> Nearly every demonstration of voting machine hacking has required unrestricted physical access to the machine and tools/keys.

For that to be any consolation, we’d have to unconditionally trust those who have physical access to the machine and tools/keys.

Such trust is not necessary with paper ballots because they can always be hand-counted with supervision from both sides of a disputed election.

A vote count given by an electronic machine has no such auditability.

> Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.

“Hacking” a stack of paper, e.g. ballot stuffing or destroying ballots, is something people can see happen. It’s not impossible, but it is very difficult to do out in the open with security cameras and the public there to watch. Not to say it doesn’t happen, but you tend to make a much bigger mess doing it.

Also, today an observer can take a video and instantly publish it on the Internet if something fishy is happening in the polling station, but nobody can see what happens inside a voting machine and whether it counts the votes properly. Electronic voting is a perfect tool for falsifying election results.

I appreciate your perspective, but these issues should be dealt with by citizens. It is not a global issue how the USA handles its elections. Foreigners weighing-in scare the shit out of our old people. That's how we get epithets like (((globalists))).

>Such trust is not necessary with paper ballots because they can always be hand-counted with supervision from both sides of a disputed election.

That assumes they aren't replaced at some point. For a nation-level election this is probably too difficult to significantly influence an election but at even a state level it's relatively doable with a little coercion and/or carefully placed individuals even in 2019 in the United States.

You also have the option to do voter impersonation in states without voting ID laws, again this would mostly only work at a more local level.

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud documents 1052 CONVICTIONS of voter fraud in the United States with 1,216 proven instances.

Outside of the United States there are all sorts of examples, including standing out the polling places with force to let people know vote our way or we'll shoot you.

What you describe can be easily detected by an observer, who can take a video and instantly publish it on the Internet. You cannot take a ballot from the box so that nobody notices. But with electronic voting, you can replace the firmware and nobody notices anything.

>What you describe can be easily detected by an observer,

Have you never heard of bribes or threats? It happens with juries, I imagine it happens with poling places, and I imagine some of those convictions involved exactly that.

If you've reached a point where you are willing to tamper with an election, greasing some palms or finding something to threaten key people with is not going to make you lose a single wink of sleep or have any mental reservations or other hesitations. People like money, like a lot, and if you haven't the funds to bribe them with the 21st century offers a horde easily discoverable information about people and those close to them.

Also, here in Russia, people who are observers, are often opposition activists, who dislike the government and for example take part in illegal protests and get arrested for this. This is the type of people that would be most difficult to bribe.

I'm not saying that electoral system in Russia is perfect; it is constantly manipulated by authorities. They are very inventive and develop new techniques every time. Nobody can be trusted, because we saw how the head of central election committee was looking for excuses to justify banning opposition candidates that you mention and ignore their objections. The meetings were livestreamed and I watched hours of such videos trying to clear up everything for myself.

But this allows us to see what measures to ensure transparency work in such circumstances and what don't. We see that independent observers and paper voting at polling stations help to prevent fraud and electronic voting would be completely opaque and uncontrollable.

You banned so much stuff, you created the most powerful black market in the world: The Russian Mob.

I'm sorry to report that I feel your government is at war with my country.

> Sure, let's do like Russia and ban opposition candidates[0] from running in the first place

Holy whataboutism. Yes Russia is a far cry from a healthy democracy but that has no bearing in any way on paper ballots. You seem to have just changed the subject entirely.

Both sides of the political spectrum are increasingly believing that elections are not fair, and it's far easier for people to believe conspiracies (true or not) when electronic voting machines are involved. At some point we will lose the ability to peacefully transition power.

A successful voting process both accurately counts the votes, and is trusted by the people. Computers can count, but they are not seen as trustworthy by the people. Paper is more understandable and trustworthy. Even as a computer programmer I'm not sure I can trust electronic voting.

Thus, even in the absence of any actual hacks or fraud, electronic voting is inferior at a primary objective of the voting system, being understandable and perceived as trustworthy.

Election commitee (or whatever it is called in different countries) has unlimited and uncontrolled physical access to those machines and their keys. What stops them from uploading a firmware that would count every N-th vote for candidate A no matter what was voter's choice? How do you detect that?

Unlike electronic voting, paper ballots are much more difficult to manipulate. If a voter has marked a box for candidate X, you cannot change it or ignore it if there are observers. An observer can verify that voting goes according to the rules and votes are counted properly. The most popular way to "hack" paper voting is to organise groups of people and ride them on a bus from one polling station to other so that they can vote multiple times, but it is more difficult to do, and easier to spot than simply replace the firmware in a voting machine.

In the case with an electronic machine, you cannot see what's happening inside.

In Canada, each person is assigned to a polling station, typically a school, church, or community center near their residence. You present ID at the door and your name is crossed off a paper list. Your name is not on the list at any other polling stations.

You have the option to mail in your vote or to vote in an advance poll, but these options close a week before the main poll, so if your name appears on the list at your polling station, they're pretty confident you haven't voted yet.

How does one “simply replace the firmware” is a way that isn’t trivial to spot by an observer?

Assuming there is no external IO such as USB or Ethernet, someone would have to disassemble the machine and solder a programming header in order to re-flash the device.

Replace the firwmare (or even the whole motherboard) long before election day when there are no observers yet.

> to disassemble the machine

Is it that difficult?

Hack voting machines: trick or bribe an election worker to plug a USB drive into all the machines a week before the election.

Hack paper ballots: bribe the multiple people, including representatives from each party who cares to send one, to look the other way while you steal a box full of paper ballots and substitute your own.

It’s not impossible, but it’s much harder to mess with paper ballots at scale and much easier to secure them.

>Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.

No they arent. You need one guy with physical access to to a machine, at any time, to screw an election, with manual counting you need everyone in the room conspiring to rig the election during the voting hours. With the possibility to volunteer to count votes and publishing the voting numbers for each voting station, you just dont get those situations.

I know its an unpopular statement, but having a democratic election is not a new problem to solve. Most western countries do it just fine. This is not a problem with the concept of paper ballots but a absurdly broken system.

Electronic voting machines run proprietary code which, AFAIK, was never publicly audited (AFAIK, the manufacturers have resisted auditing efforts bitterly).

How can you trust that the machine will behave as you expect in a "real world" setting, when the results truly count?

IMHO, the biggest risk from electronic voting machines isn't some rando swinging the elections with their 1337 haxx0r skills: the biggest risk is that the machines basically come "pre-hacked" from the factory - either intentionally, or unintentionally (bugs happen).

My concern is with the officials themselves. Everyone should be treated as untrustworthy.

In Minnesota, the problem of individual untrustworthiness is handled by putting multiple people on every task - and those people must be from different political parties. So any time ballots are handled, marked or unmarked, members of at least two different parties are present.

So simple, so effective.

That's how it works in the 9 states I've lived in personally.

Translate that concern into action. Volunteer to be an election official yourself and keep an eye on everyone else. Participate in how this thing works. It's really rewarding.