[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.