The Indian Voting Machines are the answer.
No operating system, no passwords, no connections, no bruteforcing anything, system on a chip, so widely distributed devices that hacking even a few of them is challenging, etc.
The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a matter of when, not if.
You need to present an election system that will convince Joe Q. Public, who is almost certainly not as tech-literate as this forum, is probably not even white-collar or university educated, and likely also suspicious of globalisation. "Tamper-proof Indian system-on-a-chip" does not have that property. Otherwise you get increasingly unhinged arguments over the election results until something breaks.
A high speed electronic ballot reader with a mechanical counter display. So you can stand there and watch it count. Then run it through a duplicate machine. It should say the same thing.
Appropriately documenting these occurrences should not be hard. Appropriately archiving them would be moderately difficult but would serve as the evidence of the final tally. The final tally of all precincts could then be calculated by any number of independent organizations.
There can't be any hard to understand computer voodoo, deleteable audit logs, or single vendor reporting the final tally. No one should trust that anyways.
Ironically in the US the current nonsense about election fraud might push electronic ballots further. If you're going to cry wolf over paper ballots then you might as well do whatever you want, literally nothing will ever satisfy them. There's no sense even trying to appease.
I think random, serialized paper ballots are the way to go. When the polls close you know the serial numbers of every vote cast, so no new serial numbers should be added to that unless a very good reason. Keep them or destroy them afterwards is another issue, but it's a step in the right direction.
I have some distrust in the American voting system, first with the computerized systems, but also that federal elections are run at the state level. With so many states and jurisdictions, I can't help but feel that fraud is happening. If the federal elections process was truly federalized, and funded if it is not already, managed and controlled by the federal government, then I think there could be greater control and security.
What do you do when duplicate serial numbers start showing up? I'm assuming you won't know who was issued which serial number, and if it's truly randomized you wouldn't even know where they were sent.
The last thing we need is to Federalize voting. Our system is robust BECAUSE it is local. The last thing I'd want is a Federal system under a President's influence.
Can you think of a reason why the people who wrote the rules we have now would want to avoid putting federal elected officials in charge or running federal elections?
When I was a kid living in Louisiana (a state well-known for political shenanigans), they had big mechanical voting machines for elections. The machines were very large and heavy and were stored in warehouses. Probably not much fun for the workers who had to move them to/from storage to polling places (they did have wheels though).
Anyways, you would walk into it and throw a big mechanical lever that would close a privacy curtain behind you. Then you would have to manually turn an individual mechanical switch for each choice. When finished voting, you would throw the big mechanical lever back to the original position. Moving the lever back would cause all of your votes to be counted, reset all voting switches, and open the privacy curtains. There were mechanical counters for all possible voting options. Then, when the polls closed the votes would be read off the counters (and presumably verified by multiple individuals) and then reported to the whoever they reported the results to.
This was before the internet, but the same machines could (and should) be used in the internet age. There's nothing to hack into electronically as the voting machines contain no electronics (at least for communications, for sure).
The only big downside is that the machines have to be stored somewhere and they take up a sizable space. Also, they incur expenses to be moved from storage to polling places (and back).
Someone will bring up voters with disabilities, but there were voters with disabilities back then too. I'm sure there was a protocol for accommodating voter disabilities.
All in all, I think it's a sensible and pragmatic solution to thwart hacking and hopefully garner more confidence in voting integrity.
Mechanical punch-card voting machines fell out of use after the 2000 election showed that they're more error-prone than either electronic voting machines or paper ballots.
Curious to know more. Is there a good source of information on the security of the hardware and software used for elections India.
As an Indian citizen I see the casual lack of security mindset in large swathe of things implemented by both public and private actors. Many things get better only though iterative failures and corresponding reactive fixes.
What type of failures and improvements have happened here, or instances of demonstrated hardness against those with motivation and access to machinery.
Regarding Indian voting machines, there is also randomization involved at various levels during distribution making it difficult to game the system but still I always wonder if there is any way to hack the system. I hope people in charge have a process to continuously evaluate the security procedures and improve it.
I never understood the desire to have any kind of machine at all. Paper ballots are a perfectly efficient and scalable system used for many large elections. Even if complicated machines are theoretically safe against malfeasance, keeping it simple increases public confidence.
> The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a matter of when, not if.
The US election system is very distributed and fragmented - there is virtually no standardization.
Even in the tightest margins for something like President you'd need to have seriously good data to figure out which random municipality voting system(s) you'd need to target to actually affect the outcome.
