SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the newer-is-not-necessarily-better dept.
The Intercept reports
The nation's secretaries of state gathered for a multi-day National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) conference in Washington, D.C., this weekend, with cybersecurity on the mind.
Panels and lectures centered around the integrity of America's election process, with the federal probe into alleged Russian government attempts to penetrate voting systems a frequent topic of discussion.
[...] One way to allay concerns about the integrity of electronic voting machine infrastructure, however, is to simply not use it. Over the past year, a number of states are moving back towards the use of paper ballots or at least requiring a paper trail of votes cast.
For instance, Pennsylvania just moved to require all voting systems to keep a paper record of votes cast. Prior to last year's elections in Virginia, the commonwealth's board of elections voted to decertify paperless voting machines--voters statewide instead voted the old-fashioned way, with paper ballots.
[...] Oregon is one of two states in the country to require its residents to vote by mail, a system that was established via referendum in 1998. [Oregon Secretary of State Dennis] Richardson argued that this old-fashioned system offers some of the best defense there is against cyber interference.
"We're using paper and we're never involved with the Internet. The Internet is not involved at all until there's an announcement by each of our 36 counties to [the capital] Salem of what the results are and then that's done orally and through a confirmation e-mail and the county clerks in each of the counties are very careful to ensure that the numbers that actually are posted are the ones that they have," he said. "Oregon's in a pretty unique situation."
[...] In New Hampshire, the state uses a hybrid system that includes both paper ballots and machines that electronically count paper ballots with a paper trail.
Karen Ladd, the assistant secretary of state for New Hampshire, touted the merits of the system to The Intercept. "We do a lot of recounts, and you can only have a recount with a paper ballot. You can't do a recount with a machine!" she said.
America's paper ballot states may seem antiquated to some, but our neighbors to the north have used paper ballots for federal elections for their entire history. Thanks to an army of officials at 25,000 election stations, the integrity of Canada's elections is never in doubt.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:55AM
There's two issues here. Having a trustworthy election system and having the average person trust the election system. While an electronic voting system can probably be built to be trustworthy, how do you convince the average person it is trustworthy? It's just as important to convince the losers they lost fairly and as long as it appears to be a black box to most people, it's impossible to trust.
I'm maybe smarter then most when it comes to this stuff and I wouldn't trust electronic voting for anything important no matter who reassured me that the code was formally verified, and I wouldn't trust myself to verify it either.
Compare to how voting works here (Canada), I can watch most of the process, show up in the morning, examine the empty ballot boxes etc and watch the whole procedure till the counting is finished at the end of the day. I also see others doing the same and as they're from all political interests, I feel pretty confident that they'll watch carefully.
There's still the flaw of absentee ballots but it is very few elections where they make a difference besides slightly changing the margin of victory by the odd individual seat changing. Here in BC last election, they did matter and I was happy to see the absentee votes not changing the outcome of the opposition winning the deciding seat.