Tom Scott
11 HN recommenders · recommended in 17 months, 2020–2026
12:01 · 5.1M views · Dec 9, 2019
Tom Scott explains why electronic voting is a bad idea. Elections must be trusted by everyone and attacks on software scale in ways attacks on paper do not, so open source or blockchain fixes do not solve it.
HN treats it as the go-to layperson-friendly argument against e-voting and links it in nearly every voting-technology thread.
20 comments from Hacker News
Tom Scott still has the best argument against e-voting IMO [1]. Briefly: an election only counts if everybody can believe the results. Making an expert level understanding of CS a requirement to verify your voting system means that Joe Q. Average who doesn't hold a PhD (or maybe even a college degree) has to rely on spooky experts telling him what to believe. If I were in his shoes then I would have no confidence that I participated in a fair and valid election. We kind of live in a bubble here on HN where most people are sort of in the tech space and could take a weekend or two to understand blockchain. I think its easy to forget that most people don't have the required background to learn it easily (or would want to use up their time to understand it). I almost have a PhD in the hard sciences and I don't fully understand the finer details of block chain. I think I would have to write my own implementation to fully appreciate it. Simplicity and the ability to explain the system to every American is a requirement of any voting system. [1] this video
I think the Tom Scott video on electronic voting from years ago remains the most convincing argument to me that it's a bad idea ( this video ). To summarize, even assuming you can solve properties like correctness, censorship resistance, privacy and coercion resistance. The fundamental problem with digital is that any exploit of any of these properties you ever have scales really well. Messing with a paper election requires a lot of people working together across the entire country. A digital hack just requires one smart person
Tom Scott made an excellent summary of why electronic voting is a bad idea, and explicitly covers both open source and blockchain as proposed solutions (hint: they don't solve the problems that make e-voting bad) this video
Tom Scott provided an excellent explanation of why electronic voting is a terrible idea. Original: [LINK] Follow-up: this video
I am not familiar with Debian's practices, but electronic voting can't work for a nation because: - centralization (there must be a central, corruptible place where the voters are authenticated or the votes are counted) - software is untrustable: [LINK] The USA has had a Diebold voting scandal. Other countries are using a paper-based voting process which can be supervised by third parties. [LINK] Relevant watching: Tom Scott: Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea this video One possible solution could be ZCash ( [LINK] ) but it has had its own problems ( [LINK] ).