Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/11/swiss_evote_usb_snafu/

by jjgreen • 4 months ago

221 468 4 months ago

palata7• 4 months ago

The title is misleading. It's an e-voting PILOT. That's important. "Switzerland is running small-scale e-voting pilots in four of its 26 cantons", three of which were not affected.

From Wikipedia [1]:

A pilot experiment, pilot study, pilot test or pilot project is a small-scale preliminary study conducted to evaluate feasibility, duration, cost, adverse events, and improve upon the study design prior to performance of a full-scale research project.

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

jjgreen2• 4 months ago

Had to truncate the title since too long for HN (often the case for the Register)

palata7• 4 months ago

And it makes it sound like a production system failed, where what actually happened is that this was a pilot that worked in 3/4 of the involved cantons and that the people who participated to it knew it was a pilot.

Alifatisk• 4 months ago

You cut out something that changed the message entirely

beautiful_apple5• 4 months ago

Switzerland has been very careful/ conservative about rolling out e-voting. The same cannot be said of other jurisdictions (like Ontario's municipal elections) where adoption is very rapid and without coordination/support/standards from the provincial or federal governments.

diego_moita4• 4 months ago

Meanwhile Brazil does full e-vote for almost 30 years collecting more than 100 million votes (that's 11 times the whole of Switzerland's population).

You'll get there Switzerland, it can be done. It is safer and faster.

palata7• 4 months ago

And they probably started with small-scale pilots, too.

diego_moita4• 4 months ago

Yes, they did.

But I think that the main reason is that Brazil's elections were a lot dirtier and a lot more unreliable than Switzerland's.

What I mean is that the push towards e-voting is much stronger in countries with unreliable elections, because e-voting is harder to tamper than the crude ways you can defraud paper ballots.

Switzerland's and other organized countries have elections that are "good enough", so the push towards e-voting is probably not that strong.

Is the "leapfrog" concept. Sometimes it is easier to adopt newer technologies in places where the existing ones are horrible. Other examples: electronic payment systems, solar panels and EVs in India and Africa.

marcosdumay3• 4 months ago

Not really. It started with hundreds of thousands of votes.

That said, Brazilian elections are completely unverifiable. They don't seem to be false, but it's hard to say anything that would be different if they were.

When it started, at the 90s, the machines were at least simpler and possible to verify up to the firmwares. Nowadays, they are not.

beautiful_apple5• 4 months ago

Brazil's e-voting does not allow voters to vote online from home on a personal computer (like in Switzerland). It has very different requirements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil

brunoborges• 4 months ago

This is not a problem.

The government _must_ come to every city to collect votes.

zoobab• 4 months ago

eVoting cannot be understood and audited by normal citizens, not even by nerdy ones. It's just good for the trash.

palata7• 4 months ago

Also e-voting can be hacked (I guess they vote from their computer/smartphone, which can be hacked from the other side of the world). The last place you want to care about phishing, IMO, is voting.

Good luck hacking in-person voting or even "physical" mail voting from the other side of the world.

phoronixrly5• 4 months ago

Regular ballot voting can also be hacked and on a scale. Making ballots invalid while counting them, or modifying them in some form or other, intentionally writing wrong values in the counting protocols...

And of course controlled vote or paid vote...

E-voting can and has also led to exposing voting fraud -- see Venezuella.

atoav5• 4 months ago

It is not even about understanding. It is about how easy it is to distrust it.

Contrary to what nerds think, the goal of elections isn't to get bulletproof results by mathematical standards. The goal is to create agreeable consent among those who voted. A good election system is one where even sworn enemies can begrudgingly agree on the result.

A paper ballot system has the advantage that it can be monitored by any group that has members which have mastered the skill of object permanence and don't lie. That is not everybody, but it is much better than any hypothetical digital system

phoronixrly5• 4 months ago

How about a machine voting system with paper fallback. You as a voter can review the paper protocol from your vote. If there is distrust, the justice system can review the paper trail as well.

zahlman6• 4 months ago

the goal of elections isn't to get bulletproof results by mathematical standards. The goal is to create agreeable consent among those who voted. A good election system is one where even sworn enemies can begrudgingly agree on the result.

First you must explain to them why the former is not an example of the latter.

jeffrallen• 4 months ago

More bluntly, the purpose of an election is to convince the loser not to send his supporters out on the street protesting.

The problem with e-voting is that it gives the losers an infinite number of things to complain about and challenge the election.

marcosdumay3• 4 months ago

The goal is to create agreeable consent among those who voted.

If you still consistently miscount so that popular power isn't aligned with the electoral results, you will still face all the problems a democracy was designed to avoid. Starting with violent protests and revolutions.

But then, most countries fail this at other stages already.

PoignardAzur4• 4 months ago

More importantly, you want your system to be bulletproof before it's audited. By the time you're talking about audits, the populists have already started flooding the zone.

The system should be so obviously secure that any person walking into a poll station should intuitively understand, seeing the poll workers, why fraud would be very hard to perform, so that when their favourite populist candidate loses and claims fraud, they think "that doesn't make sense".

If the voter needs to read technical documentation to understand why the populist is wrong, it's already too late.

phoronixrly5• 4 months ago

The ballot voting process is also misunderstood by regular citizens, even nerdy ones. From experience, even by voting officials.

tribaal2• 4 months ago

As a Swiss citizen I strongly disagree. Most people capable of reading and basic maths (addition!) can understand the counting of our paper ballots. My kids understand how this works since they are like 5.

Any citizen can go and check how votes are counted in their Geminde. Any citizen can check what is reported in the federal tally. I did several times. It's not rocket science.

jackweirdy• 4 months ago

It’s a nice property of elections that you can measure votes needing more intervention against the margin of victory before you decide your next step

ritzaco• 4 months ago

I don't care how much maths and encryption you use, you can't get out of the fact that things can be anonymous (no one can know how you voted) or verifiable (people can prove that you only voted once) but not both.

- Switzerland usually gets around this by knowing where everyone lives and mailing them a piece of paper 'something you have'

- South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your fingernail

I've read quite a bit about the e-voting systems in Switzerland and USA and I just don't see how they thread the needle. At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database.

Until we all have government-issued public keys or something, there isn't a technical solution to this? (Genuinely curious if I'm wrong here)

phoronixrly5• 4 months ago

At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database.

It's the only problem in existence that can be solved by the blockchain...

caminanteblanco• 4 months ago

But generally sacrifices that anonymous axis via a reproduceable public ledger

beautiful_apple5• 4 months ago

Ironically most production e-voting systems do not use blockchains. That's because there isn't need for decentralization, just verifiability of a correct result and protecting voting secrecy.

kanapala• 4 months ago

There's a goverment issued public & private key right here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card

presentation• 4 months ago

Japan has them built into My Number Cards too https://www.digital.go.jp/en/policies/mynumber/private-busin...

BenjiWiebe2• 4 months ago

Clearly the mark of the beast.

dmos623• 4 months ago

You should care how much maths and encryption you use [0][1], because this is not only possible, but there are multiple approaches.

