(this is Australia. we have compulsory attendance at voting booths for eligible citizens, you can spoil your paper or walk away but we enforce with a fine, participation in the one obligation of citizenship)
-I have been offered voting remotely in elections for my home economy of the UK and I would have welcomed some kind of homomorphic encrypted, secured voting method, given I have done KYC with the UK government to get my pension paid, I don't see there is a problem with them knowing who I am online.
I therefore do not totally agree with the headline, but I'm willing to be convinced by the article, because comparing the land of hanging chad to my own, I think paper and pencil is just fine. BTW we have a senate election which demands ballot papers cut from A0 paper in long strips. Hundreds of boxes to be filled in. What we don't have is the vote for every judge, official, proposition on the table, we just elect representatives and senators, but we have a complex vote method. It just works. We do machine reading, but every single paper is reviewed by people, and parties have rights to monitor the vote, in secured spaces. We do not have a serious concern with the integrity of our vote, and the question is regularly asked and tested. (it's not just because we believe its secure and don't check)
Its a great list of signatories, includes people I respect. I would think that the prime question for americans is "how much worse or better than the current approach could this be?"
I would feel much better if they required ink.
The mark of vote being indelible or not is irrelevant. The monitoring and protection of the ballots is far more important. For example, representatives of all political parties are involved in the count, oversight by an agency, etc. If you had time to erase and re-mark ballots, you could swap out paper ballets too.
There are scrutineers that watch counting happen at the booth once polls close, and who also see and hear the numbers get phoned into HQ. HQ has more scrutineers from all parties checking both postal votes and recounts.
If anything doesn't match up it gets flagged. I think that the ability of every party to watch votes themselves means that trust is increased, and they have skin in the game (if they didn't object at the booth why not!?).
Pen markings are perfectly valid however, so you can bring a pen to the booth to vote with if you'd like to do so.
It's also true of course that erasers don't quite erase pencil. It would be fairly obvious that the paper was tampered with.
It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.
Also https://www.reuters.com/world/india/family-remote-himalayas-...
There was really no good reason for that, unless they were really against a certain segment of the population voting (a lot of people in the apartments didn't have cars, or were too busy to go so far to vote).
I would love to go back to paper elections, even with all its problems (hanging chads anyone?). Let's make attack scaling as difficult as possible.
When we moved away from paper voting with public oversight of counting to electronic voting we significantly deteriorated trust, we made it significantly easier for a hostile government to fake votes, all for marginal improvements in efficiency which don't actually matter.
Moving to internet voting will further deteriorate the election process, and could move us to a place where we completely lose control and trust of the election process.
We should move back to paper voting.
But I what is written over and over is more on the lines of "I don't trust the process". I cannot blame anyone for not trusting Internet voting: I am a professional SWE, and it would be impossible for me to establish that any such system isn't pwned. Too much code to audit, hardware that's impossible to audit. But it's pretty trivial to demonstrate to the layperson how paper voting works, and how poll observers can prevent that process from being subverted.
You get text messages each step of the process too. “Your ballot has been mailed”/“your ballot has been delivered”/“your ballot has been received”/“your ballot has been counted - thanks for voting”.
However, those are in the context of whatever political system they're in. No level of efficient election design is going to put a dent in the fact that California loves direct-elected downballot offices (e.g., treasurer, controller, insurance commissioner, state judges, local judges, etc.) and referenda, which all result in super long and complicated ballots with 50+ questions each.
It looks like a paper document intended for a human, and it certainly can be. A machine can also read it. (And does, prior to it being cast: the ballot is deposited into what honestly looks like a trashcan whose lid is a machine. It could presumably keep a tally, though IDK if it does. It does seem to validate the ballot, as it has false-negative rejected me before.)
But now the "paper trail" is exactly what I submit; it's not a copy that I need to verify is actually a copy, what is submitted it my vote, directly.
In the 2026 election, only 1.3% of voters were registered in jurisdictions that use direct-recording electronic machines without a voter verifiable paper audit trail (https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mode/navigate/map/voteE...). 67.8% of voters are registered in precincts that primarily use hand-marked ballots, and the balance mostly use BMDs to generate premarked ballots.
