[greenduck]

Tom Scott still has the best argument against e-voting IMO [1].

Briefly: an election only counts if everybody can believe the results. Making an expert level understanding of CS a requirement to verify your voting system means that Joe Q. Average who doesn't hold a PhD (or maybe even a college degree) has to rely on spooky experts telling him what to believe. If I were in his shoes then I would have no confidence that I participated in a fair and valid election.

We kind of live in a bubble here on HN where most people are sort of in the tech space and could take a weekend or two to understand blockchain. I think its easy to forget that most people don't have the required background to learn it easily (or would want to use up their time to understand it). I almost have a PhD in the hard sciences and I don't fully understand the finer details of block chain. I think I would have to write my own implementation to fully appreciate it.

Simplicity and the ability to explain the system to every American is a requirement of any voting system.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs&t=12s

[eindiran]

Hard disagree. The world is complex enough that every person in the world relies on the words of "spooky experts telling [them] what to believe".

Even outside of that, elections require trust in the process. Already, with a "simple" system in place, we have to trust that no one is committing fraud, that votes aren't being surreptitiously added or thrown out, etc. E-voting doesn't fundamentally change the trust dynamics at all: people ultimately need to believe that the people in charge of the process aren't up to any funny business or bad at their jobs.

This argument gets used a lot to argue in favor of first past the post. Explaining a Borda count or single non-transferable vote is harder than explaining: most votes = win. But I think it ultimately comes down to trust: if the people voting trust the people involved with the process (even if they don't understand the nitty-gritty details) they will accept the results of an election.

[chrononaut]

> E-voting doesn't fundamentally change the trust dynamics at all: people ultimately need to believe that the people in charge of the process aren't up to any funny business or bad at their jobs.

A notable difference is that any John or Jane Doe can become a poll worker or poll watcher with little barrier to entry no matter their background, and verify the integrity of their elections should they choose to do so.

To me, the lack of the ability for an average person to do this would significantly change the trust dynamics.

[greenduck]

> relies on the words of "spooky experts telling [them] what to believe".

Widespread distrust of subject matter experts already exists in the US. You can't just tell people to shut up and listen to the experts.

The efficacy of vaccines is one of those things that is almost impossible for the average person to verify. I can get in a plane and confirm for myself that it doesn't fall out of the sky. I can't get a vaccine and directly compare it with my chances of catching the flu without one. That's the reason why people widely trust the safety of planes, but there exists an anti-vax movement in the US.

Even with alternatives to first past the post, the complexity is of a wildly different scale than blockchain. I can sit down with someone and go step by step how ranked-choice works right now without looking up material. I'd have to pull out reference material and then start with the basics of hash functions or something to explain blockchain.

[bhhaskin]

I used to think the same thing until last night. Watching the different results come in. The average person already has no clue what is going on. You need a degree in high level statistics to understand why races are called when they are.

After you cast your vote what happens after that? Who counts them? How are they counted? How are those counts counted toward the total? Who is certifying all of this? How are those people chosen?

[majewsky]

All this "calling races" bullshit is only because the ballot counting process is so utterly fucked up in the US. I live in Germany. When there is an election for federal or state parliament, polls close at 6 PM and results appear around 8-10 PM on the websites of the state election offices. Somewhere around midnight, the "preliminary official result" is released. (The official result follows about a week later, after the routine recounts are done, but they never differ by more than a few votes.)

We do also have predictions on TV as soon as the polls close at 6PM, and they are always off by a few percentage points, but they rapidly converge, especially because the official results come so fast. By 8 PM there is not much chance for surprises (maybe one or two parliament seats get reallocated as percentages shift), by 10 PM the predictions have pretty much reached their final destination.

(And by the way, we have a ton of mail-in ballots, too. The federal supreme court ruled in 2009 that everyone can have a mail-in ballot if they want, so it's getting more popular every election.)

If a citizen wants to check the election process, they can go to any polling place (including the ones where mail-in ballots are counted) and watch the polling workers count the paper ballots. The volunteers are obligated to announce the final tallies to all citizens that are present to observe. (There are not always people present, but I've seen it happen a few times when volunteering as a polling worker.)

Then afterwards they can go to the state election office's website and verify that the same numbers appear for that particular voting district. I've done it once just to see how the verification process works, and I think the whole process is very easy to understand and verify for every citizen.

[bryanlarsen]

Almost every other western country manages to do this efficiently and quickly and transparently, and most of them use paper ballots.

[Simulacra]

Does size matter ?

[dudul]

Why would it? Each state is roughly the size of a country the parent is referring to, each state organizes their elections, so each state should be able to be equally efficient.

[_y5hn]

If countries had a slow count every 50 years, it'll be every year on average in US. Size has different distributions.

