This is an extremely pessimistic view, but it’s evidently played out in the US, which (usually) espouses democratic principles, so it’s probably justified in some regard.
In Australia, I believe that the officials and processes are highly trusted by the general public (or at least by those who participate in it).
This (anecdotal) perception of trust has been earned through various means: a famous ad campaign in the 80’s featured John Farnham’s “You’re the voice” promoted an individual’s agency and participation, and a fairly hilarious Twitter account provided much needed outreach to a wider audience. There’s a somewhat impish yet popular pundit named Anthony Greene who has earned a reputation for delivering enthusiastic and entertaining analyses and observations during each election.
The volunteers and temps who run and scrutinise elections are also just regular folk, and the commission exercise transparency and due diligence where necessary. They’re also independent of the government in so far as they do not implement policies like other departments: they merely activate the electoral procedures, once they have been triggered by an act of parliament.
The thought of a sitting government or their agents affecting the outcome of an election is really only plausible in the context of branch stacking, or engineering the timing to suit their strategic interests. Murdoch media is viewed as a significant threat to democracy.
The view that ‘all government elections are run by the government so they can’t be trusted’ is bordering on conspiracy theory logic. In many jurisdictions, they are executed by good people working for agencies that operate at arm’s length, with effective measures to prevent, deter and avoid misdeeds.
The structure of the election process itself, is what determines whether it is a plausible conspiracy or probably impossible.
In an election where each vote is counted by hand, it's indeed quite hard and implausible for the government to conspire to rig it.
If, however, the government presented you with a process which had very few points of failure - a single person counting tens of thousands of votes using machines, or mail ballots where all the workers never needed to see the voter, and rely on government supplied information to validate the person exists - these do not require huge conspiracy but only a select few.
It is indeed bordering on conspiracy theory, and the border is exactly on proper process.
Another way to "measure" the security of an election process, is instead of looking at votes gap, look at how many people are needed to conspire to change the results. If your answer is very few, for example, a hacker with access to voting machine, the worker which counted thousands of votes, or the voting machine manufacturer, or the dude with the mail ballots database, it is a possible conspiracy, because it is possible that very few people aren't honest.
A properly designed election process really does require an implausible conspiracy to rig.
An improperly designed election, is almost like a backdoor, and the conspiracy theory defense no longer works.
By the way, there's another side to the coin: in a properly designed election, fraud claims simply do not happen, because it would take hundreds of individual and independent claims of fraud, to be able to claim that the results should be different.
Because the most simple solution, hand counting, works, if the government fails to give you proper verification, it is already the government's fault.
This is also the explanation that should be given in any functioning democracy. You shouldn't need PR campaign or media to establish trust in elections. Well designed democratic elections, by design, the losing side as a verifier can tell they were fair by the protocol itself. The losing side can try to see how many parts of the process they don't trust, and almost always in normally decentralized election, they could discount those parts and the results would barely change.
If your government fails this verification, skips the rational explanation and instead gives you cliche media campaign, and uses an inherently bad process, that's the part where you should already stop and distrust it.
At that point, the government already broke through all the security boundaries of the election process, and it's impossible to know that they didn't exploit it.
This is still hung up on the premise that ‘the government’ will conspire to rig or manipulate it. The government isn’t an amorphous entity that responds to its master’s demands: there are arms that operate independently, responding to legislation, rather than orders, and the people working there know that.
They are public servants, not political servants.
Also, the challenges of observability aren’t insurmountable in a digital system. They can be addressed through independent oversight and trusted platform concepts.
People counting votes do make mistakes too. That’s why a vote isn’t counted by a single person - it’s counted by several to avoid human error.
> The government isn’t an amorphous entity that responds to its master’s demands
and yet history tells us that governments do conspire and that the times we've been made aware of it happening after the fact are likely not the only times it has happened.
In the case of voting machines the government doesn't even need to be directly involved. If all of the code used isn't open source and publicly available, if the hardware is closed and inaccessible to the public for auditing and review by experts, and if there is no paper trail to interdependently verify the results then the entire system is impossible to trust by design.
The government is the "Eve" of this protocol. What happens in practice is that the government is controlled by political parties, and these have enough leverage to put their confidants into sensitive positions.
And the challenge of observability is that your adversary here, Eve, or the government, is the one providing the information. Therefore you can't rely on that information in the verification.
Human error hardly matters. And normal elections shouldn't have razor thin margins, razor thin margins are already evidence of tampering.
The irony is that instead they use the razor thin margins to justify ridiculous methods of counting.
Several people are used to counting to prevent malicious opportunities, not innocent errors. Innocent errors have zero probability of changing anything.
In Australia, I believe that the officials and processes are highly trusted by the general public (or at least by those who participate in it).
This (anecdotal) perception of trust has been earned through various means: a famous ad campaign in the 80’s featured John Farnham’s “You’re the voice” promoted an individual’s agency and participation, and a fairly hilarious Twitter account provided much needed outreach to a wider audience. There’s a somewhat impish yet popular pundit named Anthony Greene who has earned a reputation for delivering enthusiastic and entertaining analyses and observations during each election.
The volunteers and temps who run and scrutinise elections are also just regular folk, and the commission exercise transparency and due diligence where necessary. They’re also independent of the government in so far as they do not implement policies like other departments: they merely activate the electoral procedures, once they have been triggered by an act of parliament.
The thought of a sitting government or their agents affecting the outcome of an election is really only plausible in the context of branch stacking, or engineering the timing to suit their strategic interests. Murdoch media is viewed as a significant threat to democracy.
The view that ‘all government elections are run by the government so they can’t be trusted’ is bordering on conspiracy theory logic. In many jurisdictions, they are executed by good people working for agencies that operate at arm’s length, with effective measures to prevent, deter and avoid misdeeds.