Say goodbye to democracy wherever electronic voting is rolled out.
DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
41–50 of 303 posts
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#42My design uses paper and pen. Deployment requires mailing ballots out and having places where people can come in to fill them out. 10 million dollars please.
I legitimately don't understand what's the invention here. If all you're trying to do is avoiding having an invalid or ambiguous ballot and you print out a paper copy anyway, why invest 10 million into a new system instead of just using some bog standard computer + printer?
If you're going to get the physical ballot anyway what's the point?
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's unfair to say there is no point in e-voting besides malice. e-Voting could make it easier / cheaper to deploy polling stations, collect ballots faster, and potentially to use more complex (but more fair and accurate) voting methods like Ranked Choice or others. As for the "We won't tell you how you voted but you can validate it", my first guess would be some kind of PKI where you are given the equivalent…
> But it's worth researching. Yet they keep pushing for half-baked insecure systems long before any of this research has been finished.
Do you want it looked at, or not? You make no point. You get mad about the research, then get mad about some wanting to do it without enough research.
Is your point that we should never, for the rest of time, investigate the use of electronics for secure voting?
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#44Software is perfectible, skinware is not. As long as corruptible human beings are in charge, there will be room for fraud.
Corruptible humans will always be in charge, until Terminator. The question is, how much corruption are we willing to put up with, how would we know it is happening, and how robust are the apparatus for correcting those abuses?
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#45> Kiniy said Galois will design two basic voting machine types. The first will be a ballot-marking device that uses a touch-screen for voters to make their selections. That system won’t tabulate votes. Instead it will print out a paper ballot marked with the voter’s choices, so voters can review them before depositing them into an optical-scan machine that tabulates the votes. Galois will bring this system to Def Con…
I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached. I do agree that the paper trail is a great thing. I'm not fundamentally against electronic voting, but I haven't heard of a system that can really compete with the simplicity and verifiability of the immutablility you get from paper ballots inside ballot boxes being watched over by interested parties on all sides.
> I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached.
I don't think that's dismissive at all. That's what it is, and it sounds good to me. Basically the computer is a scribe with perfect handwriting that fills out the paper ballot for the voter while the voter watches. Absolutely any voter is qualified to assert whether the ballot contains the votes they intended to cast.
From there, you could have the voter carry the ballot and drop it in a box that's being observed by any number of interested parties, providing old-fashioned accountability. Counting by scanner is an optional time saver, with hand counts as the alternative / double-check.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#46Good news. An Agora voting system's fork powered by SGX/TrustZone and verified by Cryptol?
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#47>The systems Galois designs won’t be available for sale. But the prototypes it creates will be available for existing voting machine vendors or others to freely adopt and customize without costly licensing fees or the millions of dollars it would take to research and develop a secure system from scratch. I guess the devil is always in the details. "freely adopt and customize" to me says that the code will not be veri…
> "impervious to certain kinds of hacking"
guess that about sums it up. it's DARPA after all folks..
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#48>The systems Galois designs won’t be available for sale. But the prototypes it creates will be available for existing voting machine vendors or others to freely adopt and customize without costly licensing fees or the millions of dollars it would take to research and develop a secure system from scratch. I guess the devil is always in the details. "freely adopt and customize" to me says that the code will not be veri…
When the military is building voting systems you should be a little leery.
DARPA's experimental computer network protocols (Arpanet) seem to be working quite fine these days.
I know DARPA is military, but they contribute so much to general research that its kinda normal to use their stuff.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#49My design uses paper and pen. Deployment requires mailing ballots out and having places where people can come in to fill them out. 10 million dollars please.
I legitimately don't understand what's the invention here. If all you're trying to do is avoiding having an invalid or ambiguous ballot and you print out a paper copy anyway, why invest 10 million into a new system instead of just using some bog standard computer + printer? If you're going to get the physical ballot anyway what's the point?
Systems comprising entirely of pen/paper and manual counters with oversight by the parties, where sufficient engagement in the community provides the volunteer manpower to oversee the election, are impervious to electronic interference.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#50> Kiniy said Galois will design two basic voting machine types. The first will be a ballot-marking device that uses a touch-screen for voters to make their selections. That system won’t tabulate votes. Instead it will print out a paper ballot marked with the voter’s choices, so voters can review them before depositing them into an optical-scan machine that tabulates the votes. Galois will bring this system to Def Con…
The paper trail is not so wonderful. What we saw in 2016 was that even if a candidate were to contest a result, none of the election committees were willing to commit to a full hand recount; instead, the only options were to retabulate through the very same tabulation processes and machines that had produced the questionable results in the first place. Without low barrier to recount by hand, the electronic systems pr…
You don't have to recount "by hand". You start with auditing by hand - looking at a sample and seeing if it's accurate. Then you run the original paper ballots through another scanner.