[0] https://satoss.uni.lu/members/jun/papers/CSR13.pdf

[1] https://fc16.ifca.ai/voting/papers/ABBT16.pdf

jjmarr5• 4 months ago

More important than lack of voter fraud is proving to the population a lack of voter fraud.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 4 months ago

South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your fingernail

This is true, but its used in other countries as well, as it's a simple, effective, low-tech, affordable process.

Most notably in India https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/02/style/india-elections-pur...

but also in many other countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_ink#International_use

beautiful_apple5• 4 months ago

You can have e-voting systems that protect ballot secrecy and are verifiable.

You can use homomorphic encryption or mixnets to prove that:

1) all valid votes were counted

2) no invalid votes were added

3) the totals for each candidate is correct

And you can do that without providing proof of who any particular voter voted for. A few such systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting

https://www.belenios.org/

Authentication to these systems is another issue - there are problems with mailing people credentials (what if they discard them in the trash?).

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ontario-municipal-elections-o...

Estonia (a major adopter of online voting) solves this with the national identity card, which essentially is government issued public/private keys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card

Lots of cyber risks with the use of online voting though, especially in jurisdictions without standards/certification. I outline many in my thesis which explores the risks to online elections in Ontario, Canada (one of the largest and longest-running users of online voting in the world)

https://uwo.scholaris.ca/items/705a25de-f5df-4f2d-a2c1-a07e9...

dietr1ch• 4 months ago

You can have e-voting systems that protect ballot secrecy and are verifiable.

In these systems the voter cannot verify that their vote was secret as they cannot understand, and much less verify the voting machine.

And you can do that without providing proof of who any particular voter voted for.

Which is good for preventing the sale of votes, but keeps things obscure in a magical and correct box.

How can I tell the machine didn't alter my vote if it cannot tell me, and just me, who I voted for? The global sanity checks are worthless if the machine changed my vote as I entered it.

fireflash38• 4 months ago

If it's a completely binary choice of "election was valid" and "election was invalid" without any partial verifications of results, I think it's still a massive step back.

By which I mean: paper ballots have problems. But a fault in a handful of ballots doesn't mean the rest of the ballots need to get tossed out.

I do not believe that a system managed by humans can be faultless.

tomp• 4 months ago

Why are you lying?

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting

The centralized server must be trusted not to violate ballot secrecy,[7] this limitation can be mitigated against by distributing trust amongst several stakeholders.
The ballot auditing/reconstruction device must be trusted to ensure successful ballot auditing (also known as cast-as-intended verifiability),[7][16] this limitation can be mitigated against by distributing auditing checks amongst several devices, only one of which must be trusted.

So neither secure nor anonymous...

fermisea• 4 months ago

What about this? Consider a toy system: everyone gets issued a UUID, everyone can see how every UUID voted, but only you know which one is your vote.

This is of course flawed because a person can be coerced to share their ID. In which case you could have a system in which the vote itself is encrypted and the encryption key is private. Any random encryption key works and will yield a valid vote (actual vote = public vote + private key), so under coercion you can always generate a key that will give the output that you want, but only you know the real one.

looperhacks• 4 months ago

Besides the fact that 99% of the general population won't be able to understand this, a $5€ wrench says that you show me proof of the correct private key (either by you showing me the letter you received, me being present when you set it up, or however it is set up)

Muromec16• 4 months ago

You have to trust that both 1) the UUID issuing party is not keeping the actual id to uuid mapping in the logs 2) the same party isn't allocating an excessive number of uuids to mass-vote for the "good" choice.

In-person voting does provide these guarantees, to extent that violating them will be discoverable and both parties have an incentive to discover such things.

swiftcoder3• 4 months ago

Until we all have government-issued public keys or something

That's actually pretty common in Europe. The Spanish DNI (national identity card) has a chip these days, which gives you an authenticated key pair for accessing digital services.

In the pilot project for digital voting, that identity is only used to authenticate the user, and then an anonymous key needs generated that can be used to cast the final vote.

mothballed3• 4 months ago

South Africa is in a somewhat similar situation of having a gigantic (1-10%, government is too broken to figure out where in that range) illegal immigrant population and poor access to paperwork for many citizens that would make any heavily scrutinized citizenship for registration lean heavily towards disenfranchisement of the poorer segments.

zahlman6• 4 months ago

Sure you can, you just need an anonymous voting mechanism that's sufficiently naive. You use the verifiable process to restrict access to that anonymous mechanism.

In Canada, at both federal and provincial levels, you walk up to a desk and identify yourself, are crossed off a list, and handed a paper ballot. You go behind a screen, mark an X on the ballot, fold it up, take it back out to another desk, and put it in the box. It's extraordinarily simple.

At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database.

Well, that kind of fraud is a different issue from someone reading the database and figuring out who someone voted for (you just... don't record identities in the database).

Bender2• 4 months ago

There will never be a technical or operational process that excludes cheating. The only deterrence that seems to work on humans and even then only most of the time is severe capitol punishment and that will only be as effective as people believe it happens thus requiring live streaming of the removal of cheaters heads without censorship. The current legal process of each country would have to be by-passed or people would just sit in a cage for 30 years. Even in such cases there will be people that sacrifice themselves if they think that bribe money can go to their family but that is at least a start.

dirasieb4• 4 months ago

paper ballots and requiring IDs

isn't that racist? i've heard it repeated but i'm not so sure

chrisandchris• 4 months ago

you walk up to a desk

I think the day I _must_ walk go a desk to vote is the day I'll give up. Voting by mail is one of the best things occuring here (in Switzerland). You get the voting stuff by mail, make your crosses, put it back into the postal box and it's delivered for free (as in beer) to the government.

jfengel4• 4 months ago

The USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well. Despite countless hours and lawsuits dedicated to finding people who voted more than once, only a handful of cases have actually turned up.

It's not that there are no checks. You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. To vote more than once you'd have to pretend to be somebody else, in person, which means that if you're caught you will go to jail.

We could certainly do better, but thus far all efforts to defeat this non-problem are clearly targeted at making it harder for people to vote rather than any kind of election integrity.

Joker_vD• 4 months ago

You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day.

So you go to other stations, duh. It's called "carousel voting" [0], if done on a large, organized scale.

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

alistairSH5• 4 months ago

This. The process in my precinct is roughly...

- Enter queue

- A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted) to volunteer

- They scratch you from the list and hand you a paper scantron sheet

- Go to private booth, fill out scantron

- Go to exit, scan ballot (it scans and then drops into a locked box for manual tally later, if necessary)

The "easy" ways to vote fraudulently are also easily caught... fake ID documents, voting twice, etc.

For people who forget their ID or have address changes that haven't propagated through the voter roll, there is provisional voting - you do the same as above, but they keep the ballot in a separate pile and validate your eligibility to vote at a later time. IIRC, the voter gets a ticket # so they can check the voter portal later to see if the ballot was accepted.

As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise. The current GOP has spent 100s of millions or billions on proving wide-spread fraud and so far, all they've managed to prove a few voters, most of whom were actually GOP-leaning, have committed fraud (and most of them were caught day-of already).

dmix• 4 months ago

Despite countless hours and lawsuits dedicated to finding people who voted more than once, only a handful of cases have actually turned up.

