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Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea

Tom Scott · 5.1M views · 2019-12-09 · 12:01

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Overview

Tom Scott explains why electronic voting is a bad idea. Elections must be trusted by everyone and attacks on software scale in ways attacks on paper do not, so open source or blockchain fixes do not solve it.

On Hacker News

HN treats it as the go-to layperson-friendly argument against e-voting and links it in nearly every voting-technology thread.

Recommended by 11 HN people across 11 months · HN mentions 2020–2026

Topics

Security & hackingUS politics & electionsCryptography
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e-votingelection securitytom scottpaper ballotsblockchain votingtrust

What people said

david-gpu · 2025-07 · Strong recommendation

Tom Scott provided an excellent explanation of why electronic voting is a terrible idea. Original: [LINK] Follow-up: [VIDEO]

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space_fountain · 2021-10 · Strong recommendation

I think the Tom Scott video on electronic voting from years ago remains the most convincing argument to me that it's a bad idea ( [VIDEO] ). To summarize, even assuming you can solve properties like correctness, censorship resistance, privacy and coercion resistance. The fundamental problem with digital is that any exploit of any of these properties you ever have scales really well. Messing with a paper election requires a lot of people working together across the entire country. A digital hack just requires one smart person

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Qub3d · 2021-01 · Strong recommendation

Tom Scott made an excellent summary of why electronic voting is a bad idea, and explicitly covers both open source and blockchain as proposed solutions (hint: they don't solve the problems that make e-voting bad) [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by Tom Scott, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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