Source code of the Estonian online voting system

Fully software, even a combo of software and hardware, cannot by itself make elections secure. Think of the Reflections On Trusting Trust problem, the need to verify firmware, etc. You can't ensure that machines _will_ work correctly, but you _can_ verify that they _did_. To do verify the machines' functioning after the fact you have to do it very soon after closing of the polls, and you have to devise a manual, statistical random sampling method where you manually check randomly sampled, marked paper ballots, against the digital cast vote record, then do a digital risk limiting audit to check that the CVR totals up to the machines' reported results. The sooner after closing of the polls you do this, the better the likelihood that any cheating will be caught. I.e., an immediate manual, partial audit of enough randomly-selected polling locations.

That still leaves tons of other technical problems to address, like security of mail-ballots / absentee ballots, the security of ballot boxes used for early voting (because you probably cannot run the above manual partial audit due to then having nightly results available to the public; or maybe you accept that), voter registration, etc.

Living in Estonia, I have a hard time deciding how I feel about this voting system.

Currently, with people trusting the government, this system is great. I can just cast my vote online, like I do everything else here, and I can be reasonably sure that my vote is counted thanks to the aforementioned trust in the system.

But I really fear the day that trust erodes.

On the other hand, though, once the trust is gone, I think it doesn’t really matter whether it’s an analog or digital count. People won’t trust the system anyways.

Then again, there’s a lot of nuances and different levels of trust, which is the reason why I don’t know what the right answer is.

There are a lot of folks who, whenever this topic comes up, seem to have no knowledge of the systems which already exist and have actually been used in real elections already. For instance, ElectionGuard has been used in several real elections in the US since 2020[1].

[1]: https://electionguard.vote/

Interesting that there are no updates for almost a year. Cool stable software, I guess?

I know the answer is "you don't", but suppose I vote vote electronically for candidate A. In the end, the candidate loses with 764 votes. How do I convince myself that my vote was counted in the 764 votes, and that it was not a randomly chosen number (with a RNG skewed around "plausible" scores) ?

The answer is paper backed by an ID, but i guess is too late for that.