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Re:When Tech Says ‘No’ by kemotep on Monday September 04, 2023 @06:20PM (#37385676)
The verifiability is the biggest one. One could conceivably develop a voting system that had perfect accountability, secrecy, and integrity, but would be far far more difficult to work out by hand. A zero knowledge roll up is not something your average poll worker could work out on scratch paper. Paper ballots counted by hand can and can achieve all the things we desire in election systems.
Re:When Tech Says ‘No’ by Gibbon1 on Monday September 04, 2023 @09:25PM (#37386851)
Fist off where I've voted they switched from punched cards to scanning paper ballots. It's all typically run by three middle aged women with a printed book of who's registered to vote. You just tell them your name and they find your entry and you sign it. That's a system I trust and it has the positive of civic engagement. And fundamentally it's not broken.

You now also have the option of mailing in a ballot. That's easier to corrupt I'm sure. But at least it's still paper.

All the fully computerized systems seem really really sketchy to me. Especially in low trust cultures where underhanded stuff is normalized.

Re:When Tech Says ‘No’ by dividedbyzero on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @08:30AM (#37390766)
Couldn't the Scantron display one thing and record another? If the paper ballots aren't manually recounted, would anyone ever know?
Re:When Tech Says ‘No’ by Gibbon1 on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @02:06PM (#37395508)
The big thing is you can do audit with original documents created by the voter themselves. Which is the problem with all the 100% electronic systems. You can't because the voter doesn't create a master copy of his vote.
Re:When Tech Says ‘No’ by mschuster91 on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @05:26AM (#37389614)
> Paper ballots counted by hand can and can achieve all the things we desire in election systems.

Sometimes, it's about efficiency as well. I've been a ballot worker here in Germany for the 14 years since I was eligible.

There are simple elections: electing a mayor, for example. You have a ton of DIN A4 paper sheets, but you simply sort them into heaps, count the heaps, and you're done. These don't really benefit from computerizing them, other than speed, but even for a larger polling station, you're done in an hour or two.

Then there are more complex elections, like the German Bundestag, where you have two votes on one DIN A4 sheet: the "Erststimme", where you vote for the directly elected representative of your district, is just as easy to count as the mayoral elections. But then you have to go through all the ballot papers again to count the "Zweitstimme", where you vote for the party lists that make up the other half of the Bundestag. While most people vote the same in both where you can short circuit during the first phase of sorting, IME around half the people vote different (say, they vote for the SPD candidate in primary because he's the one that will most likely have success over the CDU conservative, but in secondary vote they vote Greens or Left), so it's still a sizable amount of paper you have to touch twice.

And then there are the horrors: the European Parliament election [1] or regional/city elections [2], where each ballot paper can reach almost 1 m² in size making them very difficult to handle, and you have a ton of ways to distribute your votes across parties ("Panachage" [3] and others), so for the (again) about half of people actually using the complex distribution you have to painstakingly check and count votes. Having these computerized would eliminate so much trouble, particularly as there's always 5-10% of voters who mess up their maths, rendering sections or their entire vote void. And counting these can last for days of very mentally intensive work.

On top of that come specialized voting schemes such as ranked choice and its countless variants, where some are very difficult to execute without having a computer that can run through vote combinations as a batch job.

[1] https://www.pnp.de/archiv/1/europawahl-altoettinger-druckere...

[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/kommunalwahl-muenchen-w...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panachage

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting

Re:When Tech Says ‘No’ by RandomLensman on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @06:05AM (#37389846)
I'd say generally the German vote counting system is efficient enough but perhaps sometimes understaffed (I guess more people could be drafted if that really helps). At the same time, because it is quite manual and involves a fair bit of people with disseminated knowledge of local results, it would be quite tough to (wholesale) manipulate without people noticing.

Maybe some level of inefficiency is actually not a bad thing.

Re:When Tech Says ‘No’ by febusravenga on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @07:18AM (#37390255)
is this inefficency, just another incarnation of Proof of work?

Anyway, I think that inefficency caused by distribution to many not connected agents (regions, committee, people) is key in achieving security in voting system, so yes it's not only not bad but inevitable.

Re:When Tech Says ‘No’ by RandomLensman on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @07:24AM (#37390285)
Not a proof of work but rather the only way things could have been done way back when and hurdles for change being high.
Re:When Tech Says ‘No’ by dividedbyzero on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @08:27AM (#37390743)
Could you elaborate on how this could be proof of work?
Re:When Tech Says ‘No’ by pmontra on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @06:16AM (#37389903)
I agree that computerized voting can make some voting schemes viable and I feel sorry for all the hard work needed to handle a big city worth of those 164x60 cm ballots, if I got the German right.

However about that 1 m² ballot: maybe the problem is in the rules, especially if they end up with 5-10% of the voters making mistakes and voiding their vote. Something different would result in less mistakes and less costs (printing, distribution, labor, storage, etc.)

Re:When Tech Says ‘No’ by kemotep on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @06:19AM (#37389930)
Paper ballots does not mean absolutely zero computers are involved. I do not know about Germany but in the United States we have voting machines that print paper ballots and those are submitted to a vote counting machine but you can verify your vote before and after printing. Voting machines are important for accessibility reasons. Not every can see or even read English after all.

The vote counting machines are then double checked by hand. A blockchain based solution would take significantly longer to verify by hand without a computer and the amount people who could do the cryptographic calculations in a reasonable time frame on scratch paper would mean we would essentially be trusting the results of the entire election to a few people. The average person can count and easily understand that the winner is whoever gets the most votes.

I would like to see these machines open sourced and confirmed to never be running on the internet through.

Re:When Tech Says ‘No’ by marcosdumay on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @11:28AM (#37393006)
> A zero knowledge roll up is not something your average poll worker could work out on scratch paper.

There's no need to do calculations by hand. An electronic voting system only needs to be verifiable by the use of public data. Everybody walks with a computer.

If you mange to create a system that does that, well, the entire world is quite interested on it.