Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens.

This is where such arguments tend to get stuck in the US. If you require proof of citizenship, but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expensive, then you are effectively restricting voting access for citizens. A measure to place stricter qualifications on voting access needs to also carefully consider and account for providing access to all citizens.

The US is a geographically very large place with worse public transportation options compared to many other countries, and with that comes differences in economic and accessibility considerations for things like "Just go to your county's office and get a qualifying ID."

This would be less of a problem if the US had some sort of national ID issued by right, but we don't, and the same people pushing for requiring ID for voting would be against creating one. They hate the idea of a national ID.

My state does all elections by mail now. How would this even work?

All this is on top of the fact that elections are run by the states, not the national government. Would such a law even be constitutional?

Even if it were a holiday, people may not be able to travel or take time off from obligations. There’s no obligation to drive 2 hours to vote, to fly back if you work in another country, or to go get a new birth certificate because Real ID doesn’t prove citizenship even though you provide citizenship documents to it when you get one…

I’ve heard of a lot of takes here about what we should do for voting to make it “more secure” but all of this is actually a solution for a problem we just don’t have.

I'm not sure how it is in Switzerland, but in Canada I will vote for maybe three candidates in five years. And I don't mean three visits to the polls (though it's usually that), I mean three actual checkbox ticks for people to count. They're paper ballots and the counting is done that night. I think if we were stuck voting for like forty different races every two years it would be a very different story and a lot of what you say would resonate with me more. Except the voter registration stuff.

We're pretty flexible about registration up here and it works. My wife one year showed up with some mail that had her name/address, and me vouching for her. Though I think a lot of the luxuries of democracy are most easily enjoyed with a trusting, cooperative culture that isn't constantly wound up about being cheated by the others.

The problem with e-voting is that it is much harder to validate. My paper ballot rests at a community building where it will be counted on the day of the vote. I can understand the process from start to finish in physical terms. Throw in a USB stick and anything could happen. It is possible we will never know what went wrong here.

Isn't this just a solution in search of a problem though? Multiple investigations have discovered absolutely minuscule amount of non-citizen voting in US elections. It's something that seems reasonable on its face but lacks any purpose and comes with an ulterior motive that it is part of the made up GOP talking points of a "stolen election" and "illegals voting".

But then they showed how easy it is to hack and we live in a world with evil countries like the US, China and Russia who want to destroy our way of life.

Go and try to figure out how to do this from scratch. Imagine your house burned down and you need to start with "nothing".

If your parents are still alive you can use them to bootstrap the process of getting those vital documents (or if you're married that can be another semi viable path).

Pitty if you don't have those resources. Furthermore it might get complicated for any partner who adopts their other partners first name (were talking about getting the documents, before you can get some sort of verified ID).

The reality is we don't have a lot of instances of "voter fraud" committed by people who aren't citizens (see: https://www.facebook.com/Louisianasos/posts/secretary-of-sta... as an example) . And the amount of voter fraud we do have is very small (and ironically committed by citizens see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio... for some examples).

> I am in favor of in-person voting

Again, the size and dispersion of the American population makes this odious. Dense urban areas will face lines (they already do) and many of them (Chicago) have moved to early voting because spreading things out over many days is just more effective. Meanwhile places like Montana (where population density is in people per square mile) make travel to a location burdensome.

I get why you feel the way you do, but the data, the reality of America, makes what you desire unnecessary and impractical. Feelings are a terrible reason to erect this barrier when it makes little sense to do so.

In Canada, at both federal and provincial levels, you walk up to a desk and identify yourself, are crossed off a list, and handed a paper ballot. You go behind a screen, mark an X on the ballot, fold it up, take it back out to another desk, and put it in the box. It's extraordinarily simple.

> At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database.

Well, that kind of fraud is a different issue from someone reading the database and figuring out who someone voted for (you just... don't record identities in the database).

It's not that there are no checks. You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. To vote more than once you'd have to pretend to be somebody else, in person, which means that if you're caught you will go to jail.

We could certainly do better, but thus far all efforts to defeat this non-problem are clearly targeted at making it harder for people to vote rather than any kind of election integrity.

You can use homomorphic encryption or mixnets to prove that:

1) all valid votes were counted

2) no invalid votes were added

3) the totals for each candidate is correct

And you can do that without providing proof of who any particular voter voted for. A few such systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting

https://www.belenios.org/

Authentication to these systems is another issue - there are problems with mailing people credentials (what if they discard them in the trash?).

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ontario-municipal-elections-o...

Estonia (a major adopter of online voting) solves this with the national identity card, which essentially is government issued public/private keys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card

Lots of cyber risks with the use of online voting though, especially in jurisdictions without standards/certification. I outline many in my thesis which explores the risks to online elections in Ontario, Canada (one of the largest and longest-running users of online voting in the world)

https://uwo.scholaris.ca/items/705a25de-f5df-4f2d-a2c1-a07e9...

[0] https://satoss.uni.lu/members/jun/papers/CSR13.pdf

[1] https://fc16.ifca.ai/voting/papers/ABBT16.pdf

That's actually pretty common in Europe. The Spanish DNI (national identity card) has a chip these days, which gives you an authenticated key pair for accessing digital services.

In the pilot project for digital voting, that identity is only used to authenticate the user, and then an anonymous key needs generated that can be used to cast the final vote.

This is of course flawed because a person can be coerced to share their ID. In which case you could have a system in which the vote itself is encrypted and the encryption key is private. Any random encryption key works and will yield a valid vote (actual vote = public vote + private key), so under coercion you can always generate a key that will give the output that you want, but only you know the real one.

This is true, but its used in other countries as well, as it's a simple, effective, low-tech, affordable process.

Most notably in India https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/02/style/india-elections-pur...

but also in many other countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_ink#International_use

It's the only problem in existence that can be solved by the blockchain...

Contrary to what nerds think, the goal of elections isn't to get bulletproof results by mathematical standards. The goal is to create agreeable consent among those who voted. A good election system is one where even sworn enemies can begrudgingly agree on the result.

A paper ballot system has the advantage that it can be monitored by any group that has members which have mastered the skill of object permanence and don't lie. That is not everybody, but it is much better than any hypothetical digital system

Good luck hacking in-person voting or even "physical" mail voting from the other side of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil