101–110 of 237 posts
This is plain bullshit. Opensource gives no guarantee that the vote won't be altered by whoever runs the machine. What we need is a zero-knowledge proof: we need the entire voting dataset to be publicly downloadable and some kind of checksumming so that, while maintaining anonimity, I can 1)check that my vote is the same 2)run whole the counting in a blink on my PC. This gives much better guarantees of no tampering
I'd like to reference Tom Scott's video[0] here. There is no need for an electronic voting system, paper ballots work perfectly. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
Until you want to scale due to using rapid direct democracy. Paper ballots will still WORK perfectly, but the workload will be massive.
In the USA, average precincts are 500 voters. Totally doable. In fact, that's how many jurisdictions did it.
Electronic voting is a bad idea and I'd be suspicious on anyone trying to promote it. How can you know that even if the source code for the voting machine is open, the voting machine is running the exact same source code? How can you know nobody has tampered the code the instance is running? I'm glad my country is still running on paper ballots and glad we require voter ID.
That being said, from times to times articles show up about someone who claimed to have invented a viable solution. So we should not diss the idea and keep an open mind. Eventually someone will find a solution.
A child can understand paper ballots and why they work. There are probably less than a hundred people in the world who can understand an electronic voting system at every level down to and including the silicon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Works fine in the UK, voter fraud is tricky (although there have been cases with postal votes) when there's a piece of paper that can be physically counted again. Very hard to defraud if you are in, purely for example, Russia.
Lots of EU nationals living in UK who have no right to vote. But they are physically in UK. I think vast majority of them would never think about fraudulently voting. But think about it logically, if voter ID is not required than it is easier to fraudulently vote. That seems logical to me. Do you have counter argument?
You can't just turn up at any polling station and say "give me a ballot paper", you turn up at the right polling station for your address and tell them your name and address.
They cross you off the list and if the same person tries to vote again, the voter is challenged, and a special (tendered) ballot paper is issued (which isn't counted in the vote). If a ward returns a significant number of tendered papers, then the returning officer can take action.
Polling places are small, and serve no more than 2500 voters.
So. In order for an individual to vote fraudulently, they must pretend to be an actual voter, they must know the name and address of the voter(s) they are pretending to be, they must do it early in the day, and they can't just keep going into the same polling station over and over, pretending to be someone new, otherwise they are likely to be recognised.
In order for a group to do this at a scale that matters, they must also be pretty sure that most of the real voters aren't actually going to turn up to vote.
Given all that, it is probably easier to engage in intimidation and/or bribery of actual voters, than to fraudulently complete ballot papers yourself. Voter ID doesn't protect against that.
Why is it that electronic voting is so vehemently opposed here on HN and by many technologists in general when virtually every other existentially vital system they rely on is run electronically?
Because it doesn't work.
Electronic voting is a bad idea and I'd be suspicious on anyone trying to promote it. How can you know that even if the source code for the voting machine is open, the voting machine is running the exact same source code? How can you know nobody has tampered the code the instance is running? I'm glad my country is still running on paper ballots and glad we require voter ID.
I'd rather say it's a good idea but it also is a technical problem that is not yet convincingly solved. It is clear though that open source by itself is not a solution, for the very reason you mention (how can one be sure about what code is running on a machine one doesn't own?). That being said, from times to times articles show up about someone who claimed to have invented a viable solution. So we should not diss t…
Of course, the current machines are still Diebold ("Premier Election Solutions"), so who knows. Ken Blackwell will make sure only the right folks vote, anyway, just like he did in 2008.
To protect voting don't use electronic voting. Paper ballots (the kind with marks read optically, not the ridiculous punch cards at the center of the Florida 2000 debacle) are easy to use and understand with a very low error rate and keep a paper trail, being the actual ballots. I don't understand why anyone other than the companies who sell e-voting machines actually want electronic voting.
They want certainty more than any thing else. For decades, computers were regarded as more accurate, impartial, certain than human tabulators.
Second factor is appropriations. Elections are big money. And like all industrires, there's a revolving door between government and industry.
Admin also want control. Their impulse is to centralize, simplify. Think of the logistics of running 100s of voting sites, 1,000s of precincts. All the training, people, materials, gear that has to be stored, shuttled around, repaired, etc. Moving to voting computers, reducing head count, moving to central count seemed like a huge win. (But you and I people computer people, we know they just traded problems.)
Electronic voting is a bad idea and I'd be suspicious on anyone trying to promote it. How can you know that even if the source code for the voting machine is open, the voting machine is running the exact same source code? How can you know nobody has tampered the code the instance is running? I'm glad my country is still running on paper ballots and glad we require voter ID.
Mapping, voter files, candidate filings, canvassing reports, ballot artwork, translations, ballot tracking, etc.
All of it should be open source. The way it used to be. Before the vendors smelled blood. (Especially after HAVA.)
I traveled my state advocating "citizen owned software". Everyone gets that phrasing. Overwhelming support.