Recent study: 80% of electronic ballot tabulating errors remain undetected even when paper record provided. (Sorry, I don’t have a link.)
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I have it on personal experience that blockchain cannot cure blindness, get the hair off my palms, or un-estrange family. Maybe cubechain will work…
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Toss in a clause stating “all other candidates get to dogpile on the offender” and you’ve got some prime-time television right there. Break out the popcorn and take odds on who breaks a hip first.
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Cubechain is already so over. You want new, improved, Icosagon Chain! Now with more sides for extra security! Why settle for the six sides of block chain or cube chain, when you can have twenty sides! Doubles as your DnD dice, too, meaning all your too-hit rolls will be secure!
Icosagon Chain! Now in mint flavor.
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broken and a threat to democracy
Or, as the GOP would say, “operating as intended”.
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The phrase “it’s a feature, not a bug” comes to mind.
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why settle for three dimensions? HYPERCUBECHAIN!
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Here’s a fun thing that occurs to me:
Prior to 2016, Russia surely knew how easy it would be to materially tamper with US election results; but while they interfered heavily and more or less openly in election advertising, it appears that they voluntarily stopped short of interfering with actual vote counts.
Presumably what held them back was the realistic fear that it might be seen as an existential act of war, worse than physically invading Alaska (or New York).
So, you have to wonder if Russia is still afraid that would be the reaction.
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All elections should have a random sample of tabulation machines audited by had every election. The decision should be about auditing more machines or if the sample was enough, not about performing the audit to begin with.
In case you remember the source, I wonder if they looked at how often automatic audits vs only on request are done? Along with the margin of error in those results. Even manual counting has a margin of error bigger than 0.
Some error is unavoidable. Minimizing and making sure it’s random error not favoring one result is the goal.
I’m in.
Also, Andrew Yang must be legit koo-koo-bananas-nuts if he really thinks a mobile app for voting is something that even deserves serious consideration.
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It is the exact kind of oversimplified, one-size-fits-all tech solution… This is not just a technical problem, so it does need more than tech solutions. We need to have a society that is not based on white male cisgendered Christian supremacy, and no matter what technologies you throw at it, as long as that is the case, it will reflect that. I do believe that robust, well made technologies can play a role in the solutions, but anyone who thinks there is some silver bullet is blind to the complexity of problems we have in society.
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Some would argue that that is a necessity, not a “nice to have”.
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The election campaign is what? A year, year and a half long?
What’s the rush for results?
Get it right, document it, and give out incontestable results. This shit is just begging for interference and legal challenges.
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From Mission to Zyxx podcast (s2e06):
She asks for their printed out forms as they have recently upgraded their system to paper, print is the future.
We’re all listening to mission to Zyxx, right? Rod, I hope so.
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The Daily Show had a nice feature on this in their Iowa Caucus coverage (start at 15:05 mark):
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I think they did not stop short. Remember that the only information the general public has about Russian meddling in our elections comes from people in Washington who have a vested interest in making us think they have figured out what happened and are top of the situation. And a lot of those people, including the orange-hued oaf who leads them, are pathological liars.
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Tech has its place in the voting system. My vision:
Start with a touch screen that displays candidate names and ballot questions. It can display official translations in any of a number of different languages and also offers a headphone jack for vision-impaired voters. I don’t remember if the position of candidate names on the page is a source of bias, but the touch screen could present the candidates in a random order if that will help avoid that source of bias.
When the voter has finished the voting process, the touch screen displays the voter’s choices and waits for the voter to confirm their selection.
If the voter confirms their choices, the machine prints in both human- and computer-readable form the official ballot. Ideally the computer-readable form can be understood by the voter independently (either a QR code that your phone can scan or an easily OCR-able font.) This standardization will help the counting process and avoid “hanging chad” type questions. The voter enters the ballot into a ballot box that reads the computer-readable form of the vote.
If the voter doesn’t confirm their choices, return to the start of the voting process.
In the event of a discrepancy, or if that particular polling place is randomly selected for an audit, count the human-readable form of the vote manually and compare against the computer-readable form (if they’re not one and the same.)
The ballot box needs to be secure, but that’s true regardless of how the ballots are marked. The touch screens and printers could be whatever’s cheapest at your local Best Buy / Staples / Walmart / other store that sells electronics. They could also be used for other purposes when elections are not being held, as long as they’re restored to a known state before and after the election.
Yeah, I think a system where the electronic part is JUST to generate a final paper ballot for counting is fine (no hooking it up to the internet, either).
Honestly, it’s the core of our whole system, and over two hundred years later we STILL can’t get this shit right? We STILL can’t adequately fund elections so there’s enough well-trained poll workers and polling stations?
“Well, we can’t afford to spend more on voting, but it sure is great seeing the President get in another round of golf this week.”
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An electronic ballot box will NEVER be secure. There are too many people who want to be able to jigger the tallies and there are too many scum who are willing to make money by selling their countrymen down the river. There are people in this country who are willing to sell drugs to children - you think there’s ever going to be a shortage of people who will sell the entire country?
Don’t you remember all the flaps that went on around the 2016 election about the skunkworks that are electronic balloting systems? Physical locks that could be opened with a Bic ballpoint pen. Machines where people who went back to verify their votes before hitting the “commit” button found their votes had been changed to a straight party ticket. Machines where the administrator login password was “123”. Machines where the code that tallied the votes included a “divide by X” setting that could be configured by a user after the polls were closed. As long as someone can see a way to gain power or money or both by contaminating voting machines, the voting machines will always be contaminated. In my opinion all the C-level executives of the Diebold company should be imprisoned for criminal negligence.
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