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Public trust demands open-source voting systems

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Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#151

Post by oceansky »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #134
oceansky wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brazil and India are doing fine

Haha no. Voting machines caused absurd amounts of political instability here in Brazil. It's essentially become wrongthink to question the system. Our elected representatives have tried to add a paper trail to the machines twice now and it was ruled unconstitutional for total bullshit reasons. Our former president was banned from future presidential races because he questioned the machines. We have a judge loudly pro…

>Our former president was banned from future presidential races because he questioned the machines.

Bolsonaro didn't question the electoral process, in fact, I doubt he even understand it himself. He questioned only the results, because in his mind he should have won by a lot.

Not dissimilar than Trump's "stop the count!" on US paper ballots.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#152

Post by xorcist »

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…

The obvious problem with smartphone voting is that it's hard to combine with voter secrecy. An abusive spouse or someone bribing the voter could demand to see what vote was cast.

And if anyone can make up a reason to doubt the outcome of the election, it will fail it's objective: Peaceful transfer of power.

The usual way to try to solve this is the ability to override previously cast votes, in secret. But the combination of that and the ability for all interested parties to independently verify the count is not trivial. But not impossible either, much has been written on the subject since e-voting was all the rage in the 90s. One would do good to study this work before designing yet another voting system.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#153

Post by lucideer »

dmurray wrote: post #100
lucideer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Ireland which I think has one of the best voting systems in the world (don't worry we've still got plenty of other serious problems with our electoral system). It's 100% paper PRSTV & so the counts are slow. Not only is this generally OK (because getting a rapid result is absolutely not a requirement of any well-functioning voting system) but it also has actual benefits. The main benefit is predicated on th…

One of the weird things for computer people about the Irish voting system is that it's non-deterministic! You can count the same ballots in a different order and get a different result (because it depends which votes you choose as "surplus" to redistribute). In practice it doesn't seem to matter that much. The counters even out the first-level effects of this, so it only matters for votes that have been transferred m…

Yeah. I think it's the best voting system in the world because I've yet to encounter one I think is better but you're right, it's far from perfect.

That said, surplus distribution tends to be the main flaw raised time & time again, & whenever improvements are discussed the general conclusion tends to be that the current distribution mechanism goes a very long way toward fair representation of the actual preference distribution. It's notable that the more computationally intensive alternatives to get "fairer" outcomes are pretty recent inventions & it's really hard to justify the effort given the tiny number of cases affected.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#154

Post by cheeseomlit »

mariusor wrote: post #122
cheeseomlit wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We need to do everything possible to increase participation in the democratic process Do we? Participation should be made easy for those eligible and inclined to do so, but I don't see the benefit of encouraging participation from people who can't be bothered to put some effort into it, or are ignorant of the issues and candidates and are easily swayed by trashy campaign ads. I've seen the statistic thrown around th…

That's what democracy is though. If only the right people are allowed to vote then you have a problem because their definition can change on a dime.

I'm not advocating that people not be allowed to vote, I'm just pushing back on the dogma of more voter participation = better, IE. just because you can vote doesn't mean you should if you dont understand what you're voting for and don't really care enough to learn.

Seeing the constant barrage of campaign ads every couple years made me think about it- Why does campaign financing matter, how do they turn money into votes anyways? The answer apparently is ads, but I see these bottom-of-the-barrel slop political advertisements and wonder how that trash could possibly have a measurable effect on the outcome of an election. But it must work, otherwise they wouldn't spend so much money on it. And the fact that elections can be meaningfully influenced by the amount of ads a campaign can run is a signal to me that the democratic process is broken in some fundamental way. The votes of well-informed constituents are drowned out by the more numerous cohorts of partisans, reactionaries, and the apathetic just going through the motions to fulfill their 'civic duty', so it seems to me that increasing voter participation without changing anything else is only going to exacerbate the problem

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#155

Post by didibus »

ItsHarper wrote: post #112
didibus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto could be argued similarly no? But it seems to have sustained trust.

Cryptocurrencies don't need to do things like make sure that no human gets more than one vote, only humans (no bots) from a specific part of the world get a vote, and keep votes secret. Blockchain is not the solution.

> Cryptocurrencies don't need to do things like make sure that no human gets more than one vote

That's pretty much the problem they were designed to solve no? It's called the double spend problem, and it's crypto's big comp-sci innovation. The whole paper was about it.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#156

Post by bruce511 »

xorcist wrote: post #146
bogwog wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that paper ballots are better, but also agree that electronic voting, when used, should be open source.

If you can independently verify the election result, then it does not matter if any of the counts were made using proprietary software. If you can not independently verify election results, what good does published source code do? Elections are a process , not a result.

20 years ago I attended an international conference on electronic voting. There were various papers on the form of elections (not on specific products.)

The huge takeaway for me was not the technology (or lack thereof). Ultimately all existing (and proposed) systems have flaws. The key was public trust in the result.

The first step to sidestepping democracy is to attack the legitimacy of elections. One can attack the process, software, hardware, ballot security, eligibility, and so on. It doesn't really matter what you attack - it doesn't matter if your gripe is legit or not. It only matters that you erode trust in the result.

If you can make people think the elections are rigged, then you can bypass them and move straight to authoritarianism.

Quibbling over open-source or not is irrelevant. We can cast doubt on the software either way. Quibbling over electronic or paper voting is equally irrelevant (there are plenty of paper-only elections worldwide that are very suspect.)

Naturally the Open Source company promotes Open Source voting machines. But in truth being Open Source has no (real) benefit. Software is easy to tweak, Open or not.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#157

Post by themafia »

bogwog wrote: post #29
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 >

I agree that paper ballots are better, but also agree that electronic voting, when used, should be open source.

Candidates drop out, die, or become ineligible in all kinds of ways. Paper is not strictly better and can create costs and complications on the day of the election itself.

Electronic voting is fine. Why can't we just have a printer in the polling booth? I run my ballot, then hit print, then I can manually verify it, and then drop the printed ballot in a box.

Literally the easiest thing to do.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#158

Post by raincole »

philips wrote: post #145
yongjik wrote: post #138

Stop me if you heard it before, but paper ballot with automatic counting machine is the way to go. You still get real time update, and you have a physical ballot box that's constantly under watch of volunteers from multiple parties. And if there's any dispute (there will be disputes) you can simply bring out the boxes and count again. It's a simple, cost-effective system which is impossible to hack. Electronic voting…

And how would you feel if those counting machines were closed source?

Even if it's open sourced, how do you know the machine actually runs the same code as you see on Github (or wherever the repo is hosted)?

Verifying that requires more expertise than verifying the physical ballots themselves.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#159

Post by [deleted] »

hannofcart wrote: post #57
bkummel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True! In The Netherlands, where I live, we still vote on paper ballots. The ballots are counted by hand. The counting is public, anyone can go and observe the counting.

This is in no way intended to be disparaging: there are processes that work within the scale of small European nations that simply won't at larger scales.

[deleted]

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#160

Post by throwaway48476 »

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 >

An optical hollerith machine would be useful. It would sort paper ballots into buckets based on selection. It's relatively easy to flip through a stack of ballots and ensure that every one has the same selection. Saves the effort of hand sorting which is not error free.
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