31–40 of 292 posts
The software doesn't matter that much. If you want to use voting machines, you need to create a paper trail with them that can be audited. Auditing the software isn't enough if you can't reliably verify that this is actually what's running on the machines, or if the machines weren't otherwise tampered with in some way.
Note that ananymous is also a required part of voting.
Is paper considered open source?
These kinds of comments always annoy me a bit. It's 2025. 155,238,302 people voted in the most recent US presidential election. It is entirely silly that we expect people to manually count that many ballots in this day and age. And count them without errors! (And yes, we can make those paper ballots machine-readable, but you still need software to count them.) Yes, I know: before computers and other mechanical system…
Why do we need machines? Counting the votes for e.g. the parliament only takes 24 hours or so, generally. And we don’t have elections every week, right?
No. Public trust demands no software or programmable hardware in the election process. • Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI > • Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs >
I agree that paper ballots are better, but also agree that electronic voting, when used, should be open source.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other countries get preliminary election results the same day even with hand-counted paper ballots. So even that isn't impossible.
Some stakes couldn't start counting mail-in ballots before the election day. That slowed down counting a lot.
In first past the post system, between 1% to 49% of votes are stolen and tossed by design. This actually, not hypothetically happens, in real life. Electronic voting maybe can be abused, and maybe some significant number votes may be defrauded. But in FPTP it has actually happened already and at a much worse scale. Imo the real high priority issue is obvious.
Unless something has changed recently, election integrity demands a voter-verified paper ballot that is retained with security by the authority, and can be physically counted, as a check against compromised or defective digital systems.
Open source is not sufficient. Don't let marketing sound bites be a confusing diversion from the problem.
If the US understands anything this year, it's how important elections are. Hopefully we get another one.
Is paper considered open source?
These kinds of comments always annoy me a bit. It's 2025. 155,238,302 people voted in the most recent US presidential election. It is entirely silly that we expect people to manually count that many ballots in this day and age. And count them without errors! (And yes, we can make those paper ballots machine-readable, but you still need software to count them.) Yes, I know: before computers and other mechanical system…
No. Public trust demands no software or programmable hardware in the election process. • Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI > • Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs >
Ironically, that results in worse count accuracy. Humans are actually quite bad at hand-tallying hundreds of millions of datapoints. Our eyes go glassy but we press on anyway. Machines are very good at doing that kind of tedious labor accurately. Whether human beings will put more trust in a system that we know will be wrong , but it's wrong for comfortable meat reasons, over a system that might be compromised but wi…
Having a paper trail and an observable counting process is worth a small error margin.