[greenduck]

That's not an argument against e-voting, but rather the election media circus and craziness of the electoral college. With e-voting you get the complexity of both.

[lhorie]

The flaw in the argument is the assumption that knowledge is a requirement for trust. But look for example at elections in Brazil: most people don't really understand how it works, but they like it nonetheless[1] because the good experience of instant gratification plants a positive initial seed in people's minds and association fallacy[2] is a thing.

There's plenty of other scenarios where we can see discrepancies between trust and understanding (for example, the general public's trust in recycling vs what actually happens w/ plastics). Heck, the US election system is quite complicated today and yet people trust it. For better or for worse, humans are often fallible and illogical.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil#Be...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

[kbos87]

I definitely see the point here, but it depends on what you mean by “understand”. I don’t think that understanding blockchain or the technical components of how such a system works would be important to the average voter.

If such a system could improve the visibility and auditability of results down to small regions, and intuitively show how that cascades up to state level results, it could be a win.

Making an e-voting system believable seems more like a UX/design challenge than a technical/engineering challenge.

[trhway]

>Joe Q. Average who doesn't hold a PhD (or maybe even a college degree) has to rely on spooky experts telling him what to believe.

The Joe is for example driving a car full of electronics and somehow he doesn't have issue trusting his life to it. And, if anything, i'm pretty sure that deep understanding of that car's electronics and software would make the Joe to only trust his car less (one can google the software expert's opinions during the Prius self-acceleration story)

[superwayne]

I can see that the car works by getting safely from A to B, thousands of times. If my vote counted or not is not observable.

[kelnos]

How is that observable in the current system? I mailed my ballot in a couple weeks ago, and BallotTrax told me when it was picked up by the post office, and then when it was delivered to election officials and accepted. But that's just an email telling me this; anyone can type up an email and send it, while dropping my ballot into a shredder.

Now, I do believe that my vote was actually counted, but I have no rational basis for this, as I don't have any kind of record or visibility into the process.

I don't think any voting process can actually really tell you that your vote was counted. At the end of the day you're just trusting that the people running it aren't corrupt, or at least that there are enough people involved that keeping shenanigans a secret would be incredibly difficult.

[setr]

Because I could, reasonably, find the damn thing; the evidence physically exists. And the threat of doing so increases trust in the system (even if no one does it), because if worst comes to worst, I can just find the slip.

In a digital system, I'm not finding jack shit. It doesn't exist anywhere except as a counter, I can't check whether it's my vote or randomly created after the fact (after suspicion was announced), and I can't trust the system itself, because it's defined by, developed by, and operated by some random group of people who managed to slap the thing together and make a sale. I can't get in there and check out any of it myself (even as just a vague threat), and the conspiracy group is sufficiently small as to be viable (I only have to "convince", what, 40 people, to cheat the votes?).

What I don't understand is why not use something like the SAT exams -- trivially hardware-counted, but also physically transparent and available -- and solve like 90% of the problem that way?

[trhway]

any e-voting system of course must make it observable. Otherwise it just wouldn't make any sense.

[randyrand]

We aren't trusting the car. We're trusting the car has not been tampered with.

We know many people want to tamper with elections. The CIA has done that much. The same is not true for cars. Steal cars, yes. But cause a random car to crash on purpose? Thats pretty rare. If were common, I personally would not trust my cars electronics either. And neither should you.

[dmalvarado]

No issues with because he usually ends up at his destination intact. If, through no fault of his own, he didn't arrive intact, spooky experts probably didn't know what they were doing.

I can see how the argument still holds water if half the time the outcome of the election didn't go his way.

[greenduck]

Science and engineering don't care if people believe in them or not.

If people don't believe the results of an election, then it is de facto illegitimate.

[jodrellblank]

I'm watching the US election from the outside, and the President declared a win, said the Democrats were trying to steal the election and he is going to the supreme court to stop voting. Twitter is packed with people apparently saying that it's impossible for PA to swing from Trump to Biden just by counting the postal votes, or that counting postal votes after the polls close is cheating, or that the postal votes were made up, or that the polling station votes are untrustworthy because there's no need to prove ID, or that polling stations were closed, or that the whole system is illegitimate if voting is not a public holiday, or not mandatory, or not proportional representation and no electoral college.

Again, whichever outcome, USA is going to have half a country that doesn't like or trust the election results. Not the voting booth ones, not the mail-in ones, not the popular vote, not the official result or the "official" result.

Seems to me that if people trust the leadership, they would trust the voting system endorsed by the leadership, not the other way round.

[totony]

The main issue with us is the strong divide of the country. It's obcene to me that a leader can be choosen whom ~50% of the population disagree with. I understand democracy is about pleasing the majority, but how is a 51%-49% split a majority in any major way?