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The systems in use are shit. That isn't what i'm talking about. People have, however, designed secure e-voting protocols, such as: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/

by darawk 8y ago

The systems in use are shit. That isn't what i'm talking about. People have, however, designed secure e-voting protocols, such as: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/670.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/670.pdf It's just that nobody uses them.

michaelmrose 8y ago
You realize our government is a hostile actor from our perspective? They are as likely to be complicit in any compromise of the system and thus unsuitable to trust to design a system suitable to preserve our democracy. The mouse can't guard the cheese. We the citizenry can probably resist and discover interference which has to be done in a fashion that is broadly distributed and plainly comprehensible by common people. Ditital systems are commonly found to be vulnerable to manipuluation that can be done by one or a small number of actors and only discoverable by a tiny portion of the population if and only if the people that compromised our democracy allow you to audit them. It seems like the best case real world system would be an unacceptable risk and astoundingly unlikely that the real world result would be any better than ACTUAL existing government IT projects which as mentioned are hot garbage. As far as I can tell its already entirely possible if laborious to prevent malfeasance at scale. The only possible benefit to the system you are describing would in decreased cost of operating the election after we pay off the billions required to build the system and slightly quicker results. We are short on neither money or time. This is still one of the wealthier nations and transitions from one group of assholes to the next in practice takes months from reasons that have nothing to do with tabulating votes. We cannot risk our democracy so that you or others like yourself can work on a neat new IT project. Our fearless leader will just have to find another way to deter millions of imaginary illegals from voting for his opponent next go round.
- darawk 8y ago
  > You realize our government is a hostile actor from our perspective? They are as likely to be complicit in any compromise of the system and thus unsuitable to trust to design a system suitable to preserve our democracy. The mouse can't guard the cheese. They aren't designing it. It's already been designed by academics. In the paper that I linked. Please read it. > We the citizenry can probably resist and discover interference which has to be done in a fashion that is broadly distributed and plainly comprehensible by common people. No, we can't. Paper ballots are ridiculously insecure. They are just paper. Anyone, anywhere can throw them away, change them, insert thousands of fake ones, etc. I don't even see how you can argue in seriousness that paper ballots are a reasonable solution to the problem of elections. They're a joke.

by darawk 8y ago

michaelmrose 8y ago

You realize our government is a hostile actor from our perspective? They are as likely to be complicit in any compromise of the system and thus unsuitable to trust to design a system suitable to preserve our democracy. The mouse can't guard the cheese. We the citizenry can probably resist and discover interference which has to be done in a fashion that is broadly distributed and plainly comprehensible by common people. Ditital systems are commonly found to be vulnerable to manipuluation that can be done by one or a small number of actors and only discoverable by a tiny portion of the population if and only if the people that compromised our democracy allow you to audit them. It seems like the best case real world system would be an unacceptable risk and astoundingly unlikely that the real world result would be any better than ACTUAL existing government IT projects which as mentioned are hot garbage. As far as I can tell its already entirely possible if laborious to prevent malfeasance at scale. The only possible benefit to the system you are describing would in decreased cost of operating the election after we pay off the billions required to build the system and slightly quicker results. We are short on neither money or time. This is still one of the wealthier nations and transitions from one group of assholes to the next in practice takes months from reasons that have nothing to do with tabulating votes. We cannot risk our democracy so that you or others like yourself can work on a neat new IT project. Our fearless leader will just have to find another way to deter millions of imaginary illegals from voting for his opponent next go round.

darawk 8y ago
> You realize our government is a hostile actor from our perspective? They are as likely to be complicit in any compromise of the system and thus unsuitable to trust to design a system suitable to preserve our democracy. The mouse can't guard the cheese. They aren't designing it. It's already been designed by academics. In the paper that I linked. Please read it. > We the citizenry can probably resist and discover interference which has to be done in a fashion that is broadly distributed and plainly comprehensible by common people. No, we can't. Paper ballots are ridiculously insecure. They are just paper. Anyone, anywhere can throw them away, change them, insert thousands of fake ones, etc. I don't even see how you can argue in seriousness that paper ballots are a reasonable solution to the problem of elections. They're a joke.