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Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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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