Sounds nice, but computer based voting systems, no matter how secure, clean or simple, are fundamentally opaque to the average citizen. That alone undermines the very democracy it tries to support. Paper based voting systems may be bloody tedious but they’re simple, and anyone can participate.
As a programmer myself, I have to say no to electronic voting systems. We need to keep it low tech.
Also, they may be opaque even to software engineers, it's not like we have magic powers to look at a physical computer and know what code is running.
Even if the code is released:
(1) Who can read and understand tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of probably not very comprehensible code? Not many people can and even fewer will.
(2) Is the code running on the machines the same as the published code?
I don't even know what code is running on my phone or laptop right now.
Even if you work in the space as a software developer, the shear amount of variance in government voting systems from registration, petition verification/validation, and voting itself is really wide. Some states have rules that vary from county to county. Some of these states have lots of counties. Election systems are some of the most byzantine you can imagine.
Disclosure: I used to work for an Election Services company.
The process needs to be understandable to non-programmers. Right now, even those who program it don't know every instruction/interaction/oddity from the processor running the code.
I can explain a voting process with pen and paper to a child.
When you vote from home I can show up and put a gun to your kid's head and tell you to vote for Pedro.
When you vote with some sort of association with your name I can look up how you voted after the fact and if you didn't vote for Pedro I can blow up your house.
The fact is that the secret, anonymous ballot is the only valid way of voting.
> When you vote from home I can show up and put a gun to your kid's head and tell you to vote for Pedro
If you could do that at a scale large enough to affect the result, I would think you could also do that at each ballot box and make the vote counters report the results you want them to report.
Also, if you could do that at scale, why would you bother with elections at all?
IMO, the main problem with digital voting is that it makes it possible to change the vote count without needing lots of people to do so.
With thousands of ballot boxes, open counting of votes for each ballot box and the publication of election results per ballot box that’s basically impossible.
In the 2020 election one of the seats for the House of Representatives had an initial margin of victory of six votes. After recounting it was something like twenty. And another had a final margin of victory around one hundred.
I doubt anybody could tell it was going to get that close. The uncertainty likely ranked into the thousands, if not tens of thousands of votes.
I think few fraudsters will be happy with slightly increasing their odds by swinging the vote by a few hundred votes. Instead, they’ll want almost certainty, if not complete certainty.
Same reason I advocate for ranked choice voting instead of other even better methods of choosing a winning candidate. Some of them require matrix multiplication.
Yeah, I’ve heard variations of that argument spoken non-ironically. Opens a whole can of worm. I’d rather assume, barring special circumstances, that anyone old enough is able to do politics (voting, being elected, being randomly drafted in a commission or jury…). With the right mechanisms groups are smarter than we give them credit for.
This "can of worms" is why democracy will fail and a Caesar will eventually ride into town and promise all kinds of things to the median voter. If it is considered immoral to hold voters to any standards, why would it be immoral for politicians to lie, cheat and steal?
As a programmer myself, I have to say no to electronic voting systems. We need to keep it low tech.