Elon Musk condemns the use of electronic voting machines (EVMs) used in general elections in some countries.

A broken clock etc etc
Also, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/
- A classic. By the way electronic with paper trail gives you faster counts, a way to validate the results and recompute them by hand when there’s an issue.
  And doing voting over multiple days and/or by mail in ballots gives you time to count everything.
  The people pushing for same day and only that day with all votes counted that day just ignore the logistics and practicality of having people vote. Or, I suspect, rather like that it makes it impossible for highly populated areas to have their votes counted while lower populated areas votes are counted.
  I’ve seen pushes for mail in ballots to be held and not counted until Election Day and then only those ballots counted by the end of Election Day counted. Which is absurd. Do mail in, count them up to and after. Or count them up to and give people with mail in ballots access to them a lot earlier. So they can be accurately counted leading up to Election Day.
  Of course the logistics of having people able to monitor those ballots over a larger period of time is tricky too. Hence why they’re often not counted until day of and so, by extension, result in ballots not being fully counted for a few days.
  
  One day only in person voting is purposeful suppression of votes.
  Also, am coder, 100% agree with xkcd. I'm still amazed the Internet itself works.
  
  Having multiple days of open voting would be a game changer for some people. It can be absurdly difficult to actually get the day off, depending on the employer, and I've had ones try to treat it as a "perk", like it shouldn't be the damned baseline that we're able to actually take part in the democratic process they're parading around like a shiny bauble.
  
  The people pushing for same day and only that day with all votes counted that day just ignore the logistics and practicality of having people vote.
  Oh, I can assure you that-
  Or, I suspect, rather like that it makes it impossible for highly populated areas to have their votes counted while lower populated areas votes are counted.
  I never should have doubted you.
  
  Of course the logistics of having people able to monitor those ballots over a larger period of time is tricky too.
  When city falls asleep, mafia awakens
- Yah, on this particular thing, he's not wrong.
  Everythinge else, though, he's fucking batshit.
- Exactly what I was thinking.
- Blockchain technology based (BBVS) could be safer but regular EVMs are still hackable
  Trustless systems are always better than centralised systems especially when the government in power is also in authority to decide whether they continue to stay in power.
  US has been blessed till now.
  But look at Russian or North Korean elections. They also use paper ballots
  I am confident that Putin is not gonna last if they go for a blockchain based voting system.
  
  The problem is not being secure; it is convincing people that it is secure. Even the stupidest person understands that marking off a paper in a booth and then depositing it in a locked box is secure. The voting method must give voters confidence that their vote was counted, the election was fair, and the results are legitimate.
  
  No it wouldn’t.

"Hacked by AI" fucking lol
- "All my information about AI comes from watching Avengers films"
  
  "All my information about AI comes from AI."

Reminder that this fucking moron is pushing Twitter as a financial tool. He wants you to use X like you would use your credit card.
But voting machines are insecure?
- He wants you to use X like you would use your credit card.
  I won't even use xitter like social media. Why in hell would I consider it as a credit card? Oh, I get it. The target audience is the idiot army.
- He wants you to use X like you would use your credit card.
  I should have seen this coming.
  That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. In October 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. (wikipedia)
  Aw man, he's trying to build Paypal? Again?

Wow. I actually agree with Elon Musk about something for once, what a shock!
Tom Scott has a very good video explaining why electronic voting is terrible all around and it will probably never be secure.
Tom Scott's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Tom Scott's video via the Computerphile channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI&t=1s
- It is actually possible to have a cryptographic structure that allows independent verification of the counts. Of course we will never have that because Repubs prefer buggy ES&S machines. (IIRC those are also the ones Kemp used to rig elections in GA.)
  https://archive.is/2020.09.15-120013/https://www.wired.com/story/dana-debeauvoir-texas-county-clerk-voting-tech-revolution/
- But is scantron voting electronic voting? Is mail in voting and early voting electronic voting? Is being ID'd on the voter registry because you know your SSN and address, name, signature, without having to use yet another ID electronic voting?
  
  I would say that "electronic voting" means that the ballot itself is digital rather than physical. So, scantrons are not electronic voting and voter registries/ID/etc. are not ballots in the first place.
  
  I think the supposed risk to electronic voting machines is that there would need to be thousands of them, are distributed, somewhat unattended, and operated by people that don't know them.
  The possibility of an exploit or misconfiguration increases, and the ability to compromise someone supervising one of the polling station increases.
  If there is are centralised systems, fewer higher skilled people would be required to secure/monitor/run the system. It can also be airgapped.
  While some of these risks are also applicable to in-person and mail-in voting, these systems have been around for ages, are not proprietary, and anyone can figure out "how it works" and can make sure "how it happened" matches.
  As soon as you get into cryptographic vulnerabilities and security, 99.99% of people would be lost in the woods
  The rest of the questions, I feel, are more systematic things.
- Seems to work alright for Estonia, they have had an option to vote electronically since 2005. If I can sign legal documents, pay bills and do other government related stuff electronically, why suddenly voting is a huge problem?
  
