In the 2016 US presidential election officials basically typod the election results in the town of Hazelhurst in Wisconsin, where almost half the votes went missing until a citizen volunteer noticed the mistake. The party officials nor election officials caught the mistake.[2]
If mistakes like that can happen then how often do they go unnoticed? How often are these mistakes deliberate?
[1] https://news.err.ee/916525/vote-miscount-in-narva-may-cost-e...
So, could you point to any one election in Estonia's history where electronic voting would have been any better?
> The Soviet era showed that election fraud happens anyway.
That's just bullshit. Just because a solution for a problem is not perfect, does not mean it's useless and that every non-perfect approach is equally bad.
> The problem with paper voting is that mistakes in counting happen very often.
Which is irrelevant to the discussion of security. Mistakes are a very different thing from intentional manipulation, both in how you can prevent them and in the effects. In particular, mistakes tend to average out, which is why they usually don't matter for elections as long as they happen at a reasonably low rate.
> In the 2016 US presidential election officials basically typod the election results in the town of Hazelhurst in Wisconsin, where almost half the votes went missing until a citizen volunteer noticed the mistake. The party officials nor election officials caught the mistake.
... which is why we should employ a voting process where only the election officials have any insight into what is going on, so we minimize the chance that a citizen discovers any errors?
> If mistakes like that can happen then how often do they go unnoticed? How often are these mistakes deliberate?
... and how would an election process that is completely opaque to the public possibly help with any of that?
With electronic voting nothing stops sysadmin from doing UPDATE votes SET vote = 'Good Candidate' WHERE vote = 'Bad Candidate'.
Also, they cannot store signatures with votes because that would disclose voter's identity and their choice. They have to store signatures separately from the votes and it means that the votes can be freely modified.
Here is what Wikipedia says [1]:
> This criticism was underscored in May 2014 when a team of International computer security experts released the results of their examination of the system, claiming they could be able to breach the system, change votes and vote totals, and erase any evidence of their actions if they could install malware on the election servers.
Of course, the government can install enything on its servers.
Here is a quote from a report on vulnerabilities [2]:
> The e-voting system places complete trust in the server that counts the votes at the end of the election process. Votes are decrypted and counted entirely within the unobservable “black box” of the counting server. This creates an opportunity for an attacker who compromises this server to modify the results of the vote counting.
> ...
> The attack’s modifications would replace the results of the vote decryption process with the attacker’s preferred set of votes, thus silently changing the results of the election to their preferred outcome.
Read: the government can "draw" any outcome they would like. Maybe they already did it, who knows.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia
In other words: It doesn't help at all against malware on the computer.
> The (state-provided) USB reader should have a small lcd screen to sum up the thing being signed "Vote for Ms.Ryjavik on election #123" "Vote for Yes on vote #432" and a confirmation button.
In other words: If the USB firmware is infected, it's still not secure.
> With these modifications, and the ability to check a cast vote has been received, you can have secure elections on insecure devices.
So, if you are using secure devices ... then you can have secure elections on insecure devices? In this scenario you aren't actually using the insecure device, other than for establishing a connection to the internet.
Or rather, as you described it, it also functions as the input device--but that is a security problem because it can be used to violate the secrecy of the vote, so it's not actually secure that way either. The only way to make it secure (sort-of) is to not use the insecure device.
> However it requires trust in the officials to do their jobs correctly and to not tamper the tally.
And that is the reason why electronic voting is not an option. Elections have to be able to remove a government from power against its will. An election process that depends on the integrity and honesty of the government that you want to remove from power is inherently broken. An election process that only works when there is no conflict is not a useful election process.