[Areibman]

From a process perspective, how can a constituent know with absolute certainty that their vote was counted, every voter in the system was legal, and the final tally was authentic? Especially when there's no way to even audit what you voted for after the fact?

Every time I try to get to the bottom of this, it always boils down to "trust the system" which makes me uneasy.

[ndiddy]

Not being able to audit what you voted for after the fact is by design. Otherwise, it would make buying votes a viable strategy since you'd be able to show them who you voted for. Yes, taking a picture of the ballot is an option, but you can always ask for another ballot paper after you take the photo. Where I live, you're not even allowed to have a camera out in the same room as a voting booth for this exact reason.

IMO the best solution here is to have electronic counting with an auditable and traceable paper trail as a backup. Every time I've voted for the past 10 years has been like this. First, I get a ballot paper from the front desk and stick it into an airgapped ballot marking machine. I then make my choices and the machine prints them onto the ballot paper. I'm able to read the paper and verify that it matches the choices I made. I then stick it into a separate airgapped ballot counting machine, which scans my ballot and deposits the paper copy into a sealed box. The entire process of setting up the machines, transporting the paper ballots, and reading the results from the machines is cross-checked and signed off on by volunteer poll workers from both parties.

[abdullahkhalids]

Each polling station should have representatives from multiple parties as well as independent observers.

> how can a constituent know with absolute certainty that their vote was counted

The representative of your party plus independent observer said all votes at your polling station were counted. You know both those community members and know them to be generally honorable. Ergo your vote was counted.

> every voter in the system was legal

None of the observers at the polling station, or the station head claimed any illegal person voted.

> the final tally was authentic

The observers all signed as witnesses on the final tally.

This is not the "system. it is humans you know who are telling you what they saw. If you can't trust other humans at their word, democracy cannot fundamentally work.

[lucideer]

> If you can't trust other humans at their word, democracy cannot fundamentally work.

This, but also, important to point out that this is a question of scale: "If you can't trust other human*s*" - plural.

[Areibman]

To rephrase: "You should trust political volunteers."

Surely we could do better? Testimony doesn't assuage my concerns that the process may not be tamper proof.

[abdullahkhalids]

It's a bit more than that.

You should trust political volunteers after you have seen their track record of being honest and truthful. (Though there is some default amount of trust the process gets because of the adversarial nature of volunteers with opposing biases checking the process).

This is along the same vein as

You should trust candidates for the seat after you have done your due diligence that they have honest and truthful, and will faithfully represent you in the legislature/administration.

as well as

You should trust civil servants to have done state activities justly and produced truthful records and reports of state activities after you have seen a record of them doing these things correctly over time.

Democracy with humans is built on a lot of trust in humans. We have to keep this in mind when arguing about these things.

[xorcist]

Hopefully one of those volunteers is yourself.

You do not have to watch every district, every election, every time. But given that enough people do it, at least once, at least in their own district, then it is easy to see why the system as a whole is trustworthy.

[kiitos]

delegation of trust is an essential and unavoidable property of any system that serves a non-trivial number of human participants

[lucideer]

I think the sentiment of the OP actually gets to the heart of this (the idea of open-source is transparency, visibility, auditability) but the problem here is it need to be applied to the actual process, not to the process of building tools for the actual process.

It's not that developing voting software should be open-source, its that actual voting should be "open-source" in the physical sense.

Trusting the system is possible if you can (you, yourself) readily observe every part of the system. I don't think giving members of the public access to the server your voting software is hosted on is a very viable idea, but giving members of the public access to paper count centres is (it's done very successfully in many countries).

[oceansky]

It's ultimately an impossible problem. There's little thing you can trust 100%.