  Because what you vote is supposed to be anonymous....
  If you ignore the anonymous part, then it's obviously not an issue.
- even a broken clock is correct twice a day
  
  Off topic, but... Can we retire this idiom? It's in this thread like 3 times and it's always used by people uncomfortable by the fact that someone they don't like made a good point.
- When did Lemmy get infiltrated by MAGA?
- That's loads of BS. Manual in person voting is easily scammed, just look at voting in Russia. Fuck this shit, everything should be 100% digital.
  
  Paper voting leaves a literal paper trail unlike electronic voting that's always a total black box in all countries that have tried it.
  
  Manual in person voting is not easily scammed on a scale that can swing an election. The slow, inefficient, in person, physical process is a security feature.
  
  I don't get what's wrong with paper ballots sent by mail. It's convenient and easy, with a paper trail for recounts. It's worked great in Washington for decades.
  
  Manual in person voting is easily scammed, just look at voting in Russia.
  Let me check. looks through window It's not the biggest source of voting fraud. Biggest source of voting fraud is Venedictov's box - Digital Electronic Voting.
  Fuck this shit, everything should be 100% digital.
  Sobyanin approves.
  
  it absolutely is not easily scammed at all.
  every single piece of paper is numbered and tracked. (tickets and stubbs, basically). all counting is done by multiple people and watched by anyone who wants. political parties are banned from voting premises.
  even better: early voting, in person, up to a week or two before. no crowds.
  errors happen about 1 in 1,000,000 with a maximum of a couple hundred, and are caught immediately.
  there is no scamming. all of the USA's voting problems are self-created.
  
  Not just digital but trustless decentralised blockchain based so it's impossibly hard to manipulate

It’s pretty rich that one of his stans is harping about how the Left “steals elections”, yet his guy literally tried that in the last election cycle. Then there’s also Bush v Gore. But yeah, it’s those crafty lefties doing the stealing!
- Every accusation is a confession.

"hundreds of voting irregularities"
Out of how many votes? Oh, enough votes that hundreds of irregularities is statistically irrelevant? Cool, just checking.
Oh, a fraction of a percent of the thousands of manual votes that Republicans had and tried to have thrown out so that dumps could win in 2020? k, just checking.
- Counterpoint: whatever methods Kemp used in GA to rig his election and erase the evidence point to significant flaws.
  
  Might want to /s that.
  Reads pretty straight.

Unfortunately Republicans are not good faith actors in this space. There are many issues to discuss about voting, but I'll just stick to one very important one, access. Republicans limit access to voting. They are not for mail in voting and continue to close down polling places forcing thousands of citizens to stand in line for hours. If they really cared, they would make it easier for the citizens to vote. But we know that's not their goal. They win when fewer people vote. So, whatever means to achieve that, that's what they'll do.
- Or at least vote in sunday.

Isn't this the doofus who wanted to send a submarine into a cave? Dude doesn't have the intellectual heft necessary to manage a QuikTrip in Topeka.
But, take this drivel seriously. They like it when rural, red areas report their vote totals first, so that the news outlets will report that Republicans are "leading" early in the evening, before the blue cities finish their counting and overtake the early totals. It's a cheap trick to sell the claim that the election was stolen to their followers, y'know, the people who think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
- wasn't it a big tube? like an inflatable tube? this guy loves tubes
- There was a survey a few years ago that found that some absurdly-large number of Americans think that chocolate milk is produced by brown cows. Like, over 10 million people. I hope it's not true, but it's become kind of a meme to convey that Americans are misinformed about a lot of things, and generally just really dumb.

I agree. While we're at it, we can also make election day a holiday and require employers to give workers at least a paid half-day off so that they can vote, and create a citizenship ID that is free and easy to get rather than using ID with requirements like a driver's license. Then maybe we can try out ranked choice voting and eliminate the electoral college. You know, since we want the election to be fair.
- and create a citizenship ID that is free and easy to get rather than using ID with requirements like a driver's license.
  Just a heads up, these already are a thing, you still have to go to the DMV to get it since they're the people who issue it, but they have IDs that are just "IDs" and then they have IDs that are also "drivers licenses." The one that is just an ID like you're talking about they just have to bring their birth cert, social security card, and proof of address like a bill or paystub or anything like that, then they fill out the info, take their pic, and voila, "Identification Card" without the driving priveleges.
  People do it all the time, because without one you can't buy smokes, vapes, booze, go to 18+ concerts, have a job in some cases, hell watch porn in some states lol, etc, anything age restricted really.
  
  i remember reading that even those are highly inaccessible to minorities, in areas with large minority populations the offices are farther away/have weird hours/other obstacles that make them harder to acquire
  
  Those aren't free, though.
  At least in California I had to pay 26 bucks for mine 10 years ago
  
  USSA is not car-centric country, it is car-ruled country.
- NATIONALIZE TACO / DEMOCRACY TUESDAY
  everything is better with guacamole
- You've achieved Canada.
  
