Brazil has been using electronic voting country-wide for more than a decade and no party complains about its security - everyone considers them much more secure than the old and easy-to-tamper-with paper ballots.
I honestly don't understand why there is such bias against electronic voting on Slashdot since, in theory, it's a "nerd community".
Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot
Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot of effort at all. Any voting system can be compromised. I don't honestly understand why the Slashdot community dislike e-voting that much.
Paper-ballot voting can also be verified by anyone, skilled or not. That is one of the most important parts of an election: that virtually anyone can check on the process.
There are also no chances of accidental errors with paper-ballot voting, while bugs in electronic voting machines [blackboxvoting.org] are known to have caused votes to be lost in the past.
Furthermore, you're talking as if paper ballot voting is without any protection at all. At least in Belgium,
all political parties have the right to send a single witness to
These methods you mention surely work for Belgium. When you've got a small country, with a relatively small population size, where vote coercion probably is a very minor issue (if a problem at all), it's much easier. The overhead of e-voting is probably not worth it.
However, consider a different situation, in which you have voting locations in extreme places such as the middle of the Amazon rainforest (and dropping the containers in the river is a real possibility), in a country of 5500+ cities spread throu
These methods you mention surely work for Belgium. When you've got a small country, with a relatively small population size, where vote coercion probably is a very minor issue (if a problem at all), it's much easier. The overhead of e-voting is probably not worth it.
Actually, about half of Belgium has voted electronically during the past elections. The process I described was for the part that still votes on paper, but there are plans to switch everyone to electronic voting.
However, consider a different situation, in which you have voting locations in extreme places such as the middle of the Amazon rainforest (and dropping the containers in the river is a real possibility), in a country of 5500+ cities spread throughout a hufe territory and in a lot of those cities some local authorities are more powerful than the police itself.
Suddenly, all these methods don't work. In the developed areas and large cities, these methods you described would work. In the most remote areas, however, e-voting was able to stop a lot of the election fraud which was going on.
According to the related Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] page it indeed seems to have helped in Brazil, and I indeed assumed a properly working system of checks by society during the election process.
Anyway, I was just explaining why "there is such bias against electronic voting on Slashdot since, in theory, it's a "nerd community"." Most Slashdotters know that it's incredibly hard to write completely bug-free software, and I guess most of them come from places where it is possible to organise elections that are generally guaranteed to be fair by local authorities.
Of course, all of the scandals that have erupted since the introduction of electronic voting don't help (in Belgium we have also already had problems with voting machines registering more cast votes than registered voters in some cases).
Individual paper-trails are actually forbidden by law, as that would make voting non-anonymous.
An individual paper trail would not make the voting non-anonymous (in fact, as of the next election they plan to finally start doing that in Belgium). Such individually printed paper ballots would not contain any indication of who cast them, and they obviously would be deposited into a secure container at the voting office just like regular paper ballots (so they can be counted afterwards if necessary).
Actually, they're even considering eliminating or restricting access to the end-of-day paper trail here for the sake of anonimity. Each voter here goes to a predetermined voting location (so you can't go to any voting location as you please).
In city elections in small towns, some minor roles will require maybe a couple hundred votes to be elected. Let's say a politician has "bought" the votes of 50 people from one given voting location but he only gets 10 votes in that location. Or worse, let's say it's a s
"Be there. Aloha."
-- Steve McGarret, _Hawaii Five-Oh_
"insecure electronic voting" (Score:3, Interesting)
This is terribly biased.
Brazil has been using electronic voting country-wide for more than a decade and no party complains about its security - everyone considers them much more secure than the old and easy-to-tamper-with paper ballots.
I honestly don't understand why there is such bias against electronic voting on Slashdot since, in theory, it's a "nerd community".
Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot of effort at all. Any voting system can be compromised. I don't honestly understand why the Slashdot community dislike e-voting that much.
Paper-ballot voting can also be verified by anyone, skilled or not. That is one of the most important parts of an election: that virtually anyone can check on the process.
There are also no chances of accidental errors with paper-ballot voting, while bugs in electronic voting machines [blackboxvoting.org] are known to have caused votes to be lost in the past.
Furthermore, you're talking as if paper ballot voting is without any protection at all. At least in Belgium,
Re: (Score:2)
These methods you mention surely work for Belgium. When you've got a small country, with a relatively small population size, where vote coercion probably is a very minor issue (if a problem at all), it's much easier. The overhead of e-voting is probably not worth it.
However, consider a different situation, in which you have voting locations in extreme places such as the middle of the Amazon rainforest (and dropping the containers in the river is a real possibility), in a country of 5500+ cities spread throu
Re:"insecure electronic voting" (Score:2)
These methods you mention surely work for Belgium. When you've got a small country, with a relatively small population size, where vote coercion probably is a very minor issue (if a problem at all), it's much easier. The overhead of e-voting is probably not worth it.
Actually, about half of Belgium has voted electronically during the past elections. The process I described was for the part that still votes on paper, but there are plans to switch everyone to electronic voting.
However, consider a different situation, in which you have voting locations in extreme places such as the middle of the Amazon rainforest (and dropping the containers in the river is a real possibility), in a country of 5500+ cities spread throughout a hufe territory and in a lot of those cities some local authorities are more powerful than the police itself.
Suddenly, all these methods don't work. In the developed areas and large cities, these methods you described would work. In the most remote areas, however, e-voting was able to stop a lot of the election fraud which was going on.
According to the related Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] page it indeed seems to have helped in Brazil, and I indeed assumed a properly working system of checks by society during the election process.
Anyway, I was just explaining why "there is such bias against electronic voting on Slashdot since, in theory, it's a "nerd community"." Most Slashdotters know that it's incredibly hard to write completely bug-free software, and I guess most of them come from places where it is possible to organise elections that are generally guaranteed to be fair by local authorities.
Of course, all of the scandals that have erupted since the introduction of electronic voting don't help (in Belgium we have also already had problems with voting machines registering more cast votes than registered voters in some cases).
Individual paper-trails are actually forbidden by law, as that would make voting non-anonymous.
An individual paper trail would not make the voting non-anonymous (in fact, as of the next election they plan to finally start doing that in Belgium). Such individually printed paper ballots would not contain any indication of who cast them, and they obviously would be deposited into a secure container at the voting office just like regular paper ballots (so they can be counted afterwards if necessary).
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, they're even considering eliminating or restricting access to the end-of-day paper trail here for the sake of anonimity. Each voter here goes to a predetermined voting location (so you can't go to any voting location as you please).
In city elections in small towns, some minor roles will require maybe a couple hundred votes to be elected. Let's say a politician has "bought" the votes of 50 people from one given voting location but he only gets 10 votes in that location. Or worse, let's say it's a s