| > how do you protect against the corrupt actor manipulating every machine except the percent that will be checked? According to this: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/count-vvpat-slips-... India checks 5 machines randomly selected in each voting "segment", no clue what that is but it's smaller than a constituency so I guess it's a polling station From what I understood that's done locally right away after polls close. So that means that you'd need a way for the conspirators to identify the non tampered machines and for them to randomly select exactly those machines and you'd need them to be present in almost all polling stations and no one to challenge the choice At that point it's essentially the same level of trust needed for paper ballots > Have people from opposing political parties count the vote and check each others result Yeah, but apparently that particular attack vector was a problem in India and this feature helps mitigate it, electoral solutions need to account for the practical situation they're in. For instance I don't support any form of electronic voting machines in my polity because the electoral system works fine with paper ballots and there aren't issues of ballot stuffing > There is no difference between a machine publishing the counted votes and the poll workers publishing the counted votes, is there? Yeah, but I was talking, for lack of a better term, about non additive electoral systems, in which the information conveyed in multiple ballots cannot be easily compressed For instance in the FPTP system you can compress all the information in a polling station by counting how many votes for X how many for Y etc. And you can simply add up these numbers to other stations The complexity scales linearly with the number of candidates In a system like, for instance, IRV, where the voter ranks the candidates and the rank is an important part of the ballot itself you can't easily transpose all this information into a single number The most you could do is build a tree data structure where the first level nodes are the first preferences and each node points to other nodes based on the successive preferences. In this case the complexity of the process is exponential/factorial because you need a field for every possible combination of preferences, including cases in which not all candidates are ranked My point was that going from a ballot to that structure is probably more error prone and time consuming to do manually than having a machine do it and that could conceivably be a reasonable justification to use electronic voting machines The auditing will still be time consuming but that's mitigated by the fact that you audit only a portion of voting machines But to clarify, I'm of the opinion that paper ballots and manual counting are preferable in every electoral system used at the national level that I'm aware of India's electronic system is just not worse than paper ballots, which for electronic voting systems is a huge success |