  We literally have none of those things.
  Edit: except perhaps the citizenship certificate but I’ve never seen one before, but yeah they exist. We don’t have ranked voting, and elections aren’t holidays, although your employer must give you paid time off to vote, like 3 hours, and there are exceptions of course, like truckers for some reason don’t get the time off.

Well, he's got that one right.
Elections should be as low tech as possible. Everything going on should be verifiable with your eyes and basic tools only.
Keep it simple and keep it monitored by at least 3 to 5 people at all times.
who cares if the counting takes a few days, as long as i can trust the results.
And dear fellows in the USA, for the love of god, move the voting day to a Sunday already.
- Counterpoint: There's a big difference between electronic voting machines and electronic counting machines.
  The way we do elections in Canada, your vote is made on paper. The paper ballots are fed though electronic counting machines to get the initial tally, but the paper record is then kept and tallied up separately to check for discrepancies. This is both fast and secure.
  Electronic voting machines, on the other hand, are an exercise in absolute insanity that security experts universally agree no one should be using.
  Of course, Musk is railing against them because he's drunk the far right Kool-Aid about stolen elections, but actual smart, educated people have been saying the same thing for a lot longer.
  
  Good point, thanks!
  As long as the hand count is recognized as the actual result i would be fine with that.Knowing humans and our tendency to be lazy, i fear we would first reduce the redundant checks and then skip them completely. In the name of efficiency of course.
  Also after witnessing the history of absolute fuckups my government (germany) produced in the field of software and IT, i don’t want them to use machines. They lost any trust i had in them with any kind of technology. Let them count and add up by hand, i’ll gladly pay extra taxes for that.
  Maybe i’m just a bit to paranoid :/
  
  In a smaller local election a few cycles back, I got to trial a paper backed electronic voting machine they were testing out for people who have dexterity or vision problems.
  You basically got the same paper ballot as everyone else, but then you slipped it into the machine and it colored the bubbles for you after you selected the option on the screen.
  Then you took your piece of paper out and handled it like a ballot filled in by hand.
  Wasn't networked and didn't see anything that could tie you to a vote.
  I got to share my appreciation for the concept, but concern about difficulty verifying it filled things out correctly, and the potential for touch screens to be difficult to use or act funny, all the difficulties of ux work to handle fixing an error, and the need for the UI to be exceptionally clear, which was difficult on the smaller screen with the larger font.
  I think it also has screen reader support, but I didn't use it, so I'm not sure.
- Check this article out, might change your mind: https://archive.is/UCAKM
  
  If you get an RSA receipt, it can be brute forced (in some years), if you don't you can't be sure it was counted.
  If you get coerced into voting a certain way on paper and taking a photograph, the coercing person needs to be in the toom to make sure you don't mark, take a photo, spoil and vote differently. With a receipt you can coerce the receipt, wait some time and buy some computing power to decrypt the vote later.
  secretly as it's illegal/vote spoiling for obvious reasons
  
  Very Interesting, thanks!
  Still I'm not sure if I would trust that system more than a handcount with at least six eyes present at all times.
- who cares if the counting takes a few days, as long as i can trust the results.
  I've never heard of in-person stations counting for longer than 6 hours.
  move the voting day to a Sunday already.
  It isn't already? Then USA gets "worse than Russia" award again.

Seems almost paradoxical but yeah physical voting is the way to go https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
- As others have said, the scalability ideal is to have electric/mechanical counters but with paper ballots. Keeps the paper trail for double checking, but also allows poll workers to deliver quick initial results to everyone breathing down their necks.
  
  Pretty sure that's how we do it up on Canada. I think random samples are hand-counted to make sure the machine count is accurate. There's early voting too so not all just in one day.
  
  Well here in Germany we have about 40-50 million votes to count in a federal election. Right when the booths close we get an exit poll that is already pretty close. After 1-2 hours there are extrapolations that are even closer and next morning, there is usually the certified result. All on paper, counted by hand.
  
