[ninkendo]

> Nearly every demonstration of voting machine hacking has required unrestricted physical access to the machine and tools/keys.

For that to be any consolation, we’d have to unconditionally trust those who have physical access to the machine and tools/keys.

Such trust is not necessary with paper ballots because they can always be hand-counted with supervision from both sides of a disputed election.

A vote count given by an electronic machine has no such auditability.

> Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.

“Hacking” a stack of paper, e.g. ballot stuffing or destroying ballots, is something people can see happen. It’s not impossible, but it is very difficult to do out in the open with security cameras and the public there to watch. Not to say it doesn’t happen, but you tend to make a much bigger mess doing it.

[codedokode]

Also, today an observer can take a video and instantly publish it on the Internet if something fishy is happening in the polling station, but nobody can see what happens inside a voting machine and whether it counts the votes properly. Electronic voting is a perfect tool for falsifying election results.

[18pfsmt]

I appreciate your perspective, but these issues should be dealt with by citizens. It is not a global issue how the USA handles its elections. Foreigners weighing-in scare the shit out of our old people. That's how we get epithets like (((globalists))).

[ryanmercer]

>Such trust is not necessary with paper ballots because they can always be hand-counted with supervision from both sides of a disputed election.

That assumes they aren't replaced at some point. For a nation-level election this is probably too difficult to significantly influence an election but at even a state level it's relatively doable with a little coercion and/or carefully placed individuals even in 2019 in the United States.

You also have the option to do voter impersonation in states without voting ID laws, again this would mostly only work at a more local level.

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud documents 1052 CONVICTIONS of voter fraud in the United States with 1,216 proven instances.

Outside of the United States there are all sorts of examples, including standing out the polling places with force to let people know vote our way or we'll shoot you.

[codedokode]

What you describe can be easily detected by an observer, who can take a video and instantly publish it on the Internet. You cannot take a ballot from the box so that nobody notices. But with electronic voting, you can replace the firmware and nobody notices anything.

[ryanmercer]

>What you describe can be easily detected by an observer,

Have you never heard of bribes or threats? It happens with juries, I imagine it happens with poling places, and I imagine some of those convictions involved exactly that.

If you've reached a point where you are willing to tamper with an election, greasing some palms or finding something to threaten key people with is not going to make you lose a single wink of sleep or have any mental reservations or other hesitations. People like money, like a lot, and if you haven't the funds to bribe them with the 21st century offers a horde easily discoverable information about people and those close to them.

[codedokode]

Here in Russia, every candidate can assign up to 2 observers to every polling station (and also one person to the election committee). As the people are chosen by a candidate, we can assume that they are motivated and you cannot easily bribe them.

Also, with presidential elections in 2018, there were no prior notifications and the government didn't know who was going to become an observer before the voting day, which was nice.

Sadly, you cannot become an observer by yourself, I don't like that.

I haven't heard about bribes or threats, but there were cases when an observer was taken away by police for allegedly being too loud and obstructing the voting. In recent elections, independent observers used a Telegram chat for coordination, so that they could ask for consultation or ask someone else to come to the polling station if something happened.

In Russia fraud is usually committed by election staff who often are public school employees, social care or government workers, people who are paid by the government. And typically they prefer to falsify results when there is no observers, they don't want to appear in Youtube videos.

Of course, in other countries the situation may be different.

[codedokode]

Also, here in Russia, people who are observers, are often opposition activists, who dislike the government and for example take part in illegal protests and get arrested for this. This is the type of people that would be most difficult to bribe.

[18pfsmt]

Sure, let's do like Russia and ban opposition candidates[0] from running in the first place. Russia was always founded on liberty and is a living example of it forever. No "blood and soil" or eugenics garbage from the Russians...Yes, that's sarcasm.

The Russian Revolution established a control-freak government that hated freedom; Lenin was a self-annointed genius. The USSR failed because the incentives were misaligned.

My grandparents immigrated from Russia when their parents saw the pogroms in the 1890s. Using scapegoats, promising free stuff, and fear mongering is over 100 year tradition. Emotion and anecdotes over data.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/world/europe/moscow-prote...

[codedokode]

I'm not saying that electoral system in Russia is perfect; it is constantly manipulated by authorities. They are very inventive and develop new techniques every time. Nobody can be trusted, because we saw how the head of central election committee was looking for excuses to justify banning opposition candidates that you mention and ignore their objections. The meetings were livestreamed and I watched hours of such videos trying to clear up everything for myself.

But this allows us to see what measures to ensure transparency work in such circumstances and what don't. We see that independent observers and paper voting at polling stations help to prevent fraud and electronic voting would be completely opaque and uncontrollable.

[ninkendo]

> Sure, let's do like Russia and ban opposition candidates[0] from running in the first place

Holy whataboutism. Yes Russia is a far cry from a healthy democracy but that has no bearing in any way on paper ballots. You seem to have just changed the subject entirely.