Ask HN: Will online voting require to trust crypto experts?
With most things, trust is established &quot;by proxy&quot; (by trusting someone who trusts whatever you worry about).<p>In free software world, we generally trust that free software is well-meaning and contains no backdoors because we assume that someone else has reviewed the code: we don&#x27;t go reviewing each and every library or app we use.<p>Sometimes that trust is misplaced, particularly with small, unused apps or libraries, but in a grand scheme of things, it works.<p>Elections are slightly different in that you want precision and guarantees. I think electronic voting can and should be introduced with a fully open source stack even for important votes, but it should never be mandatory: in theory, for those who understand the process, verifying their vote is much easier electronically.  This would enable trust-by-proxy to work as well for the technically inclined.<p>There is the trouble of verifying that the software any voting system is running matches the source code you are given access to. In that sense, having public access to a full database of votes (or at least electronic ones) would help quell that concern as well — at the very least, each competing political party could run their own system to verify your vote.<p>Still, I think the easiest way to manipulate votes today, and how it&#x27;s usually done in democracies, is by media manipulation (by selective reporting or over-reporting to drive a narrative), and no voting system can help with that :)