Why should you be forced to trust that what you're shown is also what was being counted? The paper record should be the actual ballot itself, with your actual vote on it.
(memories..)
When I lived in NYC there was a giant lever you got to use - it was pretty fun - but positioning the actual paper was kind of tricky.
I think Georgia used to have Diebold machines where you would get a little receipt but I'm pretty sure they were very hackable. Anyway half of them were always broken.
Besides avoiding any issues (real or imagined) with touchscreens, it makes it extremely cheap to stand up more polling places with more booths, since only one tabulator is needed; the booths themselves can just be little standing tables with privacy protectors.
all it would take is one person saying their printed ballot does not match their specific selection, and the whole thing would become chaos.
(the machines used in Texas vary by county, in my county we use Hart InterCivic machines that are touchscreen but produce a paper trail - honestly I think it works well)
>Besides avoiding any issues (real or imagined) with touchscreens,
Wait... I don't think these are the complaints being made against internet voting at all. The problem is with a computer counting and reporting it, right? Centralized, less transparent, etc.
I dont view writing my vote on paper and scanning it to be paper voting if it's just immediately fed into a computer.
Electronic tabulation introduces little risk when the ballots are paper.
And not all paper systems are good either. I'm sure everyone remembers the disaster that was the punch card system used by Florida in the 2000 election...
Do European and other first world countries favor electronic tabulation?
Is it possible that introduction of all electronic factors reduce trust?
Now, you might contend that this is not a list of first-world countries exactly (but rather I sampled the largest countries). You must keep in mind that the use of electronic tabulation in the United States is mostly a response to the very limited budget on which elections are carried out; electronic tabulation is much less expensive than significantly increasing staffing. As a result, globally, electronic tabulation tends to be most common in poorer countries or countries with newer election systems, while hand tabulation is most common in wealthier countries with long-established election procedures.
For this reason, the countries you might go to for comparison (like France and Germany) have largely manual election processes that have often seen few changes since the Second World War.
The Help America Vote Act (2002) had a de facto effect of making the United States a country with much newer election processes, as HAVA requires strict accessibility measures that most European election systems do not meet (e.g. unassisted voting for blind and deaf people). Most US election systems didn't meet them either, in 2002, so almost the entire country had to design new election processes over a fairly short span of time and on a shoestring budget. Understandably, election administrators leaned on automation to make that possible.
It's also important to understand that because of the US tradition of special-purpose mill levies and elected independent boards (like school boards), the average US ballot has significantly more questions than the average European ballot. This further increases the cost and complexity of hand tabulation, even ruling out entirely the "optimized" tabulation methods used in France and Ireland.
Mail-in voting enabled citizens who otherwise simply couldn't vote, to vote. Citizens who, more often than not, were from already disadvantaged backgrounds.
I have a friend somewhere else in the world who is in the business of providing electronic voting machines to governments (cities and countries) to run elections. I won't mention where in the world because there are only so many of these companies and his is very prominently known in the region he serves. They develop the machines, write the software and provide the service.
He told me stories of various elections across the region where governments or specific political parties ask him to tilt the playing field in their favor by secretly altering the code. He has refused every single such requests because, as he put it, if you do for one side or the other, sooner or later you get burned (or worse) and it's over. He happens to be one of the honest and responsible players. That's not necessarily the case for others.
When I asked him about US elections, his answer was very simple: I can't believe you allow people to vote by mail. You don't know who's voting. You don't know how many times they are voting. You don't know if someone is voting for a dead person. You don't know if the person who filled out the form is legally allowed to vote. You don't know if votes are being intercepted and discarded or somehow replaced. You don't know anything. And this all before a single mail-in vote is counted.
The only thing you can state with absolute certainty is that mail-in ballots can be subject to manipulation and that this manipulation can reach enough scale to affect results in elections where the margin is so narrow that a few hundred or a few thousand votes can determine who wins.
Simple example: We receive eight ballots. There's absolutely nothing to prevent me from filling out all eight of them as I see fit and mailing them. Nothing.
There's also nothing to prevent bad actors from destroying ballots in large quantities.
