My ideal voting system would allow me to have a real time feed of votes as they come in, so that at the end of the night I can check my records vs the "official" records. Names can be detached, all I need is a Ballot id. BallotId can be something as simple as the hash of RegisteredVoterId + password + Salt + ElectionId. As long as the voter remembers their password, they can look up their record, and the record can b…
How do you validate that there are no 'additional' votes? Why do you require a password? Simply give them an anonymous id when they vote.
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 infrastructur…
or just use paper ballots like other countries do ..
Have there been any competitions to make an open source, highly scalable and verifiable anti-tampering voting system? Maybe even a competition to see how few resources can be allocated to facilitate millions of simultaneous voters? i.e. "did it in 50 lines of python!" like the javascript 1k competitions. [1]
My 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.
How well does it work for people with motor disabilities? Vision disabilities? Does an X mean a choice or they crossed out their choice? What happens when the pens run out of ink? What if they can’t read English?
Helpers? What do you pay them? Can they understand that dialect of that obscure language? Do you trust them not to lie about what they’re marking on the ballot for someone?
The truth is electronic voting machines have upsides. Having the system fill out the ballot which the voter then hands in seems like an almost ideal use to me. It’s totally verifiable but can help many people who wouldn’t be able to vote without help.
Your ideal voting system is vulnerable to coercion ("log in and show me who you voted for or else") and phishing. Voting systems should provide confidence to voters that votes are counted correctly, but not permit anyone, including the voters themselves, to learn how they voted after the ballot is cast.
Fair enough, this idea came to me before 2016. Post 2016, in this world where people are ready to commit violence purely based off their judgement of your political beliefs, this is a legitimate concern.
as we all know, political violence and coercion did not exist before 2016
>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.
I've heard of that too, but I believe that only comes to tax software.
In some other countries they mail you a postcard with how much taxes you owe, but if you have deductions they didn't know about you have to correct it... They wanted to a similar system here but the major companies like Intuit and H&R Block lobbied agaisnt it...
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.
DARPA isn't a voting system end user, and things built by DARPA tend to be proof-of-concept things that explore the possibility space and help later users set requirements for follow-on procurement.
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”.
Actually, the HGP was on the verge of being scrapped, but then the U.K. came to the rescue with a major investment to make up for the US. If I recall this right, the US enterprise (Celera) wanted to take an algorithmic shortcut in mapping and verifications, by this overtaking the HGP regarding final results in order to provide the data as a paid service. This happened 7 years before the scheduled finalization of the HGP. Eventually, they finished in a tie. (However, this has been some years ago now and I'm not a US citizen.)
> 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…
This is absolute hogwash, there are other methods than a full hand recount if you have a paper trail, some of which only require counting a small number of the ballots by hand.
The best example of this is a Risk Limiting Audit (RLA). You only have to re-count a smaller number of ballots until the overwhelming probability is that the vote is confirmed, or that the vote is rejected. Depending on the disparity between the ballot options, this count can actually be very small.
> 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…
Only part I don't care for is the touchscreen.
People consistently overestimate the reliability of that solution, especially for older voters with mobility challenges. Pushbuttons or levers that demand macroscopic elbow/shoulder motion are easier for that demographic to use than sensitive screens requiring fine motor control.
And that's all to say nothing of what happens when the screens become miscalibrated and accept taps a few pixels off. I'm fairly confident most of the "It switched my vote" reports we hear are actually this category of "user-error" (which should really be counted as "machine malfunction").