> to figure out which random municipality voting system(s) you'd need to target to actually affect the outcome.
As you said, no standardization, which means all precincts reports on wildly different time intervals, if you can interfere with just tallying during or after the fact, and you can get the information on other precincts before any other outlets, you could easily take advantage of this.
It's essentially the Superman II version of interfering with an election. Just put your thumb on the scale a little bit everywhere on late precincts all at once.
The fact that so many states let a simple majority of their state take _all_ electors actually makes this possible. If more states removed the Unit Rule and went like Nebraska and Maine this would be far less effective.
endgame|1 year ago
You need to present an election system that will convince Joe Q. Public, who is almost certainly not as tech-literate as this forum, is probably not even white-collar or university educated, and likely also suspicious of globalisation. "Tamper-proof Indian system-on-a-chip" does not have that property. Otherwise you get increasingly unhinged arguments over the election results until something breaks.
akira2501|1 year ago
Appropriately documenting these occurrences should not be hard. Appropriately archiving them would be moderately difficult but would serve as the evidence of the final tally. The final tally of all precincts could then be calculated by any number of independent organizations.
There can't be any hard to understand computer voodoo, deleteable audit logs, or single vendor reporting the final tally. No one should trust that anyways.
CaliforniaKarl|1 year ago
Ref.: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hand...
Spivak|1 year ago
Molitor5901|1 year ago
I have some distrust in the American voting system, first with the computerized systems, but also that federal elections are run at the state level. With so many states and jurisdictions, I can't help but feel that fraud is happening. If the federal elections process was truly federalized, and funded if it is not already, managed and controlled by the federal government, then I think there could be greater control and security.
ForHackernews|1 year ago
Colorado ballot envelopes already have a bar code - essentially your "serial number".
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because everyone who thinks there's widespread election fraud seems to not know anything about how elections work.
saxonww|1 year ago
zie|1 year ago
SubiculumCode|1 year ago
hollerith|1 year ago
neverartful|1 year ago
Anyways, you would walk into it and throw a big mechanical lever that would close a privacy curtain behind you. Then you would have to manually turn an individual mechanical switch for each choice. When finished voting, you would throw the big mechanical lever back to the original position. Moving the lever back would cause all of your votes to be counted, reset all voting switches, and open the privacy curtains. There were mechanical counters for all possible voting options. Then, when the polls closed the votes would be read off the counters (and presumably verified by multiple individuals) and then reported to the whoever they reported the results to.
This was before the internet, but the same machines could (and should) be used in the internet age. There's nothing to hack into electronically as the voting machines contain no electronics (at least for communications, for sure).
The only big downside is that the machines have to be stored somewhere and they take up a sizable space. Also, they incur expenses to be moved from storage to polling places (and back).
Someone will bring up voters with disabilities, but there were voters with disabilities back then too. I'm sure there was a protocol for accommodating voter disabilities.
All in all, I think it's a sensible and pragmatic solution to thwart hacking and hopefully garner more confidence in voting integrity.
ndiddy|1 year ago
albert_e|1 year ago
As an Indian citizen I see the casual lack of security mindset in large swathe of things implemented by both public and private actors. Many things get better only though iterative failures and corresponding reactive fixes.
What type of failures and improvements have happened here, or instances of demonstrated hardness against those with motivation and access to machinery.
viewtransform|1 year ago
The Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) do simple counting of key presses and keep tally of the totals.
The machines are not reprogrammable, run on alkaline batteries and have no WiFi/Bluetooth, USB or ethernet.
samarthr1|1 year ago
There was an interview with one of the Profs who designed the EVMs here.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
db1234|1 year ago
recursivecaveat|1 year ago
kkielhofner|1 year ago
The US election system is very distributed and fragmented - there is virtually no standardization.
Even in the tightest margins for something like President you'd need to have seriously good data to figure out which random municipality voting system(s) you'd need to target to actually affect the outcome.
akira2501|1 year ago
As you said, no standardization, which means all precincts reports on wildly different time intervals, if you can interfere with just tallying during or after the fact, and you can get the information on other precincts before any other outlets, you could easily take advantage of this.
It's essentially the Superman II version of interfering with an election. Just put your thumb on the scale a little bit everywhere on late precincts all at once.
The fact that so many states let a simple majority of their state take _all_ electors actually makes this possible. If more states removed the Unit Rule and went like Nebraska and Maine this would be far less effective.
ForHackernews|1 year ago
next_xibalba|1 year ago
readthenotes1|1 year ago
brandonmenc|1 year ago
[deleted]