[ddingus]

They ALL have a known vulnerability. Works like this:

Pretend the machine is a person in a secure room only they are in, and only they know the contents of.

You approach a window, tell them your vote. They say it back and optionally hand you a piece of paper.

Then, in that room, they do whatever they want, and the final tally, winner of the election is determined by whatever they did in the room.

Voters have no chain of trust between their expression of intent, and the record used for the final tally. When voters make physical expressions, and those expressions are counted, voters know the election, on a basic level, can be trusted to reflect the collective intent of the people.

When they use electronics, they have no idea. They push a button, or mash a screen, and the display will tell them something and that something could be anything. They cannot know.

None of us can without forensic level examination of the machine. Even then, we can only verify function and infer a voter intent was correctly recorded and or used for the tally.

Secondly, should there be error, or controversy, the enduring record of voter intent both walked out of the building and or is a collection of grease smears on input devices.

Useless in a court of law.

The only way around this is to make vote records personally identifiable and basically use the systems for banking. (Who gets around this problem with multiple, redundant records created at the time of transaction)

[Slippery_John]

Why not have paper ballots that can be read by a machine? It doesn't get around the issue entirely, but you can always look at the physical ballots for a recount. It's a lot harder to tamper with an election at scale when you need to handle physical ballots.

Or just abandon electronic voting entirely. Ireland tried electronic voting, but scrapped it for just these reasons. You could even keep the ballots in a machine-readable format for sanity checks if necessary.

[danaris]

In New York State, we have exactly this: optical-scan ballots. We fill in the bubbles of the candidates and issues we support with a black marker, then personally feed them into a voting machine that both securely stores and automatically tabulates them. If they needed to be hand-recounted, that could easily be done.

The one significant improvement I would prefer in this process is verifying on the optical-scan machine's screen which options you have voted for, with the option to retrieve your ballot and fix it if anything shows up wrong.

[dbcurtis]

My precinct in Sunnyvale has been doing this for decades. Paper ballot, marked with ink (no “hanging chad”). Ballot is machine readable, and cheap. And easy to process. And has no reliance on high tech on voting day — you could vote by candle light if the power goes out.

[ddingus]

This!

I don't have any real concerns about machine counting given a physical record, basic statistical means can tell us all we need to know.

[misterprime]

The problem with public vote records is that people may be incentivized financially or coerced via threat to vote a certain way. The bad actor in this situation can verify with public record if the victim followed through.

Somehow I think this is less of a threat than our "black box" vote tallies, but it is valid.

[ddingus]

Precisely! I think electronic voting records are wrong. We should use paper ballots, and Counting them electronically with something simple and robust like Optical scan works really well. Let the statisticians run some Audits and we can be really confident. My state does that. Oregon.

[amanaplanacanal]

Yes, also in Oregon. Our elections are also by mail, so you don't have to stand in line at your local voting station.

[Ajedi32]

Which, when you think about it, kinda presents a similar problem to public vote records. (People can be incentivized financially or coerced via threat to vote a certain way.)

[ddingus]

So far, that has not been the experience in Oregon. First, doing that is a Felony with teeth.

Second, the system has a way for the voter to get around coersion. They can submit their vote, and fail to do a valid signature, or even just do it correctly.

Once they have voted, they can contact elections, have that vote invalidated, and or request another ballot to vote correctly. If they want to, they can do that in person, at the elections office, and or tell their story.

It's hard to coerce tons of people, which is needed to impact an election. And those who take part are all at real risk for hard time.

The actual is much different. People will gather to vote together. Our family does this, and will often have open door times. Young people have come to do it and learn about stuff. People tend to take it seriously. The votes differ, and that's OK. Democracy. (and the ones in the minority can totally gloat, should it turn out they made the right call. All good.)

So, we get the voter guides out, make sure people understand, and they, themselves cast their votes, whatever those votes are, we seal them all up and either mail, or take them to the drop box, or elections office.

Most people I know take a while to vote. They have the ballot, and work through it as they have time.

That is what I do personally.