Again, do not mischaracterize my statements here. I am not asserting that any of this has happened. I am saying that mail-in ballots enable potentially serious manipulation and are insecure.
This is like saying that short passwords are insecure. Lots of people use them safely and never get hacked. We all know they are unsafe. The fact that they might not be insecure enough for the general public to understand the issue (because you don't have news every day showing how many thousands of people are getting hurt) is immaterial. The truth of the matter is independent of the perceived consequences. Short passwords are insecure. Mail-in ballots are insecure.
Just as there is nothing to prevent a person threatening or physically coercing 8 members of their household to vote as they direct.
This is hard to scale up into the hundreds.
WRT mail-in ballots, these are common place in Australia.
You post in a provided envelope to the AEC address, that outer envelope indentifies you against the voter rolls, just as you are identified when you attend a physical voting location.
The inner sealed envelope contains your voing slip - this is removed and passed on to the "votes from district" counting bucket .. just as all the voting slips from physical voting locations are.
In the checksumming of the election the same person being marked down as having voted multiple times, whether at various locations or by multiple mail in ballots, gets caught and investigated.
At this point voters are marked off against registration rolls and actual votes are anonymous.
This is important in an Australian election as no one should know that someone drew a crude suggestive image of their local member and submitted that.
The real downside of mail in voting is missing out on a sausage sizzle with others in your district at a voting location on voting day.
I have to admit, it's a bit disturbing that his reason for not doing it is because he might get "burned" or caught. How about...you know...because he believes in upholding democracy?
I encourage you to click the ‘Read’ tab to see the actual circumstances resulting in the convictions as most are for trying to game ballot signatures and have nothing to do with votes being cast. It just doesn’t happen because the system is secure.
Never once has anyone, outside of their expansive imagination, proven that voting by mail is not secure and effective.
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57152/why-isnt-...
> He told me stories of various elections across the region where governments or specific political parties ask him to tilt the playing field in their favor by secretly altering the code. He has refused every single such requests because, as he put it, if you do for one side or the other, sooner or later you get burned (or worse) and it's over. He happens to be one of the honest and responsible players. That's not necessarily the case for others.
Just to be clear, if you are actually telling the truth you have a fundamental duty to reveal the company in question and who is making these requests, as doing so can constitute a felony in many countries across the world. So I recommend you telling us where this is happening.
How does that work though? What's the root of trust identifying me as me to a government who, at most, has a written record somewhere of my birth, and definitely not enough information to tie that to any particular face or body.
Nearly every nation on earth does this. It's nothing new. We have the technology and the means. This isn't a problem.
Maybe the payout isn't worth it, but (a) empirically, people seem to be willing to spend a lot more than that per vote if necessary, and (b) it's not substantially harder or riskier to do that than to risk prison voting for a dead person or whatever else some fraudster might cook up; if we think this is an important system which people are trying to rig then the proposed cure just keeps honest people honest.
Mail voting has routinely been proven to be extraordinarily difficult to exploit at scale. For as much feverish dedication there is to the idea of how terrible it is (for quite obviously partisan benefit) there is absolutely no evidence of any kind of substantial fraud. It's a right wing fever dream exercise in post hoc logic to justify depriving the 'right' people in our society of their vote. Simple as that.
Mail voting is common in many systems, it's convenient, and worst of all ... More people vote!! All of which is very dangerous to the power of a certain class of politicians.
We already use paper voting. If you mean go back to a time before voting machines, then I fear that would actually reduce trust because the amount of tabulation errors, data entry, and spoilt ballots would skyrocket. The only people who are increasing doubt in voting machine are the same people who are trying to disenfranchise voters and not accepting the results of past elections.
The last presidential election where doing a paper recount might have helped was in 2000 and believe it or not, the same party that's calling for abolishing voting machine today was the one who sued to avoid a paper recount then.
If efficiency is low enough to significantly affect turn out, you cannot trust the results.
> We should move back to paper voting.
Nowhere in the US is electronic voting used from what I know of. Estonia is the only country I know of that does internet voting, but my info could be out of date.
I agree with you on local elections - electronic voting is good enough for town or even state level elections. The stakes are dramatically lower.
