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.)
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?
The only real risk comes if their voting server that decrypts votes would be compromised and no one would realise it. As with any electronic service there of course is some risk, nothing is 100% secure, but I would personally take that risk to vote electronically.
It's not a question if encryption fails, but when. Paper ballots are anonymous by design, unless you mark the ballots they are untraceable. Digital ballots don't have that feature.
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.
I think people intend it to be a clever undercutting of the person they dislike. But it stopped being clever ages ago. When does something become a cliche? Because it just sounds petty now.
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.
A system being slow and inefficient makes defrauding that system similarly slow and inefficient. To affect an election run on paper ballots you have to somehow physically alter or insert thousands or millions of pieces of paper without being detected. This will mean spending large amounts of time and money and must necessarily involve numerous people.
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.
There's no way to guarantee privacy. An overbearing spouse, an anti-union boss, or a judgmental pastor could all insist on seeing the votes marked as they prefer.
You can fill it out in a booth if you want, there's in-person locations with help for the disabled and privacy areas.
It's illegal to insist on seeing someone's vote, so I'm not sure what would stop such people from requiring this hypothetical person to record themselves voting at a polling location. In general mail in ballots make voter intimidation much more difficult.
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.
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.