Trust in the system should always be highly valued even if the skepticism is largely unwarranted. Saying a lawsuit hasn't caught it yet won't persuade many skeptics.

PoignardAzur4• 4 months ago

The USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well.

No, no, no. January 6 is a systemic failure.

The purpose of a voting system is to select the most popular candidate in a way that is so far beyond doubt that a populist loser can't claim the results are wrong without alienating his base.

Even leaving aside the whole "Trump doesn't care if his lies are credible" thing, the US system works very poorly there. Mail-in voting, drive-in voting, voting machines, they leave room for suspicion, no matter how confident the people running the system are.

max514• 4 months ago

And it turns out it works pretty well.

Does it?

This is the third election in a row where the losing party claim the election was not legitimate and/or hacked.

nness2• 4 months ago

Australia has a system where you are anonymous and can prove that you only voted once:

You have to be registered and must vote within your electorate, so your name appears on a certified list for that electorate and each voting location has that list. When you vote, they strike your name from the list.

After the election, the lists from these locations are compared. Anyone who votes twice has their name struck twice, and are investigated for electoral fraud.

Whether people know if you voted or not is immaterial, as voting is mandatory in Australia.

Works pretty well for a paper system.

pcchristie• 4 months ago

How does that prove that you only voted once? If I know someone's name and address (and by extension their electorate) I can rock up and vote as as many as I want.

spiddy2• 4 months ago

yes you can.

each citizen gets an anonymized private key via a secure channel (eg. postal) and use that to vote.

votes are double enveloped: outer envelop: anonymized id + inner envelop: vote.

mixnet separates the votes and cryptographically shuffles them to decouple relationships.

only at the end the shuffled votes are decrypted using the private key of the election itself that was split using shamir secret sharing (eg 5 out of 7 shares to reconstruct)

the thing that’s not clear from the article and it’s a shame is that it seems the failure was the hardware (the 3 USB keys) not the election software. This could be simply avoided by having redundancy on the hardware (2 USBs per share) or more shares themselves (5 out of 9 shares)

jasonwatkinspdx• 4 months ago

On the US keep in mind elections are run at the state level and below, so we don't have a single voting system, we have 50+.

My state, Oregon, for example uses a very straightforward vote by mail system. They ask if you wanna register to vote when you get/update your drivers license or state id. Your ballot just comes in the mail, you fill it out, send it back. For folks that lack a permanent address or similar, you can get provisional ballots at libraries and similar city offices. The provisional ballots make you fill out enough information to check if you're allowed to vote.

It's simple, convenient, secure, and efficient.

So why don't more states do it this way?

Unfortunately there's a long ugly history of using all sorts of dirty tricks for voter suppression in the US, in particular to keep Jim Crow going. And unfortunately variations of that continue today. I don't have the energy to dig into it fully here, I just want any international readers to be aware there's a whole lot of utterly craven bad faith when it comes to discussions around voting fraud and security in the US.

someguynamedq• 4 months ago

Sorry, isn't this dead simple?

Maintain a list of identity hashes. When someone goes to vote, deny them if they're already in the list . Otherwise, add their hash to the list then allow a vote to be cast.

Muromec16• 4 months ago

This makes the secrecy aspect problematic. You can't have zero trust in authority, verifiability and resistance to sabotage all at once.

kolinko• 4 months ago

I think with zero knowledge proofs we can have it both ways?

pmontra• 4 months ago

The Italian way looks similar to the Swiss way. In detail:

When I go to cast a vote in Italy I bring with me my state issued photo ID (everybody has one, I mean: must have one) and a state issued sheet of paper with the address of the place I must go to vote and a grid of empty spaces. I don't have to register to vote, basically I'm registered at birth. The people at the polling station take my two cards and look for me in their registry. They mark that I came to vote, stamp an empty space on the second card and handle me the paper ballots. I think that in this way it's both anonymous and verifiable. When the card with the stamps is full, they mail me a new one.

The state definitely know where people live. Babies are registered when they are born and people have to register any change of their address of residence. It's been like that at least since Italy became a country in the 1860s.

By the way, how do I know that they counted my vote as I cast it? I can't know it. I must trust that they did not open the box and replaced the ballots, but people from the several competing parties visit the polling station and can attend the counting. I trust that process much more than something happening inside a computer program.

irq-1• 4 months ago

...the fact that things can be anonymous (no one can know how you voted) or verifiable (people can prove that you only voted once) but not both.

Isn't that what secure hashes do? ID to hash is anonymous and checking for duplicate hashes verifies only voting once.

XCSme• 4 months ago

Blockchain!

emilfihlman• 4 months ago

This is just plain wrong.

An extremely simple scheme is allowing voters to enter an identifier of their choosing and displaying that with the votes publicly. This is both verifiable and anonymous.

Any issues you can come up with this scheme are also iirc pretty easily solvable.

yellowapple4• 4 months ago

you can't get out of the fact that things can be anonymous (no one can know how you voted) or verifiable (people can prove that you only voted once) but not both

Seems like the obvious solution here would be for the voting machine to generate two separate records:

- A record of the vote itself, without specifying the voter

- A record of the voter having voted, without specifying for whom/what

And of course, if the number of vote records doesn't match the number of voter records, then shenanigans have likely ensued, warranting an election fraud investigation.

zvqcMMV6Zcr• 4 months ago

Until we all have government-issued public keys or something

Nah, that still boils down to "you have to trust government". And I preferred when "Why would they care how I vote?" was a rhetorical question.

rainmaking• 4 months ago

Swiss vote one-time private key comes in the same envelope as your certificate of eligibility and ballots for postal votes.

askelia• 4 months ago

you can't get out of the fact that things can be anonymous (no one can know how you voted) or verifiable (people can prove that you only voted once) but not both.

Actually, I think there might be a way to get both. I've been thinking about this while building my app SoWasIt.

The idea: A public chain records that "user X voted at time T" (like a digital voter roll). It's immutable and public. "user X" could contain voter Id, name, like on a signing sheet. The vote itself (the choice) is stored separately, with a random UUID generated. Privately during the vote, no timestamp, no incremental id, no link to the voter. The UUID is sent back to the voter who will use it to verify his vote integrity. At the end, all votes are published in batches (anonymous UUID + choice in clear). Ideally in an immutable chain so it can't be altered later (and ideally for me on my app )

=> You can verify your vote by looking for your UUID in the final table. => You can verify that the number of votes matches the number of voters (public chain count = final table size) => you can verify the counting for each candidate

=> You can't link a UUID to a voter unless you have both the UUID and the voter's identity, which only the voter knows.

It's not perfect, you still need to trust that the system doesn't secretly store the link between voter and UUID, or have a man-in-the-middle system to intercept votes whil it's processed. And to not add fake voters: That's why you need to publish something like voter cards ids, so that anyone can go to the administration, check that a specific voter actually exists.

So no, it's not impossible to have both anonymity and verifiability – it's just hard, and it shifts the trust to other parts of the system. But that's politics, not just tech

Anyway, in my humble opinion, people manage to cheat with traditional paper vote (mostly because citizens don't care enough to spend time lokking after the ballot box till the end), electronic can only make things worse. And as the French comedian Coluche once said: "If voting really changed anything, it would have been banned a long time ago."

eunos• 4 months ago

That's a very exact number if you know what I mean

marcosdumay3• 4 months ago

You mean round, not exact.

