Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

1) Easy to check by whom? With paper, it’s a bunch of people yelling to the news they saw discrepancies. In USA, we have probably the most expensive election in the world and we heard it all in 2020 from sour Republicans. To this day many people believe the election wasn’t secure and was “stolen”, including with physical ballots being shipped in, etc. On the one hand you have people yelling and on the other side you have people saying it’s all fine. Just like after a Venezuela or Belorussia election or the Crimea referendum. None of that would be the case if the elections could just have a standard way to be run, same as we now have electronic standards for DNSSEC or certificate PKI the EVM or IEEE standards. We can do things at scale because of standards. We could remove most of the uncertainty.

2) You don’t have to come out and reveal your PII, in order to publish a complaint as a voter. You’d just have to reveal that you know the private key, here is your receipt signed by the vendors in the system, and here is the actual result the UX vendors reported. The reputation of the vendor would be PROVABLY destroyed, all those receipts would be entered as evidence and they’d have to pay reparations in lawsuits. All because people were forced to double-check from 2 devices. The UX vendor would face chilling effects far larger than currently, for tampering with an election. None of this requires PII of the claimants.

3 and 4. You say it’s the whole system but proceed to list only things related to registration. Which, I already said, remains an issue, but the actual voting can be done on a phone. All your concerns could be also done with a banking app etc. where far more money is at stake than a single vote, yet people use them all the time.

I am not sure how you are supposed to impersonate a person unless you steal their phone, and then force them to open the voting app and enter their biometrics, just for a lousy vote — and you’d have to do this all across town at scale? Nan.

If you’re saying that a bank can “roll back a transaction” if you report losing your app, and somehow the election reaching finality (like a blockchain transaction) is a negative, then you’re saying that

As for people losing their private keys or phones or maybe so poor they can’t afford to have a computer or whatever, they can register to vote in person. If they failed to update their registration, though, before the election, and they can’t vote from their phone, it’s the same issue as if they didnt register at all. So they didn’t vote. But on net there is a much bigger turnout.

5. Okay we agree here. And this isnt an academic point — Al Gore would have been president if they could have counted the votes faster, we could have probably avoided the entire Middle East being on fire, the rollback of US civil liberties, maybe even prevented 9/11 with NORAD, and finally could have avoided the current disastrous wars in Ukraine etc. since Bush was the one to push them into NATO back in 2008 when the Ukrainian public strongly opposed NATO membership until 2014, but he worked with Yuschenko to do it anyway (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2010/03/29/ukraine-says-n... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Ukraine)

I think we both know that a corrupt government would not want to secure elections with merkle trees and publish them online. Too much chance of being caught, and they’d have no way to fudge the results reliably. By making decision-making cheap, the public in every country would be welcomed to hold regular referendums on topics (like California Proposition XYZ) and the governments would be MORE accountable to the people. (Personally, I think provably random polling is superior to voting, due to turnout issues, but that’s another story).

You can say whatever you like but when the rubber meets the road, corrupt officials and their detractors overseas (the war hawks looking to cast doubt on any way to figure out what, say, the actual people of Crimea or Donetsk want) both prefer paper ballots and the effective inability to cast absentee ballots when you fled the country or were internally displaced. While cryptocurrency allows you to take your money with you while fleeing a war zone, the crypto-voting would let you vote from anywhere as long as you had registered as a citizen back before being displaced etc.

It’s literally technology you can add to secure things and corrupt governments avoid it, war hawks across the world hipe they don’t use it, and you are arguing that even adding it makes things less secure and less reliable.

To put some numbers on this, from my experience.

Health insurance manual claims processors (who usually average ~5 years of experience) can do 95+% accuracy, at speed (a few minutes), at scale. That's counting and verifying multiple things against processing rules.

General data entry, from less trained folks, tends to average around 85% accurate (i.e. 15 mistakes + 85 entries correct, out of 100 entries).

Except he did not "push them into NATO in 2008". 2008 was the year that Ukraine's membership application was formally rejected by NATO, and there it has sat, in the doghouse, ever since. But Putin invaded anyway, because the NATO noise was never the reason he invaded in the first place.

The most significant consequence of the Bush presidency was probably the criminally insane invasion of Iraq -- which arguably did encourage Putin to go into Ukraine, on equally vacuous and fraudulent pretexts. "If they can get away with it, then why can't I?" was apparently his thinking.