Group Sues To Stop German E-Voting

kRemit writes "The German hacker group Chaos Computer Club today sued the German State of Hessen to prevent the use of electronic voting machines (Google translation) in the upcoming elections on January 27. This comes as a follow-up to the Dutch initiative 'We don't trust voting machines,' which succeeded in banning the same type of voting machines in the Netherlands."

you can tamper with paper votes

[circletimessquare]

but it is cumbersome, slow, small in scale, and hard to hide

on the other hand with electronic voting (and to a lesser extent mechanical voting), you have an order of magnitude more attack vectors. you can also do a lot more damage with the slightest of effort, quickly, with a lot of volatility and potential for permanent obfuscation, destruction, or scrambling and outright manipulation. you can cover your tracks well too, and you can quickly survey the landscape and tweak votes in ways that are hard to sniff out later

paper voting is totally transparent to everyone involved. electronic voting is opaque. there is no verification, nothing of substance. nothing to see or touch

electronic voting is probably one of the greatest threats to faith in democracy in the 21st century. not a joke in the least

we need to lose this really bad idea asap

Re:you can tamper with paper votes

[Gideon Fubar]

Yes, but Germany is in Europe. ;)

John Gruber said it best...

[riscfuture]

Computer enthusiasts really like computers, so when they say, "No, I don't think it's a good idea to use computers for this," you should probably listen.

Re:you can tamper with paper votes

[countach]

Machines that count paper votes can be tested by manually counting a sample. If the sample differs significantly from the mechanical count, you have a problem. You could cheat this way, but not by much.

Re:You are ignoring the key issue that led to this

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoah there. Not all paper ballot systems are equal. In ireland, people use voting slips that are written on, not ambiguously punched. And hand counted locally, with adversarial counters (i.e. people of all party affiliations checking eachothers' counts). And the voting system is proportional representation, more complicated to count, but they still manage (the american/corporate-affiliated irish government of the time tried to introduce electronic voting the election before last, and failed due to the machines' demonstrable insecurity and unreliability).

Ireland has less people you say? True, but it still has millions, it's about the size of a US state. And these things scale well! They're amenable to hierarchical decomposition! Vote local, count local, subsubtotal, subtotal, total => result.

Human voting is a human process, and computers should stay the fuck out of it. It's incredibly more difficult to bribe _everyone_ involved in a human-counted election than to change a few lines in a closed-source unverified voting machine.

Re:You are ignoring the key issue that led to this

[chebucto]

A few points:

- Florida did not simply use paper ballots; it used mechanical voting machines to punch those ballots.
- Paper-punching machines are needlessly complicated, opening them up to unique kinds of disruption. Their performance in Florida may have been deliberately degraded: there are allegations that substandard paper was sent to that state by a voting-machine company for use in the machines (read more here [votetrustusa.org])
- In voting, the simplest is the best: paper + pencil for the voter; trustworthy citizens for the counting. This is what we use in Canada; a country of 30m people, and we are able to announce election results the night of the election. There is universal trust in the voting process - though not, I am sad to say, in politics in general :)

Re:English Version Available

[nem75]

There are big flags at the top of the article, one for Germany, and one for English. I suppose the submitter didn't realize that funny blue and red flag was for Great Britain and meant English.

Which just goes to show once again that in web design representing different language versions by flags is a bloody stupid idea.

And yes, this is off topic, but the above can't be pointed out too often, so I'm willing to take that karma hit.