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Public trust demands open-source voting systems

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Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#101

Post by lucideer »

fabian2k wrote: post #52
Yizahi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And enforce national photo ID finally, like all other countries. I know this is a REP take, but they are absolutely correct in this particular issue.

In other countries everyone has an ID automatically. That is a requirement to use IDs for voting. You need a proper national ID system, not the hodgepodge of random identity documents the US uses.

> In other countries everyone has an ID automatically

(Splitting hairs here but) this isn't true: in some countries, but not all.

In some countries ID is an optional document you only need to acquire if you want to drive, vote or travel internationally.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#102

Post by mariusor »

floweronthehill wrote: post #78
shadowgovt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#103

Post by kanzure »

Why stop at software? Open-source software is a good idea in election systems. The principle could be better generalized as an "open" (copyleft licensed) process for the entire system, regardless of whether the election system is implemented as software or not.

Anyone who talks about election security should be required to spend at least a few moments walking around Defcon in the election machine hacking village. Even absent electronic voting machines we still need to apply that same level of rigor to security across all domains of the election system no matter what format is used.

More fundamentally, the epistemic meaning of a ballot, a vote, or an option on the ballot, how options are even decided for inclusion or their exclusion, which outcome deciding algorithms are used, and how "the result" is interpreted by society or implemented by a political agent is deeply confused. The vote itself has very little resemblance to what actually happens. Such things likely cannot be formally specified anyway. Massive amounts of ambiguity, noise, error rate, and insecurity are to be expected in these kinds of systems. So what then are we even doing with all this? I am not referring to what we say we are achieving, or what we say we are intending to achieve, but rather what kind of actual outcomes be can supported by careful engineering of all these components?

Blockchain is no solution here. See:

"Going from bad to worse: from Internet voting to blockchain voting" https://www.dci.mit.edu/s/VotingPaper-RivestNarulaSunoo-3.pd...

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#104

Post by lurk2 »

gmueckl wrote: post #56
shadowgovt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Human tallying is a source of errors, but it typically doesn't affect the outcome in major ways. This is more of an argument against large scale winner-takes-it-all election systems, as they have the least resilience against this kind of error. The main benefit of manual tallying is that election tampering at scale becomes a rather labor-intensive and physical process that is more likely to leave detectable traces. C…

> Compare that to the the last US presidential election that has statistical oddities in machine-tallied voting results of kinds that have historically been shown to correlate with election fraud.

When and where was this?

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#105

Post by cheeseomlit »

mariusor wrote: post #92
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 >

Posting those links without any insight from your side is just quoting dogma and, to me, it shows that you haven't really spent any time to consider the arguments. In my opinion shows that you lack imagination. Every problem Tom mentions can be worked on and overcome. Maybe not today, maybe not by the next big election, but we should still start now, rather than later. We need to do everything possible to increase pa…

>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 that less than half of americans can even name the 3 branches of government, and if that's true I think those people have a civic duty not to vote.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#106

Post by jdoliner »

Throughout most of the non-US parts of the western world voting works quite well using paper ballots and hand counts. Any organization treating voting like a tech problem is willfully oblivious of the existing very good low-tech solutions. I think the intention is often good. But tech is also a new vector for attacking elections, so sometimes it's malicious. And it's very hard to tell the difference, and with elections even the appearance of interference is risky. We should outright reject technical solutions to voting, all it does is add risk.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#107

Post by lurk2 »

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.

You don’t understand how scale works.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#108

Post by jancsika »

teddyh wrote: post #54
shadowgovt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

User name checks out.

I mean, you left yourself open to that glib, low-effort criticism when you wrote this:

> no software or programmable hardware

That's obviously too stringent. Consider:

1. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet.

2. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet, then confirms the hand count by feeding all the ballots into an electronic bubble-sheet reader.

Your claim is that #1 is more trustworthy than #2. That's an extraordinary claim that requires more evidence than two youtube links!

Edit: to be clear, I want the requirement that all voting must be paper ballots like the human-readable bubble sheets mentioned above. But saying that no software or programmable hardware can be used "in the election process" is so extreme that it sounds like a parody of my own position.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#109

Post by aweiland »

Yizahi wrote: post #43
jcarrano wrote: post #20

Just use paper, count by hand, and abolish mail-in ballots and you should be fine.

And enforce national photo ID finally, like all other countries. I know this is a REP take, but they are absolutely correct in this particular issue.

Correct on the idea maybe, but their implementation schemes are designed to disenfranchise those less likely to vote for them.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#110

Post by oivey »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #75
oivey wrote: post #58

I don’t really understand the blind trust in paper in person ballots. Historically and currently, elections are stolen all the time whether paper or not. Off the top of my head some recent ones: election irregularities in Venezuela and the Russian referendums in Crimea. If people in power want to cheat, they will. Shuffling around the tech isn’t going to do all that much to change things.

That's a non-sequitur. Election manipulation is orders of magnitudes easier with voting machine manipulation and might not even be traceable. With paper ballots, you have to swap thousands of ballots that are handled by thousands of people, corrupt or prohibit independent observers, deal with election commissions and overseers, and so on. You can have recounts. With voting machines, you just have to push a software p…

It’s not a non-sequitur. The thesis behind the push for in person paper is predicated on the idea that it makes it prohibitively difficult to steal an election. That’s demonstrably untrue based on current and historical examples.

As another example, you don’t have to swap the ballots at all. Somewhere in the chain of custody, someone could just “lose” ballots for a region that is projected to vote against whoever they’re trying to fix the election for. They could forge or lose some other accompanying paperwork that was to manage those ballots, too. Or they could not bother doing that either because what are you going to do, redo the election?

Cooking up examples is sort of pointless. There are always going to be new and unexpected ways to commit fraud. The actual root issue isn’t technological. It’s sociological trust.

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