That is a feature, not a problem to be solved. It means that there are tens of thousands of eyes that can spot things going wrong at every level.
Any effort to make voting simpler and more efficient reduces the number of people directly involved in the system. Efficiency is a problem even if the system is perfectly secure in a technological sense.
That makes software really unsuitable.
There is really nothing we can do to satisfy these people except create some kind of structure they demand which will somehow be made to heavily lean in their favor. That is what will satisfy them. Nothing else will.
Voter registry is used to generate traceable but anonymous keys
Used when voting
Votes are electronically counted.
Voters can check their votes against the count
Third parties can check vote counts against the anonymized registry
The best paper record is the actual ballot you yourself marked and turned in. It shows exactly what the ballot said and it shows what your selection was. Counting of those ballots can take place in public, on camera to make sure that each vote gets counted correctly. No internet or computers needed.
Also, even with paper ballots hand counted people aren't suddenly going to trust elections, at least not some people I know. I had someone say that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants voted in the last election. That obviously didn't happen and there's already controls to stop that from happening but that didn't stop them from believing it. It's one of the issues with the conspiratorial thinking, it's durable even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
For example even in country with pervasive internet connectivity (99%) like in Netherland the voter turnout in 2024 is only 77%.
Security technology of trust management in the centralized voting system and architecture has already been solved and well understood, and now we are even moving into zero trust with multi-factor authentications.
All this while the venerable Kerberos has been around for decades with its secure derivatives, and its secure alternatives are numerous. For the more challenging fully distributed arguably has already been solved recently by blockchain, immutable data, etc.
This is the classic example is not that you can't (as claimed by the the article), but you won't. This is what political will is all about and since this is on political voting this lame attitude is kind of expected.
[1] Voter turnout of registered voters, 2024:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/voter-turnout-of-register...
Agreed.
However, in some states, such as California, mail-in voting has become the default.
What's used to verify identity and integrity? Your signature from your voter's affidavit of registration, a signature from any past voter form, or literally an "X"[1]. Your signature doesn't even need to match, it just must have "similar characteristics". You can print your name or sign in cursive, you can even just use initials. They're all accepted.
We're firmly on the "honor system".
Pair that with lack of voter ID laws, and we have a system that's designed to be untrustworthy.
Yes, I agree, a state issued ID should be free...
[1] https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/elections-code/elec-sect-3019/
In Australia you can postal vote if necessary, but "prepoll" voting is much more popular (I believe 37.5% of registered voters, 90% of which actually voted, in 2025). It's just so convenient, with the same crowd of volunteers and officials as actually polling day.
Steelmanning: They're putting the effort in so we don't have to. Either they find a way and it'll be awesome, or at some point they become an object lesson.
edit: Or third path: They muddle along just well enough with a system that can't work in theory, but ends up nearly working in practice, stochastically? (see also: email, wikipedia, or a hundred other broken things that can't possibly work but are still hanging on. )
Then our voting systems could be electronic, secure, open, verifiable, and mostly private; assuming effective oversight / this organization does not issue fraudulent tokens or leak keys or identities (big assumption, but I don't think it's impossible.)
Maybe this isn't what you meant by verifiable, but there are systems with this property and they are bad.
I think that's fine and the best we can do, but the person I replied to said you can verify your vote is tallied correctly. That implies checking what the actual vote was.
(However you would verify your vote, imagine the person who is coercing you is just standing over your shoulder with threat of force. An example might be an abusive husband who does not want to allow their wife to vote freely/against him. A briber might simply force you to allow them to look over your shoulder before they'll pay you off.)
Vs. paper ballots in a polling place: a coercer would not be permitted in the poll booth with me. I get to vote, and when I leave, … I can tell them whatever, but it does not need to match my vote. It utterly defeats bribery, as the briber has no way to verify that I'm doing what they way.
Another reason (besides what I mentioned in another post below) why such a secure system will never see the light, even if we can technically build it, is that the average person will start to question: why do we still need to vote for representatives if we have such a system in place? Can't we as citizens vote directly on bills/acts? Which makes sense since the current system was designed before all these tech and connectivity.
