How about a machine voting system with paper fallback. You as a voter can review the paper protocol from your vote. If there is distrust, the justice system can review the paper trail as well.

I don't understand the reason for electronic voting. The UK manages to tally up paper votes overnight, even from far-flung Scottish islands. Electronic voting is literally solving a problem that nobody has.

UK population density (people/sq km) is 289 and Switzerland's is 228, so not very different. Plus Switzerland is fully connected, there are no remote islands.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by...

Australia also has paper ballots.

The area isn't that much of a problem

So more populated countries have more potential poll workers to choose from. Isn't this a linear relationship? What does size have to do with anything?

> If there is distrust, the justice system can review the paper trail as well.

There is always, so you would just always count the ballots.

What is the rush to tally the ballots? Do we need an _instant_ count? Isn't that actually a negative attribute as far as security is concerned?

The distance between the election and the taking of the office is often months. I just don't understand why electronics need to be involved at all in this system.

FWIW Swiss elections are counted in at most 6 hours, usually quicker except for big cities. If your system takes longer than that, it's a bad system.

Also it's not just elections to offices, but also votes on yes/no propositions, which can take effect more or less immediately.

> If your system takes longer than that, it's a bad system.

Why?

> which can take effect more or less immediately.

In our jurisdictions they're usually reserved. Courts can be used to challenge laws as unconstitutional. And you typically want a bright line implementation date that everyone can see coming.

Because hand-counting of paper ballots, as done in Switzerland (and many other places) is the bare minimum. Any more complicated system that still takes longer is adding complication unnecessarily. An electronic election system should be able to count all the ballots basically instantaneously.

In Switzerland the courts have no power to rule laws as unconstitutional - this is a power reserved to the people (who are sovereign), via referendums. So when the people strike down a law at referendum, that takes effect immediately as the voting population is the "final instance". Usually when they vote positively for something, there is still then some implementation period - sometimes quite a lot of it, e.g. there was a vote to reform the tax system passed on Sunday, and it will take effect according the government at the start of _2032_.

What is the need for it? You want faster results? Not needed, elections don't need to be fast, they need to be trusted. You want to have less humans in the loop to be more efficient? Having humans in the loop is actually a feature not a bug as it distributes the trust on many actors.

Paper ballots work just fine if done correctly and most democracies have a long history of knowing how to do them correctly with very high stakes.

Electronic (or even online) votes are fine for low stakes stuff, like what the color of that new bridge ought to be, but not to select the fate of a whole nation.

Regular ballot voting can also be hacked and on a scale. Making ballots invalid while counting them, or modifying them in some form or other, intentionally writing wrong values in the counting protocols...

And of course controlled vote or paid vote...

E-voting can and has also led to exposing voting fraud -- see Venezuella.

but it's done in public where anyone observing the count can see that the people counting don't have any pencils etc in their hand

Exactly - it's done in public, and not centrally. Any citizen can go and check how it's done in their own Geminde.

Yeah but it cannot be hacked from the other side of the world. I think it's a different kind of threat.

If an attacker from somewhere else in the world want to tamper with their votes, they have to get Swiss people to modify the ballots, or get their agent to learn Swiss-German, good luck with that :D.

The ballot voting process is also misunderstood by regular citizens, even nerdy ones. From experience, even by voting officials.

As a Swiss citizen I strongly disagree. Most people capable of reading and basic maths (addition!) can understand the counting of our paper ballots. My kids understand how this works since they are like 5.

Any citizen can go and check how votes are counted in their Geminde. Any citizen can check what is reported in the federal tally. I did several times. It's not rocket science.

> basic maths (addition!)

Technically you don't even need that, you just need to be able to count, i.e. find the successor to a given number.

The rules for deciding the winners in proportional parliamentary elections are quite a bit more complex than that...

True.

> At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database.

It's the only problem in existence that can be solved by the blockchain...

Ironically most production e-voting systems do not use blockchains. That's because there isn't need for decentralization, just verifiability of a correct result and protecting voting secrecy.

But generally sacrifices that anonymous axis via a reproduceable public ledger

Unless pseudonymized...

Are you implying that the lack of data harvesting is a disadvantage?

It not a disadvantage but a rare trait nowadays.

