111–120 of 307 posts
The goal of a voting system is not verifiability, but trust. Without trust elections have no legitimacy.
Trust is a social challenge, not a technological one. It is effectively impossible to stuff ballot boxes at scale in the US, but a large number of people still believe the last presidential election was stolen.
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Something being hard does not mean that it should not be tried. There are methods for preventing all the issues Tom Scott raises.
Suppose for the sake of the argument we implement such methods that bring the level of security of the digital vote to be mostly equivalent to paper voting (though I do not think this is possible). Then why do you think it would be better to use a harder method of counting votes? I do not see a strong argument to justify the change. The burden of proof is on the new technology, not on the old one that has been workin…
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I think these are technically interesting systems, but "trust" really is the goal. "Verifiability" doesn't necessarily imply "trust," especially if it's shrowded behind inscruable crypto mumbo-jumbo. A voting system should be something voters and poll workers (i.e., local volunteers) can understand.
> especially if it's shrowded behind inscruable crypto mumbo-jumbo HTTPS is shrouded behind inscrutable crypto, but nearly everyone trusts it with their credit card details. Voting doesn't have to be any different. The implementation details don't matter, as long as there are easy-to-understand verification concepts such as receiving a "tracking number" for your vote that is then easy to see it was counted. And then…
I remember having a boss demand I put the authorize seal next to our credit card form, else it wouldn't be secure
We used stripe
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IT literacy is not increasing; if anything it's going down. My wife's Gen Z siblings grew up with iPads and think computers are magic.
OK, fair. I meant it in the sense of the younger generation has more exposure to concepts like encrypted communication and peer to peer communication and encrypted ledgers, etc. They might not know how exactly they work, but they know they exist and have an inkling of their attributes as they pertain to data secrecy, auditability, etc...
As usual, good old fashioned pen and paper is worlds better than this or any other attempt by overzealous tech people with a hammer looking to hit this particular nail.
I think that stamp and paper ballots are actually hampering the democratic process. There are many downsides of physical ballots: the need to physically be at one location, having to set aside a day to vote, lack of interest for younger demographics... all of these could go away with a good electronic ballot. The more people can vote, the better the democratic process will be. Making it easier for _everyone_ to vote…
That only happens if the people in charge of the elections are enemies of democracy. It also means that the results are being manipulated and not particularly legitimate.
The election day is obviously a public holiday. There are plenty of polling locations, so you never have to go far to vote, unless you live in a particularly remote rural area. And because there are enough polling locations, you should not have to stand in line for more than a couple of minutes.
Tom Scott videos which cover why electronic voting is a bad idea: https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI?si=kGDOYOb_RiiQaZ3u https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs?si=YdQgNC4uUZDUDbab
What if you want your citizens to be able to vote on policy matters in real time to make things more democratic? It would be too burdensome with pencil and paper. Alternatives are useful.
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> especially if it's shrowded behind inscruable crypto mumbo-jumbo HTTPS is shrouded behind inscrutable crypto, but nearly everyone trusts it with their credit card details. Voting doesn't have to be any different. The implementation details don't matter, as long as there are easy-to-understand verification concepts such as receiving a "tracking number" for your vote that is then easy to see it was counted. And then…
> Voting doesn't have to be any different From your long sibling thread I gather that for you it is more important to be able to verify the votes by yourself through the output of the voting system (the excel example) than to be able to reason through the voting system itself. Whereas for schroeding it is more important to be able to conceptually understand and scrutinize the voting process as a whole, even though it…
That is unnecessary complexity already. Ballots can be counted directly in the voting stations, by the local citizens. If you want to check your vote is counted correctly, stay to witness the counting. After the results have been counted, they can be communicated to the city hall via phone, so everyone in the room can hear it.
This is something all digital systems are really bad at, even if everything is readable and verifiable, unless all your members know how to read that code.
Edit: and even if they know how to read that code, can they trust the machines are running that code at the big day?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Suppose for the sake of the argument we implement such methods that bring the level of security of the digital vote to be mostly equivalent to paper voting (though I do not think this is possible). Then why do you think it would be better to use a harder method of counting votes? I do not see a strong argument to justify the change. The burden of proof is on the new technology, not on the old one that has been workin…
Why do you think it's harder to count votes? I'm not sure what belenios uses, but in the process I envision a ballot is a publicly accessible encrypted ledger, where the votes exist publicly.
I assumed this from the parent post
>> Something being hard does not mean that it should not be tried.
As opposed to paper voting, which does not have the issues raised by Tom Scott. If that is not what you meant, don't you agree that a more high-tech solution, complete with unspecified but granted methods that mitigate the security problems, requires more expertise and makes the process of voting as a whole more difficult than the low tech one? (eg infra / software maintenance, robustness to outage, educating people on how to use it, ... everything discussed by other threads)
> ballot is a publicly accessible encrypted ledger, where the votes exist publicly
It is cool, but I do not see how this improves upon voting on paper by mail.