Electronic Voting Risks

The cluster focuses on concerns about the security vulnerabilities, hackability, and lack of trust in electronic voting machines, with strong advocacy for reverting to paper ballots to ensure reliable and verifiable elections.

📉 Falling 0.4x Politics & Society
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Comments
20
Years Active
5
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#1661
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Keywords

US mfsecurityseals.uk PropRep.html BAD www.aec OK stanford.edu gov.au rangevoting.org duckduckgo.com voting ballots electronic paper election ballot votes machines elections vote

Sample Comments

donpott Oct 6, 2021 View on HN

Because Electronic Voting is generally considered too attack-prone to be trusted.Relevant Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

fsh Nov 17, 2022 View on HN

Attacking an electronic voting system requires changing a few integers. Surely this is much easier than stuffing ballot boxes all over the country. In functioning democracies, the polls have observers from multiple parties which makes ballot stuffing infeasible.

actionfromafar Jan 13, 2023 View on HN

Hasn't that improved recently with better ballot counting, fewer machines that only stores the result in hard drive somewhere instead of paper trails etc?

wlll Oct 26, 2018 View on HN

There's a good video on why any computerised or electronic elements in the voting process are a bad idea here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

pmoriarty Aug 21, 2019 View on HN

Electronic voting and vote counting machines pose one of the greatest threats to democracy.We should really just go back to paper ballots, which are not perfect but are a lots less hackable at scale and are much more trackable than electronic machines are.

pedrocr Aug 3, 2017 View on HN

Implement that system and an attacker will then proceed to destroy your democracy by hacking the digital part, making the counts not match and causing complete distrust in the voting system. Properly implemented paper elections have no significant fraud possibilities and convince whoever lost the election that he indeed lost. There is no problem to solve here and technology only makes things worse.

philips Aug 19, 2025 View on HN

Personally I agree.However, I think a weakness in the arguments is that many of the tabulation machines we have are very old, poorly designed for vote integrity (eg no paper ballots or confusing scan sheet design), and closed source which can lead to accusations of both hardware/software flipping votes and the systems being impossible to audit.To counter these concerns you can use paper ballots everywhere, open source software for the machines, and risk limiting audits to verify the c

detaro Aug 10, 2018 View on HN

What specific attack scenario that works for paper ballots fails with a voting machine?

awayand Oct 5, 2014 View on HN

voting should never be computerized. the risk for exploits to go unnoticed is too high. paper and pen seems to me the only safe implementation.

jakeogh May 17, 2016 View on HN

Computerphile: Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI