Say goodbye to democracy wherever electronic voting is rolled out.
You still have paper ballots - with audits.
DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
51–60 of 303 posts
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#52Earlier 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…
> 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. In Australia we use IRV (what you call ranked-choice) and we don't have any forms of electronic voting for federal elections, and the overwhelming majority of votes cast in state elections are paper ballots (which ar…
Maybe not for IRV specifically, though it would arguably be easier anyway.
There are more esoteric (see, mathematically dependent) voting systems that meet the Condorcet criterion.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#53> 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.
And I like it. The simpler the design, the better. Sometimes it takes a billion dollars and a couple of smart researchers to invent the "obvious" solution to a problem.
We've got butterfly ballots, confusing electronics-only machines, and a variety of bad standards as the basis of our current voting infrastructure. Telling everybody to use a damn PDF + printer would be a gross improvement.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#54>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…
Isn't there a law in the US prohibiting public institutions from competing with private businesses? This may provide a cause for not rolling it out, but rather handing it over to private enterprises for implementation. Edit: I recall the US having to withdraw from the Human Genome Project because of this as soon as a private enterprise claimed it as a field of business.
No, that’s not true. I’m unaware of such a law and could point to many counter examples. The human genome project was declared “complete”.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#55I'm a fan of Galois, so I'll keep tabs on this project.
Agreed. I was about to write this off as a boring project that might go nowhere, but I have a huge confidence that Galois will treat this with the gravitas necessary from a computing and security theory point of view.
It might still go nowhere, but I expect there will be very interesting developments as a result of it.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#56Could this be a useful application of blockchain?
No.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
I'm sorry if this comes off as a bit hostile, but did you read at least the title of the article? "DARPA is building", not researching.
The content of the article reflected this - mostly about actually making a system, very little about research on the math behind secure voting on untrusted hardware. It's clear they want to use this.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Don't forget that electronic voting machines can have accessibility features that paper ballots lack - having a glorified form printer is actually a sound design that lets us gain these benefits without the negatives.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#59Earlier 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…
> 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. In Australia we use IRV (what you call ranked-choice) and we don't have any forms of electronic voting for federal elections, and the overwhelming majority of votes cast in state elections are paper ballots (which ar…
Your votes are still probably counted by a computer. In San Francisco, we use optical scan ballots. This system is very similar. It prints out a ballot that you validate and feed into an optical scan machine. Marking the ballot is electronic, which allows for more language choices, assistance for hearing impaired people, etc.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#60Why does this keep coming up? What is the compelling argument against paper ballots? There is no need for results to be known immediately, so how does making voting an exercise done by computers make anything better, particularly when computers are much more vulnerable to remote interference?