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Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?

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Re: Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?

#31

Post by mcintyre1994 »

Chinmayh wrote: post #23
jimrandomh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have the ability to verify who you voted for, because that would eliminate the secret ballot.

By that logic, you are saying that everything in my bank account is public information. If there is an incentive to get to know who a individual person has voted for, then it would be with all parties. And if you think there is just one party that is much stronger as compared to others. Then, it doesn't matter if you vote or not. They are just being nice by letting you vote.

Your bank statement is available to somebody who's threatening you, because it's available to you. That's the problem with being able to verify your own vote, somebody else can force you to show them who you voted for, so they can threaten you to make you vote for who they want. It's the same reason you can't take a photo of your ballot.

Re: Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?

#32

Post by LinuxBender »

hsienmaneja wrote: post #10
LinuxBender wrote: post #2

Multiple engineers have testified before congress that they were ordered to make systems easy to hack. This has been going on for decades and nothing has changed AFAIK. I suspect everything will go fully electronic with no paper-trail, despite my having a paper trail every time I fuel up my vehicle.

Citation?

This isn't a college paper. I do not need to cite everything that I state. You can find these on search engines and youtube easily enough.

Re: Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?

#33

Post by AnimalMuppet »

LinuxBender wrote: post #32
hsienmaneja wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation?

This isn't a college paper. I do not need to cite everything that I state. You can find these on search engines and youtube easily enough.

If you claim something that is not generally known, a citation is kind of nice. If you are asked for one, a citation is even nicer - where one asks, ten or a hundred others may have the same question. You want the asker to go Google it, but you might save a hundred people the work.

Re: Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?

#34

Post by AnimalMuppet »

The way I could see doing it would be to hack several states' voting systems, and totally mess with the results so that they are clearly incorrect. Like, Trump wins California and Massachusetts over Hillary by 99% - something obviously, blatantly wrong.

Note well: I am not advocating actually doing this. But that's what I think it would take.

Re: Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?

#35

Post by squozzer »

Most software people I know aren't particularly persuasive. One trait noticeably missing among them is the ability to simplify a complex topic without losing too much relevant information.

But even if some are, ways exist to undermine an expert's credibility about a complex topic.

For example, when Robert Oppenheimer began warning people about the dangers of nuclear war, the attacks came. Once the government felt comfortable enough with Edward Teller, it could proceed with revoking Oppenheimer's security clearance.

That said, not sure a paper receipt actually helps because it's certainly possible for a voting machine to spit out a receipt, then change whatever data the receipt was supposed to capture. And unless the change was drastic and massive (e.g. Trump wins California) then it will probably go undetected.

Re: Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?

#36

Post by gnulinux »

Wow this thread is very depressing. I'm really sorry to say that this time I strongly disagree with HNers.

I'm a previous human rights activist and I worked in a lot of past elections in Turkey. I am very opinionated on this issue and I strongly believe the future is software-only votes.

Naive reasons why we should use software-only voting:

1. Humans can do mistakes. Machines can't do mistakes (unless humans who programmed them did mistakes)

2. It takes more time and resources to count votes compared to automating it.

3. You'll use less paper, so better for environment.

Better reasons why:

1. Voting is an entirely impossible-to-debug process. If you live in a corrupt republic like Turkey of Russia you need to spend thousands of dollars and people to ensure elections are held democratically. Because government won't ensure that or they will actively work against it. Software can be made debuggable.

2. If you live in a country like Russia, government can attempt collect data about your votes to estimate/learn which party you voted for. With cryptography this can be made mathematically impossible (or equivalent to very hard problems like PvsNP)

3. Recalculating election results is very infeasible in real life. If you store election data (so that it's impossible to find who voted what) and make it open, everyone can confirm election results EVEN IF we find a bug in retroactive computation script.

4. With free software (free as in freedom) it is possible for experts (computer scientists, cryptographers, law makers, attorneys etc...) to audit the process of election. This is not possible in real elections: lawyers cannot audit the election so it's possible some people make wrong decisions interfering in people's votes (i.e. deciding a bad vote to be ok, vice versa)

Problems:

1. Backdoors etc. Solution: use free software and pay experts to redundantly confirm system works. Pay software engineers to maybe write parts of the system in agda, idris, coq so it's provable. This is not terribly worse than the space program etc.

2. Not everyone can use computers. Solution: you can organize the exact same election system, call people to special places to vote and use computer instead of paper.

3. What if we're hacked even after experts checking the system? Solution: redundantly store the data, use parity bits RAID etc to ensure data integrity. If there is some unrecoverable data loss, cancel elections.

Re: Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?

#37

Post by joshumax »

LinuxBender wrote: post #32
hsienmaneja wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation?

This isn't a college paper. I do not need to cite everything that I state. You can find these on search engines and youtube easily enough.

I've done a cursory search and all I can find is articles on the dangers of EVMs and EVM manipulation; nothing about engineers testifying that they were forced to make them vulnerable. Perhaps there is information on this but it isn't immediately obvious based on a Google search. Additionally, while leaving out a citation where it's due is a common and normal occurrence, actively becoming hostile when asked to provide one is a great way to destroy any sense of credibility.

Re: Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?

#38

Post by erlongsb »

gnulinux wrote: post #36

Wow this thread is very depressing. I'm really sorry to say that this time I strongly disagree with HNers. I'm a previous human rights activist and I worked in a lot of past elections in Turkey. I am very opinionated on this issue and I strongly believe the future is software-only votes. Naive reasons why we should use software-only voting: 1. Humans can do mistakes. Machines can't do mistakes (unless humans who prog…

Also if one goes with a private-blockchain you could reuse the existing infrastructure. Make all the polling places run their own nodes. Being a programmer, sysadmin or whatever, is such a common occupation nowadays.

Re: Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?

#39

Post by endisukaj »

Chinmayh wrote: post #21

I am not sure why Software should not be used. My solution would be 1. Open Source software, which can be verified by everyone. 2. Voting via an app with authentication as good as or through your bank account. 3. After Voting, We should be able to query and verify who our vote is with - on a particular day of counting, and get whole history of our votes. An individual persons vote is append only. Please, do let me kn…

> Open Source software, which can be verified by everyone.

What makes you think that the open source software you verified is the software actually loaded on the machine you are using to vote. What about the software on the machine that counts the votes?

> Voting via an app with authentication as good as or through your bank account.

What about voter secrecy? Logging in and then voting defeats the purpose of voting.

> After Voting, We should be able to query and verify who our vote is with - on a particular day of counting, and get whole history of our votes. An individual persons vote is append only.

If you can query to find your vote then anyone else can. Do you want everyone to know who you voted for?

Re: Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?

#40

Post by endisukaj »

Chinmayh wrote: post #23
jimrandomh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have the ability to verify who you voted for, because that would eliminate the secret ballot.

By that logic, you are saying that everything in my bank account is public information. If there is an incentive to get to know who a individual person has voted for, then it would be with all parties. And if you think there is just one party that is much stronger as compared to others. Then, it doesn't matter if you vote or not. They are just being nice by letting you vote.

> If there is an incentive to get to know who a individual person has voted for, then it would be with all parties.

Buying votes is a thing. If it's easy to verify that you voted for X party then it's very easy to sell your vote.

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