I don't understand the reason for electronic voting. The UK manages to tally up paper votes overnight, even from far-flung Scottish islands. Electronic voting is literally solving a problem that nobody has.

> If there is distrust, the justice system can review the paper trail as well.

There is always, so you would just always count the ballots.

What is the rush to tally the ballots? Do we need an _instant_ count? Isn't that actually a negative attribute as far as security is concerned?

The distance between the election and the taking of the office is often months. I just don't understand why electronics need to be involved at all in this system.

What is the need for it? You want faster results? Not needed, elections don't need to be fast, they need to be trusted. You want to have less humans in the loop to be more efficient? Having humans in the loop is actually a feature not a bug as it distributes the trust on many actors.

Paper ballots work just fine if done correctly and most democracies have a long history of knowing how to do them correctly with very high stakes.

Electronic (or even online) votes are fine for low stakes stuff, like what the color of that new bridge ought to be, but not to select the fate of a whole nation.

GP already said.

> eVoting cannot be understood and audited by normal citizens, not even by nerdy ones.

I suggest you explain the verifiability of evoting systems to your grandma or your friend with an art degree. Then ask them to explain the same to their peer while you just listen. Then repeat the exercise with paper voting. You will see the difference.

Just imagine you have to explain a child in kindergarden how the collective choice is made. Raising hands works. Putting different pieces of paper into a jars works. Magical machine says the result was X does not work unless they trust it, regardless of how correct the magical machine was under the hood, because the majority lacks the skill of intuitively understanding this themselves. Sure, they could trust an expert or an figure of authority, but that is a fleeting thing. A fleeting thing that may be enough for inconsequencial decisions, but not enough to steer countries.

Even I as someone who would have the skillset to understand why it has to be correct would have an easier time verifying a paper ballot process than ensuring that network connected complexity behemoth was running the program I checked for weeks correctly in any moment during an election. And even if you had a way to guarantee that, who tells me this was the case in the whole country or thst evidence wasn't faked a millisecond before I checked?

Meanwhile with paper and poll watchers from each party it is very easy to find actual irregularities and potential tampering — trust is a gradual thing with paper while it is much more binary with digital. If there is a sign for the digital machine being untrustworthy you can throw the whole result into the bin.

That's easy to explain. We live in a world where A&W's 1/3rd pound burger failed to compete with the McDonald's 1/4th pound burger because 4 is bigger than 3 so people thought the McDondald's product was bigger. There's zero hope that this public will understand fancy encryption.

This is the point. The way you carry out elections need to optimize for not having the loser riot on the streets, nearly all other considerations are secondary: speed, efficiency, etc.

It is also interesting which role human psychology plays in this. Trump for example used the late trickeling in of the mail vote to incite the January 6th riots. His followers found it shady that the gote changed in the end.

Sure. But that problem is not inherent to paper ballots. In fact miscounting (read: manipulation) is even easier and harder to detect with digital systems.

So you double-count, you checksum (our table just tallied 100 ballots, do our vote counts sum to 100? good, keep going), you checksum some more (does our total vote count amount to the number of registered votes in this poll station), you film everything, and ideally you do this with volunteers drafted on election day.

This isn't rocket science.

but it's done in public where anyone observing the count can see that the people counting don't have any pencils etc in their hand

Yeah but it cannot be hacked from the other side of the world. I think it's a different kind of threat.

If an attacker from somewhere else in the world want to tamper with their votes, they have to get Swiss people to modify the ballots, or get their agent to learn Swiss-German, good luck with that :D.

> basic maths (addition!)

Technically you don't even need that, you just need to be able to count, i.e. find the successor to a given number.