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Comment by pie_flavor | Hacker News Reader

Haven't watched it, but to summarize what I imagine someone aligned with me would say: A ballot's entire lifecycle can be watched as it goes from the stack to the booth to the dropbox to the counting pile. Poll watchers are vestigial as soon as voting machines are involved; it becomes the honor system, which is not trustworthy enough in a system where the parties do not trust each other. The best you have is 'we have found no evidence of widespread voter fraud', a carefully couched statement from media organs you don't necessarily trust either. You, a (Democrat/Republican), can trust a system with paper ballots, because people from your party will observe all relevant details of the process everywhere the process occurs.

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The lifecycle do get interrupted with early voting and postal voting, and as past elections where I live have shown (Sweden), some number of boxes of votes will generally be discovered after elections. The postal system are not designed to be 100% reliable and some portion of mail do get lost, fail in the sorting process, or get sent to the wrong location and put into the "fix it later" process which will miss the election deadline.

Software and hardware is still magnitude more vulnerable to intentional misbehavior, and even accidental mishaps has a higher risk of massive negative consequences, and its harder to discover failure compared to boxes of votes that has a physical presence.

In practice by the way the actual role of your appointed watchers is to figure out early whether you've won.

They can see whether another candidate's ballots are piling up faster than yours, they can estimate whether a table counting ballots for a district you're expected to dominate is being given way fewer ballots to count than you'd expected...

Yes, they would obviously spot if some election worker is like adding a pile of pre-marked mass produced ballots to a pile or something, or if they were just putting half of your ballots in the wrong pile - but stuff like that basically never happens, whereas somebody will win and it'd be nice to know before it's announced if that's achievable.

The thing is, a software based voting system with a sufficient number of checks and balances preventing tampering seems to be a lot more trustworthy to me than human poll watchers and workers. It wouldn't surprise me at this point that there may be moles in parties that are secretly from the other party.

And the other related issue is that in 2025, it simply should be possible to vote from your phone in a way that verifies your identity, if you'd like, using the faceId/fingerprint biometrics that most smartphones from recent years have.

An election needs to be trusted by everyone, and explainable to all voters. It does not help that you believe it is safe. You have to trust the compiler, and the chips, and everything, and convince all voters it works.

Paper ballots are fine. It is not complicated at all and an election is the one thing you just cannot get wrong in a representative democracy. It can cost a bit and you only do it once every few years.

The obvious problem with smartphone voting is that it's hard to combine with voter secrecy. An abusive spouse or someone bribing the voter could demand to see what vote was cast.

And if anyone can make up a reason to doubt the outcome of the election, it will fail it's objective: Peaceful transfer of power.

The usual way to try to solve this is the ability to override previously cast votes, in secret. But the combination of that and the ability for all interested parties to independently verify the count is not trivial. But not impossible either, much has been written on the subject since e-voting was all the rage in the 90s. One would do good to study this work before designing yet another voting system.

Thank you!

Sounds like externally verifiable logic systems is an upcoming need.

E.g. You as a Citizen walk around with your own System Verification toolkit and can at any time Verify that the voting system tabulates your vote. Something fantastical like that.

Trust is hard to maintain with human. Digital trust is not a human concept, the way I think at least. So this area is tricky.

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