[SCHiM]

I think it is you that misunderstands the point made in the comment.

Their point is not that the cryptography is flawed, or that the results can be tampered with or that the electronic voting system is less reliable than manual counting and voting. In fact, I do believe that electronic voting is more accurate and less (or not) vulnerable to certain types of attack/fraud.

The problems is that a large part of society is not capable of understanding the mathematics, or validating the results themselves. They don't understand how the security of cryptography propagates through the system to provide the results of the vote.

This creates another attack avenue, that is, you don't attack the results of the ballot, but you attack the entire system. You discredit the system because it is complicated, you use the limited understanding of the voter base to invalidate the results. Discredit the experts, the mathematicians, scientists, etc. It should be obvious that certain magnetic personalities should have no trouble swaying their base that they are being deceived by these "experts"...

The traditional system is not impervious to such attacks, but it is less so.

EDIT: But this likely differs by society too. Perhaps the answer to which system is better is: it depends.

[brabel]

The original commenter said well that it's important that the population actually believes the system is secure (separately from it being objectively secure or not). But in Brazil, people widely believe the system to be better than paper ballots. As the other commenter said, fraud was really common with paper ballots in Brazil in the 80's and early 90's, people had little faith in them (and as a Brazilian, I find it quite funny that it's the other way around in other countries: for some reason they do believe paper is safer without really explaining how).

People may not understand the mathematics or the encryption, but they do understand that you can't just change votes in that electronic machine unless you have high level of skills (as opposed to being able to make paper ballots disappear). To successfully attack the system, you need to be able to infiltrate the machine in such a way that you cannot be found out later (if it's found a machine was tempered with, there's ways to either invalidate some votes or recover the original if possible), and because all machines are completely independent, you would need to attack, physically, one by one. There are hundreds of thousands of machines, I believe... it's just not feasible to do that without making it obvious. So no, you can't just attack the entire system.

[lelc]

> This creates another attack avenue, that is, you don't attack the results of the ballot, but you attack the entire system. You discredit the system because it is complicated, you use the limited understanding of the voter base to invalidate the results.

That is exactly what Bolsonaro did. He effectively proved the system is vulnerable to a trust attack... it does not matter if the system is safe from tampering if a significant part of the voters do not trust the system.

But this issue has become so politicized in Brazil that it has become impossible to discuss it reasonably. Pointing out any flaws in it is interpreted as an "attack to democracy".

[tmottabr]

first, paper ballot suffer the exact same problem..

In fact i strongly believe that Bolsonaro would do the same thing regardless of the system, if we had paper ballots he would complain it is not electronic.

The same trust attack you can do on electronic system you can do on analogical systems. Anything you do will be subject to this problem

second, the truth is that electoral system does not care if people trust in it or not. Even with Bolsonaro attacks and a massive distrust by the right wing on the system it was still used and the results accepted.

The only thing that matter is whatever you can prof in the electoral court if there was fraud and no one was able to do it, not even bolsonaro.

[lelc]

The main point is that it is a lot easier to trust something you can understand than some black-box machine certified by experts. Thus, eletronic voting systems are more vulnerable to trust attacks.

[tmottabr]

i agree that not understanding something make it easier to mistrust, but understanding does not ensure it will be trusted.. the same way not understanding something does not necessary mean people will not trust it..

paper ballots are easy to understand but it is know to have many vulnerabilities thus it suffer from trust attacks the same way..

On the other side, i think a good example is that most people do not understand 1% about how modern cars work yet many people trust then with their life daily..

I personally would not trust a 100% analog election with paper ballots and manual counting of the votes like old ages, but i do see the value on adding paper ballots on top of modern electronic voting system as another layer of audition.

You use the physical paper ballot that will be manually counted but digitally printed by the machine and thus could have an electronic signature to validate making it impossible to create fake votes. You could even have automated counting of those votes if you some qr code and only manually count the paper ballots in some cases.

all a person could do it trash some votes, but then the count between the paper ballots and the electronic consolidation would not match.

[rodrigodlu]

> "Allow people to vote, and have their votes counted, in a demonstrably fair way

It was known to not be fair, specially for the challenger candidates that didn't had access to the govt machine and the money that came with it.

The idea for me is to make the system robust in general - so, simple dismissive arguments is not the right way to do, right?