At the Voting Village, Susan Greenhalgh called Internet voting "the Theranos of Voting" - something scientists agree isn't possible to do properly, but vendors try to sell anyway. Our panel explored the question "If I can shop online, why can't I vote online?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0RiIRGPMYc
@alison Online systems are compromised all the time. Online bank fraud and tax fraud, and identity theft that enables them, are common problems. The difference is that, because neither banking nor tax payments are anonymous, it's generally possible to either insure or roll back fraudulent transactions.
One a vote is cast, on the other hand, it can't be traced back to the voter and corrected later if irregularities occurred. A compromise of an online voting system could cause irreversible harm.
@Selena@alison It's absolutely possible to build trustworthy voting systems, even out of untrustworthy components. But it requires that there be a reliable artifact of the voters' ballot choices (such as a paper ballot), which online voting systems, by definition, don't have.
This is a well understood area in which a great deal of progress has been made in the last decade. Google "Risk Limiting Audits" for details.
@mattblaze@alison My take on it is that either you choose to trust the system or you don't: if you don't than no amount of re-telling will convince you that Trump lost, if you do than reasonable precautions are enough.
@mattblaze Yeah, as everyone knows there’s absolutely no fraud ever with online shopping, not from vendors, not from credit card thieves, not from credit card companies, not from shipping companies and there’s never any websites that go down or aren’t reachable, or aren’t reachable but only from some locations or have bugs that make them not work on slow connections or with some accessibility tools or mysteriously lose data or are high jacked or are hacked or are defaced or