Looks like some block-size thing.

ericmay3• 4 months ago

Stories like this probably scare some people off from electronic voting but I don't think this is that big of a deal. When we finish voting operations in my area we load the ballots up on someone's personal vehicle and they take them down, securely, to where they need to go. That vehicle could get blown up and those ballots could be gone, though I think we could still get a record of the results.

That being said for the United States, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship, and making "voting day" a paid national holiday. Not so much for technical or efficiency reasons but for social reasons. I'd argue it should be mandatory but I don't think we should force people to do anything we don't have to force them to do, and I'm not sure we want disinterested people voting anyway.

Exercising democracy, requiring people to put in a minimal amount of thought and effort goes a long way. It should be a celebratory day with cookies and apple pie and free beer for all. Not some cold, AI-riddled, stay in your house and never meet your neighbors, clicking a few buttons to accept the Terms of Democracy process.

I know there's a lot of discussion points around "efficiency" or "cost" or "accessibility" or how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections) and there are certainly things to discuss there, but by and large I think the continued digitalization and alienation of Americans is a much worse problem that can be addressed with more in-person activities and participation in society. We're losing too many touchpoints with reality.

phailhaus2• 4 months ago

Voter registration already requires proof of citizenship. What is the point of requiring that high bar of proof on the day of voting as well?

nomorewords• 4 months ago

Why have voter registration?

grosswait2• 4 months ago

How is it a high bar of proof if it is already required? Edit: and already met

tossstone• 4 months ago

I've lived in 3 states and none of them have required proof of citizenship to register to vote. You basically check a box that acknowledges that you are a US Citizen with the right to vote and that illegal registration carries penalties.

AuryGlenz2• 4 months ago

In my state it doesn’t require that. You just need someone else that’s registered the vouch for you. A registered person can vouch for up to 8 people:

https://www.sos.mn.gov/elections-voting/register-to-vote/reg...

Waterluvian2• 4 months ago

I think a lot of what you argue might make sense for American elections where you're voting for an absolutely ridiculous number of things.

I'm not sure how it is in Switzerland, but in Canada I will vote for maybe three candidates in five years. And I don't mean three visits to the polls (though it's usually that), I mean three actual checkbox ticks for people to count. They're paper ballots and the counting is done that night. I think if we were stuck voting for like forty different races every two years it would be a very different story and a lot of what you say would resonate with me more. Except the voter registration stuff.

We're pretty flexible about registration up here and it works. My wife one year showed up with some mail that had her name/address, and me vouching for her. Though I think a lot of the luxuries of democracy are most easily enjoyed with a trusting, cooperative culture that isn't constantly wound up about being cheated by the others.

soco• 4 months ago

In Switzerland I voted last week for 5 election lists and 6 different topics. This happens at least 4 times a year, but I don't call it "ridiculous number of things".

stetrain6• 4 months ago

That being said, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship

I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens.

This is where such arguments tend to get stuck in the US. If you require proof of citizenship, but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expensive, then you are effectively restricting voting access for citizens. A measure to place stricter qualifications on voting access needs to also carefully consider and account for providing access to all citizens.

The US is a geographically very large place with worse public transportation options compared to many other countries, and with that comes differences in economic and accessibility considerations for things like "Just go to your county's office and get a qualifying ID."

xvector• 4 months ago

Even the poorest people have a state ID or drivers license. You cannot get most jobs without some legal ID.

ericmay3• 4 months ago

I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens.

I completely agree and I don't think there is a fair argument to suggest otherwise.

AuryGlenz2• 4 months ago

Pretty much every bill that has ever been put forward for needing an ID to vote has had a provision for free IDs. That’s not where things get caught up.

Also, it’s a pretty silly thing anyways. I don’t even drink and I still need my driver’s license quite a few times every year.

dolni• 4 months ago

but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expensive

Where in the US do you find it's difficult for people to get an ID? Where is it not? What percentage of the population has an ID in a place where it's difficult to get one vs somewhere it is easier?

What constitutes an ID being expensive?

Nearly every country in the world requires proof of citizenship to vote. How is the rest of the world dealing with this problem? Do you think that their democratic processes might be compromised because of it?

jonas212• 4 months ago

I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens.

This is essentially what the Supreme Court said when they upheld Indiana's Voter ID law in 2008 [1]:

The burdens that are relevant to the issue before us are those imposed on persons who are eligible to vote but do not possess a current photo identification that complies with the requirements of SEA 483. The fact that most voters already possess a valid driver’s license, or some other form of acceptable identification, would not save the statute under our reasoning in Harper, if the State required voters to pay a tax or a fee to obtain a new photo identification. But just as other States provide free voter registration cards, the photo identification cards issued by Indiana’s BMV are also free. For most voters who need them, the inconvenience of making a trip to the BMV, gathering the required documents, and posing for a photograph surely does not qualify as a substantial burden on the right to vote, or even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.
Both evidence in the record and facts of which we may take judicial notice, however, indicate that a somewhat heavier burden may be placed on a limited number of persons. They include elderly persons born out-of-state, who may have difficulty obtaining a birth certificate; persons who because of economic or other personal limitations may find it difficult either to secure a copy of their birth certificate or to assemble the other required documentation to obtain a state-issued identification; homeless persons; and persons with a religious objection to being photographed. If we assume, as the evidence suggests, that some members of these classes were registered voters when SEA 483 was enacted, the new identification requirement may have imposed a special burden on their right to vote.
The severity of that burden is, of course, mitigated by the fact that, if eligible, voters without photo identification may cast provisional ballots that will ultimately be counted. To do so, however, they must travel to the circuit court clerk’s office within 10 days to execute the required affidavit. It is unlikely that such a requirement would pose a constitutional problem unless it is wholly unjustified.

[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/553/181/

charcircuit• 4 months ago

obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens.

I do not think it is that straightforward. Making it more accessible makes it possible for people with less skin in the game able to vote. Imagine how invested someone who owns several properties and businesses in a city is and how much they care about the success of the city compared to some other person who is just renting an apartment and has not even a job in that city meaning they could move at any time. The vote of the first person is much more important than the second. Trying to make voting overly accessible may make more people from the second category start voting which could result in bad decisions being made because people can easily move away if things go wrong.

lolc• 4 months ago

Please realize that Switzerland holds many votes per year. There is no big voting day where I have to go somewhere. I could go cast my ballot in person, but I can also fill out and send in my ballot in advance. That is entirely routine and part of my day like other paperwork.

The problem with e-voting is that it is much harder to validate. My paper ballot rests at a community building where it will be counted on the day of the vote. I can understand the process from start to finish in physical terms. Throw in a USB stick and anything could happen. It is possible we will never know what went wrong here.

