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Comment by rwallace | Hacker News Reader

The push to e-voting actually surprises me - if it was just one country, I'd write it off as just one of those things, but the fact that it keeps happening in country after country. Generally speaking, most human behaviour can be explained by assuming that people value status and power above all other things. So you can expect those in power to try to keep that power.

But e-voting surely does the reverse: it throws open the playing field, putting power up for grabs to whoever can hack the system, with no way to predict who that will end up being. So why do those currently in power want that to happen? (Not a rhetorical question: I'm actually curious about the answer.)

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There is no thing such as an unexpected outcome by e-voting for those in power.

How not? Sure, the people who ordered the system installed might have planned to arrange a hack themselves, but once it's in place, anyone can hack it.

Yeah, such a hack will become either a mess and declared invalid or something political motivated. The event horizon of political motivation can be calculated. Therefore planned ahead.

So if I understand you correctly, what you're saying is, those who already have and are used to wielding power, are (whether rightly or wrongly, it's what their intuition tells them according to their experience so far) reasonably confident they can use existing power structures to manage what ever mess results and prevent it getting out of hand? That does sound like a reasonable explanation.

Follow the money. All the new voting systems are about enriching cronies at public expense.

Now that HAVA's touch screen fiasco has played out, the next big push is for vote by mail (postal balloting) requiring all new gear and enabling exciting new business models.

That these new systems are unverified, unreliable, and easy to subvert (undetectably) is just a happy side effect.

One form of hacking or another, prevention must occur in both types. Old school is busing people you want to vote a certain way to the booths and leaving others behind, having some vote at multiple stations, even through absentee votes for people who you know won't vote or cannot; the dead being an example.

I would say than an effective electronic system would need to be open from code to monitoring. There is no reason to have the voting machines nor machines which accumulate the vote to be connected to any external network.

You have to start trusting somewhere.

> You have to start trusting somewhere.

Sorry, I'm fresh out of trust. I made the mistake of learning the mechanics of election administration.

The only "trust worthy" system is one based on mutual distrust. If two or more belligerents (aspirants) agree to the final count, then it's probably satisfactory.

Probably because politicians seem to think that these systems are perfectly secure.

But why? Usually when people believe untrue things despite being informed otherwise, it's because at some level they see social status in it. Is there any status to be gained by claiming e-voting to be secure?

I like how this can be read both ways. It could mean that the system is 'secure' in providing an accurate tally of voter intentions, or that it is 'secure' in assuring the desired outcome for whoever is in control. The latter possibility makes more sense to me.

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