* “internet voting is insecure”
who wins?
Internet money needs to be the opposite, and reversible through the courts.
It is an unsolvable problem for mail in voting, which is why it should be prohibited in most cases.
One local scammer made off with a $5m government refund for a fraudulent business tax filing. You can't make this stuff up if you tried...
At some point, one is just amazed at the size of the cons people pull online. =3
Why? Honestly Internet voting would improve overall turnout, which seems more important. And we probably could accomplish anonymity with some clever cryptography.
That is why you typically show id, get a ballot and there is no relationship between the two.
And we could use cryptography to vote anonymously after authentication online.
Without saying too much about my home country I believe it's doable.
* records last > 500 years with no electricity . corruption is obvious at first glance. ( bad records don't appear to be good).
* counting is easily distributed by number of workers
* readily visually inspected with no special tools . ideal for auditing
* records stay in order at rest.
* easy to detect & protect against tampering
* easy to train new users . CRUD tooling costs pennies per operator
* cheaper to scale writes & reads
TCO and risk-assessment for paper records exceeds digital on nearly every measure.
But I could make the argument with any high trust internet system.
Let's take another high trust activity we do on the internet - banking. Internet banking gives a hacker the ability to steal millions while sitting across the world. This is the same argument the authors make about changing a million votes.
So it really comes down to the pros vs cons. That's the more important discussion imo.
Do the benefits of internet voting outweigh the cons?
Bank fraud happens all of the time and at scale. However, it is entirely insurable and reversible.
Election fraud is not reversible. Trust cannot be restored in the way that a bank account can.
At best you might be able to scam someone into sending you a few hundred dollars via Zelle. Some scam centers do this 24/7, but it isn’t that easy, and apparently they rely on human trafficking to acquire free labor.
The complex systems backing internet banking (including the people and processes) are immense in scale. They evolved over decades and were honed and improved as real problems occurred. Needless to say, there is no room for iterative trial and error in elections.
If you hack the bank you get very little, at least today. If you hack an election you get everything. No thanks. No to electronic voting.
Many countries do exactly that, sometimes with a few exceptions (ex: expats, disabilities, ...).
One problem with internet voting that does not apply to money is the "receipt-free" aspect. That is, a voter should not be able to prove that he voted for a particular candidate, as it would allow for vote buying, threats, etc... And it is a hard problem. With money transactions, you generally want the opposite, which is an easier problem.
With Internet voting, the ways to cheat are not all that well-known among the general population, and even among an audience like HN I bet we couldn't come up with all the ways to cheat. (That's not a challenge!) So there's going to be fundamentally less trust in the election process than with paper ballots, even if the Internet-voting system was actually made completely secure. (And I'm not persuaded it can be made completely secure, given that secret ballots are a fundamental requirement of the process).
So yes, paper ballots are very much the way to go.
The issue is how to preserve privacy...
Understandable, but then vote-buying becomes possible. The reason vote-buying is impossible in a secret ballot is because you can't prove how you voted to anyone else. If you can look up your own ballot even five minutes after it's dropped into the box, then you can show your screen to someone else who then hands you $100 for voting the right way, and elections change from being "who has persuaded the most voters?" into "who has the most money to buy votes with?"
It got made into a 1992 movie called "An American Story" (which covers many things, the Battle of Athens being just one of them). I have no idea how accurate the movie is (I know it's not 100% accurate, but how much it changed I don't know).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newbern,_Alabama#Mayoral_dispu...
P.S. Population of that town in 2020, according to the census? 133 people.
Caro covers this pretty extensively in his LBJ biography series, but it's reasonably clear from the evidence that LBJ won his senate seat by some pretty crude paper voting record manipulation after the fact - changing a '7' to a '9' by writing over the number with a pen - almost certainly with LBJ's knowledge. Given that his senate seat eventually put him in the presidency, it's probably the most consequential voter fraud ever committed in American history (that we know about, I suppose).
