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Comment by dstroot | Hacker News Reader

I suppose I'm an optimist. I believe it is possible to create a secure online voting system. My life savings might be held at Fidelity, Merrill, or elsewhere, my banking is online, 90% of my shopping is online and it all has "good enough" security. Plus most banks seem to be well behind the state of the art in security. I believe with the technologies we have available today, we could create a secure, immutable, auditable voting system. Do I believe any of the current vendors have done that? NO. But I believe it could be done.

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People of limited technical ability can understand the checks and balances of a paper voting system, which legitimizes outcomes. No digital voting system I'm aware of has this characteristic.

They can't understand the cybersecurity of a banking app either yet they use those.

You're not securing your banking details from the bank. The people running the elections are a probable adversary during elections, though.

That makes software really unsuitable.

Elections in most countries involve tens of thousands of volunteers for running ballot stations and counting votes.

That is a feature, not a problem to be solved. It means that there are tens of thousands of eyes that can spot things going wrong at every level.

Any effort to make voting simpler and more efficient reduces the number of people directly involved in the system. Efficiency is a problem even if the system is perfectly secure in a technological sense.

I find that argument lacking. Each of those people is also a potential weak link or even an adversary from a security standpoint. Would I rather have 10,000 weak links or one software system with rigorous testing and logging?

How do you solve the issue of manipulated voting? That's solved by in-person ID-authenticated voting, but can never be solved by online voting.

Money are stolen electronically every day - we do not know how to build secure systems. Considering the stakes for national elections (civil war or government instability) good enough is not good enough.

I agree with you on local elections - electronic voting is good enough for town or even state level elections. The stakes are dramatically lower.

It's of course possible. In fact electronic voting could be safer. The issue is that voting has nothing to do with technical details of safety and everything to do with trust. If your electorate doesn't understand modular arithmetic, then there's no point to electronic voting.

"trust" is a fuzzy concept - people use iMessage and have no concept of how it's architected or how it works. But they trust it. Why? because trust is something that is transferable. If you trust me, and I tell you iMessage is safe then you have a high likelihood of trusting iMessage. If this is reinforced by other people you trust, even better. There would be ways to create a voting system in the open, and have it validated by third parties. If you've ever bought stock it's because underlying the transaction, and auditor has certified their financials...

Banks have KYC - in the USA it's racist to ask someone to prove their identity before voting.

We have ID.gov and we have blockchain. If we can ensure that the person submitting the vote is indeed that person, would it matter whether it was online, in a booth, or by mail?

I'm told people of color have a hard time getting IDs.

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