[cal85]

The vast majority of computer professionals I have discussed this topic with are very clear: there will never, ever be a safe way to digitise elections. Your engineers may be proud of valiant efforts, but all computer systems are hackable in principle despite the best intentions of everyone involved. This problem is manageable even for big, important stuff like banks, because there are ways of resolving things when the systems inevitably get hacked from time to time. But elections are just too big and too important (not to mention highly targetable) to introduce layers of technical complexity in which there may lurk vulnerabilities.

And, perhaps more importantly, digitisation makes the system impossible for regular folks to properly understand and trust. People can understand ink and paper ballots: you gather them in boxes and you count them. If the result is very close, you count them again (more carefully and with more eyes on it). Until everyone is agreed on who won. That clarity is very important so people can accept the result. Lots of human eyes on every step of the process. People are rightly suspicious of results from systems that include some black box of technical complexity that 99% of people can’t begin to understand.

[seer]

When electronic voting was introduced in my country - Bulgaria, immediately the results were quite different than previous elections - with as much as 10% diff.

It was largely attributed to the fact that incumbents did not know how to “hack” this new system (yet?) but were pretty adept at cost effectively manipulating paper ballots.

For example they would infiltrate remote areas with little to no observers and stuff the ballot boxes.

Once the new electronic voting system was introduced, suddenly they didn’t know what to do, so the votes ended up more representative, e.g. much closer to projected numbers than before.

Now the system is “electronic counting + paper ballot” So you still go to a voting place, there are still independent/multi party observers, there are still paper ballots available for recount, but you have cryptography on top of it to prevent traditional tempering.

[rodrigodlu]

You just pictured our 80s and early 90s here :)

We also tested a dual system with printers (early 00s i think?) but they were found to be unreliable and challenging due to the scale needed. There was also not a serious discussion on what to do if there's differences between the two.

Also probably more funds to research a safe way to redo all public electronic signatures (resign the candidates database and the operating system) to quickly launch a second, third round if we need to vote again due to differences.

How do you do in your case?

[rpgbr]

The majority people everywhere is very clear: there will never, ever be a safe way to make elections with paper.

It’s funny how all of sudden the forward thinking, all-digital tech community turn itself in old school conservative when discussing digital elections without even considering the bigger issues with alternatives.