The idea that a malware could be on a phone “altering things automatically” feels like a 90s FUD cliche. If an online voting system existed, it won't be like a poll that you see on Twitter, for instance; it will be far more involved. For example, we can have blockchain as the network, and not just transparent to all, but even after you vote you can still check your vote and see if it was potentially altered, and a proper electronic chain of custody can also ensure that the vote was counted per the process, and all of that is visible to anyone who would like to check and even count ALL the votes yourself, again, just like how transparent blockchain is.
And saying paper voting is more secure isn't true at all, because these votes will be counted electronically at some point, either by a machine or just a simple Excel sheet, opening the same risks as the previous one except here, if it would happen, you will never know and you as a voter can't trace the vote from when you voted all the way until it was counted. The voting process should be designed in a way with zero trust in mind, just like how secure systems are designed now, like storage, encryption, vpn, etc., and voting should too.
I personally believe that we can build a very secure, robust, and trustworthy system that can be used for voting online, but I think no one wants that for all sorts of political purposes, either by actually altering the results that could go unnoticed, or at least keeping the window open to blame the results on a faulty system.
if we assume the user connection is secure (ie, about as secure as banking), can we have secure internet voting?
Our livelihoods are increasingly (almost entirely) digital and endure great efforts to abuse. But banking and/or retail operate on a different spectrum. For one they make money. The costs associated allowing their business online may never make sense for a non-profit based activity like voting.
Do we have any examples of internet activity as tempting to infiltrate/pervert that is secure and doesn’t extract value?
Anyways it seems greater damage will be done before we even reach a provably secure system. So paper/pencil voting would be better.
But fear not - even if we abolish voting machines we aren’t out of the hole just yet. We have good company with concepts like Citizens United as well as activities like sweepstakes that try to sway the populace to throw away a vote for a chance at a million. Illegal - sure - but that won’t stop the ostensible infinitely wealthy from enduring a slap on the wrist - or more appropriately a verbal reprimand (which is all that happened last time) for their part in electioneering. And if that didn’t work we have an onslaught of reAlIty and bots that poison our conversations in order to form our world views.
I’m jaded. I’m overly pessimistic. I’ll go now.
A single compromise once can have incredibly bad long term consequences for the majority of a ruling elite gain power indefinitely.
There must always be a paper trail and a blockchain ledger provides the most reliable and secure means to maintain integrity.
This is just an attempt at control using the majority of cases that most websites and applications are insecure. If enough effort and time is invested of course we can create a fairly robust and secure voting system.
We use the internet for too much, more systems should be airgapped. It’s a miracle that there hasn’t been a tragedy yet from a hack of critical infrastructure. Even things like water treatment and energy systems can be vulnerable: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/08/american-water-largest-us-wa...
Hackers get into people's bank accounts, medical records, etc. all the time. We know that these systems are massively insecure. Also, none of those things are kept secret from everyone involved. Your bank gets to know how much you paid for something. Your doctor gets to know what your xray showed. The judge can see what court documents you filed. There are a lot of eyes on that data and trails to catch problems. Nobody is allowed to know how you vote. It's a very different problem than the online submission of bank transactions and court records.
There are also robust systems for correcting the record when something goes wrong. Sadly still not enough in place to protect the people whose data gets stolen or leaked, but that's another topic.
Voting is a uniquely hard process, where most kinds of validation are actually attacks.
No one (including yourself) can be allowed to look up how you voted later.
See, here we always had issues with corruption, and thats why we had to implement it.
The thing is that we always had major issues at the city level elections, because many small groups dominate different regions, and they just controlled the election officials, influenced voters, disappeared with ballot bags, and did all types of crazy stuff. It was pretty common at the eighties exchange votes for gas, dentures or even tubal ligation.
For all this reasons, a specific voting registry was created in 1985, and an electronic voting machine was used for the first time in municipal elections in 1995. This solved most issues, and elections started to be a lot easier, there was A LOT of confusion in the past. After it was available in all cities in the country, they started to do national elections.
The main idea here is that this is a government endeavour, not a private company. There are so many security layers that I think that only another external government actor would have resources to attack it.
