5 ms·

"Manual banking, with humans counting cash, scales well, and has far fewer attack vectors that electronic banking.".

by fooker 8y ago

sp332 8y ago
But that's not actually true whereas GP's is. I mean how would voting be better if we had the capacity to count billions of votes?
- fooker 8y ago
  Not just the capacity, the verifiability and redundancy it can support. I am a little bit surprised that people at Hackernews are so hostile against technology. Sure, there are some attack vectors, but we have 4-5 decades of security research and engineering to mitigate or at least detect that. Don't throw away the baby with the bathwater.
  - brod 8y ago
    so we should build machines to tell the truth quicker and then verify the machines told the truth by using methods that do not include using machines... when machines are built to determine the truth but cannot be trusted to do so - it's (more or less) a negative sum game.
  - sp332 8y ago
    Ok well if I see any voting machines like that I might reconsider. In the meantime stick with paper.
Chris_Chambers 8y ago
Whataboutism
jerf 8y ago
That metaphor doesn't work, because there is no (obvious) equivalent to double-entry bookkeeping for a vote. There's no counterparty. As history shows, double-entry bookkeeping does not entirely prevent fraud, but as history also shows, it does significantly raise the bar. Other people reference other cryptographic possibilities but it's still not clear you get that counterparty advantage or any equivalent as cleanly from any of them. I try to speak precisely, so I chose not to say that it does not on purpose. Maybe someone could convince me. But I've seen too many games and incredibly subtle backdoors to have too much confidence in such things. Nor am I sure how to convince the general public that they are correct, whereas convincing them paper ballots work is easy, and they intuitively understand the requisite security measures. It is not sufficient for a voting scheme merely to obtain the right number, it must also be trusted by the losers, or it's a waste of time.
- fooker 8y ago
  >it must also be trusted by the losers, or it's a waste of time. There is no voting scheme that is trusted by the losers. With paper ballot, you can easily claim ballot stuffing or biased counting.
  - Symbiote 8y ago
    At least in the UK, independent observers can (and do) follow the paper trail: observe at a polling station, watch the ballot box being sealed, follow it, watch it bring unsealed, observe the count.
    - fooker 8y ago
      Why does that not translate to electronic voting? We have had hash functions and digital signatures for a while.
      - shakna 8y ago
        How does one observe the binaries on a voting machine? Nobody seems willing to sign on to that [0]. When you can't audit what is in a voting machine, you can't guarantee if it works. [0] https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2017/10/star-vote-collapses/ https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2017/10/star-vote-coll...
        fooker 8y ago
        >How does one observe the binaries on a voting machine? You can make this argument against literally any programmable machine. Also, checksums of reproducible builds (a feature a lot of compilers in production now support) are a good way to know the software wasn't altered. Securing the hardware is more of a protocol issue than a technical one here.
        shakna 8y ago
        > Also, checksums of reproducible builds (a feature a lot of compilers in production now support) are a good way to know the software wasn't altered. Nobody will agree to doing that. I just said that. > Securing the hardware is more of a protocol issue than a technical one here. I wouldn't agree. Because the binary being run, isn't being run in isolation, making verifying the database difficult. [0] If we're not allowed to verify any of the internal workings of the voting machine... How can we say it actually has a copy of a verified binary on it? Random verification of a voting machine is far more intense, costly, and time-consuming than verifying that a bunch of people at the voting place are doing their jobs correctly. [0] https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/17/voting-machine-remote-access-elections/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/17/voting-machine-remote-ac...
mikeash 8y ago
Banking has do be done daily, can reverse bad transactions, and has no requirement to keep the customer’s activity so secret that even the bank doesn’t know what they’re doing. Elections, on the other hand, happen once or twice a year, can’t be reversed in the event of fraud, and need to protect the voter’s privacy to such an extent that even giving them, and only them, confirmation of how they voted is considered far too dangerous.
- fooker 8y ago
  Banking has to be done daily only because we are used to modern banking systems. Banking was not done daily 100 years ago.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    And the other major differences I pointed out?
    - fooker 8y ago
      Here you go. > can’t be reversed in the event of fraud Counterexamples from one country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UK_Parliamentary_election_petitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UK_Parliamentary_elect... > need to protect the voter’s privacy And you are convinced that there are no algorithmic solutions? Here is an attempt from a famous computer scientist whose algorithms book most of us have read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot (This one turned out to be cumbersome to implement because of bad UX, but worked rather well.)
      - mikeash 8y ago
        You can potentially reverse an entire election and do it again, but you can’t reverse one vote. I’m sure there are solutions. My point isn’t that it’s impossoble, it’s that banking and voting are so different that the existence of solutions for one tells us nothing at all about the other.

