- Switzerland usually gets around this by knowing where everyone lives and mailing them a piece of paper 'something you have'

- South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your fingernail

I've read quite a bit about the e-voting systems in Switzerland and USA and I just don't see how they thread the needle. At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database.

Until we all have government-issued public keys or something, there isn't a technical solution to this? (Genuinely curious if I'm wrong here)

That being said for the United States, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship, and making "voting day" a paid national holiday. Not so much for technical or efficiency reasons but for social reasons. I'd argue it should be mandatory but I don't think we should force people to do anything we don't have to force them to do, and I'm not sure we want disinterested people voting anyway.

Exercising democracy, requiring people to put in a minimal amount of thought and effort goes a long way. It should be a celebratory day with cookies and apple pie and free beer for all. Not some cold, AI-riddled, stay in your house and never meet your neighbors, clicking a few buttons to accept the Terms of Democracy process.

I know there's a lot of discussion points around "efficiency" or "cost" or "accessibility" or how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections) and there are certainly things to discuss there, but by and large I think the continued digitalization and alienation of Americans is a much worse problem that can be addressed with more in-person activities and participation in society. We're losing too many touchpoints with reality.

> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.

This is why you do parallel paper/electronic voting. Fill it out electronically, it prints a receipt (maybe including a QR code), you mail the receipt (along with the 'classic' absentee voting stuff, i.e. double envelope, proof of eligibility to vote in the outer envelope.)

Oh and as a side effect it can be audited very nicely.

I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database. That is 100% anonymous and can't be cheated. The database is the instant answer at election closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers as confirmation that nothing weird happened.

No way to hack that. If you print something different on the paper the voter will see it. If you try to hack it by printing more papers than actual votes, the paper count won't match the amount of voting passes that you collected/verified when letting people into the polling station.

It may even be safer than the current paper approach, because if the paper vote counters try to cheat their counts won't match the database triggering an investigation as well.

No thanks.

https://scotopia.in/journal/journalbkend/paper_list/v-4-i-1(...

Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

My Līberum Cōnsilium (see references on page 55):

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/delibero/raw/HEAD/docs/manual/...

Make the ballot printout layout a standard format. Then machines from multiple vendors can verify the counts on a subset of the ballots. And as a last resort, the ballots can be hand counted as well.

I have a hard time believing that it collected exactly 2,048 votes by coincidence

For HN I would have expected a more detailed discussion of what could have gone wrong (it seems like a bug in some software package since we have this power of 2 ^ 11 being 2048

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

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

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.

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."

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

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

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.

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...

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 last 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.

Paper ballots with physical marks are easy to track and recount. Digital paper trails are ephemeral. Whom does this benefit? The people counting the ballots.

We vote during the day... polls close in the evening... A few hours later we have the results. Hand counted, for the entire country.

What is the difference?

Edit: I just realized you also mentioned "voter-passes" when entering the voting site. That definitely makes it much harder! If those were corrupted you could still pull it off, but that level of sophistication is really likely to get caught.

Maybe a dual system of paper ballots and e-voting could be good so that they cross check each other. Can't stuff paper ballots without manipulating the digital counter, can't manipulate the digital counter without stuffing ballots. A digital counter also enables meta analysis which could identify suspicious patterns, like a wave of votes for a particular candidate.

For instance, such a system would be immune to corruption. That's one of the major reasons such a system will likely never appear.

And bigger picture, once you prove a system that’s easier, more efficient, reliable… you could expand to more votes on more things. Like… the Swiss do.

—-

(A German advocating for paper-based bureaucracy… whatever next? ;) )

You are misunderstanding "who to trust".

The source of trust in a paper vote election is your party's representative + independent election observers. You believe them that they were sitting at the polling station all day, watching both the voting and counting, and nothing fishy happened. You don't have to trust the state officials in any way, and you don't have to trust any one else either. Just your party - which is kind of the point. The only people you maximally trust is your party.

In your proposal, you are saying that to trust the outcome, I must trust the state officials - the ones who built the machines. Those are exactly the people I distrust to do a fair election.

When I go to cast a vote in Italy I bring with me my state issued photo ID (everybody has one, I mean: must have one) and a state issued sheet of paper with the address of the place I must go to vote and a grid of empty spaces. I don't have to register to vote, basically I'm registered at birth. The people at the polling station take my two cards and look for me in their registry. They mark that I came to vote, stamp an empty space on the second card and handle me the paper ballots. I think that in this way it's both anonymous and verifiable. When the card with the stamps is full, they mail me a new one.

The state definitely know where people live. Babies are registered when they are born and people have to register any change of their address of residence. It's been like that at least since Italy became a country in the 1860s.

By the way, how do I know that they counted my vote as I cast it? I can't know it. I must trust that they did not open the box and replaced the ballots, but people from the several competing parties visit the polling station and can attend the counting. I trust that process much more than something happening inside a computer program.

Sheriff monitors the ballot box (ex. Jimmy Carter's opponent).

Only allow loyalists to count the result (and then report w/e you want; ex. Russia).

So paper systems require ballot boxes and polling stations for the vast majority, which makes elections expensive, complicated, and generally problematic. And unpopular, with low turnout, particularly during flu season and pandemic.