Russia launched an attack on USA political system

[Riedquat]

Just going to say it: by 'not counted', I meant 'actively discounted'.

I'm saying the system's rigged.

Very hard to do with paper ballots and the correct system. It would be much easier to rig an electronic system; in the paper one there are lots of people who can see exactly what is going on all of the time, but who knows what might be happening in the electronics and software?

[Darth Wedgius]

I could be mistaken but Voting Machines are thing only in USA. To they think that most Americans can't write name on paper because at least that's how it does seems to me.

You are mistaken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroni ... by_country. And it should be pretty obvious that a written name is more laborious to process than an electronically recorded vote, a darkened circle, or a checked box. And it should be pretty obvious that "most" Americans being able to do something is only good enough if you don't mind excluding large minorities.

[Darth Wedgius]

Just going to say it: by 'not counted', I meant 'actively discounted'.

I'm saying the system's rigged.

If you mean Trump vs. Gore, even the New York Times said that by pretty much any standard, Bush won the Florida re-count. If you mean a vast conspiracy manipulating current votes... Never mind.

[Darth Wedgius]

I like electronic voting, mostly to remove ambiguities like hanging chads, smudged circles, etc., that seem to hard to get rid of as long as we allow humans to vote.

But it does make the vote a bit easier to hack. I can think of ways to allow each voter to check that their own vote was recorded, but not to ensure that it was counted, at least not without anonymity.

Say the user enters his vote and hits a "ready to submit" button, then gets two slips of paper. One has 32 random hex digits (from 0 to 9 or from A to F, inclusive), the votes, and a cryptographic hash of the random number and the votes. All that information is made public. Someone can then look up their random number and the hash in a public list of the votes.

But how do you know that the voting authority isn't just releasing those records, but with their own total? It's easy if you make the votes public record too, but then you lose anonymity and, given the talk in some circles about making certain voters pay, I'm not sure how comfortable people would be with that.

You can probably use an electronic machine to record someone's votes and then print out a slip to be submitted, with more reliability than humans punching out chads or filling circles, for a modestly better voting process, I suppose.

[Jonathan101]

Thank God I live in a country where I just have to draw an "X" on a piece of paper.

[Admiral X]

In my state we have paper ballots, which are then scanned, much like the standardized tests I took growing up.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Yeah, our voting machines are easier to hack than alien space-ships in Independence Day.
https://xkcd.com/2030/

[ProfessorDetective]

You can probably use an electronic machine to record someone's votes and then print out a slip to be submitted, with more reliability than humans punching out chads or filling circles, for a modestly better voting process, I suppose.

Hmm. That's not bad.

[Yukaphile]

Point being, we've had questions as to the accuracy of electronic polls ever since 2000. We need serious reform, but you just won't get that passed under the current Congress.

[Riedquat]

I just don't see the point of electronic voting. The potential problems outweigh the issues with voting using paper ballots, and the only real downside of the paper ballots is the effort involved with counting them, but that's something that seems to get managed perfectly well. It smacks of "things have to be high tech these days and paper isn't high tech therefore it needs to be changed" which is a pretty poor reason.