smr wrote:Eventually, I see a system where a person swipes their thumb on their computer to verify who they are and could vote from home.
Ask an engineer working in the automotive industry about their safety standards, and what they think the safest car might be. Figures like "millions of miles between accidents" will, at some point, be used, because cars are (all things considered) extremely safe.
Ask an engineer working in the airplane business, and they too will rightly point out that airtravel is extremely safe, even more so than travelling on the road.
If you find a software engineer telling you that they found a way to make electronic elections work, run away as fast as you can, because you just found someone fundamentally incompetent and unqualified.
Electronic voting is not safe and cannot be made safe, on a fundamental level. If there are chain of custody issues in normal pen-and-paper ballot counting, the complete lack of a trivially verifiable chain of custody in electronic voting machines should be a massive red flag for you.
Like, you have a bunch of machines using proprietary hardware running proprietary code, supervised by people who can not be guaranteed to be impartial before and after a vote, programmed by people who can be bribed, and subject of intense research in finding zero-day exploits (which due to the nature of these machines are unlikely to be patched).
Yes, you can cheat in a pen and paper ballot. There's a lot that can go wrong with those, with or without ill intent, but literally
anyone can be taught what to look out for. It is, quite literally, possible to pick random people off the street, tell them what to look out for, and be reasonably sure that they can do an adequate job of ensuring the integrity of an election. Can you do the same with electronic voting, smr?
Relevant XKCD