There's a whole bunch of ways in which electronic voting machines raise concerns over domestic or foreign interference, and also there's a *lot* of safeguards that make it difficult in the first place or which allow identification after the fact. Experts in the field consistently assert that (a) we should be doing better, and (b) that there's zero evidence that there has every been any interference at that level
@mjg59 my concern with electronic voting machines is that even with no evidence of interference, they provide a breeding ground for mistrust and conspiracy theories. Because to most people they are utterly opaque, regardless of what verification exists in principle, whereas the counting of paper ballots is generally easy to understand.
@beardyandrew I do not think they're a great idea! Optical scan feels like a strong trade-off between speed and trust, but also if you're coming from UK elections the whole thing feels kind of confusing because you are not used to having to vote on 50 different things on the same ballot
https://www.voting.works/ produces open source electronic voting solutions that are carefully designed to be as transparent as possible, but any electronic device has enough complexity in it that there will be people asking questions. And if the past month has taught us anything, it's that being open source doesn't mean that something is magically free of security vulnerabilities (no shade on Votingworks, I think their designs are as secure as possible with current tech),
Electronic voting machines that involve hardcopies of every vote are the best way, IMO.
It allows you to randomly select a number of voting boxes to double check the tally by hand to ensure there's no funny business going on, but to do the majority of counting electronically for speed.
@mjg59
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@wouter …and allow the voter to validate the hardcopy before confirming their vote (you don't want to give the voter a copy because that enables the whole vote buying thing)
Oh yes, indeed! I considered that so obvious as to not merit mention, but yeah, duh.
@mjg59 I recently got shown a demo of one of the votingworks machines and even got to take part in a mock election where we got to use one of the machines to cast votes. I've been naturally skeptical of electronic voting for a long time but the VW machine was very well designed, answers to the audience's questions were all sensible and it gave me a lot of confidence that e-voting could be made to work. But they're not as widely used as their competitors yet and I don't know if I'd trust other manufacturers as much