So I hear the cons for e-voting all the time. It's absolutely true no system is sound and secure. However consider this: most politicians aren't exactly tech-savy. There are way more cost-effective methods to "rig" elections (for the Swiss scale). Dead people voting. Volunteering staffers. Depending on country method of vote transfer. Human error when counting.
Having helped with an e-election system myself, I saw first-hand how it caught "bugs" in the process. For example some district entering wrong information (lots of cross-referencing checks tripped an "alarm").
In the U.S sure, I can see why people would be concerned. No offence, but the systems in place for social and other citizen-related info ain't excellent. If there's an entire market for false identities it's saying something. Taxes not being done automatically. Social security number being the one way to identify. Online banking being a pain in the ass.
Scalability is an issue. If a system is open to billions, there is more incentive to work on "theoretical" exploits. But let's not pretend paper-voting is a better alternative. E-voting doesn't solve the corruption problem, but it makes it easier to find.
Tom Scott and some of the pen-testers that shit on on the concept have good points. However they all are based on the idea that staffers manually counting works better. Tom Scott's New Hampshire example is anecdotal – that system was an insult to the word naïve. The pen-testers taking a dump on Estonian system were picking on stuff like WiFi passwords being visible and seeing over the shoulder an admin's terminal. The systems responsible for the counting weren't connected to the WiFi and it was there for guests. Lot of good staring at a terminal did with no access to the actual machines holding the program.
I don't see e-voting becoming a thing due to all the FUD spreading. But I hope it will be reviewed as a means of double-checking. Perhaps some studious people might actually go out and study the actually proposed architecture. It's really never as simple as one program doing the counting with a flavor of auditing. At least when done right(ish).
Paper voting has a big advantange: any random person from the street can understand all parts of it, and can think of virtually all possible manipulations.
You don't have the same on electronic voting systems. There you need to ask experts, [which again need experts [which again need experts [...]] to explain to you what is going on.
Paper based voting also excludes me, a Swiss person living abroad, from reliably voting.
I don't understand why these discussions are done in this black/white manner. There's valid policy discussions to be had, but treating the other side as maliciously dumb isn't helpful.
The proposed eVoting solution will not do you much good then. It still relies on paper mail getting to you in time, and untampered with.
I understand the problem Swiss persons living abroad have with voting, but there are better ways to solve this than putting the whole vote at risk due to unsecurable Internet voting.
Having helped with an e-election system myself, I saw first-hand how it caught "bugs" in the process. For example some district entering wrong information (lots of cross-referencing checks tripped an "alarm").
In the U.S sure, I can see why people would be concerned. No offence, but the systems in place for social and other citizen-related info ain't excellent. If there's an entire market for false identities it's saying something. Taxes not being done automatically. Social security number being the one way to identify. Online banking being a pain in the ass.
Scalability is an issue. If a system is open to billions, there is more incentive to work on "theoretical" exploits. But let's not pretend paper-voting is a better alternative. E-voting doesn't solve the corruption problem, but it makes it easier to find.
Tom Scott and some of the pen-testers that shit on on the concept have good points. However they all are based on the idea that staffers manually counting works better. Tom Scott's New Hampshire example is anecdotal – that system was an insult to the word naïve. The pen-testers taking a dump on Estonian system were picking on stuff like WiFi passwords being visible and seeing over the shoulder an admin's terminal. The systems responsible for the counting weren't connected to the WiFi and it was there for guests. Lot of good staring at a terminal did with no access to the actual machines holding the program.
I don't see e-voting becoming a thing due to all the FUD spreading. But I hope it will be reviewed as a means of double-checking. Perhaps some studious people might actually go out and study the actually proposed architecture. It's really never as simple as one program doing the counting with a flavor of auditing. At least when done right(ish).