Looks like we're about to have the same voting/election discussion we've had at least 5 times over the past month or so. If anyone's interested in reading what's already been discussed, here are links to the previous threads:<p>"American Elections Will Be Hacked"
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921967" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921967</a><p>"Maryland will audit all votes cast in general election"
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885396" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885396</a><p>"Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability"
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883356" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883356</a><p>"In Pennsylvania, Claims of a Rigged Election May Be Impossible to Disprove"
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790247" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790247</a><p>"Votes could be counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers"
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841178" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841178</a>
Why do Americans use voting machines exactly? I mean, it just prints out their choice at the end right? What benefit do they actually gain from having pressed buttons instead of using a pen? It just seems to fuel the hacking conspiracy every time a president is elected.<p>In the UK we turn up, go into the booth with the paper slip, and tick our choice with a pen. Then we fold it and post it into a container which later gets shipped off to the counting room. I just can't understand why you guys have to physically turn up if you are just going to select your answer on a computer anyway.
This is missing the point though.<p>The american voting system is actually very secure.<p>It's highly decentralized, machines are not connected to the internet, implemented in many different ways, which means that they would have to do many attacks many different places without being discovered to even have an effect.<p>75% of them have paper trails which would require an even bigger achievement to change enough off as it's again highly distributed and decentralized, and it would require mostly physical presence to do it. And thats just a few of the things that makes this more or less impossible.<p>A bigger concern is access to the actual voter databases but what they can there there is mostly creating chaos which would obviously be horrible but have no effect on voting.<p>The biggest problem is actually when examples like these spread without the above consideration as that can trigger the population to loose faith in a system that is probably as safe as it has ever been.<p>P.S. I am highly supportive of whistleblowers like Snowden but this is missing the point.
It's interesting to view recent events in the US as a crisis of measurement. The news media measured the voting public with polling samples, we then measured the voting public with a vast government apparatus. Clearly, the measurements did not agree. Logically there are three possibilities: the media was right, the polls were right, or neither were right.<p>It's actually quite a good thing that we start to speak openly about threat-models against all voter sentiment measuring tools, especially the official ones.
This headline massively misconstrues Snowden's role and technical capacity in any such voting machine hack. Snowden merely said that it could be done, and pointed to a video published by Cylance.
Why hasn't some state used a hash to allow trustworthy online voting? They could add a unique id on the back of your driver's license and then allow you to use your unique id to generate anonymous/one time use id's. They could then have a publicly accessible server that at all time displays a column with anonymous id, vote and every person can verify that their personal vote is correctly displayed.
E-Voting can be easily solved with ID cards combined with something similar to the blockchain so that you can verify your vote if you need to.<p>The technology is there but I don't think there is any incentive to make it happen.<p>The only problem that I can see is that we cannot be certain that any e-voting technology will survive future information security research and as a result the design needs to factor continuous upgrades.
Wouldn't a voting system that let people confirm that their vote is taken into account be trivial to implement?<p>I can't believe we still rely on trust for this kind of thing.