Elon Musk condemns the use of electronic voting machines (EVMs) used in general elections in some countries.

One day only in person voting is purposeful suppression of votes.

Also, am coder, 100% agree with xkcd. I'm still amazed the Internet itself works.

Having multiple days of open voting would be a game changer for some people. It can be absurdly difficult to actually get the day off, depending on the employer, and I've had ones try to treat it as a "perk", like it shouldn't be the damned baseline that we're able to actually take part in the democratic process they're parading around like a shiny bauble.

The people pushing for same day and only that day with all votes counted that day just ignore the logistics and practicality of having people vote.

Oh, I can assure you that-

Or, I suspect, rather like that it makes it impossible for highly populated areas to have their votes counted while lower populated areas votes are counted.

I never should have doubted you.

Of course the logistics of having people able to monitor those ballots over a larger period of time is tricky too.

When city falls asleep, mafia awakens

The problem is not being secure; it is convincing people that it is secure. Even the stupidest person understands that marking off a paper in a booth and then depositing it in a locked box is secure. The voting method must give voters confidence that their vote was counted, the election was fair, and the results are legitimate.

No it wouldn’t.

"All my information about AI comes from AI."

I would say that "electronic voting" means that the ballot itself is digital rather than physical. So, scantrons are not electronic voting and voter registries/ID/etc. are not ballots in the first place.

I think the supposed risk to electronic voting machines is that there would need to be thousands of them, are distributed, somewhat unattended, and operated by people that don't know them.
The possibility of an exploit or misconfiguration increases, and the ability to compromise someone supervising one of the polling station increases.
If there is are centralised systems, fewer higher skilled people would be required to secure/monitor/run the system. It can also be airgapped.

While some of these risks are also applicable to in-person and mail-in voting, these systems have been around for ages, are not proprietary, and anyone can figure out "how it works" and can make sure "how it happened" matches.
As soon as you get into cryptographic vulnerabilities and security, 99.99% of people would be lost in the woods

The rest of the questions, I feel, are more systematic things.

Because what you vote is supposed to be anonymous....

If you ignore the anonymous part, then it's obviously not an issue.

Off topic, but... Can we retire this idiom? It's in this thread like 3 times and it's always used by people uncomfortable by the fact that someone they don't like made a good point.

Paper voting leaves a literal paper trail unlike electronic voting that's always a total black box in all countries that have tried it.

Manual in person voting is not easily scammed on a scale that can swing an election. The slow, inefficient, in person, physical process is a security feature.

I don't get what's wrong with paper ballots sent by mail. It's convenient and easy, with a paper trail for recounts. It's worked great in Washington for decades.

it absolutely is not easily scammed at all.

every single piece of paper is numbered and tracked. (tickets and stubbs, basically). all counting is done by multiple people and watched by anyone who wants. political parties are banned from voting premises.

even better: early voting, in person, up to a week or two before. no crowds.

errors happen about 1 in 1,000,000 with a maximum of a couple hundred, and are caught immediately.

there is no scamming. all of the USA's voting problems are self-created.

Manual in person voting is easily scammed, just look at voting in Russia.

Let me check. *looks through window* It's not the biggest source of voting fraud. Biggest source of voting fraud is Venedictov's box - Digital Electronic Voting.

Fuck this shit, everything should be 100% digital.

Sobyanin approves.

Not just digital but trustless decentralised blockchain based so it's impossibly hard to manipulate

Might want to /s that.

Reads pretty straight.

Good point, thanks!

As long as the hand count is recognized as the actual result i would be fine with that.Knowing humans and our tendency to be lazy, i fear we would first reduce the redundant checks and then skip them completely. In the name of efficiency of course.

Also after witnessing the history of absolute fuckups my government (germany) produced in the field of software and IT, i don’t want them to use machines. They lost any trust i had in them with any kind of technology. Let them count and add up by hand, i’ll gladly pay extra taxes for that.

Maybe i’m just a bit to paranoid :/

In a smaller local election a few cycles back, I got to trial a paper backed electronic voting machine they were testing out for people who have dexterity or vision problems.

You basically got the same paper ballot as everyone else, but then you slipped it into the machine and it colored the bubbles for you after you selected the option on the screen.
Then you took your piece of paper out and handled it like a ballot filled in by hand.

