Sure there are risks to online voting but it's significantly less risky than many of the other pieces of critical infrastructure that rely on the Internet. The risks of online voting can generally be controlled through policy and oversight, in a similar way to non-online elections.
Meanwhile, no electronic voting system, no matter how clever, is any further than one fuckup or one dirty sysadmin away from being a total fraud.
Democratic legitimacy is an expensive feature, but it is worth every cent.
Not entirely true. The best electronic voting systems require multiple fuckups and/or multiple dirty developers and hardware manufacturers to become a total fraud. Not saying that is safe enough for elections yet, though. But there is no reason why you can't add multiple checks and balances and mutually-hostile guarantors to an electronic voting system.
If the system is algorithmically secure, there should be no need to rely on the security of the NSWEC, past a set of secret keys.
If the system relies on the security of the NSWEC then it is open to subversion by someone who knows the NSWEC's secrets.
If the system is algorithmically secure, and the NSWEC is still not releasing information, then the NSWEC is simply undermining trust in its own system.
I suspect that part of the problem is that the NSWEC is a bureaucracy, which has to justify its own existence. A secure on-line voting system, with minimal secrets, would largely make the NSWEC redundant on election day. The NSWEC need to accept that its job is to set up a secure system, then on the day relegate itself to a monitoring function on a par with any other interested citizen.
But any citizens can check each of the paper voting system steps and it is definitely not possible for electronic voting system.
Note that the paper voting systems are also quite hackable in practice. It is actually pretty hard to track your own vote and make sure it was counted correctly, that the votes in all districts were added correctly and, when you find your vote miscounted, proving fraud is quite hard as well. I should know, I voted in this election: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_general_election,_2006...
You lost me there but I agree you are right concerning the possibilities of electronic voting systems and its inherent safety and accountability depending on the implementation.
But then I say paper requires less technical skills and is an order of magnitude less expensive than the cost associated with a safe and sane voting system ?
> Note that the paper voting systems are also quite hackable in practice. It is actually pretty hard to track your own vote and make sure it was counted correctly, that the votes in all districts were added correctly and, when you find your vote miscounted, proving fraud is quite hard as well. I should know, I voted in this election: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_general_election,_2006....
> On August 28, the TEPJF announced the results of the partial recount, subtracting 81,080 votes for Calderón, 76,897 votes for López Obrador, 63,114 for Roberto Madrazo, 5,962 for Patricia Mercado, 2,743 for Roberto Campa, and 7,940 for the remaining candidates. A total of 237,736 votes were annulled out of the approximately 4 million votes recounted. Than means around 6% of the recounted votes were annulled.[29][30]
Wow. That is indeed a good example in favour of electronic voting system.
>You lost me there
Intuitively: you can add a list of encrypted numbers and then decrypt only the result. Additionally, you can prove that the decryption is correct without revealing the private keys. Decryption keys can be distributed so that no single person can decrypt the votes directly. So, you track your encrypted and signed vote until it goes into the counting process and then you verify the zero-knowledge proofs that tell you the counting was done correctly, but the counting itself doesn't tell anyone anything about individual votes, just the sum of votes for each candidate.
> But then I say paper requires less technical skills and is an order of magnitude less expensive than the cost associated with a safe and sane voting system ?
Right now? For national elections every X years? With our current understanding and computing infrastructure? Absolutely! I am not in favor of online voting right now (except perhaps for a limited number of remote votes for nationals outside their countries, possibly with reduced anonymity).
Where secure electronic voting could shine is in direct democracy systems, where you vote on at least some important resolutions directly or where you can revoke an administration's mandate at any time by getting a threshold number of "votes of no confidence" on it. If you have to vote every week, or every month (let alone daily...), then paper voting is unworkable.
> Wow. That is indeed a good example in favour of electronic voting system.
Actually, we have had electronic fraud before as well (in the global counting). So, I doubt electronic voting would fix democracy in Mexico either. At least not by itself. Just pointing out that the system being replaced is not infallible either...
Given that we're generally happy to trust online banking, my feeling is that there is a way to make electronic voting secure enough. Where you want to draw that line is subjective though!
I don't think this is the right analogy.
* Citizens constantly monitor their bank accounts
* Citizens are *extremely* upset if an error harms them.
* There are procedures for reversing errors.
* There is a legal system for recourse if errors aren't reversed.
Changing $15,000 back to $18,742 is an easy, painless process. Replacing the ruling party is anything but.
Show me one system -- one computer system ever -- with a proved, actual (not projected) MTBF of 100 years.
The paper ballots are scanned: http://www.elections.act.gov.au/elections_and_voting/scannin...
After scanning, "the preference data from those ballot papers was transferred to the electronic voting and counting system (eVACS)"
So you do have an electronic voting system, just not end-user accessible.
Speaking frankly, ACT elections don't matter; it's basically a town council.
Federal elections and state elections are actually important.
Interesting that Australia does not scan paper ballots yet, the amount of manual work must be enormous.
This is a feature, not a bug.
An "indicative count" is available on the night of an election, and final results take a few weeks.
A few weeks versus extremely high assurance of a legitimate count is an excellent tradeoff, in my view. Who is hurt by the delay? Nobody. It's already expected and accounted for.
As a profession we love benchmark porn -- latency! throughput! TPS! BPS! -- but optimisation is pointless if you undermine key guarantees. It's pointless to have an instant count if it can't be trusted. And the sheer unwieldiness of a paper ballot drastically amplifies the difficulty of subverting it.
Audits (of the procedures, devices and people involved in the votes as well as the results) as well as impartial (or mutually hostile) observers as well as a legal framework for declaring the legitimacy of the result with provision for partial or full reruns on the election in cases of doubt.
Clearly there are improvements that could be made but almost all of the problems that they found were procedural and the ones that were technical amounted to "if I can control the server I can control all the votes" or "if I can control a user's computer I can control their vote", which is not a surprising outcome.
If I control the vote counting depot I also control all the votes, if I coerce a person I also control their votes. We have dealt with these problems for more than a century, we can deal with them in an online context.