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I keep hearing this, but I can't quite bring myself to agree. Let's stay tech-positive and use this problem to advance our industry. The problem is this: we d

I keep hearing this, but I can't quite bring myself to agree. Let's stay tech-positive and use this problem to advance our industry. The problem is this: we don't have any machine that simplifies vote counting while being as trustworthy as having many people count marks on many sheets of paper. And since that is prone to errors and manipulation as well, so the bar is actually much lower than "perfection". Can we really not do trustworthy vote counting better than humans? Can we not make a computer that defeats a human at reliable counting? If we cannot do that, we should reconsider our craft and wonder why. I am not enough of a computer scientist to come up with a good verification plan, but I'd be very surprised if we couldn't do it. Gullible or corrupt government officials, sneaky sales people and shady politicians are a very different problem. Our job should be to make the machine so good and reliable that these people are driven out of the game.

empath75 9y ago
Even if we could, politicians don't want it. The voting systems put in place post 2000 were broken by design.
klondike_ 9y ago
The problem is that using a computer reduces this to a single point of failure. It only takes one hack of the vote counting machine to compromise the whole election. Even if you use multiple machines, they're probably running the same software and could all be compromised simultaneously. Computers have no morals and blindly do what they're told to. When the votes are counted by a group of humans, one person making a mistake (maliciously or not) isn't a big deal because nobody expects humans to be perfect. There are checks in place to catch those mistakes. It would take a huge conspiracy to compromise the entire system. I suppose there could be a solution in the future, maybe with blockchains or something. Until then, manual counting is the best option.
- sgc 9y ago
  Anything networked is a fail. If machines were offline and had an extremely simple, embedded code base, and all they did was to mark (highly visible, perhaps square) marks on a paper, 100 to a line, of vote tallies to be humanly summed, it seems like it would reduce error. There could still be punch card ballots that each person verified were entered correctly (ie directly read) to have a better trail as well. But there isn't really a need for a computer for that. It could all be analog/mechanical.
jacques_chester 9y ago
> The problem is this: we don't have any machine that simplifies vote counting while being as trustworthy as having many people count marks on many sheets of paper. Except there's no problem. Hand counts work fine. Impatience is not a reason to substantially weaken the foundations of democratic legitimacy.

empath75 9y ago

Even if we could, politicians don't want it. The voting systems put in place post 2000 were broken by design.

klondike_ 9y ago

The problem is that using a computer reduces this to a single point of failure. It only takes one hack of the vote counting machine to compromise the whole election. Even if you use multiple machines, they're probably running the same software and could all be compromised simultaneously. Computers have no morals and blindly do what they're told to. When the votes are counted by a group of humans, one person making a mistake (maliciously or not) isn't a big deal because nobody expects humans to be perfect. There are checks in place to catch those mistakes. It would take a huge conspiracy to compromise the entire system. I suppose there could be a solution in the future, maybe with blockchains or something. Until then, manual counting is the best option.

sgc 9y ago
Anything networked is a fail. If machines were offline and had an extremely simple, embedded code base, and all they did was to mark (highly visible, perhaps square) marks on a paper, 100 to a line, of vote tallies to be humanly summed, it seems like it would reduce error. There could still be punch card ballots that each person verified were entered correctly (ie directly read) to have a better trail as well. But there isn't really a need for a computer for that. It could all be analog/mechanical.

jacques_chester 9y ago

> The problem is this: we don't have any machine that simplifies vote counting while being as trustworthy as having many people count marks on many sheets of paper. Except there's no problem. Hand counts work fine. Impatience is not a reason to substantially weaken the foundations of democratic legitimacy.