  My state does Scantron style ballots. You fill in the little ovals and put it into a machine to be counted.
- Did Musk figure out people will always rather want the opposite of what he is yapping about?

not even joking, i find that if there's one Twitter account to act as a definitive guide to policy, science, technology and various issues, it's Elon's account.
just carefully read every tweet and do the exact opposite. there's no way you can go wrong with it.
- Broken clock this time though. Electronic voting is risky.

Even his good opinions need to overhype AI...
Anyway, we all saw that Tom Scott video, we know it's a bad idea.

Brazil has used electronic voting since 1997 and has had no major issues since (there was a bad history of fraud in the paper ballot era). It runs on Linux and they hold a public safety test in the year before where they test the system's security.
- If the machines are running open source software and are easily auditable that's fine. The problem is in the US, they're not.

Those must be the ones he can't pay to manipulate.

Wow, this is one of the very few oppinions me and Musk share.
@OP why add an acronym when it is just a twitter post that doesn't even mention said acronym?
- Yup, mail voting every time, with dropoff locations everywhere. There's a paper trail, so recounts can be done if we suspect issues.
  I'm not worrried about voting machine fraud, I just don't see the point.
  
  came to say that mail in voting was the most secure method.
  
  I'm worried about voting machine fraud when there is no paper trail, since that is how Kemp stole an election and got away with it.
- You’re not even American, you’re Swedish
  
  Correct, but how is that relevant?

It's not even all about being hackable. Voters should be able to fully understand exactly how their vote is counted. These systems ain't it.
- Unironically blockchain go brrrrr

"Risk of being hacked by AI or human is still too great."
But he trusts his life and everyone elses to the AI and computer code in his car that goes 0-60 in 2.5 seconds to not be hacked. Makes sense actually yea.

Can't election committees call recount anyway?
EVMs, especially those, that do not connect to the internet, are fine. Online voting on the other hand...
- I think in year 2024 we should be able to vote using a fucking app. No gerrymandering, everyone 18 our older automatically registered to vote.
  If we could do that we never see another Republican in office again. Add rank choice voting and we might even have people who give a shit and can fix this country.
  
  100%
  I can do my banking, file my taxes, access my social security, make changes to practically any national database, apply for citizenship, all online and secure.
  But for some reason I can't vote online.
  GTFOOH
  
  We really need positive digital ID. The US DoD has the right idea with the CAC, though really it's just a digital certificate issued by the government. The smartcard format is convenient for being wallet-able but there's plenty of other form factors for these things these days.
  It amazes me that we as a society do official, important real-life things on the Internet with no way to validate our identity.
  I even cringe a bit anytime someone tells me to DocuSign. Buying my house was a trip, especially all the forms that took place before closing. Like, it's great that I'm signing these things digitally, but there's still no proof that I'm the one signing these. I'm not in the presence of a notary, lawyer, or any sort of witness. I'm just clicking a link on an email and drawing my finger on the screen. That could, theoretically, be anybody who gains access to my email, with or without my permission.
  But, if I'm signing with a certificate, I have provided a PIN or password to unlock this device I carry on my person, that a trusted third party had given me when proved that I am who I say I am, in person. It's a solid technology and it really needs way better adoption.
  But muh mark of the beast!
  
  I want to be able to vote online, too, but then I think about how easy it is to falsify your identify online vs in person and I don't know how it could work without introducing a new level of probable fraud.
  
  I think in year 2024 we should be able to vote using a fucking app.
  Putin approves.
  Please don't do this on country scale. Relevant xkcd.
  No gerrymandering,
  Agreed. That's fucked.
  everyone 18 our older automatically registered to vote.
  USA has another "worse that Russia" award here.
  Add rank choice voting and we might even have people who give a shit and can fix this country.
  Last step would be removal of Iron Throne(presidency) and USA becoming United Soviet States of America.

I want everyone to have a cryptographic identity rooted in government trust that they use for voting and everything else related to the government.

- That sounds like a really bad idea to me. Over here the voting machines are completely offline and don't have a hard drive. It prints out a small receipt with your vote in human readable form and as a QR code, which you drop in an electronic ballot box. As a software engineer, this feels like the only safe voting machine.
- Voting booths are important. People should be able to vote how they want, and that means secret ballots. This is only possible with a secure space.
  I know that Americans love mail-in voting and yearn for online voting, but mail-in is a poor substitute for voting booths, and online voting would be terrible for this plus many many other reasons.
- Even if we had online voting the DRM required to make sure nothing is amiss would be kernel level and unavailable to linux users or if available, objectionable. It would also probably be tied to fucking chrome.

Honestly, I'm open to election reform if it means dead people can't vote.
- Dead people already can't vote. People get arrested for using ballots of dead people already in the US.
  
  In that case, leave voting how it is.