RandomLensman• 4 months ago

What would constitute a "proof of citizenship"? Would a passport be enough, for example?

rhcom2• 4 months ago

voting requiring proof of citizenship

Isn't this just a solution in search of a problem though? Multiple investigations have discovered absolutely minuscule amount of non-citizen voting in US elections. It's something that seems reasonable on its face but lacks any purpose and comes with an ulterior motive that it is part of the made up GOP talking points of a "stolen election" and "illegals voting".

expedition322• 4 months ago

I used to be really angry that we still vote with paper and red pencil. The Netherlands is ultra digital after all!

But then they showed how easy it is to hack and we live in a world with evil countries like the US, China and Russia who want to destroy our way of life.

amanaplanacanal• 4 months ago

I would guess most people don't have a proof of citizenship handy. This would get even worse if the effort to get rid of birthright citizenship succeeds, how would you even prove you are a citizen?

This would be less of a problem if the US had some sort of national ID issued by right, but we don't, and the same people pushing for requiring ID for voting would be against creating one. They hate the idea of a national ID.

My state does all elections by mail now. How would this even work?

All this is on top of the fact that elections are run by the states, not the national government. Would such a law even be constitutional?

pseudalopex4• 4 months ago

My state does all elections by mail now. How would this even work?

Trump told Congress to ban most mail ballots.

All this is on top of the fact that elections are run by the states, not the national government. Would such a law even be constitutional?

Experts said no. But this Supreme Court surprised experts before. And the constitution said Congress could decide elections of Congress. They have the power. They need an explanation enough people would accept.

Spivak• 4 months ago

Yeah, I think most people who want proof of citizenship are forgetting that your driver's license (even your REAL ID) isn't a proof of citizenship. It's passport, certificate of naturalization, or birth certificate.

Restricting voting to people with passports and who happen to have a birth certificate handy is going to make the first election with the requirement weird as hell and probably backfire on Republicans if their goal is winning at any cost.

Requiring some form of ID that your state is willing to accept as good enough is a very different beast than proof of citizenship.

zer00eyz• 4 months ago

> requiring proof of citizenship

Go and try to figure out how to do this from scratch. Imagine your house burned down and you need to start with "nothing".

If your parents are still alive you can use them to bootstrap the process of getting those vital documents (or if you're married that can be another semi viable path).

Pitty if you don't have those resources. Furthermore it might get complicated for any partner who adopts their other partners last name (were talking about getting the documents, before you can get some sort of verified ID).

The reality is we don't have a lot of instances of "voter fraud" committed by people who aren't citizens (see: https://www.facebook.com/Louisianasos/posts/secretary-of-sta... as an example) . And the amount of voter fraud we do have is very small (and ironically committed by citizens see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio... for some examples).

I am in favor of in-person voting

Again, the size and dispersion of the American population makes this odious. Dense urban areas will face lines (they already do) and many of them (Chicago) have moved to early voting because spreading things out over many days is just more effective. Meanwhile places like Montana (where population density is in people per square mile) make travel to a location burdensome.

I get why you feel the way you do, but the data, the reality of America, makes what you desire unnecessary and impractical. Feelings are a terrible reason to erect this barrier when it makes little sense to do so.

kanbara• 4 months ago

i don’t think that requiring in-person “ID”-proofed voting and removing mail-in ballots (which is the best part of voting in CA) does anything to bring people back to reality…

Even if it were a holiday, people may not be able to travel or take time off from obligations. There’s no obligation to drive 2 hours to vote, to fly back if you work in another country, or to go get a new birth certificate because Real ID doesn’t prove citizenship even though you provide citizenship documents to it when you get one…

I’ve heard of a lot of takes here about what we should do for voting to make it “more secure” but all of this is actually a solution for a problem we just don’t have.

ramon156• 4 months ago

We should at least start with electronic voting to compare it against real voting. I know there have been more smaller local tests, but they are not comparable.

estebank2• 4 months ago

That being said, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship

The appropriate time to verify citizenship is the one that already happens: during registration. Poll workers only need to verify who you are and that you're registered.

drivebyhooting• 4 months ago

In my experience there was no verification other than verbally verbally confirming address and name.

nonameiguess• 4 months ago

I'd agree in principle with your idea about proof of citizenship, but unfortunately the reality I experienced is I had a valid California driver's license with a Texas address because I had been in the military and California allowed that, but Texas changed their laws to require a Texas ID to vote, and subsequently they also closed 90% of the offices you have to go to to get an ID. Luckily, I knew about this way in advance, but it took 9 months to get an appointment, and when I got there, it required something like four different forms of proof. There were people in there who still lived with their parents who didn't have their own names on any bills bringing their parents in with them to vouch that they actually lived there, getting turned away and told to go fuck themselves. It was extremely transparent and obvious what the state was trying to do, not wanting young people and recent transplants to vote.

drdaeman• 4 months ago

Instead of full e-voting I would love to see an additional scheme to a traditional paper ballot that allows for verification. Something like STAR-Vote or Scantegrity. Even if it’s flawed, it would be nice to run specifically because it doesn’t affect the elections but could produce useful insights. If it fails - nothing particularly bad happens, if it works - cool, we get extra assurances or maybe spot some fraud that we weren’t aware about.

But there seems to be either no political will, or some issues with the practical implementations. There were some municipal experiments here and there, and then just… crickets. Anyone knows what happened to those efforts?

openasocket• 4 months ago

Voter ID is often touted as an important part of election security, but when you look at the threat model of elections it just doesn't do much. Think about how you would try to cheat at an election. The common methods are things like ballot stuffing, throwing out votes, discouraging people from voting, etc. Examples include spreading disinformation about what day voting is happening, seizing ballot boxes and replacing them with forged ballots that favor your candidate, or calling in bomb threats to polling places. These are not prevented by voter ID requirements.

The only thing voter ID prevents is voter impersonation. It prevents you from finding someone else's name and polling place, going there, pretending to be that person, and submitting a vote on their behalf. But that threat doesn't really scale. Even if you assume no one at the polling places notice you coming to vote over and over under different names, a single person could probably only do this a few dozen times on election day. To scale that you would need more people; and every person you add to the scheme increases the odds of someone slipping up or getting caught. But the real issue is if any of the people you are impersonating try to vote! While election officials don't record what people voted for, they do record who voted, and the ballot counting process will automatically note that people voted multiple times. So you would have to figure out some way to gather a database of a large number of people you know aren't going to vote, and get a bunch of people to turn up at a bunch of polling places under those names. It's just not practical to do, when elections are decided by thousands or tens of thousands of votes.

how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections)

The devil is in the details. I don't trust that the groups drafting Voter ID legislation are doing so in good faith. For example, North Dakota passed a voter ID law years ago. It stated that you needed a valid state-issued ID that included a street address. Sounds fine, right? The problem is that most homes on Native American reservations don't actually have street addresses. Tribal members use P.O. boxes for mail, and that P.O. box is on their driver's licenses. This was brought up when the law was proposed, but it passed anyway. The Spirit Lake Nation and the Standing Rock Sioux tribes had to sue in federal court. They were eventually successful, but it took years, and in the meantime the 2018 midterms were held with many Native Americans literally unable to vote.

See https://www.npr.org/2020/02/14/806083852/north-dakota-and-na...

mulmen6• 4 months ago

That being said for the United States, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship

Why?

