Everyday someone trying to "fix democracy"
DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
101–110 of 303 posts
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
With too low a barrier to recount-by-hand, every election becomes contested because the cost to demand a recount is minimal and the losing candidate might win.
Where's the problem? I've been leaning towards the idea that maybe every election should have a hand count. You can get your electronic count first for the early announcements, but it should be verified by the hand count. What's the downside, just the cost? Seems likely worthwhile to me.
The problem is that the vast majority of elections aren't counted incorrectly, and you're vastly increasing the cost on an under-funded system for no benefit in five-nines of the cases (and the remaining cases can have a recount triggered by one of the candidates, but not at no cost to them).
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
or just use paper ballots like other countries do ..
The Butterfly ballots WERE paper ballots. Give America an idea, and SOMEONE in America will royally screw it up. Its a big country filled with lots of smart people, but also filled with lots of dumb people. DARPA is working to come up with the standard that the whole country should follow. That's good and useful research. Even if it comes out to be the obvious solution (a paper ballot off of a damn printer), there's…
> The Butterfly ballots WERE paper ballots.
They were particularly badly arranged punch card ballots; the solutions to both the bad arrangement (“don't do that, like most people didn't do previously”) and the punch card (”use optical scan”) related problems are not only well known but pretty widely adopted.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#104My 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 mac…
Don't care, my system is still better.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
This is missing two completely unnecessary failure modes that pen and paper don't have: 1. You cannot know whether the device leaks your vote, i.e., whether your vote is secret. Mind you that in addition to an attack inside the device, this can also happen via simple electromagnetic side channels inherent in the device--as has been demonstrated quite a while ago for Nedap voting computers by the dutch campaign agains…
> You cannot know whether the device leaks your vote, i.e., whether your vote is secret.
The electronic voting machine never is granted your identity. But I'll grant it's possible that records of the voter identity with the ballot identity exist and could be used to map the voter's vote.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 acce…
It is still impossible to submit a vote without personally verifying it or deciding that you don't really care enough to review your choices. A peripheral device is one more thing than can break or be tampered with. The user experience issue is up to them to implement. In general, getting elderly people, low-income populations and other late adopters of technology to use touchscreens correctly has been much easier th…
I'm a poll worker so I have some experience with the problem. I agree with you that a peripheral is one more thing that can break or be tampered with, and I wouldn't recommend a mouse. Here's what I've observed (at least in the iVotronic systems we use in Pennsylvania):
- since there's only one screen, and it's all touchscreen, users get consistently confused between pictures of buttons describing what the buttons do and the buttons themselves
- the touchscreen is itself a peripheral and prone to wearing out. When it does, the fact it's wearing out is difficult to observe during the election day; there's no cursor indicator, so a poll worker can't check calibration.
- users with fine-motor-coordination issues have to brace against the box to steady themselves to touch the tiny targets they want. There's nowhere to brace against a touchscreen that isn't also touch-sensitive input, and the screens don't accept multi-touch.
A row of buttons along each side of the screen, not unlike the solution used at many ATMs, would ameliorate all these problems. These boxes are already custom hardware jobs, so switching out touchscreens for a couple of button banks would be cheaper, equally usable for most voters, and more usable for mobility-impaired voters. It would improve all three observed problems.
Wishes and horses though; the machines we have are the ones we use.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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... Adam's Ruins everything talked about this https://youtu.be/Fj4anUL-LvY
California has their own tax software you can use online, although it doesn't cover as many use cases as TurboTax.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#108>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.
The benefit of open source is that it is verifiable by peer review.
I would take an open source and peer reviewed voting system that was originated by the NSA and CIA and every other spook organization over one that was closed-source and hand-coded by Larry Lessig or whomever is your favorite person of integrity.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#109Could this be a useful application of blockchain?
Could be a good application of hash chaining as it has existed since the 80’s. Block chains wouldn’t add much value over that here, however.
Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
#110My 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…
In addition to the issues of vote buying described in other comments, you’re also amplifying the spoiler effect to a massive degree with a real time vote feed.
Anyone in later time zones will be less incentivized to vote if they can see the results of all the votes that came before them.
IMHO even exit polling should be outlawed. This day-long televised circus during elections is really damaging to democracy...