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Fantastic. Now explain how that works to non-programmers. You may not hand-wave, you may not ask them to trust a black box, and they must truly understand and

Fantastic. Now explain how that works to non-programmers. You may not hand-wave, you may not ask them to trust a black box, and they must truly understand and trust your system. And then you can compare that explanation to the explanation for paper ballots, envelopes, and voting urns. The public's trust in a voting system is a very important feature of that voting system. That the public can participate in voting is also a very important feature. If voting is relegated to a black box that everyone should trust, because, pinky promise, a very clever person designed the black box, then people will stop trusting voting.

Buttons840 8y ago
Well said. I like to remember that our highest goal is not to count votes correctly, but to build a stable society where we can be safe and happy. I believe a foolproof computer system could count votes perfectly, but it may make our society less stable in the process. Our current population is not ready to understand a fancy computer voting system, and are not capable of distinguishing between a foolproof system and `print "I win!"`.
logfromblammo 8y ago
You are requesting new requirements that are not part of the voting system currently in use. I currently have to trust a black box whose inner functions are hand-waved away such that I cannot understand it even if I wanted to. Established systems of voting have equally established attack vectors. If someone cannot understand what a cryptographic hash function does, even if they don't need to understand how, they cannot function in civil society without trusting someone else who can. Someone might go to a hundred HTTPS sites a day, and the security works invisibly to them, with no complaints, and yet while voting once every two years, one of the simplest concepts in all of cryptography is suddenly a problem? It's simpler than Bitcoin. The public can handle it.
- henrikschroder 8y ago
  > You are requesting new requirements that are not part of the voting system currently in use. They are absolutely part of the voting system currently in use. I strongly suggest that you follow tptacek's advice in the top comment and volunteer as an election worker a couple of times so you get a feel for how the process actually works. > Someone might go to a hundred HTTPS sites a day, and the security works invisibly to them Most people have no idea why or how that is more secure than HTTP, they can't tell the difference, they don't need to know the difference. But the biggest difference is that in online banking or whatever, there are humans who can check if something's gone wrong, if your account has been hacked, you can call your bank and ask them what happened, and you can usually trust them to know what's going on and what went wrong, and you'll get your money back. Or not, and then you can sue them. Either way, it's fixable. Voting has no authority that can fix things if something went wrong. The voters are the authority, which means that all the voters need to understand and trust the entire system for it to be authoritative.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    You have suggested that I don't know how my voting process "actually works", and that I cannot know that without volunteering to help run an election. I do not agree with your premises. Furthermore, that's an ad hominem argument. The black box I am referring to specifically is the optical scan vote tabulator machine that sits between me and the ballot box, in my current polling place. I have seen it multiple times, and examined it to the extent that I am able. When I lived elsewhere, there were different machines. Every one of them has been a black box to the voting public. I very explicitly do not trust those machines, because I know how the grey boxes that build the black boxes typically work. The publicly available information about them does not inspire trust. They are defective by design, and stink of corruption. Some places do have trustworthy elections, using publicly-observable hand-counted paper ballots, like in Minnesota; or slightly less trustworthy vote-by-mail for everyone, like in Oregon. Good for them. I have never voted in those places. Bad for me. And voting does have an authority that can "fix" things. It's usually the secretary of state for the state, then the supreme courts for that state and for the US. I remember when the SCotUS threw the PotUS election to GW Bush by interfering in Florida's lawful elections process. They didn't back up the voters' authority in that instance. I have felt the frustration of statewide elections where I had a sense that someone was dicking with the results, and there was nothing I could do about it without putting so much effort in that I'd be turning elections activism into an expensive, thankless hobby. I have zero trust in the current US elections process, and never believed that my vote actually counted for anything. I honestly don't know why I keep voting--gesture of defiance, maybe. I think the voting systems in every place I have voted have all been broken, from the enabling legislation all the way down to local procedures at the polling place. First-past-the-post is broken mathematically. Ballot access laws are cheating. Gerrymandered district boundaries are cheating. Restricted primary voting is cheating. I can't do anything to fix the systemic flaws without spending 20 years becoming the controlling authority of a single-issue political bloc and fundraising it all the way to actual significance, but encryption math and open, publicly-auditable software is a lot less work, and could still help with the local procedures. Of course, we'd also need a trustworthy compiler that can produce bitwise-identical binaries of different machines, and a trustworthy computer to run the compiler on, and some way for the public to verify that the software running during the election is the same software that was compiled at the public ceremony. And then also assume that an attack on integrity might still succeed, and proceed under the assumption that the system is compromised, whether by intentional act or accidental mistake, by auditing the final results in a non-predictable way. Buuuuuut... it's not really my job to restore trust in the system. That's up to the ones profiting from it. I have named a system that I, personally, could possibly trust. But it will probably not be adopted, because the trust comes from the tamper-resistance, and elections tampering is a feature desired by those currently holding elected office. In my estimation, voting in the US won't be fixed within the next 5 years, because there is currently profit to be taken by keeping it broken.