So... Graphene on a completely Lenovo (Chinese)-owned Motorola Mobility saying they focus more on security than other EU/US vendors. Bold strategy.

you know there is a meme in Chinese netizens that they call Lenovo the sweetheart of US empire (美帝良心), the same thing that the same SKU was sold in America that is either cheaper than the equivalent in China or not even listed for

I'm calling out Graphene for dealing with a Chinese-owned company instead of US or Euro-owned vendor. There is a difference between manufacturing parts and components in China, and the entire design/development, production, assembly, and maintenance being owned by a Chinese-owned vendor.

Not to mention that by their actions Graphene are aiding an economic and political adversary develop more secure devices.

> I'm calling out Graphene for dealing with a Chinese-owned company instead of US or Euro-owned vendor. There is a difference between manufacturing parts and components in China, and the entire design/development, production, assembly, and maintenance being owned by a Chinese-owned vendor.

Nearly the entire design and development process for European phone brands is done by Chinese ODM partners. It wouldn't be a positive to have a largely non-technical company between us and the company doing the technical work.

Our partnership with Motorola Mobility isn't exclusive. Motorola Mobility are currently the only company both willing and able to meet our hardware requirements. We've talked to multiple smaller companies but they're currently unable to provide what we need.

> Not to mention that by their actions Graphene are aiding an economic and political adversary develop more secure devices.

GrapheneOS isn't based in the US and has no American directors but yet you're talking about it as if it's an American state-owned enterprise. It's the US which regularly threatens to destabilize and annex the country where we're based, not China. There's no Canadian or European company which is truly designing and building modern smartphones. We could have worked with a South Korean company if they had wanted to build a device with official GrapheneOS support instead of only improving their own OS.

Will you still be able to support Pixel phones for a while in tandem? I purposely bought a 9 Pro XL once I heard about your woes with the 10. Now I feel slightly obligated to buy the Motorola release to show my support.

On a slightly unrelated note, many years ago you completely changed my viewpoints on security. This was before Copilot integration. May I ask if you still recommend Windows to pair with Graphene?

Pixels will continue to be supported until end-of-life. We still intend to add support for future Pixels too. Google is welcome to work with us to make that smoother.

> May I ask if you still recommend Windows to pair with Graphene?

I never recommended Windows. macOS on their latest hardware is the overall least bad out of the mainstream options (Windows, macOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.). An iPhone or Pixel with GrapheneOS is far more secure than any of those.

What about Qubes? Or is it too much of a hassle that it ends up being a net negative for security? (For normal users, that is)

What's wrong with a Chinese owned company? As someone who has no plans to step foot in China, I'd much rather be spied on by the Chinese than the US or EU.

Adversary? Unsure if you've been living under a rock, but the US and Europe are the ones starting wаrs and destabilizing half the world. They are the actual bad guys.

I'll get a Chinese company's phone over an American or Euro company's phone (is the latter ever a thing?) any day.

The reason I was ever interested in a fully oss mobile operating system is because my economic and political adversaries are the owners the the tech companies no matter what country they are from.

Thinkpads are also part of Lenovo and is technically Chinese. But see, which device is recommended for privacy purposes the most because of Libreboot/Coreboot and how much respected thinkpads are in the privacy minded community.

Can't believe I am saying this but a chinese company can be good and an american company can be bad.

Not an exact fan of china, especially their authoritarianism but I am not a fan of america right now either.

For what its worth, a lot of American phone companies also use chinese factories or chinese components and assemble them in India or Vietnam (Apple) and then say that we are making phones in India which while true, isn't the most accurate picture but it keeps the masses happy.

Models recommended for Coreboot are old ones. You can't get it on newer ones or can't even edit the UEFI/ACPI tables on them because firmware is a) signed b) on SMD nvram making it pita to flash

That article is fron 2012. According to wikipedia Motorola Mobility was then aquired by Lenovo in 2014, and Lenovo still ownes Motorla Mobility to this day.

It ended up in Chinese hands.

Ah, reminds me of 'Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System? (2022)' https://db.cs.cmu.edu/mmap-cidr2022/

Ah yes, the ever popular "mongoDB's developers were incompetent therefore mmap is bad" paper.

Pure tripe. https://www.symas.com/post/are-you-sure-you-want-to-use-mmap...

Sometimes that’s far more work than it’ll ever be worth.

If I get my patches upstream, then I don’t have to waste time reintegrating patches and rebuilding packages when I could instead be doing productive things.

Can't tell if sarcasm