I know there's a lot of discussion points around "efficiency" or "cost" or "accessibility" or how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections)

How do other countries run elections to overcome their racially motivated systemic voter suppression?

and there are certainly things to discuss there

This is a laughable understatement.

but by and large I think the continued digitalization and alienation of Americans is a much worse problem that can be addressed with more in-person activities and participation in society.

I think this is naive. You are attempting to force an outcome without understanding the cause. Systemic racially motivated voter suppression is an undeniable reality in American politics. Voter ID is a clear example of exactly that. It is used to disenfranchise minority voters. This is clear established fact.

There is zero evidence of any voter fraud happening that would be eliminated by additional voter ID.

This is a serious topic that requires you educate yourself on reality. I suggest you take your advice above and touch reality, you are overly digitalized if you think voter ID has any merit at all.

fabiofzero• 4 months ago

Brazil has digital voting since 1996 and it works pretty much flawlessly. I'm sure Switzerland will figure it out someday.

MengerSponge• 4 months ago

Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.

anonymars• 4 months ago

Indeed -- https://m.xkcd.com/2030/

clcaev• 4 months ago

Don’t forget about https://verifiedvoting.org/ and its decades-long advocacy for scanned paper ballots.

pilingual• 4 months ago

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/01/16/internet-voting-i...

eqvinox3• 4 months ago

sigh

This is why you do parallel paper/electronic voting. Fill it out electronically, it prints a receipt (maybe including a QR code), you mail the receipt (along with the 'classic' absentee voting stuff, i.e. double envelope, proof of eligibility to vote in the outer envelope.)

Oh and as a side effect it can be audited very nicely.

ninalanyon5• 4 months ago

If you are doing paper voting why bother with voting machines at all? What's the benefit?

eqvinox3• 4 months ago

Immediate results without miscounts and at far lower cost. Given some confidence into the system, you'd only audit the paper ballots stochastically for a randomly chosen, say, 5% of election districts each time.

[Whether that's worth it, I'll not make a statement on.]

ninalanyon5• 4 months ago

Why is everyone so obsessed with automating voting? It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.

sonofhans2• 4 months ago

Control. If you can centralize all voting results in a single place you can control distribution of them. If you are the only entity able to read the results then everyone else has to take your word for it.

Paper ballots with physical marks are easy to track and recount. Digital paper trails are ephemeral. Whom does this benefit? The people counting the ballots.

throwaway5752• 4 months ago

As the article notes, the Swiss do both. The normal system is a paper ballot based system. This was for secure e-voting for those unable to use paper ballots.

The separate question, of why people are obsessed with it - implicitly in the United States - is a separate question.

sonofhans - to reply to your follow up here, I mostly agree with you. But I would soften it to say it is a tool that can be used for good or bad ends, and I felt the Swiss were using it more towards good ends. But I agreed that the ability to misuse it is intrinsic.

hatthew• 4 months ago

If it works, it should be much more efficient than the current system. Of course that is a massive "if"

ge962• 4 months ago

I'm still annoyed in the US I can't just show up and vote. The one time I wanted to vote "sorry you're not registered" like what? I'm a citizen just let me vote, oh well. And I was too late to register at the time.

mschuster91• 4 months ago

And I was too late to register at the time.

That's a thing pretty much everywhere. Developed countries such as Germany automatically enroll everyone eligible based on the registration data (you gotta register at the local authority after moving), but even we have a deadline if you think you should be eligible but didn't get a voting invitation to sort that out.

ghufran_syed• 4 months ago

I think the issue is that you can only be registered to vote in one jurisdiction. So being a citizen isn't enough (though as I understand it, many jurisdictions let you cast a provisional ballot in these situations)

bell-cot• 4 months ago

Without a real-time, probably national "who has voted & where did they vote" database - how would a "just show up and vote" system block a citizen from voting once in each of multiple jurisdictions?

UltraSane• 4 months ago

Every vote should be a separate piece of paper. My preferred voting method are the fill in the bubble sheets that get scanned as they go into the locked box. They automate the vote count but can be manually counted if needed.

IshKebab• 4 months ago

If implemented properly it has some significant advantages: faster counting, votes can be verified, more resilient to fraud. Unfortunately it seems like nobody is implementing it properly yet.

rstuart4133• 4 months ago

It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.

Electronic voting has lots of advantages. It can be end-to-end verified, it can be a great help to disadvantaged people (blind, illiterate), it can deliver results faster, it can probably be made more robust to retail-level tampering than paper ballots provided a paper audit trail it kept (as all electronic systems designed with security in mind do).

The one question mark in my mind: the current US system resisted Trump's efforts to corrupt it pretty well. I think that was because of the inertia created all the people involved in staffing the ballot stations, counting and verifying the votes. The machinations of the electoral college being highly visible put people doing the wrong thing at high risk for decades after Trump leaves the stage.

An automated electronic system could remove a lot of that human inertia. Human efficiency is not an advantage in an electoral system, it's a weakness. You want as many people involved as possible.

jonas212• 4 months ago

I wish the article had more technical details. Obviously, 2048 being a power of 2 stands out as being possibly related.

nobrains• 4 months ago

It was a pilot. Isn't this (kinda) good news that this "bug" was caught and now the next iteration will be closer to the intended behavior?

mulmen6• 4 months ago

I propose voting by shooting ballots. It seems dangerous at first but every negligent discharge strengthens democracy.

august-• 4 months ago

honest question - has any country actually deployed e-voting at scale without running into serious issues? it feels like every pilot i read about hits a wall at some point

t0mas88• 4 months ago

While this sounds like it allowed remote voting, it's interesting that some places (e.g. The Netherlands) went back to 100% paper instead of voting machines. That causes counting to take quite some time, with estimates/interim counts in between.

I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database. That is 100% anonymous and can't be cheated. The database is the instant answer at election closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers as confirmation that nothing weird happened.

No way to hack that. If you print something different on the paper the voter will see it. If you try to hack it by printing more papers than actual votes, the paper count won't match the amount of voting passes that you collected/verified when letting people into the polling station.

It may even be safer than the current paper approach, because if the paper vote counters try to cheat their counts won't match the database triggering an investigation as well.

macintux3• 4 months ago

Voting machines here (Indiana) will print a sheet with your choices, which you can review before feeding it to a counting machine. That way you have a paper trail for recounts, and a sanity check before the vote is cast.

realo• 4 months ago

We have 100% paper voting in Canada.

We vote during the day... polls close in the evening... A few hours later we have the results. Hand counted, for the entire country.

What is the difference?

mattashii• 4 months ago

Possibly, ballot sheet size?

The national elections in NLD have a single ballot in the whole country, with 10+ parties who each get a column of their candidates on the ballot, and with one box for each of the candidates. In these elections for the 150 seats of parliament, often there are 200+ candidates listed total. As a result, the ballot sheets need to be quite large and so are quite far into the 'unwieldy' part of the handling spectrum.

This size issue also complicates verification and counting, because you have to verify that of all checkboxes, exactly one is filled in, and sorting/counting needs to do this for practically every ballot.

