With an American company? Really Microsoft?
It's apparently free and open-source. What exactly is your concern?
Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
31–40 of 177 posts
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine I ask the voting machine to give me 100 sealed envelopes with "Alice" written in them and 100 sealed envelopes with "Bob" written in them. I open and destroy 199 of them, verify that Alice votes are Alice votes and Bob votes are Bob votes. I then walk out of the voting booth with a sealed Alice envelope, then deposit it into the ballot box. That's the "verifiable" step in here. The only way for you to know wh…
The post states: > The combination of the tracker – which allows individual voters to verify that their votes have been accurately recorded – and the verifier – which allows anyone to verify that the recorded votes have been accurately counted – enables full “end-to-end verification” of the correctness of election results. I understood this to mean that I am able to use the tracker to verify that my vote was cast for…
Right - the way you verify that is by asking for 100 sealed Alice envelopes, and opening 99 of them at random. If the machine was trying to trick you, you have a strong chance of catching it. You still walk out with a sealed envelope, and the would-be vote-buyer can't be sure it isn't a Bob envelope.
This Numberphile video explains the process a bit more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRTvoZ3Rho
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can just not vote. It has the same impact on the results of the election.
Not always - spoiled ballots can sometimes count, or indicate growing dissent in society. Not voting can achieve neither. Here's a case from last week of a spoiled ballot giving someone a majority of one: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/03/ballot-pape... Was that the result the voter intended? Probably not, but who knows? :)
How is this individual vote any more or less significant to the outcome than all the others?
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#34So we are supposed to trust all the digital pixie dust voting and no paper trail ?
This isn't an electronic voting system.
> ElectionGuard provides a complete implementation of end-to-end verifiable elections. It is designed to work with systems that use paper ballots, supplementing today’s tabulation process by providing a means of public verification of the accuracy of reported results.
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#35I shall repeat it like a mantra: voting beeing slow inefficient is a side effect of it’s transparency. You want a voting system were a average voting helper can look at it and say: “There was nothing fishy there, I saw it”. This is because it is about trust and not only about secrecy and security.
Your electronic voting system can be mathematically perfect, but if nobody average can say from the outside that everything is going by the rules and it makes sense, then it is worthless.
This is why paper works so well: it takes not much skill to count it, it has to have a physical place (harder to make it vanish) and everybody can have their eyeballs glued to it, and if something fishy is going on, it is harder to hide from the average voting helper.
Even I as a programmer with some crypto knowledge would never be able to fully gurantee for the integrity of a voting system, because who knows what software version is running out there in the wild, and whom I have to trust on that one.
Paper has no software version and errors in the process can (and are) catched more easily.
Electronic voting is good for decision were power is not involved, or where the outcome doesn’t really matter. I’d rather improve what we have instead of replacing it with a mathematical sound blackbox that everybody can with perfectly rational reasons distrust when the vote went into the wrong direction.
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#36It certainly has nothing to do with democracy, and intended to solve exactly one problem: Microsoft's need to increase revenue through sweet gov't funded contracts. Let's not be fooled by opensourced code, once the idea is sold to politicians, and media, someone should be contracted to implement this useless staff. And who's this going to be? Not hard to guess.
Maybe they are solving multiple problems at the same time :-)
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#37I thought about some advantages of paper voting compared to electronic: you can spoil the ballot, for example, if you don't like any of candidates and there is no option titled "Against all". In electronic elections, you cannot do that.
You can just not vote. It has the same impact on the results of the election.
Actually, spoiled votes show how many voters turned up but did not like any of the candidates. It's a clear message to candidates that this is not voter apathy, the votes are there for the taking, but their policies and behaviors are not supported.
Not bothering to show up at all doesn't give any clear message.
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#38It certainly has nothing to do with democracy, and intended to solve exactly one problem: Microsoft's need to increase revenue through sweet gov't funded contracts. Let's not be fooled by opensourced code, once the idea is sold to politicians, and media, someone should be contracted to implement this useless staff. And who's this going to be? Not hard to guess.
It's possible to have more than one motivation...
I'd actually be more worried if there wasn't a clear incentive for MSFT to work on this project.
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#39I shall repeat it like a mantra: voting beeing slow inefficient is a side effect of it’s transparency. You want a voting system were a average voting helper can look at it and say: “There was nothing fishy there, I saw it”. This is because it is about trust and not only about secrecy and security. Your electronic voting system can be mathematically perfect, but if nobody average can say from the outside that everythi…
Even a mathematically perfect voting system could be substituted in entirety.
Replace the whole damn thing with your own one in an identical case running system.out.println("my favourite candidate wins! ");
Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
#40It certainly has nothing to do with democracy, and intended to solve exactly one problem: Microsoft's need to increase revenue through sweet gov't funded contracts. Let's not be fooled by opensourced code, once the idea is sold to politicians, and media, someone should be contracted to implement this useless staff. And who's this going to be? Not hard to guess.
So therefore it's better if they didn't do this, is your conclusion?