Do you trust digital voting for the election of the President?

No and I never will

A basic requirement for democracy is the process must be transparent and understandable for everyone. Telling non-technical people to "trust" the machine is how you erode it.

Paper voting is dead simple: you (and your opponents) can observe the count in person. Electronic voting has far too many potential attack vectors. Once a weakness is found, you can potentially overturn an entire election. At least with paper ballets, you have to potentially bribe everyone which is infeasible on a large scale or democracy has already fallen.

No. There must always be a paper trail.

I used to teach web programming. One of the exercises I had for students was to create a ballot box.

The first step was making it work as expected — accept votes and only display a count when “Election Day” has ended.

Then, I suggested constraints — code it so your preferred choice always wins; make it so the vote totals check out (don’t just add an arbitrary to the preferred total); make sure the margin of victory never triggers an automatic recount, etc.

That opened a lot of eyes, especially for beginning programmers. If they could do it…

Paper and pencil ballots run by a non-partisan electoral commission. Those ballots are then counted by members of the electoral commission while being supervised by one or more members of the parties involved.

I would not trust any digital, electronic or electrical voting system. Actually I wouldn't trust any mechanical voting system either.

Related question: Do you trust voting by mail?

Some reasons to maybe not trust it:

- The mail can be gamed. Say, stop delivering mail from areas that politically lean one way or the other.

- There's no check on who voted. We get ballots for children who have moved out of state. We could vote several times, if we chose to (and were willing to break certain laws to do so).

Like digital voting, it doesn't really matter whether this happens or not. It matters whether people think it happens, and whether you can prove that it didn't. And it's going to be impossible to prove that someone didn't vote for their kids. Under current conditions, it's going to be impossible to get either side to think that the other side isn't willing to systematically break the rules.

Digital voting represents too much of a centralized juicy target for me to ever trust it.

When the target is big enough, a state funded, motivated, bad actor will eventually manage to disrupt it.

Depends on the setup. I wouldn't trust anything network connected. I would also want paper backup for validation.

I once used a touch screen voting machine about 10 years ago. The screen calibration or button values must have been atrocious. I got to the review screen and it said I was about to vote for the opposite candidates in a couple races. I had to go back and very carefully select everything again. Some of the buttons were not matching with the touch areas that should be associated with them.

Overall, the best system I've used are the bubble sheets. It has a verifiable paper ballot, can be electronically counted, not network connected, and is simple to use just like in school.

Paper ballots cannot be hacked remotely by foreign actors, or manipulated in seconds using an exploit. I could see a blockchain-based one work though.

There's to my knowledge no digital voting system used in practice that wasn't found to be severely lacking in terms of security. The famous Estonian iVote system is a case in point; it wouldn't be infeasible for a large, dedicated actor (e.g. Russia) to manipulate it, or at least to cast severe doubt upon its results.

Mainly that's because it's really hard to simultaneously maintain both anonymity and integrity, both of which are essential to voting. Lest you think anonymity is not important, think about what happens if I can see how you voted: I could simply pay you for voting "the right way".

The research literature is full with proposed electronic voting schemes, and security reviews thereof. As far as I can see, current mainstream consensus in the security community is that there is no system secure enough to be recommended, and many doubt that it can ever be done.

No, I'll never trust only a computer. There must be something that can be counted by hand, a physical record with a chain of custody.

From what I've heard, the best way to run an election is the process used in Australia.[1]

  1 - https://www.aec.gov.au/voting/counting/

even if I trust a system, it's hard to see how to spread that trust to others. The systems we have now for electronic voting are complicated and it'd require some confidence in your understanding of the subsystems its built of and how they connect to claim you trust the assemblage. It's far too much to ask the average voter to gain that background so that they can trust their vote is being handled correctly.

Simple paper ballots are quite complicated enough, thanks. There's those who can't understand the check and correction mechanisms we use for paper ballot elections, but that complexity is far closer to comprehension than any of the fancier methods proposed to replace it.

If the result could be publicly verifiable like a bitcoin transaction then yea makes sense.

We could create a distributed public ledger of votes with a setup similar to bitcoin. Every vote is encrypted with malleable encryption so that I can not tell what way an individual voted but I can add up the votes and I can find which candidate has the greater number of votes. Private votes with a publicly verifiable result!

- Edit -

As far as I know all current systems are black boxes which require blind trust of the box, the company that made the box and the software inside it. This is the worst possible setup for security that I can think of.

In the US you are asking if I trust "digital voting"/a bug to not start a civil war.