There has been some experimenting with changing the ballot to a 'party' and 'list number' ballot, where you fill in the party of your chosen candidate together with their number on the party list, but AFAIK that has not (yet?) been approved for wider use.

monkaiju• 4 months ago

I think this is probably sufficient, but also wonder if theres a circular logic to the "No way to hack that" claim. If the hypothetical hack could both corrupt the digital votes and the printing it could ensure the vote counts line up. I guess it maybe makes it harder, but if the printed paper votes are there to validate the digital votes and vice-versa I'm not sure its quite as air-tight as claimed.

Edit: I just realized you also mentioned "voter-passes" when entering the voting site. That definitely makes it much harder! If those were corrupted you could still pull it off, but that level of sophistication is really likely to get caught.

kosinus• 4 months ago

One of the reasons The Netherlands abandoned voting machines was because of electromagnetic emissions that could be read tens of meters away.

abdullahkhalids2• 4 months ago

The database is the instant answer at election closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers as confirmation that nothing weird happened.

You are misunderstanding "who to trust".

The source of trust in a paper vote election is your party's representative + independent election observers. You believe them that they were sitting at the polling station all day, watching both the voting and counting, and nothing fishy happened. You don't have to trust the state officials in any way, and you don't have to trust any one else either. Just your party - which is kind of the point. The only people you maximally trust is your party.

In your proposal, you are saying that to trust the outcome, I must trust the state officials - the ones who built the machines. Those are exactly the people I distrust to do a fair election.

stevenwoo• 4 months ago

The poster is also trusting the database provider, database admin, the voting machine provider, the voting machine maintenance person, etc in an electronic voting machine since they implied this by saying database. Manual paper counts with multiple counters and multiple counts that resolve differences are hard to top when each set of counters is adversarial. In spite of that one thing I thought might be useful and point of failure if electronic voting were allowed is from Venezuela of all places. Each precinct printed an initial tally, the opposition collected most of them and claimed they were cheated. They might have had a fair election up until the voting machines were summed up at a central location -it appears the ruling party cheated when adding up the precincts. https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-election-maduro-machado...

rsynnott• 4 months ago

Ireland has both paper only voting, and a PR-STV voting system. Counting can take, literally, days (the most recent EU election took five days to fill all the seats). It is a spectator sport for a certain type of nerd.

matheusmoreira3• 4 months ago

I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database.

They absolutely can. Brazil uses electronic voting machines and that exact method was proposed to increase the trustworthiness of the system. We'd get the best of both worlds: fast vote counting and an auditable paper trail that serves as the ultimate truth.

Supreme court declared it unconstitutional using total bullshit arguments ranging from "it compromises voting secrecy" to "it's hard to implement", thereby fueling concerns that the voting machines are compromised.

max514• 4 months ago

I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database

If it's counted electronically from the database, the piece of paper is completely worthless. Unless you can get the entire voting population to give you their paper and then count them, you will never know if the count is right. If a hacker switched 15% of the vote from one party to another, how could you tell from a piece of paper that tells you who you voted for?

tryauuum• 4 months ago

you can count the paper votes only in your voting point/building. If there are abnormalities you can alert other people to trigger the global recounting

Yes, it's not foolproof, attacker can just modify the electronic voting data in places where he knows people don't usually do recounting. But it makes his job harder

something765478• 4 months ago

If the paper vote is the source of truth, then the database just seems unnecessary.

luplex• 4 months ago

I don't understand the need for e-voting. Germany's entirely paper-based system works fine! After voting closes, volunteers count the votes for a few hours and we get a result.

bdamm• 4 months ago

Canada also uses hand counted paper ballots and it works great. There's no need to make large-scale voting electronic, and I'd never trust it without major social institutions in place that can provide the kind of oversight we have with good old paper ballots.

hootz• 4 months ago

Brazil uses fully electronic voting and it works great.

cedws• 4 months ago

The only potential benefit I can think of is getting results faster, but it's really not important enough to optimise for.

Maybe a dual system of paper ballots and e-voting could be good so that they cross check each other. Can't stuff paper ballots without manipulating the digital counter, can't manipulate the digital counter without stuffing ballots. A digital counter also enables meta analysis which could identify suspicious patterns, like a wave of votes for a particular candidate.

CorrectHorseBat• 4 months ago

Another possible benefit I've heard of is it can stop some kinds of voter intimidation:

Someone gets hand of an empty ballot, they fill in the ballot and give it to you and tell you to come back with another empty ballot. Rinse and repeat. Of course, with today's smartphones there are simpler ways to do this. Also moot if you can vote by mail, which is why voting by mail is a really bad idea.

coffinbirth• 4 months ago

Drawing two crosses on a piece of paper every couple of years has really nothing to do with democracy. Democracy is when one can vote on all topics on any level (local village, town, district, county, state, ...) using the computer at home. This is possible to implement using the algorithms/data structures available today. We actually do basically everything online today - except voting.

For instance, such a system would be immune to corruption. That's one of the major reasons such a system will likely never appear.

riffraff2• 4 months ago

For instance, such a system would be immune to corruption

OTOH, it enables vote buying and intimidation at scale: you vote from home in exchange for 5€/not being beat up and have to film yourself doing it, so that the local bad guy gets authorized to bulldoze the local nature reserve.

Vote buying and intimidation already exist, but proving it is harder, all remote voting on everything would just make it more convenient.

mft_• 4 months ago

Wider participation in voting? Easier to vote for people who can’t travel to the voting station, for myriad reasons? Just more efficient for everyone involved?

And bigger picture, once you prove a system that’s easier, more efficient, reliable… you could expand to more votes on more things. Like… the Swiss do.

—-

(A German advocating for paper-based bureaucracy… whatever next? ;) )

hocuspocus2• 4 months ago

We vote 4 times a year and it's not always easy for Swiss citizens abroad to receive and mail ballots back in time.

xeromal• 4 months ago

I feel like building for edge cases is the cause of many of our countries' problems.

stubish2• 4 months ago

The pilot is for people unable to get to a polling booth. Traditionally, we use postal votes for this. But postal votes enable voter fraud (primarily selling your vote), so we can only use it for a small portion of votes or results become too suspect.

So paper systems require ballot boxes and polling stations for the vast majority, which makes elections expensive, complicated, and generally problematic. And unpopular, with low turnout, particularly during flu season and pandemic.

brainwad11• 4 months ago

Switzerland is fully postal voting and has been for ages; it's fine and there is no social distrust despite the theoretical risk of vote selling.

steve1977• 4 months ago

Everyone ever involved with IT in Swiss governments (both on a cantonal and on the federal level) will not be surprised.

ChoGGi2• 4 months ago

Paper has a trail, e-voting makes it's own trail.

No thanks.

everfrustrated• 4 months ago

The biggest advantage physical voting has it is follows human-scaling laws. Which often is a problem (inefficient) but for voting this is a massive benefit for one particular reason - due to lack of automation any fraud doesn't also benefit from the same automation so has to be large scale and widely distributed for it to be impactful (the fraud has to be distributed to the humans involved). Which isn't to say that it can't happen (and does!) but requires a lot more effort and in the physical world there always a lot more fingerprints left, cameras looking, informants, etc.

lesuorac2• 4 months ago

Isn't the advantageous fraud easy to do?

