Joe or Sally are randomly slipping in a few miscounts (or the people auditing them, or the people auditing them). If you're careful, you can be sure that only specific code is executing.

I'd be fascinated to get a breakdown of trust in computerized voting systems, from programming professionals, by programming speciality. I have a suspicion you'd get different answers from firmware/RT folks vs js front-end, to pick a couple of examples.

> Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and reliable, easily moreso than humans.

Such systems are better enough that businesses handling cash use them to count paper money.

Next to voting, or perhaps ahead of it, people surely value reliable accuracy in their money. So why not ballots?

Because the current implementations for ballots don't feel up to snuff, and I at least don't trust profit-driven companies to make "simple computerized systems" that are auditable and whatnot. Get a good solution in place for many election cycles and then we can all be happy.

With encryption/hashing, maybe requiring some of that "process encrypted data without decrypting the data" fancy papers from a year or two ago that I never understood, can't we do some basic anti-fraud measures?

Sure, we use a computer to produce a paper ballot (computers DON'T count or keep counts). The voter has a voting id that is hashed/encrypted/processed in such a way that the number is verifiable as a valid ballot hash (maybe using some sort of public/private key pair) so hashes can't simply be randomly generated.

So the computer UI produces the ballot. The voter is told to check their ballot reflects what they wanted to vote for. The ballot is scanned with a scantron.

Not sure if this is a "thing" or if there's a problem with it, but why not live-stream video of every vote being counted so the entire population could validate at least the counting portion of voting.

so then the attack becomes introducing enough error at critical counts such that it affects the result without being regarded as having been tampered with

pretty easy if your company produced the machines

How would this defeat doing a statistical hand sampling of the ballots to verify the electronic counting is accurate?

what's the failure point? then you work inside that

I know a guy who did this for a job for a company that produced food

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign

his entire job was to allow the company to push up as close to that line as possible without going over when checked randomly

saving them tens of millions a year

Depends on how many ballots you sample, but the number you could change would only matter in an extremely close election and in my state, if a vote is within 0.5%, it triggers an automatic recount. These systems have layers of auditing and validation to prevent these errors whether intentional or not.

Random audits can generally solve this. Take a random count from a random machine and validate that it matches the hand count. If I’m trying to rig an election I would have to be very reckless to just cross my fingers and hope that the systems I hacked aren’t audited. I’d have to bribe the auditors or something, and at that point it’s simpler to just bribe people anyway and not bother with the whole hacking part.

Scanned paper ballots are changed all the time -- the manufacturer doesn't know that row 2 option 1 is a particular candidate. Authorities aren't stupid and know to change the ballots and test the machines.

Teachers and students understand how this all works, so it has a lot of trust.

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