Reply to post: Re: Time to revert to Paper

Re: Time to revert to Paper

"One state in the USA is ditching their electronic voting because they are so hackable."

The real question is "does increasing the speed of an election result do anything for democracy?" - in western countries with established democracies, I doubt that a one or two day voting process has a major impact on the trust in the system. The reality is that most political positions aren't that time critical as you can always fallback to the previous candidate until the result is confirmed.

Based on Slashdot stories over the last ~20 years, the issue isn't even with some of the voting machines being hackable - they're more likely to have software bugs that cause them to fail to register some or all of the votes and the auditing of actions taken is questionable i.e. some of the machines appear to have only counted one parties votes or potentially had "votes" entered by staff to hide the fact that they failed to register any votes during the day. While these incidents are isolated, little has been done to try and address any of the issues other than prosecute people who highlight the issues.

Having been directly involved in a council election process, while there are potential areas where fraud could occur, the paper ballots and ability to recount those ballots are the single biggest counter to fraud as you have to be able to fool both observers, security cleared staff doing the counting and those overseeing the election process to the point where no one notices any abnormalities. And even if a formal recount is not requested (we never had an election without at least one recount request as candidates had results that didn't match their polling/expectations in the elections I was involved with or the elections immediately proceeding my involvement), a sample recount would likely identify anything unusual. Pressing a button that gives you the same result in a "recount" is unlikely to add any trust - add in the reduction in the number of people involved in an electronic process combined with the increase in trust required for those administering the systems, I would have major concerns with smaller teams producing faster results in this case.