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You still have to securely distribute those machines. All of the things still apply. Actually you need even more security! Printing paper is cheap. Shipping it is cheap. Checking it is cheap and obvious. Reprinting is cheap. You don't even need to ship them. Most of the cities are close to industrial areas which has big printers and paper mills. Making stamps or buying pens is cheap. You validate ballots at the polli…
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> 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.
Haven't crypto an opposite bias, with no guarantee that any given transaction's ledger will stay relevant ? Dropping votes is as problematic as allowing too many. In general, money transactions have failure modes that don't match what we want for other use cases. That's the same trap as using credit card payments for ID verification, it only works if you don't actually care about the ID.
Assuming you can vote from the comfort of your phone or home, that's kind of the whole point, it doesn't matter much if you have to wait even 30 min to get confirmation.
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…
Humans just need to be able to separate a few hundreds of ballots into a couple of piles. When introducing double checking this makes an incredibly rigorous process, which can be open to the public. This is the case here in Germany.
Everything after that can be done by computers as all the data after that is published.
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I've counted paper ballots for multiple presidential elections in my country. People who think it's not safe should really spend some time learning how it works. It's impossible to cheat at scale. Each ballot is verified to be correct my multiple eyes. A person is reading, one is writing down the name, one is verifying and some other things I don't remember. To cheat you need to have everyone in on it. A whole town i…
Yet there are many ways in which paper ballots can be taken advantage of. As an example do a search for Eastern European Carousel Voting[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting
Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters. Every ballot can only be given somebody whose identification is checked against this publicly available list and marked. The lists must have multiple copies some in the hands of opposition observers. They need to be published.
It might be an aside but it would be, "really groovy" if the general public started to realize that, "democracy" is a way of life and a set of considerations that furthers an open public discourse and attempts to maximize human felicity and reduce cruelty. In an oxymoronic sense it's the public voting on things that actually kills real democracy. https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/Antirepresentationa... https:/…
No. Democracy is not about reducing cruelty, or any other vaguely activists points of views. It is about having people choose where they want to go. It might be that these choices unveil that humanity, statistically speaking, is actually a cruel bunch. And, what you think is cruel, might be just fair to someone else. Democracy is about surfacing the human nature.
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Each polling station should have representatives from multiple parties as well as independent observers. > how can a constituent know with absolute certainty that their vote was counted The representative of your party plus independent observer said all votes at your polling station were counted. You know both those community members and know them to be generally honorable. Ergo your vote was counted. > every voter i…
To rephrase: "You should trust political volunteers." Surely we could do better? Testimony doesn't assuage my concerns that the process may not be tamper proof.
Just use paper, count by hand, and abolish mail-in ballots and you should be fine.
how then should voters who are not physically present in their voting district cast their votes?
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If it’s just a signature or stamp, won’t the 7 year old ask why those can’t be faked or forged?
That's an inquisitive 7 year old. Definitely reward them. Let's explain. A good voting system needs to guarantee - Secrecy of who voted for whom - Transparency of everything else. The names of everybody in the process, the process itself and all the statistics should be verifiably public. Being an observer to your polling station must be a guaranteed voter right. Similarly all participating parties must have the righ…
Is there any way to prevent the observers from knowing who votes? I could see a scenario where a party chooses observers that are likely to intimidate potential voters (e.g. KKK members in a majority black polling station).
Just use paper, count by hand, and abolish mail-in ballots and you should be fine.
> abolish mail-in ballots how then should voters who are not physically present in their voting district cast their votes?
If you want people temporarily out of their district to vote, then in district X you could have a box for district Y, put paper ballots in, and send the sealed box to Y to be counted. The important thing is that the vote is cast in person by the right voter and put immediately into the box.
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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.
Correct, there are several aspects to voting that blockchains don't address: - The Human Identification Problem (not sure if there is a more official name): uniquely identifying a human being. If you solve this, you solve many forms of fraud (anything rooted in identity fraud) and eliminate entire industries dedicated to reducing fraud losses. Best attempt so far has been the Estonian ID system [0]; Sam Altman tried…
I believe you can do this with crypto. It's still anonymous. The government verify you, then give you a signed key that you use to generate your voter ID locally yourself. The network accepts your voter ID because it's signed. I think there's even ways to allow single use signatures and so on.
Now everyone gets one and only one voter ID (which is like their wallet) but for voting.
You can decide how many years that's valid for.