These machines have special hardware, the encryption keys are loaded at the election day by the government, the machines are there only for the 8 hours of voting, then came back to a government deposit, they account for every machine, they are audited before and after, they randomly choose the election officials, the machine prints a receipt for the voter and the stats of votes of that machine. Each person has an election location and room/machine, so schools are used. If a machine has problems, they have to on the fly generate new keys for a substitution. In 2024 they used 570.000 machines at the election.
When the election day finishes, they place at the door of the room the machine receipts, so any ONG or international organization can verify. After it they take the machine to a central place where they connect to them and trasmit the data, and in one hour we know the president. During these decades we had presidents from the right and from the left, and all cities and states, so you can say it works just by seeing all this power cycling all the time.
I agree with the article in the sense that we need paper confirmation, and that we cannot trust the voter machine, but I think Brazil solved this by making sure to control the machine, and printing receipts and making then available to any public organization.
I particularly think that only one thing is missing in this technology, technically speaking, I would like to have a personal key with an ecc key created by me, that would allow me to insert this card when voting, so it would encrypt my vote, store and send to the server, so I could, using my card (even online) check for my voting history, connecting all the endpoints. It is still anonymous, but verifiable by me.
More information here: https://international.tse.jus.br/en/electronic-ballot-box/pr...
It's bullshit, we don't control anything. Our voting machines are Linux computers that never survived a public auditing, so the government stopped let the public audit them.
If either China or the US decided to seriously invest into corrupting the hardware, it would be a several years long process but would actually cost less than our presidential campaigns. There are probably several ways to corrupt the machines software without anybody noticing (it a Linux PC, full of opaque firmware), that we won't know about because the details aren't public.
Without a paper confirmation that we could audit, nobody can't claim it's working. What would expect the results to be if it was compromised?
Fine. But by that standard, in a world where someone can bring their phone or AI glasses into the voting booth to record the whole voting process, how can any voting system be deemed secure? Anyone can show anyone else how they voted.
You can record a picture of a ballot and then spoil it and things like that.
- How votes are cast
- How votes are counted
- How votes are custodied
In order for an election to be trusted, all three steps must be transparent and auditable.
Electronic voting makes all three steps almost absolutely opaque.
Here's how Mexico solves this. We may have many problems, but "people trust the vote count" is not one of them:
1. Everyone votes, on paper, in their local polling station. The polling station is manned by volunteers from the neighborhood, and all political parties have an observer at the station.
2. Once the polling station closes, votes are counted in the station, by the neighborhood volunteers, and the counts are observed by the political party observers.
3. Vote counts are then sent electronically to a central system. They are also written on paper and the paper is displayed outside the poll both for a week.
The central system does the total count, but the results from each poll station are downloadable (to verify that the net count matches), and every poll station's results are queryable (so any voter can compare the vote counts displayed on paper outside the station to the online results).
Because the counting is distributed, results are available night-of in most cases.
Elections like this can be gamed, but the gaming becomes an exercise in coercing people to vote counter to their preference, not "hacking" the system.
If that's gaming the system, what even is the point of voting?
This may be a bit tinfoil hatty of me, but I think the whole anti-woke thing is a ploy to interfere with that kind of education.
Good point. Let's just get rid of voting and go back to "divine right of kings", at least until they develop a cure for human gullibility.
There are historical factors that contribute to those things you brought up. American minorities are disproportionately affected by things like limited hours, for example. You'd know that if you were an American POC.
I don't mean this as an ad hominem, but was this comment generated with AI or something?
This characterization is reductive and basically a straw-man.
The principle underlying opposition to "counting in one day" is basically that every vote that is correctly placed in time should be counted, and as many people as possible should have access to voting. Mail-in voting, for example, has been shown to increase voter turnout by making voting more convenient, but you have the question of what to do with ballots that are received late. There are pretty good arguments for counting all mail-in ballots that are postmarked before the election, and I don't think "xenophobia" is among them.
In America specifically, all decisions relating to access to voting are considered against a backdrop of our widespread and systematic attempt to restrict voting. A modern example of this is related to wide disparity in the number of polling places, and therefore the amount of time required to vote, in "urban" regions of some southern states as compared to rural regions.
I have never heard of a racism-based opposition to paper ballots. I think you just made that up.
Why would you want that?
