[floweronthehill]

I've counted paper ballots for multiple presidential elections in my country.

People who think it's not safe should really spend some time learning how it works. It's impossible to cheat at scale. Each ballot is verified to be correct my multiple eyes. A person is reading, one is writing down the name, one is verifying and some other things I don't remember.

To cheat you need to have everyone in on it. A whole town involved to cheat and to at best win one polling station. It's safe because anyone can attend the counting, so each party can send someone to check no shenanigans is going on.

So the more votes you want to be winning by cheating the more people must be brought in the conspiracy. That's impossible to be unnoticed at the scale of a city, much less at the scale of a country.

[mariusor]

Yet there are many ways in which paper ballots can be taken advantage of. As an example do a search for Eastern European Carousel Voting[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting

[okanat]

It is not the paper ballots that's taken advantage of. They have no general public participation and opposition. The public simply do not give a damn about polling stations in places where Carousel voting is possible. There is no opposition observers or they cannot be because the examples in the Wikipedia page are dictatorships, not democracies. You cannot turn a dictatorship into democracy by voting.

Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters. Every ballot can only be given somebody whose identification is checked against this publicly available list and marked. The lists must have multiple copies some in the hands of opposition observers. They need to be published.

[mariusor]

> Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters

Yeah, do that by hand please, without relying on electronic means.

Paper ballots with "honour" based out of circumscription participation is not secure. My country also suffered from this issue and it's not an authoritarian regime. They fixed it by adding and checking IDs on a ballot participation list. Nobody explained how that works to the average voter.

What I was trying to underscore is that even for something that's presented as simple and fool proof as paper ballots one can find vulnerabilities, especially when you're dealing with nation level threats. So in my opinion we shouldn't ask electronic ballots to be more security than what is already in wide use.

And in fairness, electronic ballots don't need to be more (or as) secure as paper ballots, but 'mail in' ballots. If we can come up with a method that's as secure as mail ballots I'd call it a success, despite what Tom Scott says.

[shadowgovt]

The more comments I read on this specific HN topic, the fewer people I see actually involved in the polling process.

I really recommend people volunteer for it, if you're American and you're concerned. All you have to do is call your county elections office; they always want more people. You get paid near-minimum wage and it takes two days a year, but that's it.

What you will discover is that most of what people are asking for in this thread is stuff the states of the United States already do.

If a person is deeply concerned how the election is run? Go get involved. It's your country and your election system.

[supportengineer]

>> It's impossible to cheat at scale

Elon did it, and they both bragged about it, publically.

[shadowgovt]

Isn't our source on Elon cheating at scale... Elon?

Why do we believe the liar on this topic?