Sheriff monitors the ballot box (ex. Jimmy Carter's opponent).

Only allow loyalists to count the result (and then report w/e you want; ex. Russia).

Muromec16• 4 months ago

It's not fraud is difficult to do, it's difficult to do so without people noticing. The problem of r-country is not that fraud is not discovered, they problem is they are not capable to course-correct (in general, but in regards to having elections specifically)

throwaway858254• 4 months ago

Sorting physical ballots is very easy to automate. You get the security of paper with the speed of computing.

WalterBright9• 4 months ago

In Washington State we get mailed ballots, which we fill in and mail in.

But the ballots are not even printed on security paper. They don't have a serial number on them, either.

kshri24• 4 months ago

This probably only works properly in the developed countries. In developing countries like India we suffered through decades of "booth captures" [1] where armed gangs would take over a polling booth and cast votes for their political candidate at gun point. Villagers would be disallowed from casting their votes. In many instances, the polling booth itself would be set on fire, ensuring that those votes are never counted.

With EVMs the polling officer can just deactivate the machine (which stops the counting at that moment) making booth capturing pointless.

Not saying this is not possible in developed countries. It could very well happen sometime in the future where armed gangs take over polling booths (especially if the candidate in question is bound to lose due to corruption/scandal and needs to cling onto political power to prevent himself/herself from going to prison).

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

mcmoor• 4 months ago

I mean looks like booth capture can only capture a booth at most and to capture more you practically need armed rebellion. But if we automate it, then you only need to capture a location to capture all booths in the region.

lelanthran• 4 months ago

This probably only works properly in the developed countries. In developing countries like India we suffered through decades of "booth captures" [1] where armed gangs would take over a polling booth and cast votes for their political candidate at gun point. Villagers would be disallowed from casting their votes. In many instances, the polling booth itself would be set on fire, ensuring that those votes are never counted.

Yeah, but these are visible! They provide evidence that the voting was not fair.

Compare to electronic voting, where a capture might be done and no one ever finds out.

We want rigging of elections to be visible. That's the whole point.

roysting• 4 months ago

Not saying this is not possible in developed countries. It could very well happen sometime in the future where armed gangs take over polling booths…

I fully expect this happening more as the systems degrade in the west and, arguably, it already has happened several times now in many different ways, even if executed in more “sophisticated” ways that make it less apparent.

What do you call the many “color revolutions” the US and EU have now perpetrated in many different ways and places? The ”gang” was just a state level actor with immense resources and methods that exceed the local capacity to prevent them… just like a local gang using arms to take over a local polling booth.

There are declassified versions of old and obsolete CIA guides on how to conduct the precursors of such “color revolutions” through long term “capacity building” that is then activated if/when necessary. That’s the voluntarily declassified manual of the CIA; someone might suggest there are more effective instructions that are classified.

There have also been medium sophistication level events like what has happened over the last several years in Europe, where Merkel ordered an election result cancelled through technicalities because she/the literal The Party, did not like the result (I guess you can take the woman out of the dictatorship…), the EU simply used the judiciary to force a “runoff” because the election results were not to its liking, de facto canceling elections, or even all the subtle measures like visually misrepresenting election results where the bar or pie chart does not match the numerical data to suppress public mandate and perceptions about results, i.e., higher result numbers being represented by smaller bars than lower numbers.

I would argue they are all examples of the very same things you describe, the equivalent of “…gangs take over polling booths…” only it’s done through process, authority, policy, or even law and those in power tell themselves they’re doing it for “our democracy” and justified through similar dystopian, narcissistic, megalomanic, authoritarian mindsets; “I need to be in power for your own good because you don’t know any better”.

It could go both ways, either things will increasingly start degrading even more as the power slips out of the “gang’s”hands, and the system starts crumbling around them; or if “digital voting” is fully implemented there will essentially be “backdoors” to make sure the powers can “preserve our democracy” just like they need OS backdoors and media control to “protect the children”, which coincidentally seems to always coincide with them remaining in power and control and the people not even being asked about major upheavals of their society and their votes being effectively meaningless because the agenda is continuous regardless of election results.

It’s like those people who used to play slot machines at the casino, (now doing so digitally on their phones) pounding at the buttons that do absolutely nothing since the algorithm is what determines where the spin ends, not them rapidly hitting an essentially dead button just because the “clicking”, the “voting”, makes them think they have control. . . . “our democracy” where you and I are not part of that “our”.

vivekd• 4 months ago

I don't think any system can do much if things have degraded to the point where armed gangs are running around with impunity. I think systems (paper or otherwise) presuppose a certain level of functional civil society

notarobot123• 4 months ago

The other advantage in physical voting is that so many people are needed to participate in the process. The probability of aligned bad actors goes down significantly when the voting process is a civic responsibility shared by volunteers who monitor each other. It's not perfect but public participation adds to the legitimacy of the process itself.

thangalin• 4 months ago

How Cosmic Ray Influenced an Election:

https://scotopia.in/journal/journalbkend/paper_list/v-4-i-1(...

Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

My Līberum Cōnsilium (see references on page 55):

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/delibero/raw/HEAD/docs/manual/...

nemo44x2• 4 months ago

Paper ballots work just fine. Why are we using tools for scale (computers) when voting is an incredibly small and finite domain. Just total waste of tax dollars and over engineered solution to a simple problem.

hocuspocus2• 4 months ago

Voting is definitely not a small domain in a direct democracy, and many Swiss citizens abroad don't receive paper ballots early enough to mail them back in time.

nemo44x2• 4 months ago

Provisional ballots work fine. Statistical inference works too.

Vvector• 4 months ago

Paper ballots are a must. Vote on a touchscreen, then have the terminal print out a voter-verifiable paper ballot that can also be machine counted.

Make the ballot printout layout a standard format. Then machines from multiple vendors can verify the counts on a subset of the ballots. And as a last resort, the ballots can be hand counted as well.

stubish2• 4 months ago

This is an eVoting system - not at a ballot box. There is no printer. And even if there was, a similar problem can occur if you lose the keys. And you need keys because the printout cannot be voter verifiable, or you enable the various forms of vote fraud that anonymous ballot boxes were introduced to stop.

PunchyHamster• 4 months ago

...so they found voting fraud, good job

qq66• 4 months ago

By the close of polling on Sunday, its e-voting system had collected 2,048 votes

I have a hard time believing that it collected exactly 2,048 votes by coincidence

userbinator• 4 months ago

Hopefully everyone on this site notices the significance of that number.

justsid• 4 months ago

I definitely assumed they were encrypted separately in 2048 vote chunks and that one such chunk failed to decrypt.

angrydev• 4 months ago

2kb ram should be enough for anybody

DoctorOetker• 4 months ago

The article is very light on the encryption scheme and software used.

For HN I would have expected a more detailed discussion of what could have gone wrong (it seems like a bug in some software package since we have this power of 2 ^ 11 being 2048

2143• 4 months ago

There’s a Phrack article that’s relevant.

Internet Voting https://phrack.org/issues/69/11

greatgib• 4 months ago

   The votes made up less than 4 percent of those cast in Basel-Stadt and would not have changed any results

I like the concept of "your vote was useless anyway".

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

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