People seemed to have forgotten the Diebold voting machines, and their provably insecure implementation... and the conspiracy theories about Bush benefiting from it. Odd how that was a liberal position at the time, and nobody called them names.

Equally important to whether the vote is fair is whether people believe it is fair.

No one but the world's best computer security experts have a hope of comprehensively understanding a computer voting system. Even on the odd chance the entire software and hardware platform were open source and verifiable, it's probably beyond 90% of us here on Hacker News to even begin going about that independently.

The result is the election is no longer constructed out of an understandable system based on folk physics we all comprehend instinctively. We all understand the integrity of a physical ballot box, physical papers, and the difficulty of mass fraud against such a decentralized system.

Switch to fully-electronic voting and we lose that. It becomes a black box. Press a button. Get a result. With no faith in the process that rendered it. Our democratic result ceases to be the result of average citizens counting papers and becomes something just handed down by experts.

I'm not American, but if my country ever moves to eliminate paper ballots I will protest. I do like the idea of a terminal that prints your human-readable ballot for you as an assistive device, though.

The voting machines that americans are talking about [1] aren't "fully electronic black boxes", they're "paper ballots + a vote counting machine + maybe a machine that acts as an overly fancy pencil (but let's you verify the paper ballot afterwards, i.e. what you talk about in your last paragraph).

The paper audit trail, physical ballot box, etc still exists.

I don't know if these machines exactly justify their cost... but they don't seem to be security risks.

[1] So by this I mean "only the republicans are complaining right now" and "they aren't complaining about states where non-paper voting machines used". In fact it looks like that of the 7 states with some form of non-paper voting machines, all but New Jersey went for Trump. New Jersey was never going to be close enough that the republicans feel like they can complain about it.

[2] List of states and how they use voting machines here: https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...

Kentucky, Lousiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tenessee and Texas are the ones with "DRE without VVPAT" (voting machines that are more than a fancy pencil and/or paper ballot counter).

[3] Election results from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

Having a paper record helps, but only if it actually gets used to manually validate the results from the counting machine. (And if you're doing a manual count anyway, why bother having a counting machine in the first place?)

> And if you're doing a manual count anyway, why bother having a counting machine in the first place

Because that way you can report preliminary results faster? I guess you also get the "two independent ways of counting say the same thing" benefit, but I'm pretty sure that they're primarily there because the news likes it.

Doing manual counts of states that at are at all close or suspected to be at all close is... normal.

Sure, why not? I have no problem with counting machines that aren't actually used to produce the official count.

Doing manual counts only when it's close isn't good enough though, as that leaves you open to a vulnerability where the attacker simply arranges for it to not be close.

> a vulnerability where the attacker simply arranges for it to not be close.

That attack, for state and federal elections, involves falsifying multiple independent organizations' poll results, including exit polling on the day of. Otherwise the "not close" results will not be credible and they will be investigated.

I think they sample for validation and only do a full recount when fraud is suspected.

> Odd how that was a liberal position at the time, and nobody called them names.

I was with you until you threw in a blatant lie. Being against electronic voting has always been a position that got negative comments, insults etc. (unless foolish, luddite, naive, afraid, and so on are not insults anymore? Or maybe you don't consider them insults when your side issues them?). Perhaps you didn't experience that, or maybe you are just doing the whole "rose-colored glasses" view on the past thing. Either way, your statement about how no one called "them" names is just a sad attempt at throwing in a little dig, one that has no basis in reality, no real facts behind it, and only serves to divide everyone.

> Being against electronic voting has always been a position that got negative comments, insults etc. (unless foolish, luddite, naive, afraid, and so on are not insults anymore?

Is that really true? I always thought it was a pretty popular position, at least in the tech community. I might be biased, but I don't know how anyone who has a modicum of understanding about computer (in)security and has performed an update query could ever be dismissively enthusiastic of electronic voting.

Moving the goalposts is a fun game, but not helpful in this situation. I guess if you only limit yourself to counting those of a particular career with a particular set of interests as people, then sure you may have a point. I tend to think of humans (no extra qualifiers) as people though, so your point makes no sense to me.

I think you're failing to apply the appropriate context to the situation back then.

Your framing of the Hursti Hack [0] and how socially acceptable it is to discuss its merits does not seem to consider the very different way society tended to handle things like this in those days. Society has changed a lot. During the Bush/Kerry race I distinctly remember that being against the voting machines was decidedly counter-culture, but definitely not indicative of being a luddite or naive. Back then, being counter-culture was "cool," and only a sliver of the population actually cared to take a position against it.

The considerable research and publication [1] related to this incident helps demonstrate that society saw this issue in quite a different light a mere 15 years ago.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hursti_Hack [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161202140146/https://www.suppo...

Good deflect, but it completely ignores the point - I and many others were insulted for being against voting machines.

Also - which is true?

* only a sliver of the population even cared

* it was the liberal position back then

Your personal experience of your thoughts is not in any way related to the statement: "Odd how that was a liberal position at the time, and nobody called them names." They are just a tangential anecdote.

