Wow. I actually agree with Elon Musk about something for once, what a shock!
Tom Scott has a very good video explaining why electronic voting is terrible all around and it will probably never be secure.
Tom Scott’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Tom Scott’s video via the Computerphile channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI&t=1s
It is actually possible to have a cryptographic structure that allows independent verification of the counts. Of course we will never have that because Repubs prefer buggy ES&S machines. (IIRC those are also the ones Kemp used to rig elections in GA.)
But is scantron voting electronic voting? Is mail in voting and early voting electronic voting? Is being ID’d on the voter registry because you know your SSN and address, name, signature, without having to use yet another ID electronic voting?
I think the supposed risk to electronic voting machines is that there would need to be thousands of them, are distributed, somewhat unattended, and operated by people that don’t know them.
The possibility of an exploit or misconfiguration increases, and the ability to compromise someone supervising one of the polling station increases.
If there is are centralised systems, fewer higher skilled people would be required to secure/monitor/run the system. It can also be airgapped.
While some of these risks are also applicable to in-person and mail-in voting, these systems have been around for ages, are not proprietary, and anyone can figure out “how it works” and can make sure “how it happened” matches.
As soon as you get into cryptographic vulnerabilities and security, 99.99% of people would be lost in the woods
The rest of the questions, I feel, are more systematic things.
Seems to work alright for Estonia, they have had an option to vote electronically since 2005. If I can sign legal documents, pay bills and do other government related stuff electronically, why suddenly voting is a huge problem?
Because what you vote is supposed to be anonymous…
If you ignore the anonymous part, then it’s obviously not an issue.
The only real risk comes if their voting server that decrypts votes would be compromised and no one would realise it. As with any electronic service there of course is some risk, nothing is 100% secure, but I would personally take that risk to vote electronically.
Here’s an overview how their process works, feels pretty solid.
Off topic, but… Can we retire this idiom? It’s in this thread like 3 times and it’s always used by people uncomfortable by the fact that someone they don’t like made a good point.
We should retire the idiom because people are using it as intended and everyone understands it as intended?
That’s loads of BS. Manual in person voting is easily scammed, just look at voting in Russia. Fuck this shit, everything should be 100% digital.
Paper voting leaves a literal paper trail unlike electronic voting that’s always a total black box in all countries that have tried it.
Look, mate, paper voting simply doesn’t work. And Russia is not the only example.
Manual in person voting is not easily scammed on a scale that can swing an election. The slow, inefficient, in person, physical process is a security feature.
I don’t get what’s wrong with paper ballots sent by mail. It’s convenient and easy, with a paper trail for recounts. It’s worked great in Washington for decades.
There’s no way to guarantee privacy. An overbearing spouse, an anti-union boss, or a judgmental pastor could all insist on seeing the votes marked as they prefer.
A voting booth was invented for this very reason.
Manual in person voting is easily scammed, just look at voting in Russia.
Let me check. *looks through window* It’s not the biggest source of voting fraud. Biggest source of voting fraud is Venedictov’s box - Digital Electronic Voting.
Fuck this shit, everything should be 100% digital.
Sobyanin approves.
it absolutely is not easily scammed at all.
every single piece of paper is numbered and tracked. (tickets and stubbs, basically). all counting is done by multiple people and watched by anyone who wants. political parties are banned from voting premises.
even better: early voting, in person, up to a week or two before. no crowds.
errors happen about 1 in 1,000,000 with a maximum of a couple hundred, and are caught immediately.
there is no scamming. all of the USA’s voting problems are self-created.
Not just digital but trustless decentralised blockchain based so it’s impossibly hard to manipulate
