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by the_snooze 974 days ago
Exactly this. Paper voting has some really great properties, like being easy to understand, easy to administer, easy to examine after the fact, and hard to attack at scale or at a distance. It's not perfect, but as the National Academies of Sciences found in its review of election security research [1], it's the best option we've currently got.

Security is a "better than" game. Just because option X isn't perfect doesn't mean X isn't a worthwhile solution given all other alternatives.

[1] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/25120/interactive...

2 comments

> it's the best option we've currently got.

And if everyone continues with the kind of sentiment prevalent in this thread that's likely the best we're ever going to get.

I don't understand how people are completely fine with having their thousands and millions of dollars handled electronically but when it comes to something trivial as voting, they suddenly put on their tinfoil hats and say computers are insecure.
Because banks have financial incentives in keeping your transactions secure, and even then errors happen all the freaking time.

Government do not have this incentive, and how do you recover from errors once malicious actors have gained power ?

Because government handled billions and has armies? Sometimes even nuclear weapons. Does your bank habe that?
I think in the future, whenever elections are lost, blaming the electronic voting system is just too easy a scapegoat.

And, for any politician who does that... I can't say they are completely making stuff up. It might just be better if we acknowledge and accept that old technology isn't bad. Windows XP is perfectly fine for controlling CNCs and medical devices to this day, as long as it's not connected to the internet. Probably better for it actually, because it won't restart to install an update with modern Windows. I'm not in favor of "new for the sake of new."