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Belgium has regional elections on Sunday, voting machines use USB sticks and store votes on a Linux partition which users will be prompted to format when using Windows, deleting all the votes
@rubenvanassche:
Belgium has it's regional elections this sunday, the voting machines are using USB sticks and store the votes on a separate Linux partition. But the stick should also be used on windows which wil ask the users to format it and so it will delete all the votes. 😮
I'd rather go out and help count paper ballots than have the security risks of an electronic voting system. Maybe I should call/mail my representatives and tell them that.
Yes, you should.
Electronic ballots really only seem to offer an advantage to the malfeasant.
Tests made by some of our best universities showed that the Brazilian electronic ballot is unsafe. I'm not even sure if such a system could ever be safe enough, because the same hack that changes a single vote could very well change a million ones. This a zero fault tolerance environment in my view. With paper ballots fraud is still possible, but changing one million votes is much harder than changing just one.
And yet we use those electronic ballots for every single election in our country.
There really is no good reason to have electronic voting...
Here's a video that explains some of the problems with electronic voting.
And it's tech people who say this. Everything is backwards and slow but voting is suddenly where politicians push for more computers!
Confusing mistakes are beneficial to them
I agree, there is nothing wrong with having a machine-friendly ballots, but there has to be some physical evidence left. This is very useful for audits, history and transparency of elections.
To be fair, complex but better voting schemes (Condorcet & friends) would be an argument in favor. But I think the drawbacks are still greater than the advantages.
Every technical expert says 'Run!' when it comes to electronic voting.
It isn't necessary, and doesn't make voting easier.
It can make vote counting a few days quicker, but that's all.
Faster vote counting, and a removal of all trust.
There are experimental designs for trustworthy electronic voting - but nobody is willing to subject themselves to the rigour necessary.
... So use paper. Counting scales well, and it's easy to verify and re-verify.
If the experts in the field, who are incentivised to get you to use their field, are telling you it's a bad idea... Maybe you should listen.
The thing is, vote counting being quicker isn't something I want anyways! I'd much rather have a long wait to find out who wins with the safety of paper ballots, than the ease of electronic voting with the massive amounts of security risks that come hand in hand.
Indeed, waiting doesn't seem to bother us much in Washington state! I'm a big advocate of our ballot system; we vote by mail with paper ballots. We will be getting our ballots for the midterms next week and we can fill them out immediately or anytime before 8pm on November 6th and drop them in either a ballot box, which are usually in front of Libraries or other public buildings, or we can drop them in the mail (postage in now paid, so you don't even need to buy a stamp). This is great because it gives us time to really look over the ballot and decide how to vote and it gives everyone the chance to vote whether or not they work on election day. They count them as they come in which means that while we do have to wait a day or two for last minute mail in and absentee votes for close races, we usually have a good chunk of the result on election night or the morning after.
Pushing aside all the arguments about why voting shouldn't be done electronically in the first place: Why aren't the votes just stored on a FAT32 partition, so that all systems can read it?
As always, there is a relevant xkcd.
That's horrifying. Governments are not savvy enough yet to implement secure electronic voting properly. Paper is a way better choice at this time.
Um
Why?
No seriously, w h y?
This is just comical.
For all the good ideas European governments tend towards adopting, Jesus Christ are they stupid.