Public trust demands open-source voting systems

If you can independently verify the election result, then it does not matter if any of the counts were made using proprietary software.

If you can not independently verify election results, what good does published source code do?

Elections are a process, not a result.

I agree insofar as ensuring all e-voting implementation attempts are open source will enable us to more comprehensively prove that it is a fundamentally bad idea.

Candidates drop out, die, or become ineligible in all kinds of ways. Paper is not strictly better and can create costs and complications on the day of the election itself.

Electronic voting is fine. Why can't we just have a printer in the polling booth? I run my ballot, then hit print, then I can manually verify it, and then drop the printed ballot in a box.

Literally the easiest thing to do.

there are even ways that paper ballots can fail. there needs to be a better process that has proper controls and checks regardless of the format used.

I wouldn't trust any democracy that uses electronic voting. It is not possible to secure voting machines and make them democratically accountable.

First video:

Arguments against electronic voting: 1) one person can change millions of votes 2) vulnerable even outside the country 3) even if you audit the software, it's hard to verify that the audited software is what is actually loaded on the machines 4) even if you check hashes of the software, how do you check the software that checks the software (this is a restatement of the Ken Thompson Hack) 5) proprietary software 6) USB sticks are insecure 7) final computer tallying everything is owned and located in a single place 8) XSS attacks on e-voting pages.

Arguments for physical voting: 1) centuries old, many attacks have already been tried and failed 2) no identifying marks on ballot = no opportunity to pressure voters to change their vote 3) multiple people involved in each stage of the process

I realized after typing that out that YouTube has a "Show Transcript" function, so try that for the second video.

Haven't watched it, but to summarize what I imagine someone aligned with me would say: A ballot's entire lifecycle can be watched as it goes from the stack to the booth to the dropbox to the counting pile. Poll watchers are vestigial as soon as voting machines are involved; it becomes the honor system, which is not trustworthy enough in a system where the parties do not trust each other. The best you have is 'we have found no evidence of widespread voter fraud', a carefully couched statement from media organs you don't necessarily trust either. You, a (Democrat/Republican), can trust a system with paper ballots, because people from your party will observe all relevant details of the process everywhere the process occurs.

This isn't a technology problem, really. It's a problem of corruptible humans. In US elections, there are billions and even trillions of dollars at stake. Observe the grifting being done by the current administration. Thus, humans are extremely incentivized to corrupt the process. Technology just makes the corruption easier. Technology enables the grifter.

Too easy to cheat.

Voter rolls are public information in the US; there are several watchdog groups that perform verification services and have done so for decades; and to date, none have uncovered the kind of large-scale voter fraud that would necessitate doing anything differently from what we do now.

In fact, I'd argue that having 50 different voting systems with 50 different ways to prove eligibility makes our elections more resilient to large-scale voter fraud, even if it makes it more difficult to verify voter rolls wholesale.

>We need to do everything possible to increase participation in the democratic process

Do we? Participation should be made easy for those eligible and inclined to do so, but I don't see the benefit of encouraging participation from people who can't be bothered to put some effort into it, or are ignorant of the issues and candidates and are easily swayed by trashy campaign ads. I've seen the statistic thrown around that less than half of americans can even name the 3 branches of government, and if that's true I think those people have a civic duty not to vote.

> Posting those links without any insight from your side is just quoting dogma

It would certainly be exhausting to share an opinion on every single resource you want to share with someone.

Cryptocurrencies don't need to do things like make sure that no human gets more than one vote, only humans (no bots) from a specific part of the world get a vote, and keep votes secret. Blockchain is not the solution.

How do you know? How can their citizens know?

They don’t have stellar democracy grades from The Economist’s index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index and both seem worse off in the last ten years than the ten years before.

Are they using only the electronic version or the mixed version? We used the mixed version in some elections here in Argentina. The paper trail is harder to fake, and the electronic part close a few problems of theonly paper version.

Placed 56 and 41, respectively, on the Democracy Index.

