Comment by atoav
4 hours ago
While these all are problems, the REAL problem is that the goal of elections isn't to get scientifically or mathematically verifiably correct results. The goal is to produce agreeable consent.
That means it doesn't matter one bit how correct you are if the regular Joe does believe you tricked. Adding computers into the mix always makes this worse. And again, this is not something you can fix with clever solutions and cryptography (that admittedly fascinates me nonetheless), the problem is that people can't see electricity generally and I something at the scale of a computer, even if you could it would be utterly meaningless.
This is why the paper ballot system is so glorious in its stupid inefficiency, because it spreads the trust in a way any adult who has mastered object permanence can verify for themselves. Invite the conflicting parties to monitor and have them begrudgingly admit their defeat in the face of the simple, inefficient but agreeable process.
This is why I as a cryptography fan, programmer and hardware guy think electronic voting is not up to the task for high stakes elections.
> glorious in its stupid inefficiency, because it spreads the trust
What is the goal? Having fancy crypto or people being confident about elections?
If spreading the trust is the goal what makes you say "inefficient". It is orders of magnitude better then any crypto system.
GP means inefficient in the sense of cost. Paper ballots add costs. Partial manual audits / hand-counts add costs. Full audits / hand-counts add a lot of cost, and in particular hand-counts require a lot of staff in order to yield results on election night.
The costliest item is counting by hand, so... don't. Use ballot scanning and counting machines and then implement a timely partial manual audit to demonstrate that the BMDs and BSCDs functioned correctly.
Full hand count is a feature not a cost. The more people involved and see democracy happen and have actual agency in making it happen the better.
Automating any of the process is (imho) harmful to above.
As I wrote in another comment we had to repeat local state elections because of problems in the paper process - including shortages of ballot papers, unusually long queues to vote, ballots being delivered to the wrong locations, and in some cases voters being turned away.
While I’m a proponent of the paper process let’s not pretend it immediately means you can be confident about the election
Oh, you absolutely can and it worked in your state. There were problems with the process and you had to repeat the election for people to be confident. People can understand all problems of the above.
With some abstract math and computers? Any real or imaginary issues are incomprehensible to most of the voters and concerns can be easily shooed away.