"Manual banking, with humans counting cash, scales well, and has far fewer attack vectors that electronic banking.".

by fooker 8y ago

"Manual banking, with humans counting cash, scales well, and has far fewer attack vectors that electronic banking.".

But that's not actually true whereas GP's is. I mean how would voting be better if we had the capacity to count billions of votes?

fooker 8y ago
Not just the capacity, the verifiability and redundancy it can support. I am a little bit surprised that people at Hackernews are so hostile against technology. Sure, there are some attack vectors, but we have 4-5 decades of security research and engineering to mitigate or at least detect that. Don't throw away the baby with the bathwater.
- brod 8y ago
  so we should build machines to tell the truth quicker and then verify the machines told the truth by using methods that do not include using machines... when machines are built to determine the truth but cannot be trusted to do so - it's (more or less) a negative sum game.
- sp332 8y ago
  Ok well if I see any voting machines like that I might reconsider. In the meantime stick with paper.

Chris_Chambers 8y ago

Whataboutism

jerf 8y ago

That metaphor doesn't work, because there is no (obvious) equivalent to double-entry bookkeeping for a vote. There's no counterparty. As history shows, double-entry bookkeeping does not entirely prevent fraud, but as history also shows, it does significantly raise the bar. Other people reference other cryptographic possibilities but it's still not clear you get that counterparty advantage or any equivalent as cleanly from any of them. I try to speak precisely, so I chose not to say that it does not on purpose. Maybe someone could convince me. But I've seen too many games and incredibly subtle backdoors to have too much confidence in such things. Nor am I sure how to convince the general public that they are correct, whereas convincing them paper ballots work is easy, and they intuitively understand the requisite security measures. It is not sufficient for a voting scheme merely to obtain the right number, it must also be trusted by the losers, or it's a waste of time.

fooker 8y ago
>it must also be trusted by the losers, or it's a waste of time. There is no voting scheme that is trusted by the losers. With paper ballot, you can easily claim ballot stuffing or biased counting.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  At least in the UK, independent observers can (and do) follow the paper trail: observe at a polling station, watch the ballot box being sealed, follow it, watch it bring unsealed, observe the count.
  - fooker 8y ago
    Why does that not translate to electronic voting? We have had hash functions and digital signatures for a while.
    - shakna 8y ago
      How does one observe the binaries on a voting machine? Nobody seems willing to sign on to that [0]. When you can't audit what is in a voting machine, you can't guarantee if it works. [0] https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2017/10/star-vote-collapses/ https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2017/10/star-vote-coll...
      - fooker 8y ago
        >How does one observe the binaries on a voting machine? You can make this argument against literally any programmable machine. Also, checksums of reproducible builds (a feature a lot of compilers in production now support) are a good way to know the software wasn't altered. Securing the hardware is more of a protocol issue than a technical one here.
        shakna 8y ago
        > Also, checksums of reproducible builds (a feature a lot of compilers in production now support) are a good way to know the software wasn't altered. Nobody will agree to doing that. I just said that. > Securing the hardware is more of a protocol issue than a technical one here. I wouldn't agree. Because the binary being run, isn't being run in isolation, making verifying the database difficult. [0] If we're not allowed to verify any of the internal workings of the voting machine... How can we say it actually has a copy of a verified binary on it? Random verification of a voting machine is far more intense, costly, and time-consuming than verifying that a bunch of people at the voting place are doing their jobs correctly. [0] https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/17/voting-machine-remote-access-elections/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/17/voting-machine-remote-ac...

mikeash 8y ago

Banking has do be done daily, can reverse bad transactions, and has no requirement to keep the customer’s activity so secret that even the bank doesn’t know what they’re doing. Elections, on the other hand, happen once or twice a year, can’t be reversed in the event of fraud, and need to protect the voter’s privacy to such an extent that even giving them, and only them, confirmation of how they voted is considered far too dangerous.

fooker 8y ago
Banking has to be done daily only because we are used to modern banking systems. Banking was not done daily 100 years ago.
- mikeash 8y ago
  And the other major differences I pointed out?
  - fooker 8y ago
    Here you go. > can’t be reversed in the event of fraud Counterexamples from one country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UK_Parliamentary_election_petitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UK_Parliamentary_elect... > need to protect the voter’s privacy And you are convinced that there are no algorithmic solutions? Here is an attempt from a famous computer scientist whose algorithms book most of us have read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot (This one turned out to be cumbersome to implement because of bad UX, but worked rather well.)
    - mikeash 8y ago
      You can potentially reverse an entire election and do it again, but you can’t reverse one vote. I’m sure there are solutions. My point isn’t that it’s impossoble, it’s that banking and voting are so different that the existence of solutions for one tells us nothing at all about the other.