Wasn't networked and didn't see anything that could tie you to a vote.
I got to share my appreciation for the concept, but concern about difficulty verifying it filled things out correctly, and the potential for touch screens to be difficult to use or act funny, all the difficulties of ux work to handle fixing an error, and the need for the UI to be exceptionally clear, which was difficult on the smaller screen with the larger font.
I think it also has screen reader support, but I didn't use it, so I'm not sure.

If you get an RSA receipt, it can be brute forced (in some years), if you don't you can't be sure it was counted.

If you get coerced into voting a certain way on paper and taking a photograph*, the coercing person needs to be in the toom to make sure you don't mark, take a photo, spoil and vote differently. With a receipt you can coerce the receipt, wait some time and buy some computing power to decrypt the vote later.

* secretly as it's illegal/vote spoiling for obvious reasons

Very Interesting, thanks!

Still I'm not sure if I would trust that system more than a handcount with at least six eyes present at all times.

i remember reading that even those are highly inaccessible to minorities, in areas with large minority populations the offices are farther away/have weird hours/other obstacles that make them harder to acquire

Those aren't free, though.

At least in California I had to pay 26 bucks for mine 10 years ago

USSA is not car-centric country, it is car-ruled country.

We literally have none of those things.

Edit: except perhaps the citizenship certificate but I’ve never seen one before, but yeah they exist. We don’t have ranked voting, and elections aren’t holidays, although your employer must give you paid time off to vote, like 3 hours, and there are exceptions of course, like truckers for some reason don’t get the time off.

Pretty sure that's how we do it up on Canada. I think random samples are hand-counted to make sure the machine count is accurate. There's early voting too so not all just in one day.

Well here in Germany we have about 40-50 million votes to count in a federal election. Right when the booths close we get an exit poll that is already pretty close. After 1-2 hours there are extrapolations that are even closer and next morning, there is usually the certified result. All on paper, counted by hand.

My state does Scantron style ballots. You fill in the little ovals and put it into a machine to be counted.

came to say that mail in voting was the most secure method.

I'm worried about voting machine fraud when there is no paper trail, since that is how Kemp stole an election and got away with it.

Correct, but how is that relevant?

100%

I can do my banking, file my taxes, access my social security, make changes to practically any national database, apply for citizenship, all online and secure.

But for some reason I can't vote online.

GTFOOH

We really need positive digital ID. The US DoD has the right idea with the CAC, though really it's just a digital certificate issued by the government. The smartcard format is convenient for being wallet-able but there's plenty of other form factors for these things these days.

It amazes me that we as a society do official, important real-life things on the Internet with no way to validate our identity.

I even cringe a bit anytime someone tells me to DocuSign. Buying my house was a trip, especially all the forms that took place before closing. Like, it's great that I'm signing these things digitally, but there's still no proof that I'm the one signing these. I'm not in the presence of a notary, lawyer, or any sort of witness. I'm just clicking a link on an email and drawing my finger on the screen. That could, theoretically, be anybody who gains access to my email, with or without my permission.

But, if I'm signing with a certificate, I have provided a PIN or password to unlock this device I carry on my person, that a trusted third party had given me when proved that I am who I say I am, in person. It's a solid technology and it really needs way better adoption.

But muh mark of the beast!

I want to be able to vote online, too, but then I think about how easy it is to falsify your identify online vs in person and I don't know how it could work without introducing a new level of probable fraud.

I think in year 2024 we should be able to vote using a fucking app.

Putin approves.

Please don't do this on country scale. Relevant xkcd.

No gerrymandering,

Agreed. That's fucked.

everyone 18 our older automatically registered to vote.

USA has another "worse that Russia" award here.

Add rank choice voting and we might even have people who give a shit and can fix this country.

Last step would be removal of Iron Throne(presidency) and USA becoming United Soviet States of America.

Right, but the whole process is the issue. If the vote counters lie, or use counting machines that are broken, voters still lose. Only fixing one part of the process is insufficient.

Also, a lack of voter turnout is a huge issue, especially in countries where voters work hourly jobs and polls have meh hours or bad locations. I mean, less wealthy voters, of course.

Never focus on one step at the expense of the rest. People with bad intentions certainly won't.

In that case, leave voting how it is.