Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

Hey - I had an idea for how electronic voting could work.

Voters would enter their vote into a computer. The computer would print out a card for you, and show it to you from behind a perspex card. You would then say "OK" to verify that it was correct and it would drop into a box.

Now there'd be a physical copy of the cards. These could be counted and checked by scrutineers as the current electoral process works. They would need to do a manual count independent of the electronic count, and the judiciary could oversee a wrap-up ceremony where the two were compared for correctness.

In order to rig a vote and get away with it, you'd need to hack both the computer system and the manual count. Chavez could do it, but joe random hacker definitely couldn't.

But you'd get a fast, clear result for television purposes. Voting cards would not be ambiguously filled in the way they are now. And if you had a compulsory preferential system, as in some jurisdictions now, you could cause the software to enforce that in a way that isn't possible with manual entry at the moment.

Your idea is very similar to Wombat Voting: http://www.wombat-voting.com/

Or you could do it all by paper. I hate to sound like a luddite here, but there's simply no place for electronics in the electoral process.

Paper is excellent for ballots. It's easy to understand (put a mark next to whoever you want to elect). It's easy to collect (put ballot in a box). It's easy to count (have multiple people look at ballot, tally result). It's easy to secure (seal the boxes, keep them in a secure location). It's easy to verify (unseal the boxes, count again). It's tamper evident (examine ballots closely). You can ensure that the whole process is fair by having observers physically present each step of the process watching for shenanigans.

The only downside is that it's labour-intensive. But really, that's minor. Accept that as the cost of being confident in the election results. There are fewer things more important in a democratic society than free and fair elections.

I actually work in a company that has a similar voting system. We print out a card, and we also burn the content of the vote in a rfid chip, that voters can check themselves. The rfid speeds up the counting, but you can always do the manual count to check up with the system. Neither the machine nor the card contain any information that can identify the person, so we can preserve the anonimity. Perhaps you can check out our site :) http://www.vot-ar.com.ar/en/system-votation/

I don't know about other voting machines, but the ones here in Northwest Arkansas had a receipt of your vote behind plexiglass that you could watch print out as you made your selections. Pretty similar to what you suggest, except that I don't believe they use the paper for anything unless their is worry of fraud.

I worked in the last elections in Brazil.

Every machine (which is never online) prints a sum of all votes at the end of the day, and several copies are given out to those who are working the poll site.

So there is a hard copy of the votes, and anyone can check.

    > So there is a hard copy of the votes, and anyone can check.

I think it's not enough to have the ability to do a count. It needs to be inherent to the system. Think of it as being similar to double-entry book-keeping.

Otherwise you can come up with situations like that described in the comment elsewhere here by DaviNunes, where a request for a check cound was denied by courts. In that election - it wasn't true that anyone could check.

You'd get all the institutional protections of the current system. But you could minimise confusing/invalid ballot entries, and get a decisive election result for media purposes on the day of the election.

This seem like a lot more complicated and expensive.

Why not just give the voter a unique hashed password that he can enter the internet and verify the vote that was computed for that password. Then the voters are the ones that will verify the election.

It breaks voter ananimity which is vary important to avoid people directly paying for votes.

Because it does not make anybody sure that their vote was correctly added, and it will make it possible for the voter to prove to a third party how he voted.

http://www.scantegrity.org/

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