<story><title>Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine</title><url>http://ijr.com/wildfire/2016/11/731642-edward-snowden-demonstrates-how-easy-it-is-to-hack-a-voting-machine-all-for-just-30/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Zombieball</author><text>A former co-worker of mine wrote software for voting machines in Brazil.  He described to me a few reasons why electronic voting machines are important.  To be honest I forget the majority, but one story that stuck with me:&lt;p&gt;One common scheme electronic voting machines help prevent is forced votes.  A bad guy gets their hand on a single empty ballot and writes the name of the candidate he wants to win on it.  He then comes to you and threatens you and your family.  Says hand in this pre-filled ballot and bring me back your empty ballot, or else...  You comply, he fills out the empty ballot again, and repeats.&lt;p&gt;The electronic voting machines protect your identity.  They allow you to vote anonymously.  They provide data integrity that is harder to spoof than paper voting methods. I explicitly asked why they don&amp;#x27;t just vote on paper ballots like they do in Canada (or the UK as you describe).  His response was that we take for granted the inherit trust our societies have to &lt;i&gt;allow&lt;/i&gt; us to vote in such a fashion without it being tampered.</text></item><item><author>hacker_9</author><text>Why do Americans use voting machines exactly? I mean, it just prints out their choice at the end right? What benefit do they actually gain from having pressed buttons instead of using a pen? It just seems to fuel the hacking conspiracy every time a president is elected.&lt;p&gt;In the UK we turn up, go into the booth with the paper slip, and tick our choice with a pen. Then we fold it and post it into a container which later gets shipped off to the counting room. I just can&amp;#x27;t understand why you guys have to physically turn up if you are just going to select your answer on a computer anyway.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>extra88</author><text>Voter coercion is something to be concerned about but the scenario you describe won&amp;#x27;t keep me up at night. The number one problem is it&amp;#x27;s hard to scale up to a level that would actually sway an election. It only takes one hero to call the police while they&amp;#x27;re at the polling station or after their family is released and the sequence is broken. There&amp;#x27;s no need for the victim to actually submit the pre-filled ballot, they can throw it out or do something to it to make it invalid then come back with the blank one. The ballots where I vote are on a heavier stock paper that are not trivial to conceal bringing in and taking out; most could do it but one victim slips up and the scheme could fail.&lt;p&gt;Where I vote, my paper ballot in no way identifies me. I identify myself upon entering the polling station, they find my name on the list of registered voters and mark it. When I&amp;#x27;m turning in my completed ballot, I again identify myself and my name is marked on a separate list. So there&amp;#x27;s a record that I voted but not for whom I voted. How would an electronic voting machine improve upon this?&lt;p&gt;BTW, where I vote, the paper ballots are the bubble scan kind and the voter feeds it to the machine themselves. This provides very fast tabulations with a paper record for security and recounts.</text></comment>
<story><title>Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine</title><url>http://ijr.com/wildfire/2016/11/731642-edward-snowden-demonstrates-how-easy-it-is-to-hack-a-voting-machine-all-for-just-30/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Zombieball</author><text>A former co-worker of mine wrote software for voting machines in Brazil.  He described to me a few reasons why electronic voting machines are important.  To be honest I forget the majority, but one story that stuck with me:&lt;p&gt;One common scheme electronic voting machines help prevent is forced votes.  A bad guy gets their hand on a single empty ballot and writes the name of the candidate he wants to win on it.  He then comes to you and threatens you and your family.  Says hand in this pre-filled ballot and bring me back your empty ballot, or else...  You comply, he fills out the empty ballot again, and repeats.&lt;p&gt;The electronic voting machines protect your identity.  They allow you to vote anonymously.  They provide data integrity that is harder to spoof than paper voting methods. I explicitly asked why they don&amp;#x27;t just vote on paper ballots like they do in Canada (or the UK as you describe).  His response was that we take for granted the inherit trust our societies have to &lt;i&gt;allow&lt;/i&gt; us to vote in such a fashion without it being tampered.</text></item><item><author>hacker_9</author><text>Why do Americans use voting machines exactly? I mean, it just prints out their choice at the end right? What benefit do they actually gain from having pressed buttons instead of using a pen? It just seems to fuel the hacking conspiracy every time a president is elected.&lt;p&gt;In the UK we turn up, go into the booth with the paper slip, and tick our choice with a pen. Then we fold it and post it into a container which later gets shipped off to the counting room. I just can&amp;#x27;t understand why you guys have to physically turn up if you are just going to select your answer on a computer anyway.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>samastur</author><text>Color me unsurprised that a person who wrote software for voting machines also finds them useful.&lt;p&gt;The problem I have with this particular scenario is that it imagines a reality in which someone can afford to collect votes one by one with impunity but can&amp;#x27;t force these same bunch of people (and one or two simply aren&amp;#x27;t enough to matter) at the voting station itself.</text></comment>