Surely what you want is to enable everyone to vote, and then to count all the votes?
In the UK where I have most experience of this stuff, there are many, many small polling stations, and usually you just walk right in and vote without queueing. The longest I ever had to wait to vote was about 30 minutes. Votes are counted locally and results usually declared within a handful of hours. Some take longer due to recounts etc if the tally is very close in a certain area, but the whole thing is pretty uncontroversial and pretty low-effort.
Here in Australia, voting is compulsory, it's always on a Saturday, and there's usually a charity sausage-sizzle at the polling place, it's sorta fun. And again, AFAICT (I'm not a citizen yet) the infrastructure is over-provisioned so people aren't waiting around forever.
From what I hear about the US, in some places voting can take hours, it seems like the number of polling places is deliberately limited to make it hard for people to vote, and you have those weird/horrible rules cropping up like it being illegal to hand out water to people in line, which seems purely designed to discourage electoral participation. And then you have all these calls to stop the count after a certain time etc.
It's deeply weird from an outside perspective. If counts are taking too long, if people are having trouble voting, provision more... but of course it seems clear that there are motives for underprovisioning, because one or other group thinks it will benefit them.
1. Everyone votes on paper.
2. An electronic tallying machine tallies the vote.
3. Vote counts are sent to a central system, IDK if it's electronic or not.
4. Candidates can challenge and start a hand recount at anytime.
I think this combo is pretty close to the ideal. The actual ballots are easy to audit. Discrepancies can be challenged. And the machine doing the tallying isn't connected to the internet, it's just a counting tool that gets the job done fast.
For people with disabilities, poll workers can come in and help with the vote.
Solution: the basic unit (paper ballot in this case) can be understood by any adult with basic education, which means anyone can detect cheating, not just a technical wizard. The only skill you need is reading.
Give me a solution that follows the same principle and I'd consider it.
Nobody cares about results coming faster except journalists that have to fill 2-3 TV hours with nonsense until there's some numbers.
No engineer that's worth of the title would advocate for electronic voting -- unless they're in the business of selling electronic voting. See the Premise.
Yeah see this is where I thought this was going.
Phones can be insecure, but in aggregate they are secure enough for literally every other component of life to be conducted on them.
>Malware (or insiders) at the server can change votes. Internet servers are constantly being hacked from all over the world, often with serious results.
Again, great point. Accepting this point will the government erase all the private identifiable data it has collected on me from its systems? Probably not, because they have made a cost/benefit analysis that suggests the risk is middling compared to the reward.
>Malware at the county election office can change votes (in those systems where the internet ballots are printed in the county office for scanning). County election computers are not more secure than other government or commercial servers, which are regularly hacked with disastrous results.
This seems like a weird seppo thing.
Currently the risk of an election being seen as fraudulent is high, and the reward of online voting is low.
But we dont have to conceptualise the modern boring election when we look at online elections. We can look at alternative models, closer to real time use and other gains that tip things back in its favor.
Actually the biggest issue I see with online democracy is apathy and minimum quorum sizes.
This article is right about secret internet voting: it’s fundamentally incompatible with unsupervised devices and global networks. But secrecy is the constraint that breaks everything.
If you instead require public, verifiable voting, most of the "unsolved" problems disappear. The core requirement becomes: everyone can independently verify inclusion and correct tallying.
That’s where blockchains are a genuine game-changer: - They provide a public, append-only, tamper-evident system of record.
- Anyone can recompute the tally from first principles — no trusted servers, no “checker apps,” no special dispute resolution.
- Server compromise or insider attacks stop being catastrophic; fraud becomes immediately visible rather than silently scalable.
- Malware can still affect an individual’s vote, but it can’t secretly change the election at scale — the main failure mode highlighted in this post.
If trust is the goal, opacity is the wrong primitive. The secret ballot is mistaken path solving a non existent and purely theoretical problem of vote buying.
In a world where we expect everything to be easily accessible, the hardships placed by all the steps required to vote (registration, confirming residency location, waiting in line for polling booth) is seriously impacting voter participation. We need to get with the times and modernize this voting infrastructure.
pokstad•1h ago
rexpop•1h ago