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Definitely shouldn't preclude independent audits. Lazy thinking, on my part. The thought was that mandatory audits would help maintain long-term confidence by

Definitely shouldn't preclude independent audits. Lazy thinking, on my part. The thought was that mandatory audits would help maintain long-term confidence by avoiding erosion of confidence in long gaps where no specific evidence triggered audits. Minimum sample sizes would help protect the mechanism from undersized propaganda-audits that ultimately undermine trust in the audits themselves. But you're right; it would probably be easier and more pernicious to do a sufficiently large audit but give the reins to partisans, ideologues, or incompetents. Fairly open access would be better, thouguh I'm sure there are still plenty of "interested" outside parties willing to perform propaganda audits for cheap. Not sure how to solve that.

laughinghan 7y ago
Hmmmm, I guess the key is that each group's auditing process itself has to be open and "objective"---paper ballots are pretty easy in this regard, every group looking at the same ballot will usually agree who the vote is for. Math/encryption could possibly work too, at least in the sense of being "objective", although it has other legitimacy problems due to being difficult for lay people to understand and trust. As far as I know, controversies over audits or the independent observers themselves being corrupted aren't really a problem in the US at least, so I'm not too worried about this.