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DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

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Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#231

Post by zanny »

gonehome wrote: post #23
snowwrestler wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love voting by mail, but I don't understand how that's legal since you could just coerce someone that way? Force them to vote by mail, watch them fill out the ballot (or fill it out for them), and mail it in.

Generally all mail in voting systems let you override your vote. If someone coerces you once and you send in another ballot postmarked after the first or go to your polling location in person on election day you can override that vote.

You basically need to hold someone hostage or under total surveillance from when the ballot is mailed to when the polls are closed to avoid them just sending in their actual ballot afterwards.

With an electronic voting system the window of time you have to hold someone hostage is much shorter - simply force their vote an hour before the polls close and then hold them prisoner for the hour.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#234

Post by r00fus »

Pharmakon wrote: post #81
hansjorg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because paper ballots increase the cost of manipulating elections.

Ironically the one recent confirmed case of a rigged election in the U.S. was rigged through paper absentee ballots.

As opposed to many potential others which were electronic and not confirmed/confirmable? Gimme the paper absentee ballot any day.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#235

Post by CBLT »

ams6110 wrote: post #198
i_am_proteus wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will the voters who are (reportedly) unable to obtain ID be able up get their prints into the verification system? 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.

> I have been informed by social scientists that requiring voter ID is racist Do you have a personal opinion on that? I don't see it as racist in any way, because it applies equally to everybody. We have a few basic rules for voters in this country, one is that they are citizens, two is that they are registered. Being able to demonstrate that you are the registered voter you claim to be seems to me to be essential to…

>I don't see it as racist in any way, because it applies equally to everybody.

To build a little on what the other commenters are saying, I recently watched a talk about equity and how it compares to equality. There's a famous image of people of different heights looking over a fence[0] that shows well how equality does not always lead to justice. I have found it worthwhile, every time I see "equality" featured, to ask about how this is different than equity. In this case, it's inequitable (to a degree) because it is disadvantageous for the poor or other marginalized groups to jump through these hoops even if they're the same hoops that the advantaged groups have.

I'll also note this equality-equity distinction is making its way into mainstream American politics. On page 6 of the Green New Deal[1] is a provision that the federal government has the duty of promoting equity and justice for people oppressed because of their race or circumstance. This is noteworthy because (as far as I'm aware) federal law has only been providing equality so far, but now there's a shift in policy to provide equity and not ask for equality.

[0] http://interactioninstitute.org/illustrating-equality-vs-equ...

[1] https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109i...

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#236

Post by drilldrive »

nathan_long wrote: post #8

> 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 best thing about it is assuring voter confidence. And this is something I have been looking forward to for years; I hope it will be implemented soon enough.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#237

Post by myth2018 »

Sounds good. But in practice it's complicated.. In Brazil we have been using electronic voting systems for 20 years. Since then, there's been absolutely NO EVIDENCE of fraud. Specialists are regularly invited to know the code and try to find vulnerabilities (the code wasn't open-sourced, and personally I don't think it should).

And, even so, the losing parties ALWAYS claim there's been some fraud, and a significant part of their respective voters buy such discourse.

There's been turnover of power pretty regularly in most parts, and even this doesn't stop folks of accusing electoral fraud.

Last year, thanks Whatsapp, the debate's gained special contours. Lots of malicious people shared videos showing fake frauds, which were dismissed after some hours.

There's been also lots of stupid people mistyping into the ballot and screaming around with a camera accusing a fraud.

It was a bit of a mess and things tend to get serious in very tight scores, since there won't be a safe, auditable way of recounting the votes without having to fully believe in the government agency responsible for operating the system.

The system makes the process extremely efficient. We are 100 million voters, voting is mandatory, and we always know the winners within a couple of hours past the end of the voting process. But..

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#238

Post by rtkwe »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #130
sverige wrote: post #60

Why 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?

Aren't counting ballots always wrong? Like every time there is a recount the number changes... What's wrong with electronic ballots? If we can have a secure and audit-able banking system (and every other aspect of our lifes), surely we can have the same for voting?

> If we can have a secure and audit-able banking system (and every other aspect of our lifes), surely we can have the same for voting?

There's one major requirement in voting systems that throws a huge wrench in everything, anonymity. In order to prevent vote buying and coercion voters can't be tied to specific votes. So any system that allows a person to check that their vote got counted for their candidate isn't workable because that violates the anonymity requirement.

There's a million reasons that votes change as they're counted and recounted. For one in some states absentee ballots can be postmarked up to the day of the election so they can trickle in for a while after the day of. Another is machine breakdowns and just mistakes as the complete numbers are gathered.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#239

Post by [deleted] »

dragontamer wrote: post #119
dragonwriter wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#240

Post by specialist »

bigj0n wrote: post #207
adestefan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the US. Now election fraud is a different issue.

There have been lots of reports of non-citizens being registered to vote in the US. It is very rare, but elections are also generally very close races. I dont get how people can just shrug off reports of dead people and non-citizens being registered to vote as a non-issue.

Registration errors are not voting errors.

How many of those dogs registered to vote showed up and cast a ballot?

--

If anyone actually cares enough to have a mostly accurate cost effective voter registration database, they'd reuse any one of our existing national demographic databases. But they don't. Because the recurring drama caused by our existing fragmented poorly funded more error prone system is too useful.

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