171–180 of 381 posts
I'm sure Abraham would be proud to have had his name attached to essentially a weapons contract masquerading as a peace deal between two evil governments.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I envision a system where after I vote I rip off the top of the card and am able to use that hash like token to later verify that my vote was counted correctly
That's only viable in countries/situations where secret ballots are not a strict requirement and vote buying is not perceived to be a problem With paper ballots if you want to be sure that your vote was counted correctly you generally can go and see the counting process, as a bonus like that you help ensure that every vote is counted correctly
I'm surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel too, since the Israeli intelligence company was supposedly "closely monitoring how their customers were using the software" or akin to that. Like, yeah, blame the UAE mostly for this but let's also have a discussion about why this was sold to anyone who would pay with no oversight at all. Western countries need to do better.
The current home secretary, Priti Patel, was forced to resign from her previous (lesser) role as Minister for International Development for secretly (and thus illegally) meeting with Israeli diplomats. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-41923007 It is completely unsurprising that there is little care shown by our government.
The current government is a huge ally of Israel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I envision a system where after I vote I rip off the top of the card and am able to use that hash like token to later verify that my vote was counted correctly
I envision the same system to later verify the votes I bought
I'm surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel too, since the Israeli intelligence company was supposedly "closely monitoring how their customers were using the software" or akin to that. Like, yeah, blame the UAE mostly for this but let's also have a discussion about why this was sold to anyone who would pay with no oversight at all. Western countries need to do better.
The UK itself is one of the largest weapon exporters in the world, exporting to many countries in the Middle East with dubious human rights track records. The UK government can't possibly know what happens with every single pistol, bullet, missile or drone they sell (if they could, nobody would be buying):
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_arms_export
A private Israeli company is exporting weapons to the same countries the UK does, and when those weapons get used inappropriately, you're then "surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel".
By the same account, are you suggesting that there should be a major diplomatic incident between every country in the world and the UK/USA every time they catch terrorists somewhere around the world using either UK/USA built-or-designed firearms?
There wouldn't be any diplomatic relationships left then:
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_firearms
If it’s the first then security services have a problem. If it’s the second then those individuals have a problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> then why not just use the paper system? One reason is efficiency, if you have the machines counting you get results faster and then you can audit only a random sample of machines records and get statistical guarantees of the election integrity. (The machine can't know before that it will be audited so if you test thousands of machines and find no discrepancy it's highly unlikely a significant portion of the others…
> The machine can't know before that it will be audited so if you test thousands of machines and find no discrepancy it's highly unlikely a significant portion of the others did cheat > It also shows that in 2013 they audited "only" 20k machines out of almost millions yet found no discrepancy. Statistically that's probably good enough if the choice of machines audited was random So how do you protect against the corr…
According to this: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/count-vvpat-slips-...
India checks 5 machines randomly selected in each voting "segment", no clue what that is but it's smaller than a constituency so I guess it's a polling station
From what I understood that's done locally right away after polls close. So that means that you'd need a way for the conspirators to identify the non tampered machines and for them to randomly select exactly those machines and you'd need them to be present in almost all polling stations and no one to challenge the choice
At that point it's essentially the same level of trust needed for paper ballots
> Have people from opposing political parties count the vote and check each others result
Yeah, but apparently that particular attack vector was a problem in India and this feature helps mitigate it, electoral solutions need to account for the practical situation they're in. For instance I don't support any form of electronic voting machines in my polity because the electoral system works fine with paper ballots and there aren't issues of ballot stuffing
> There is no difference between a machine publishing the counted votes and the poll workers publishing the counted votes, is there?
Yeah, but I was talking, for lack of a better term, about non additive electoral systems, in which the information conveyed in multiple ballots cannot be easily compressed
For instance in the FPTP system you can compress all the information in a polling station by counting how many votes for X how many for Y etc. And you can simply add up these numbers to other stations
The complexity scales linearly with the number of candidates
In a system like, for instance, IRV, where the voter ranks the candidates and the rank is an important part of the ballot itself you can't easily transpose all this information into a single number
The most you could do is build a tree data structure where the first level nodes are the first preferences and each node points to other nodes based on the successive preferences.
In this case the complexity of the process is exponential/factorial because you need a field for every possible combination of preferences, including cases in which not all candidates are ranked
My point was that going from a ballot to that structure is probably more error prone and time consuming to do manually than having a machine do it and that could conceivably be a reasonable justification to use electronic voting machines
The auditing will still be time consuming but that's mitigated by the fact that you audit only a portion of voting machines
But to clarify, I'm of the opinion that paper ballots and manual counting are preferable in every electoral system used at the national level that I'm aware of
India's electronic system is just not worse than paper ballots, which for electronic voting systems is a huge success
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about Russia, but China doesn't let people from other nationalities to occupy positions of power especially in foreign policy, in which they're completely right. This is the main weakness of the USA and UK. They will let foreign born people to raise to power and dictate self servicing policies, many times in detriment to their own population. For example, take Henry Kissinger: a german born person, he sp…
Which UK politician are you referring to? The only one I’m aware of in high office currently who was born abroad is Boris Johnson, who was born in New York - a fact so far down the list of reasons for his unfitness for office that it does not really register. The idea that this is the “main” problem in the UK is frankly laughable.
Controversially, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Lebedev has been ennobled and is now qualified to sit in the House of Lords, most definitely a position of power though he has not as yet chosen to appear there as far as I know. It turns out that Unelected Lords are also permitted to be ministers in the cabinet, so...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about Russia, but China doesn't let people from other nationalities to occupy positions of power especially in foreign policy, in which they're completely right. This is the main weakness of the USA and UK. They will let foreign born people to raise to power and dictate self servicing policies, many times in detriment to their own population. For example, take Henry Kissinger: a german born person, he sp…
Which UK politician are you referring to? The only one I’m aware of in high office currently who was born abroad is Boris Johnson, who was born in New York - a fact so far down the list of reasons for his unfitness for office that it does not really register. The idea that this is the “main” problem in the UK is frankly laughable.