Re:Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy
by specialist on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @11:39AM
(#11902713)
Corruption and incompetence are indistinguishable.
Electronic mediated systems are utterly infeasible to audit. Among other reasons, many failure modes are silent.
The good standard for election administration is the Australian Ballot (private voting, public counting), administered per precinct (distributed), counted onsite when the polls close. It's observable, there's a physical chain of custody (that can be verified), it has the largest attack surface area (increases the cost of attack).
On the privacy note, only the Australian Ballot preserves voter privacy while ensuring a public count is possible. Postal balloting, touchscreens, online voting all remove the secret ballot (otherwise they could not be verified).
Electronic mediated systems are utterly infeasible to audit. Among other reasons, many failure modes are silent.
The good standard for election administration is the Australian Ballot (private voting, public counting), administered per precinct (distributed), counted onsite when the polls close. It's observable, there's a physical chain of custody (that can be verified), it has the largest attack surface area (increases the cost of attack).
On the privacy note, only the Australian Ballot preserves voter privacy while ensuring a public count is possible. Postal balloting, touchscreens, online voting all remove the secret ballot (otherwise they could not be verified).