ElectronicVoting

Quora Answer : In the U.K., we vote with paper and pencil. I am a software engineer, and I feel that a tech solution is simpler. Why doesn’t the U.K. use an electronic voting system?

Jun 8, 2017

Electronic voting you can trust is REALLY, REALLY hard.

The problem is this :

Most computer security relies on being able to tie users to their actions. Eg. in Unix, all actions are committed by known users with pre-granted permissions. You can look at logs to find out who did what. And track down people who have done the wrong thing.

But voting needs to be anonymous. It needs to NOT be possible to tie votes back to who cast them.

That's a major mismatch.

If you can't trace who cast each vote, how can you prove that someone cast the vote at all? And that the vote wasn't inserted into the database by a hacker somewhere along the line?

Any kind of technological solution to this, requires that voters put their trust somewhere :

Either

a) the voting machine company who says "our machines can't be fiddled with". (Thanks. But as a software engineer myself, I wouldn't trust Diebold or any other company as far as I could throw them.) Or an institution who audits the machine. (Not much better.)

Or

b) some kind of advanced mathematical algorithm. As a software engineer I might trust something like a blockchain with "coin-mixing" type anonymization solution ... in principle. But I certainly don't feel qualified to look at code implementing some complex algorithm and be sure that it's doing exactly what it says without errors.

And that's me.

For 99.999% of the UK population, the words "trust us because it's on a blockchain with a "coin-mixer" type anonymization" are going to instil zero confidence.

The nice thing about pieces of paper with pencil crosses is that we all intuitively understand that if you plan to make hundreds of thousands of them either appear or disappear surreptitiously, the very physicality and bulk of those pieces of paper works against you. The number of people required to help organize and manage them works against you. The chances are that someone else involved in the handling of those pieces of paper and ballot-boxes will see you and call you out.

But if you move to an electronic system where hundreds of thousands of votes can be added or taken away simply by changing records in a database, invisible to the human eye, in a system managed by a handful of specialists, then it's much easier to fiddle it.