Since you do somehow think anecdotes are super duper relevant though:

I was an adult for bush/kerry. I remember too. Things were very different on the surface, but the divide was there then too - it was deep and it was pervasive. I remember coming out of a screening of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' and being yelled at by a crowd of people who thought I was a 'dirty liberal' and 'scumbag' for even seeing it. I remember having people threaten me because I was against the Iraq war and Afghanistan occupation. I remember being told my volunteer work to help underserved communities get access to the internet was pointless because "those people will never learn". The sides and arguments haven't changed - what has changed is the volume. The language of "us vs them" hasn't changed. The ignorant argument style of "here's my one personal viewpoint as proof that you are wrong" hasn't changed. The talking heads are still east coast liberal elites in an ivory tower (or fascist assholes just spewing lies and stirring up hate).

Perhaps my experience is an outlier. Perhaps you are just doing that "good old days" thing. Either way, neither of our stories have anything to do with the very specific point you replied to.

> Your personal experience of your thoughts is not in any way related to the statement: "Odd how that was a liberal position at the time, and nobody called them names." They are just a tangential anecdote.

The statement in and of itself is also an anecdote. A hyperbolic one, at that.

The amount of butthurt people are displaying in this thread indicates to me that my point is quite on the money. The degree of controversy and rudeness that comes across in your own posts in particular is astonishing.

You're clearly older than I am, by the way. That's pretty sad.

I'm not sure this is the appropriate context, though. There are plenty of people today who think it's "cool" to be counter to the dominant culture, including active research and security analyses claiming to show flaws in voting security. The difference is that the dominant culture has shifted strongly in a direction that you and I favor, so we care about being excluded from it in a way we didn't in 2005.

That's because most of the criticism wasn't in the form of conspiracy theories or accusations, but instead in the form of technical or at least logical arguments against their use. It was, "this is a problem and it isn't being addressed at all."

With the 2020 election, it was -- after the fact -- "all these machines are now corrupt because I lost". And I use the term "I lost" because it was the Trump campaign and it's most adherent supporters that were making the claims. And then there were recounts and investigations... which turned up nothing, but the complaints continued into court cases... which also turned up nothing, but the complaints and court cases turned into rallies... which became riots and insurrections.

So the difference is that the first group was largely rational and reasonable -- you'll note the distinct lack of injury and death -- while the second group ignored the facts, didn't care about the actual problem of the machines, and used it as a scapegoat to fuel insurrection, violence, and populism.

I'm sorry if you can't see it, but it's really not very subtle.

Also the entire year before the election concluded, one side was openly talking about contesting the results only on the basis that they didn't like not winning.

Fake populism.

I think most positions like "electronic voting machines" are just ... issues of convenience and not really tied to any political ideology.

Frankly I think that's most political situations.

"No nation building" was a vary big part of Bush Jr's platform ... and then he started some nation building that we only just got out of 20 years later.

Distrusting electronic voting machines only marks you out as a Republican conspiracy theorist when a Democrat is president, like now. It was a perfectly respectable position held by tech-literate Democrat supporters in the 2000s under Bush, became one again the moment Trump took office, and ceased to be one as soon as it seemed like Biden won. It really is that simple and that partisan.

On Twitter, where literally everything is a political shibboleth.

If you're security conscious, it's entirely possible to know there's no reason to believe anyone successfully tampered with voting machines, AND know that it's something that could happen one day if we don't take it seriously.

> On Twitter, where literally everything is a political shibboleth.

Left unchecked, that kind of thinking will destroy America. If too many people look at everything through the lens of partisanship, paralysis follows, and that eventually leads to death.

And it's a both sides thing. I've seen a lot of people act like anyone who has problems with the implementation of the Afghanistan withdrawal is a Trumper clone of Stephen Miller. That kind of thinking has led to some truly awful things said in apologia for it.

> Distrusting electronic voting machines only marks you out as a Republican conspiracy theorist when a Democrat is president

I'd modify this.

Distrusting electronic voting machines only marks you out as a conspiracy theorist (of any political leaning) when you only care about the issue if an election doesn't go your way.

People who actually care about the issue continue rallying for changes to election security even if their party won.

If you stop caring once things go your way, you don't actually care about election security, you're just using conspiracy theories to comfort yourself when you lost.

I work in computer security and I see a lot of experts like Matt Blaze being inundated by crazy conspiracy theorists. These are people who have spent years working against the tide to improve voting technology -- primarily by advocating for paper trails in electronic voting systems. Now, having seen many of these goals achieved, these experts are being attacked on Twitter by conspiracy theorists who are attacking even voting machines with a paper record based on insane theories (involving the President of Venezuela). These positions have nothing to do with the security of voting machines, they're crazy nonsense. Much of which is being promoted by supporters of a candidate who refuses to accept that he lost.

To pretend that a bunch of people just "switched sides on the issue of voting machines" is totally counterfactual. It's perfectly reasonable to want to improve insecure DREs, and many people on all sides of the political spectrum wanted this. It is not reasonable to decide (en masse) that the family of Hugo Chavez owns a voting machine company, and that somehow they're conspiring to change votes in ways that can't be detected in the paper trail -- and moreover believing all of this insanity without the slightest shred of evidence.

I don't expect much from HN, but I do expect much, much better.

You might be noticing that the media does not demand any logical consistency from democrats.

Democrats don’t operate on a spectrum of logic, instead they operate on a spectrum of virtue signaling.

I’d modify this to say that for the last 30 years they tended to view success of their party’s platform more on the virtue of their good intentions rather than the outcome that platform or policy achieved.