JimMarch

This is your captain speaking. AND THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN SHOUTING!

Ahem. Sorry. Gotta make some light of something this bad.

Can you jump?

It's worse than that.

In banking you can and in fact must have a complete audit trail of which human being put the money into the system, and then which human being handled it at each step of the way complete with date stamps and so on.

We have decided to go with secret voting which means we need to disconnect the name of the voter from the vote at some point fairly early in the process.

That means that the voter is not able to prove how they voted later! If they could then Guido could break their legs if they voted "wrong", or much more likely they could be fired by their boss for voting for a pro-union candidate for example.

Or vote selling becomes a huge issue.

These problems make it fundamentally more difficult to do electronic voting than electronic banking.

It's not "albinism". It's "acute hyper-honkeyism".

There's a bunch of different attacks possible. I've done a decade of election monitoring in the field and in a whole number incidence I found county election staff who were corrupt. I spent nearly an hour recounting such stories here:

https://youtu.be/rA0y6OroQGw

Backdoors in home routers engineered by China would be one concern. Another is spyware at the PC or smartphone level. But the biggest issue is, can the data be tampered with once it gets to the final computer that tallies all the votes county-wide? That's an attack surface that only needs one corrupt tech staff to exploit.

Right now some counties in the US are doing "internet voting" of sorts - they pass precinct-level data to the county over VPNs and cellular modems. So what happens if one county election staffer gives the VPN password to their good buddy at the Russian embassy? That county is pwned.

Saying "one county" makes it sounds harmless but think about how many states are dominated by the politics is just one county? Cook County in Illinois, Maricopa County in Arizona, King County in Washington state and the list goes on and on and on. Take Baltimore and you own Maryland. Take Boston and you own Massachusetts.