E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 22:40 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
In reply to: E-vote advocates still don't get it... by HenrikH
Parent article: Cryptography and elections

That's not what e-voting is. E-voting is about online voting, not having electronic voting machines.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Feb 1, 2020 13:11 UTC (Sat) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

E-voting is about electronic voting with no paper-trail. It is about having to trust exclusively the correctness of electronics and software with no means of recounting of physical ballots.

Online voting is the amplification of the problems with e-voting to the n-th degree.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Feb 1, 2020 13:33 UTC (Sat) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link] (1 responses)

No it's not. E-voting is Electronic Voting, which for most discussions relate to using electronic voting machines at the voting facility.

Online voting would allow vote buying and vote bullying on a massive industrial scale no matter how you implement it which is why even the die hard e-voting advocates are seeing the problems with that.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Feb 1, 2020 14:00 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

The thing is, it's not "using electronic voting machines" that folks take issue with; it's the so-called DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) ones -- where the official vote only exists in electronic form, making it pretty much impossible to prove that what a voter entered was actually/accurately recorded. And no, spitting out a receipt or audit log is insufficient, as that proves nothing.

Instead, the ones that are considered acceptable are those that print out a completed paper ballot based on the voter's choices. That printed ballot is the actual legal ballot, which the voter can double-check before submitting/stuffing into a ballot box. Even if the ballot is electronically scanned as the next step, the physical ballot still exists and can be audited or manually counted.