alt Hacker NewsLiving in Estonia, I have a hard time deciding how I feel about this voting system.
Currently, with people trusting the government, this system is great. I can just cast my vote online, like I do everything else here, and I can be reasonably sure that my vote is counted thanks to the aforementioned trust in the system.
But I really fear the day that trust erodes.
On the other hand, though, once the trust is gone, I think it doesn’t really matter whether it’s an analog or digital count. People won’t trust the system anyways.
Then again, there’s a lot of nuances and different levels of trust, which is the reason why I don’t know what the right answer is.
Replies
It's easier to restore the security of elections run with paper ballots because people can get involved locally. It's not possible to steal numerous paper-based elections in a row -- at some point the thieves' energy/funding runs out and security can be restored. With a digital system, if the system is changed to be vulnerable, or if it always was, then there is no way to recover.
The advantage of paper ballots is that the possible ways that the system can be rigged are technologically limited. Either ballots are forged or ballot are miscounted. Both are mitigated by having election officials physically present who validate that voter registrations are valid and that counting is being done accurately, and having those officials be made up of representatives from each participating political party.
Then the defense-in-depth is that paper ballots are inherently decentralized. Even if you manage to pull off a complex operation to rig ballots at a local voting location, you'd have to do the same at hundreds or thousands of other locations to affect the results of the election.