Reason we use electronic voting machines since the 90s in India:
(1) The problem of booth capturing. In a massive population, law and order is a unique challenge that most of the western countries do not face. Local goons used easily get hold of a lot of ballots and mass vote in 5 minutes and then run away before the law arrived. EVMs are made in such a way that every button press needs about 45 seconds to a minute after which you can vote again.
(2) The problem of illegal votes. Button based voting is precise. No chance of illegal votes.
(3) The problem of counting votes correctly from such a massive population. The chance of making mistakes is a lot higher and this is a unique problem that the west have never handled.
> The convenience of getting results a couple of hours earlier
Its actually a matter of many days here. The window for corruption is too high. And there are too many human vectors who can be compromised by bribes. EVMs just throw all of that out of the window.
(4) I will just mention environmental factors, although its not my main point. More population = more paper. We have 1 National Election, about 29 State Elections (28 states, 1 NCT), 1000s of municipal elections, and 10s of thousands Village headman elections!
This means some kind of elections all year round are always ongoing!
> And there are too many human vectors who can be compromised by bribes
Those bribable humans will be just as bribable when they're working in an electronic voting system. Just that instead of tampering with ballots, now all they have to do is change a number in a database table.
Same argument for online crime. Some election manager will demand the machines be put online, and someone perhaps half-way across the world will find a vunlerability.
Electronic voting is not a secure system without -- at the absolute minimum -- an auditable paper record. The computer expands the attack surface dramatically.
There's a lot to unpack in your comment. I disagree that the western world either hasn't faced or isn't currently facing the above issues.
Conventional efforts to strengthen voter enfranchisement address many of the points without the added stakes.
I don't see how the threats of underlying issues of crime and corruption are mitigated by making voting electronic. If thugs prey on voting stations and voters, it seems there are more apparent options available sans the added inherent risks to the voting system itself.
India faced a lot of instances of booth capturing, where the lines of the police and security services were spread too thin by the sheer population count that was voting.
About 1,00,00,00,000 people voting together between thousands of political parties and candidates! I am not wrong when I say that the west has never faced this.
Why not have a machine then, which could make this task scalable and easier to manage?
>>Local goons used easily get hold of a lot of ballots and mass vote in 5 minutes and then run away before the law arrived.
Without knowing anything about your country I think that by going digital you've just made the goon's job easier. They just need to bribe whomever is in charge of the electronic machine.
So, suppose the electronic machine runs a program, which doesn't allow adding arbitrary votes at will. How bribing an operator would help goons to disrupt the voting?
(Can we sort of prove there is no cryptographic solution to a good list of problems with online voting?)
(1) The problem of booth capturing. In a massive population, law and order is a unique challenge that most of the western countries do not face. Local goons used easily get hold of a lot of ballots and mass vote in 5 minutes and then run away before the law arrived. EVMs are made in such a way that every button press needs about 45 seconds to a minute after which you can vote again.
(2) The problem of illegal votes. Button based voting is precise. No chance of illegal votes.
(3) The problem of counting votes correctly from such a massive population. The chance of making mistakes is a lot higher and this is a unique problem that the west have never handled.
> The convenience of getting results a couple of hours earlier
Its actually a matter of many days here. The window for corruption is too high. And there are too many human vectors who can be compromised by bribes. EVMs just throw all of that out of the window.
(4) I will just mention environmental factors, although its not my main point. More population = more paper. We have 1 National Election, about 29 State Elections (28 states, 1 NCT), 1000s of municipal elections, and 10s of thousands Village headman elections!
This means some kind of elections all year round are always ongoing!