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Public trust demands open-source voting systems

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Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#81

Post by tialaramex »

pie_flavor wrote: post #53
ncr100 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(META: Anyone want to summarize the 20 minutes of video, and make it more relevant to this conversation than simply, "No." ?)

Haven't watched it, but to summarize what I imagine someone aligned with me would say: A ballot's entire lifecycle can be watched as it goes from the stack to the booth to the dropbox to the counting pile. Poll watchers are vestigial as soon as voting machines are involved; it becomes the honor system, which is not trustworthy enough in a system where the parties do not trust each other. The best you have is 'we have…

In practice by the way the actual role of your appointed watchers is to figure out early whether you've won.

They can see whether another candidate's ballots are piling up faster than yours, they can estimate whether a table counting ballots for a district you're expected to dominate is being given way fewer ballots to count than you'd expected...

Yes, they would obviously spot if some election worker is like adding a pile of pre-marked mass produced ballots to a pile or something, or if they were just putting half of your ballots in the wrong pile - but stuff like that basically never happens, whereas somebody will win and it'd be nice to know before it's announced if that's achievable.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#83

Post by teddyh »

oceansky wrote: post #73
teddyh wrote: post #13

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 >

Brazil and India are doing fine

Placed 56 and 41, respectively, on the Democracy Index.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#84

Post by fmbb »

babyshake wrote: post #71
pie_flavor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't watched it, but to summarize what I imagine someone aligned with me would say: A ballot's entire lifecycle can be watched as it goes from the stack to the booth to the dropbox to the counting pile. Poll watchers are vestigial as soon as voting machines are involved; it becomes the honor system, which is not trustworthy enough in a system where the parties do not trust each other. The best you have is 'we have…

The thing is, a software based voting system with a sufficient number of checks and balances preventing tampering seems to be a lot more trustworthy to me than human poll watchers and workers. It wouldn't surprise me at this point that there may be moles in parties that are secretly from the other party. And the other related issue is that in 2025, it simply should be possible to vote from your phone in a way that ve…

An election needs to be trusted by everyone, and explainable to all voters. It does not help that you believe it is safe. You have to trust the compiler, and the chips, and everything, and convince all voters it works.

Paper ballots are fine. It is not complicated at all and an election is the one thing you just cannot get wrong in a representative democracy. It can cost a bit and you only do it once every few years.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#85

Post by ordu »

I think, that there is only one way to make voting machines to be trustworthy. If anyone can run ballots through their own machine to verify results, AND there will be multiple parties doing exactly this, then you can trust the outcome.

But still it is not a way to fight a political party that will use dummy machine that counts each ballot as a vote for them, and then accusing all others that they are trying to steal the elections. It is an unbelievable stupid tactic, but I think it may work in USA, judging by people eager to believe any BS if it supports their party.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#86

Post by pessimizer »

This is a power problem, not a technical problem.

The US has the worst voting system intentionally, not accidentally. And mail-in voting shows we aren't even a little serious about election integrity. We're militantly against it: you can get people to rabidly support universal IDs for trivial, nonsensical reasons that have never resulted in significant problems; and to demand digital IDs, device attestation, and real names on social media; but to the same people showing IDs to vote is supposed to be the end of democracy.

People have made this proposal every year since the 90s, and depending on the year it was the Republicans rabidly opposing it or the Democrats rabidly opposing it. Good luck getting things accomplished with a good argument. That's not how things get done. The people who get the final say about this would love to get rid of voting altogether, but they'll settle for vendor kickbacks.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#87

Post by lucideer »

Areibman wrote: post #26

From a process perspective, how can a constituent know with absolute certainty that their vote was counted, every voter in the system was legal, and the final tally was authentic? Especially when there's no way to even audit what you voted for after the fact? Every time I try to get to the bottom of this, it always boils down to "trust the system" which makes me uneasy.

I think the sentiment of the OP actually gets to the heart of this (the idea of open-source is transparency, visibility, auditability) but the problem here is it need to be applied to the actual process, not to the process of building tools for the actual process.

It's not that developing voting software should be open-source, its that actual voting should be "open-source" in the physical sense.

Trusting the system is possible if you can (you, yourself) readily observe every part of the system. I don't think giving members of the public access to the server your voting software is hosted on is a very viable idea, but giving members of the public access to paper count centres is (it's done very successfully in many countries).

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#88

Post by n8cpdx »

Under appreciated benefit of hand-counting paper ballots: it is an opportunity for participation in your democracy.

I had the privilege of helping count votes in my small town 2012. Volunteers stayed up after voting ended and all of the ballots were double checked - counted by two separate people, working together at a long table. Cheating or manipulation was inconceivable, and there were many layers of double checking.

The beauty of this system is it is infinitely scalable. The more voters there are, the more vote counting volunteers there are. For larger cities you can split up by blocks or per polling place. There should be many polling places to make voting easy and accessible.

It isn’t fast or fancy or glamorous. But communities ignore the power of communal activities at their peril.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#89

Post by atoav »

To understand criticism with electronic voting system let's assume the best case: say you make the perfect, mathematically verified voting software. That is perfectly up to date each election. That runs on open yet tampersafe hardware that is as the stickers say never obsolete. That notices any human error and hacking attempt (not that such a thing exists).

Even with that utopian scenario the remaining problem is that the goal of elections is agreeable consent. Mewning the goal isn't just to get a decision. The goal is to get a decision, people can agree with because they trust the process must have been okay. If your vote is low stakes, like where you go for lunch with your collegues, then that trust doesn't matter, who cares if it was wrong? But if it is high stakes even a perfect digital system is problematic, because even intelligent, technological expert voters have no chance of understanding which of the moving parts might influence what in which way in practise.

Meaning a paper ballot with the right process can more or less be understood by everybody who can count and has mastered the cognitive skill of object permanence.

A Rust project with a 30k Cargo.lock file filled with dependencies on an even more complex operating system, running complex (in a different way) hardware, that might differ for each voting location isn't that. And that isn't about the programming language or the tech stack. It is about the intransparent nature of electronic systems themselves.

I spent a three quarters of my life learning programming and electronics including hardware design and I teach that stuff on a university level. Even I would have a hard time ensuring there is really no backdoor in the whole stack. And this fact means even if there is no backdoor in it, there might be and there is no realistic way for a normal person to check. I understand the nerd appeal. It is cool to toy around and figure that problem out. But the core of the problem is not technological it is sociological.

That is such a big flaw that IMO it is not worth it for high stakes elections.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#90

Post by tialaramex »

oivey wrote: post #41
okanat wrote: post #23

Public trust cannot exist if the voting system requires *any* expertise. Voting systems should be idiot-proof. If you cannot explain how voting system is manipulation-proof to a 7 year old, your voting system is untrustworthy. This means anything more complex than a pen or a stamp on an approved paper is too complex.

If it’s just a signature or stamp, won’t the 7 year old ask why those can’t be faked or forged?

What signature or stamp? In my country we make any mark, although conventionally a cross is used in illustrations.

Many countries have secret ballots, mine doesn't, for reasons which are extremely sketchy (and presumably why my country is blue, not dark blue like New Zealand on the democracy map)

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