The UK system

Posted Jul 26, 2018 20:26 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
Parent article: Security quotes of the week

means that votes COULD be traced, but would need a serious insider attack.

When you turn up at the polling station, you are given a ballot, and the serial number is recorded on the voter list. The completed ballot is placed in a sealed box.

When the voting station closes, the voter list goes in one direction to secure storage. The ballot papers go off to the town hall to be counted. That is the LAST time the voter list and the ballot papers are in close proximity.

So to find out how someone voted you need to (a) know their voting station, (b) gain access to the voter lists, and (c) be able to search through the ballot papers to find their ballot. Do-able, but far from trivial.

Cheers,
Wol

The UK system

Posted Jul 26, 2018 23:09 UTC (Thu) by ErikF (subscriber, #118131) [Link]

The Canadian system also has serial numbers on the ballots, but the DRO (deputy returning officer)'s responsibility to remove the counterfoil, so there should be no way of tracing a vote to a voter once the ballot has cast. IMO, this is as private as you can probably get, while still preventing fraud.

The UK system

Posted Jul 27, 2018 9:36 UTC (Fri) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

It has to be considered in context too - probably any basic non-terrible voting system would be considered trustworthy* in the UK (ranked 8th best in the Corruption Perceptions Index), but would suffer from alleged widespread interference in, say, Pakistan (ranked 117 out of 180).

(* ignoring a few lunatics saying you should use pen instead of pencil, else MI5 will rub out your mark and change your vote)

If you don't have a society that strongly respects and enforces laws, and a free press that will investigate abuses and push for action to be taken even against the government's wishes, then I suspect no brilliant technical solution for voting will really be good enough. If you do live in a good society, you should be alright as long as you avoid pathetically bad technical solutions (like, say, most current electronic voting systems).