I also think it's pretty clear that this "aggressive questioning" has ulterior motives, since it never points out specific flaws in the transparency of the system, and never advocates for actual improvements to electronic voting machines, while there are very obvious low-hanging fruit to criticize and improve.

For example, while the software and hardware is audited by a very diverse panel, it's too institutional: you can't inspect it as an independent researcher. It's also not clear which parts of the supply chain are subject to the audits. I trust it's all of them, and these institutions are doing their job of pointing out the parts that they have _not_ audited, but I, as a member of the public, can't verify.

I'd argue ff you have thuggery at that level in public then you have bigger problems than voting systems.

And if that's country wide then the country isn't a democracy so the voting system is moot.

In terms of voter fraud, it's the very inefficiency of paper in person voting that provides the large scale protection - it's incredibly hard to do what you describe at a national level.

On the other hand, it's much easier for organised crime to influence voting machines nationally - in an undetected way - you probably only need to intimidate a handful of key people.

Sincere question: why is "rapidness of reporting" so important that we'd trade away other important goals?

(Within reasonable limits, I mean.)

Rapid results?

In Blighty, we have paper voting. The polls close at 10pm, the manual count takes place overnight, and the result is typically known the next day.

How much more rapid do you need?

How do other larger countries manage it without scanners?

In Blighty, the counters (paid volunteers from the local council working voluntery overtime) are supervised and audited. Not to mention representitives from the local political parties will be present as well as the local press to oversee the proceedings. Typically the returing officer will also allow anybody else to be present and observe the proceedings, space and practicalities permitting.

The process is quite fair and rigorous.

Certainly it´s possible to rig in person voting - but if you do, people will know that you did. And that also matters.

This would need at least a majority of die-hards present in a (near) majority of polling locations. At this point, the party can probably win the election without fraud.

For the counting process you have "auditors" from all the different parties. We have that system in Argentina and it works pretty well in terms of electoral transparency. People's choices are another thing.

This seems both the least likely and easiest threat to remediate. Also the threat doesn’t scale.

Could just draft people, for example. On a local level there is also more knowledge in voters that can be compared to counts etc.

These volunteers will have a far easier time scaling their conspiracy if voting machines are involved. There are fewer points of failure to corrupt and it is easier to produce a plausible sketchy result where their guy wins by 100 votes.

The decision to publish the ledger is one made by the election administrator in the interest of transparency - there is no requirement to do so, but it is believed to increase public trust in the process. Unfortunately these types of transparency measures haven't necessarily been rigorously evaluated and the tradeoffs with ballot secrecy may not be favorable. that is the real significance of this research to me, not really anything about the use of machines.

Some states do quite the opposite, e.g. seal ballots after the election and only allow inspection by court order. This has obvious benefits for secrecy, but then creates a lot of objections when people/organizations that doubt the election outcome are told that they cannot review the actual ballots (without meeting some threshold to justify such an order, which can be quite high since these rules were often put in place to try to counter pay-to-vote or voter intimidation schemes).

The existence of such a ledger isn't even required, but it makes it radically easier to audit the count process to detect errors. US election administrators demand a very high level of accuracy in vote counts (higher than what is typical in a lot of other countries), so in hand-count processes it's common to tabulate each ballot multiple times, and with machine tabulation there is usually some kind of automatic recount or risk limiting audit, either by retabulating with separate machines or hand-counting a sample. All of these are much easier processes when you can correlate a ballot to the previous time it was counted, so that errors discovered in auditing can be tracked to the specific ballot that was miscounted and corrected. Otherwise, if you count a batch of ballots twice and get different results (which is virtually guaranteed with hand counting), you will have to recount the entire batch over and over until you get satisfactory convergence. There are several different methods of doing this: some jurisdictions serialize ballots when they are printed so that tabulation can be tracked by that serial number. Other jurisdictions avoid this potential secrecy hazard by only serializing ballots after initial tabulation (e.g. ballots pulled for a sample audit have sequence numbers added on stickers or hand-written). Some tabulating machines can add sequence numbers as they run. All of these have different considerations as far as reliability and secrecy, but unfortunately there is next to zero funding or political interest in researching these issues and applying the resulting knowledge. The result is that everything is highly variable from state to state and some states continue to use processes that are known to have significant defects, most famously Louisiana with its ongoing use of non-auditable DRE machines (the only state that continues to do so).

