| > With so many links in the chain, it's my opinion that it's unreasonable to expect them all to be processed by people. It won't scale and I'm not convinced that it's that much safer anyway. I think the main argument for physical voting is that it's much safer precisely because it doesn't scale well - and so attacks against it don't scale well either. The manpower requirements buy you security. > As painful as it is, I think we all need to trust the state, to some degree, to do the jobs that are the responsibility of the state. I agree, but I think it does not apply to elections - simply because it's the one place where both the ruling party and competing groups have very strong incentives to mess with the process. > Once the votes have been tallied for a district, isn't it possible to tamper with them as they are transmitted up the chain to the next link in the processing? Yes, but again, the argument goes, the less scalable and more manpower-intensive the whole process is, the more difficult is to hack it. > I think that is possible, the best we can hope for is to push for as much transparency as possible and hope that, if it comes to it, we have enough data to detect such tampering. I agree with the call for transparency, but I also agree with the people who point out that inserting electronic systems destroys that transparency (too easy to hack, too complex for general population to inspect). |
Spot on. Democratic process means "owned by people". So the voting system must be able to be run in the hands of the people. Hence the necessity to have it in the form of a simple technology such as pen/paper.
Moreover, having the votes counted in some hours instead of a night doesn't make a big difference, considering the time that is needed for example, to form a government once the vote is closed.
I love computers, but it's not the right tool for this job. It's not much different than free software : the problem here is political rather than technical.