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Having asked it dozens of times, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t trust anyone to build a voting system. I like it as a question tho, since it’s open ended enough to really let the candidate focus on the domains interesting to them; scalability, security, data modeling, whatever they want really.
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> 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 ..
> 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.
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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.
I'm sorry, do you know what the acronym D.A.R.P.A. stands for, or that they explicitly stated they aren't the production implementer of any such system? Do you know what the network you're throwing packets at is based on?
Researching that doesn't require a prototype. So why are they building one? As a first step to using a voting system based on it. This isn't 'research', it's propaganda to sell the idea that hardware can be secure. They'll give it to Defcon or whoever, and once they fix all the weaknesses hackers can find, they'll triumphantly declare it's 'secure', and that we can switch to e-voting, and not to worry our pretty little heads about chip/compiler-level backdoors, or if the builders of the system themselves subvert it.
They can state they won't be the implementer of such systems all they like, that doesn't change the intent of this program - to push e-voting reliant on 'secure' hardware.
> 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…
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 mac…
Do we really think that a large conspiracy of translators for obscure languages is a viable attack?
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or just use paper ballots like other countries do ..
And add fingerprint identification, like other countries do.
I've always wondered why nobody suggests doing that in the US to help prevent or ease people's concerns about potential voter fraud. It's simple, low-tech, and hard to screw up.
Unless if I'm missing something, which of course is possible. Can someone tell me what the downsides are to an idea like that?
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or just use paper ballots like other countries do ..
And add fingerprint identification, like other countries do.
I have been informed by social scientists that requiring voter ID is racist, so it seems that fingerprint checks would also be racist via the same logic.
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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.
Ultimately: the administrators weren't thinking about ballot issues. Palm Beach, Florida, was understaffed and underpaid, under-invested. They had other things on their mind when they deployed their machines.
They needed to move off of the punch-card system ASAP, but they couldn't afford to. They had the same issue in 1996 before the famous year 2000 issue. It was known, but not much could be done about it.
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I guess this printer methodology from DARPA might be too expensive. Or maybe the scanning machines can be owned by the state, so that poorer areas won't have to invest into the machines. Etc. etc.
There's a lot of issues aside from "use paper ballots". The entire voting system needs to be considered. I hope that DARPA's challenge will include these issues in their design process.
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> 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.
I agree. But why did butterfly ballots proliferate in Florida? Ultimately: the administrators weren't thinking about ballot issues. Palm Beach, Florida, was understaffed and underpaid, under-invested. They had other things on their mind when they deployed their machines. They needed to move off of the punch-card system ASAP, but they couldn't afford to. They had the same issue in 1996 before the famous year 2000 issu…
Sure, but moving money around to deal with that problem is easy (and mostly doable intrastate, but, a federal role isn't unreasonable.)
But this isn't a problem calling for novel technology. (As has already been demonstrated by the move to e-voting that happened in many places after 2000, though some people got the wrong message and decided that we just chose the wrong technical solution—but a lot of that is due to lobbying by the people selling technical solutions.)