Buttons840 8y ago

Well said. I like to remember that our highest goal is not to count votes correctly, but to build a stable society where we can be safe and happy. I believe a foolproof computer system could count votes perfectly, but it may make our society less stable in the process. Our current population is not ready to understand a fancy computer voting system, and are not capable of distinguishing between a foolproof system and `print "I win!"`.

logfromblammo 8y ago

You are requesting new requirements that are not part of the voting system currently in use. I currently have to trust a black box whose inner functions are hand-waved away such that I cannot understand it even if I wanted to. Established systems of voting have equally established attack vectors. If someone cannot understand what a cryptographic hash function does, even if they don't need to understand how, they cannot function in civil society without trusting someone else who can. Someone might go to a hundred HTTPS sites a day, and the security works invisibly to them, with no complaints, and yet while voting once every two years, one of the simplest concepts in all of cryptography is suddenly a problem? It's simpler than Bitcoin. The public can handle it.

henrikschroder 8y ago
> You are requesting new requirements that are not part of the voting system currently in use. They are absolutely part of the voting system currently in use. I strongly suggest that you follow tptacek's advice in the top comment and volunteer as an election worker a couple of times so you get a feel for how the process actually works. > Someone might go to a hundred HTTPS sites a day, and the security works invisibly to them Most people have no idea why or how that is more secure than HTTP, they can't tell the difference, they don't need to know the difference. But the biggest difference is that in online banking or whatever, there are humans who can check if something's gone wrong, if your account has been hacked, you can call your bank and ask them what happened, and you can usually trust them to know what's going on and what went wrong, and you'll get your money back. Or not, and then you can sue them. Either way, it's fixable. Voting has no authority that can fix things if something went wrong. The voters are the authority, which means that all the voters need to understand and trust the entire system for it to be authoritative.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  You have suggested that I don't know how my voting process "actually works", and that I cannot know that without volunteering to help run an election. I do not agree with your premises. Furthermore, that's an ad hominem argument. The black box I am referring to specifically is the optical scan vote tabulator machine that sits between me and the ballot box, in my current polling place. I have seen it multiple times, and examined it to the extent that I am able. When I lived elsewhere, there were different machines. Every one of them has been a black box to the voting public. I very explicitly do not trust those machines, because I know how the grey boxes that build the black boxes typically work. The publicly available information about them does not inspire trust. They are defective by design, and stink of corruption. Some places do have trustworthy elections, using publicly-observable hand-counted paper ballots, like in Minnesota; or slightly less trustworthy vote-by-mail for everyone, like in Oregon. Good for them. I have never voted in those places. Bad for me. And voting does have an authority that can "fix" things. It's usually the secretary of state for the state, then the supreme courts for that state and for the US. I remember when the SCotUS threw the PotUS election to GW Bush by interfering in Florida's lawful elections process. They didn't back up the voters' authority in that instance. I have felt the frustration of statewide elections where I had a sense that someone was dicking with the results, and there was nothing I could do about it without putting so much effort in that I'd be turning elections activism into an expensive, thankless hobby. I have zero trust in the current US elections process, and never believed that my vote actually counted for anything. I honestly don't know why I keep voting--gesture of defiance, maybe. I think the voting systems in every place I have voted have all been broken, from the enabling legislation all the way down to local procedures at the polling place. First-past-the-post is broken mathematically. Ballot access laws are cheating. Gerrymandered district boundaries are cheating. Restricted primary voting is cheating. I can't do anything to fix the systemic flaws without spending 20 years becoming the controlling authority of a single-issue political bloc and fundraising it all the way to actual significance, but encryption math and open, publicly-auditable software is a lot less work, and could still help with the local procedures. Of course, we'd also need a trustworthy compiler that can produce bitwise-identical binaries of different machines, and a trustworthy computer to run the compiler on, and some way for the public to verify that the software running during the election is the same software that was compiled at the public ceremony. And then also assume that an attack on integrity might still succeed, and proceed under the assumption that the system is compromised, whether by intentional act or accidental mistake, by auditing the final results in a non-predictable way. Buuuuuut... it's not really my job to restore trust in the system. That's up to the ones profiting from it. I have named a system that I, personally, could possibly trust. But it will probably not be adopted, because the trust comes from the tamper-resistance, and elections tampering is a feature desired by those currently holding elected office. In my estimation, voting in the US won't be fixed within the next 5 years, because there is currently profit to be taken by keeping it broken.