[Zombieball]

A former co-worker of mine wrote software for voting machines in Brazil. He described to me a few reasons why electronic voting machines are important. To be honest I forget the majority, but one story that stuck with me:

One common scheme electronic voting machines help prevent is forced votes. A bad guy gets their hand on a single empty ballot and writes the name of the candidate he wants to win on it. He then comes to you and threatens you and your family. Says hand in this pre-filled ballot and bring me back your empty ballot, or else... You comply, he fills out the empty ballot again, and repeats.

The electronic voting machines protect your identity. They allow you to vote anonymously. They provide data integrity that is harder to spoof than paper voting methods. I explicitly asked why they don't just vote on paper ballots like they do in Canada (or the UK as you describe). His response was that we take for granted the inherit trust our societies have to allow us to vote in such a fashion without it being tampered.

[extra88]

Voter coercion is something to be concerned about but the scenario you describe won't keep me up at night. The number one problem is it's hard to scale up to a level that would actually sway an election. It only takes one hero to call the police while they're at the polling station or after their family is released and the sequence is broken. There's no need for the victim to actually submit the pre-filled ballot, they can throw it out or do something to it to make it invalid then come back with the blank one. The ballots where I vote are on a heavier stock paper that are not trivial to conceal bringing in and taking out; most could do it but one victim slips up and the scheme could fail.

Where I vote, my paper ballot in no way identifies me. I identify myself upon entering the polling station, they find my name on the list of registered voters and mark it. When I'm turning in my completed ballot, I again identify myself and my name is marked on a separate list. So there's a record that I voted but not for whom I voted. How would an electronic voting machine improve upon this?

BTW, where I vote, the paper ballots are the bubble scan kind and the voter feeds it to the machine themselves. This provides very fast tabulations with a paper record for security and recounts.

[Zombieball]

> How would an electronic voting machine improve upon this?

I am just theorizing here: Someone now takes the box of paper votes and runs it through the scanner machine. And passes this number along to someone. What is stopping them from tampering at this step? I think this is precisely what my co-worker was describing. There is an inherent trust that your paper ballot is scanned and recorded in a fashion that matches your vote.

An electronic voting machine could potentially communicate votes in real time over a secure connection. Or in the case of Brazil's machines, I believe stores it locally, encrypted, with a verifiable cryptographic signature of some sort.

I'm sure we all know the multitude of other attack vectors this introduces. I guess I am just not convinced that paper makes things more secure.

[rbanffy]

I worked on the 2002 model. It stored the signed voting data on a removable CF card which was under a tamper proof seal. After installation the machines were kept physically secure and, during the election they are never under the supervision of a single person. After the election the machines are returned to local elections authorities (if they are too late, they are invalidated) where the memory card is read and totalized.

We designed a vote printer that would allow the voter to see a paper copy before storing it, but it was never used.

[grzm]

There are many steps along the chain that have to be secured in both electronic voting (which has a variety of meanings) and paper ballots. Paper ballots enable audibility, which is a separate issue that's also important for voting.

Given the number of comments you've made on this thread, it seems this is an area of interest to you. I encourage you to look though the previous HN discussions on this topic. Here's a list of some of those from the past month or so:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13032743

[Zombieball]

Thanks!

[jacobush]

Depends, different places have different problems. Consider: it only takes one hero to call the police, get beaten to a pulp by the responding LEO, for the chain to continue. Depends who is friends with who and how "civilized" the corruption is.

[dmichulke]

While I fully agree with your take:

Doesn't scale is a concept that only developers and entrepreneurs understand. Sadly, that makes it an invalid argument for the other 98% of the population.

[samastur]

Color me unsurprised that a person who wrote software for voting machines also finds them useful.

The problem I have with this particular scenario is that it imagines a reality in which someone can afford to collect votes one by one with impunity but can't force these same bunch of people (and one or two simply aren't enough to matter) at the voting station itself.

[NumberCruncher]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_FNsuyX8lNo

[bsznjyewgd]

In Canada, after you fill out your ballot in secret, you fold it up and hand it to the poll worker, who tears off a stub and then hands the ballot back to you, and then you insert it into the ballot box yourself in plain view.

I don't know if this is the current case (or perhaps your scenario is one of the reasons for the current procedure), but they can just put a serial number on the stub so that the poll worker can verify that the ballot that was handed out was the one just filled out.

[Zombieball]

This is a good low-tech solution!

[patall]

I am not sure how you vote but in my country, you could not pre-fill the ballot because you only get it at the voting booth. You have a voting registration that you bring to the booth, there you exchange it for the ballot which you fill out in a closed cabine and the pass right into an urn. (Which is basically like a voting machine, you only fill out your vote at the place you are voting). Honestly, not a very good reason for voting machines, only maybe against mail voting.

[Symbiote]

In the UK, you could just go to the desk and ask for a blank ballot in exchange for your "mistake".

[michaelfdeberry]

|A bad guy gets their hand on a single empty ballot and writes the...

I am sure there are many reasons to prefer electronic voting, but that just seem logistically impossible when you are talking about millions of people. No way that wouldn't go unreported or undetected.

Whereas, with voting machines, if compromised has much more reach and would be difficult to detect.

[danjoc]

Bad guy is easily defeated. "I'm sorry, I've accidentally spoiled my ballot and marked the wrong candidate, may I have a new one to fill?" Bad guy's ballot goes in the trash, you fill the spare new one, you still have the original blank one to hand back to him. Bad guy wasted his time.

[corecoder]

Bad guy's friends are likely to be in there watching as the voter does what you suggest.

[Zombieball]

Don't shoot the messenger! I am just passing along the one story I remembered / found interesting.

I'm not saying this scenario is plausible for swaying the outcome of a presidential election (which is what I am sure is on many of your minds right now). But for locally elected officials? Seems at least plausible to me.

At the end of the day I imagine electronic voting is all about speed. A quick wiki search brings up the following anecdote:

> The voting system has been widely accepted, due in great part to the fact that it speeds up the vote count tremendously. In the 1989 presidential election between Fernando Collor de Mello and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the vote count required nine days. In the 2002 general election, the count required less than 12 hours. In some smaller towns the election results are known minutes after the closing of the ballots.

[makeapoint]

Each polling place can provide free "stump the chump" ballots that you can give back. So you throw the one they gave you away, fill out and submit your own, then hand them back a dummy ballot that won't get counted.

Or, alternatively, spend tons of money on electronic voting machines that allow the bad guy to game the system on a more massive scale without having to threaten as many people.

[kayamon]

> One common scheme electronic voting machines help prevent is forced votes. A bad guy gets their hand on a single empty ballot and writes the name of the candidate he wants to win on it. He then comes to you and threatens you and your family.

I'd be willing to bet money that this scenario has never, ever happened.

[umanwizard]

This technique is called the "Bulgarian train" and is alleged to have happened throughout the Balkans.

https://insajder.net/en/site/tema/794/

http://www.novinite.com/articles/120632/Bosnians+Name+Vote-B...

[codesuela]

he could just force him to make a video of him voting the way he wants with his smart phone (for both, paper ballot and electronic voting machine).

[extra88]

Which is a reason why in some locations it's illegal to photograph or video record voting. Where I vote, you do it in a curtained area so it would be easy to get away with but with setups like where Trump and family voted in New York, you're mostly out in the open with a short partition.