In this case, the ledgers were published on the internet, there was no collusion necessary to obtain them. The problem here is more the level of record-keeping and transparency about the counting process, not how the counting itself was done.

> And then you can run off 50, 100, 250 copies of that ballot and stuff the ballot box.

At least at my polling place (but I'd really hope this is universal), the machine (the ballot box, effectively) is in the middle of the room, and closely watched. You would not be permitted to stuff more than one ballot into it. (Not to mention this would be voter fraud.)

> Easy to do if the voter and the poll worker are in cahoots.

Again poll watchers are the answer.

> The simpler the machine, the better.

The simplicity of the machine does nothing for this attack? In fact a wooden box is perhaps most vulnerable. But, again, this is completely mitigated by poll watchers. (Not to mention such an attack would likely be mitigated by other voters simply going "yo, what are you doing?"…)

> Would be caught on a recount... probably.

… aside from perhaps a discrepancy between the count of voters who voted on the roll, and the number of ballots in the box (on the initial count), a recount isn't really catching this.

I suppose if I wanted to mitigate this, you could put a signed "This is the ballot for the 2026 election" (+nonce, so that if someone duplicates it, we can pick out the duplicates/replays) on the ballot paper, and attempt to control physical distribution of actual ballots. But now we need to generate a nonce, and we're right back to "I'm sure an LCG is sufficient, right?"

Maybe not freedom, but Switzerland did some shooting (at allies and axis) and took casualties. To preserve its neutrality.

I once read an account by a poll watcher of her experience in 2012. She said that at her polling place, there had been a number of people showing up to vote on Election Day, being told they had already voted during the early-voting process, and swearing up and down that that wasn't true, that they always voted on Election Day and never voted early, and that whoever had voted in their name had done so fraudulently.

Now, in that particular case, the state (I believe it was Colorado though I'd have to find the article I read, and I don't remember where to find it any more) didn't require photo ID, so there was no way to prove that the people showing up on Election Day were the actual voters, as opposed to the cheaters. But this poll watcher's opinion was that they were the actual voters, and the cheating had been done by whoever had submitted ballots in their name days (or weeks) earlier. Given how many people she said this had happened to, I'm inclined to agree with her: it wasn't three or four people, it was (she said) something like one-third of the people who showed up on Election Day at that polling place.

That's a case where the fraud couldn't be repaired by knowing that it had occurred — the fraudulent ballots (if they were indeed fraudulent) had already been accepted, and it was impossible to go pull the ballot allegedly belonging to Joe Smith back out of the ballot box. But the publicly-available list of "who voted" did at least make it possible for the fraud to be detected in that particular case.

Yet so few people go the next step and say, “Let’s do away with the secret ballot itself.” It really is a recent invention, American democracy survived nearly 100 years before the Australian ballot was adopted. There are obviously concerns (vote buying, organized crime, etc) but they can be dealt with. And public voting would almost completely eliminate concerns about the voting process itself being subverted by a malign actor.

What if the opposing party knows you haven’t voted yet?

Obviously there's broad uncertainty about what is and isn't genai. FWIW, to my eye you didn't make the right call on this one, and the software classifiers agree.

Since no two readers are going to agree about what is or isn't genai, no one is going to agree that the site guidelines are being enforced consistently. And that's only one of several things to be annoyed by! This area is a mess, and is going to remain a mess for awhile, unfortunately - governed by noise, inconsistencies, and implacable tradeoffs.