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

Would you say the same thing about poll taxes?

The idea of ID laws is not inherently racist. It's the implementations that are problematic.

For example, one jurisdiction that got in trouble for its voter ID law (I forget which one) was found by the courts to have, when writing their law, did a study of what forms of ID voters had, found out which of those had the biggest differences between prevalence among whites and among blacks, and then picked as the allowed forms of ID those that would most favor whites and disfavor blacks.

Places that aren't as blatant about it (or at least aren't dumb enough to actually talk about it in legislative committees for which subpoenable records are kept...) often leave hints that their motive is racial. For example, they might limit the number of places that can issue IDs, and reduce their operating hours, so that a poor person without a car (more likely to be black than white) has to take a long bus ride there and back, and has to take time off work to do so. This can be a serious hardship. (Worse, it might take more than one trip if there is any problem with the supporting documentation for the ID application. Unsurprisingly, it has been found that minor errors that tend to be overlooked when a middle class white person applies are much more likely to derail things for a poor black person).

Another hint that their motives are suspect is that such efforts are usually accompanied by efforts to make it harder for minorities to vote that have nothing to do with ID, such as closing polling places in minority neighborhoods and limiting voting hours, or reducing the number of voting machines at minority neighborhood polling places so that lines will be long.

If voter ID laws were actually about preventing voter fraud rather than about suppressing legitimate votes from poor and minorities, they would be accompanied by changes to make it cheap and easy for people to get the appropriate ID.

Also, they would be about registration ID, not voting ID, since what little fraud there actually is usually takes place via absentee ballots.

Because now instead of securing centralized voting locations and machines you somehow have to create perfectly secure software running on you Aunt Flourence's machine with 51 tool bars and 3 different bot nets installed and also make sure she can use it properly and securely. Oh also now you're accepting votes as bits over the internet giving nation states probably the juiciest target and the widest possible attack surface (see securing every voters computer).

Even using something like the IME and secure enclaves to take the computation outside the the range of your average exploit it's still vulnerable to attack.

Then even if you've perfectly secured the hardware and software you're just left with the largest login/key infrastructure problem of all time with the average voter having to understand how to not be tricked into not actually using your secured software and hardware environment...

I'll read the paper you linked, but know that it's contrary to the received wisdom, and I'm very skeptical of any claims that auditing elections are feasible or worthwhile. By audit, I mean anything short of a full manual recount.

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Okay. I lightly read that paper.

First, it specifically says to only audit the VVPR, meaning the actual ballots, not the VVPAT, which is just what the computer says it recorded. So there might be some miscommunication. I assumed #bdamm was referring to the VVPAT.

Second, the meat of the paper is refinements for calculating the confidence that the official result is correct based on recounting a sample. All of the caveats with audits, not within the scope of this paper, remain the same.

This amazing talk by Ben Adida is really relevant. He has worked on solving voting for a long time now and does a great job here of breaking down some of the salient parts of the problem.