Haha no. Voting machines caused absurd amounts of political instability here in Brazil. It's essentially become wrongthink to question the system.

Our elected representatives have tried to add a paper trail to the machines twice now and it was ruled unconstitutional for total bullshit reasons. Our former president was banned from future presidential races because he questioned the machines. We have a judge loudly proclaiming that the machines are UNQUESTIONABLE with such unwavering pride you'd think he'd have the balls to start a billion dollar bug bounty and post it here on HN. He only allows you to "audit" the system by appointment behind closed doors and the only tools you're allowed to bring with you is a pen and a piece of paper. People found issues even with these restrictions. There are people protesting to this day, laymen asking for source code, completely unaware of the existence of supply chain attacks and the fact the source code would prove nothing and serve only to humiliate them. We have former US president Biden's top CIA guy telling our former president to stop questioning the machines, wouldn't be surprised if they had access to this shit.

Germany did it right: voting machines are unconstitutional because citizens do not understand it. Elections must be fully auditable by the average person. This is the correct stance.

One of the weird things for computer people about the Irish voting system is that it's non-deterministic! You can count the same ballots in a different order and get a different result (because it depends which votes you choose as "surplus" to redistribute).

In practice it doesn't seem to matter that much. The counters even out the first-level effects of this, so it only matters for votes that have been transferred more than once; it can be determined statistically that it changes the result only in a very small number of cases; and there are plenty of other weird threshold effects to care about instead. But it's one property you might expect of a fair voting system that Ireland doesn't give you.

This is in no way intended to be disparaging: there are processes that work within the scale of small European nations that simply won't at larger scales.

That's an inquisitive 7 year old. Definitely reward them. Let's explain. A good voting system needs to guarantee

- Secrecy of who voted for whom

- Transparency of everything else. The names of everybody in the process, the process itself and all the statistics should be verifiably public.

Being an observer to your polling station must be a guaranteed voter right. Similarly all participating parties must have the right to send representatives to observe the entire process.

Before opening the polling station all ballots are counted by multiple observers from all sides. This is recorded into files / documentation of each observer. So the number of possible ballot papers that can be voted on is documented.

Then each ballot paper needs to be stamped with a official local seal. This is also observed by every observer. The number of stamped ballots is also counted and documented. The number has to match the original ones.

The number of people who can vote in that voting station is determined by a population survey. In bigger cities each region must have roughly the same number of constituents.

The number of ballots that are stamped must match the number of eligible voters in the polling station. A voter can request to change a damaged ballot paper. The replacement should be done in front of all observers and the voter. The replaced ballot is destroyed in front of everyone.

After putting their ballot into the box, the voter has to sign their name in multiple printouts of the list of eligible voters of that polling station. These printouts of the lists are held by observers from multiple sides. The number of signatures has to match the number of ballots in the box.

Everybody can observe the count. All the numbers are checked against each other.

If you think that this is infeasible, I come from a country of 80 million people and live in a similarly sized one. Both of them use the same system. It works. It scales since it is an almost trivially parallelizable problem. We get the election results in the same day of voting.

What signature or stamp? In my country we make any mark, although conventionally a cross is used in illustrations.

Many countries have secret ballots, mine doesn't, for reasons which are extremely sketchy (and presumably why my country is blue, not dark blue like New Zealand on the democracy map)

I prefer paper ballots. I'm in a country that uses paper ballots exclusively. I didn't make that argument here because the topic was voting machines.

How do you feel that the paper bill counter in your bank is closed source? It does not matter because it's trivial to verify. The counter says "here is a pack of one hundred ballots for candidate A," and if you're in doubt, you just count them again. While representatives from candidate A's and B's team are watching.

Even if it's open sourced, how do you know the machine actually runs the same code as you see on Github (or wherever the repo is hosted)?

Verifying that requires more expertise than verifying the physical ballots themselves.

> If you can't trust other humans at their word, democracy cannot fundamentally work.

This, but also, important to point out that this is a question of scale: "If you can't trust other human*s*" - plural.