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[Pierre-Marie Pédrot <pierre-marie.pedrot AT inria.fr>]

Hi,

On 26/04/2022 20:43, mukesh tiwari wrote:
> Yesterday, I came to know that few municipalities in France are using
> electronic voting machines to conduct elections, but given that since
> 2007, electronic voting (machines) is subject to a moratorium, which
> means that new municipalities cannot buy new voting machines but those
> who have already bought them can continue to use them. My question is:
> if you are a voter in one of those municipalities which conduct
> elections via electronic voting machines, what are your big concerns
> and how do other voters in your municipality perceive these electronic
> voting machines?

Here are my 2cts as a French voter that only voted on such machines from
2007 (the year I turned 18) until now (the first election where I got to
vote on paper after officially changing my residence).

In 2007, incidentally on the day I turned 18, there was a little event
at my city hall for all the youngsters that were about to vote for the
first time that year. The then-mayor was obviously there, and he was
officially responsible for the introduction of voting machines in our
town, or at least he boasted about them in the local newsletter. At the
time I was already quite concerned about these machines, so I tried to
chat with him about it.

To say the least, I was heavily depressed by the conversation. The guy
had literally no idea he was talking about and his general understanding
of "technology" in the broadest sense was abysmal. I vividly remember
him saying with a big smile "do not worry, they are not connected to the
internet so this is perfectly safe". This is a pretty good approximation
of the content of the whole conversation. I hopelessly argued a bit why
this kind of comment was fairly concerning and mentioned some real
issues, but he was clearly not getting it.

As for the voters in this municipality, nobody I know cares.

Worst part of it is that I came to agree with these people. As
materialized by the glorious results from last week, you do not even
need to cheat the machines to completely derail an election. The voting
machines are the finger, when the whole institutional and media system
is the moon we should be staring at. Paper ballots won't save us from
the manufacturing of consent.

PMP

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