4 ms·

For something as important and simple as voting, I'd think we could develop an unhackable, fully open-source, formally verified voting system...?

andrewla 7y ago
I think this is a hopeless goal, sort of related to Reflections on Trusting Trust. Even the most basic version of this, a ballot-marking system, is pretty much infeasible unless you have formally verified hardware as well, which is not even possible even for commercial vendors. At least for them, selling sealed units that are somewhat resistant to physical modification is possible, but even there physical compromises have been demonstrated. Ballot scanning machines (for hand-marked ballots) are a pretty good balance of time/accuracy/simplicity, with the auditability being a big bonus for both random checks and for disputed elections. To take New York state as an example, it has manually marked ballots now with ballot scanners for tabulation, and I'm reasonably comfortable with the tabulation and placement aspects; where NY fails is largely in usability -- ballot design is worse than terrible, and borders on misleading. That plus the inscrutibility of NY's ballot initiative system (trying to find the actual text of the ballot measures is nearly impossible) makes the whole system a little shakey. And part of that as well is the scope of elected positions for minor things (what the hell is a Comptroller and why are we voting for one); they basically are a power transfer from the executives to the party machine to allow them to essentially give positions to people favored by the (unelected) party apparatus, which give toeholds to higher positions.
- excursionist 7y ago
  > is pretty much infeasible unless you have formally verified hardware as well, which is not even possible even for commercial vendors Why is it not possible? Formal hardware verification is probably more common than formal software verification.
yifanl 7y ago
How do we verify that our hypothetical perfect software is what's running on the voting machine?
deadmetheny 7y ago
We have this. It's called a paper ballot.
- gpvos 7y ago
  It's not entirely unhackable, but way better than anything based on electronics.
JohnFen 7y ago
> we could develop an unhackable "Unhackable" is an unachievable goal.

andrewla 7y ago

I think this is a hopeless goal, sort of related to Reflections on Trusting Trust. Even the most basic version of this, a ballot-marking system, is pretty much infeasible unless you have formally verified hardware as well, which is not even possible even for commercial vendors. At least for them, selling sealed units that are somewhat resistant to physical modification is possible, but even there physical compromises have been demonstrated. Ballot scanning machines (for hand-marked ballots) are a pretty good balance of time/accuracy/simplicity, with the auditability being a big bonus for both random checks and for disputed elections. To take New York state as an example, it has manually marked ballots now with ballot scanners for tabulation, and I'm reasonably comfortable with the tabulation and placement aspects; where NY fails is largely in usability -- ballot design is worse than terrible, and borders on misleading. That plus the inscrutibility of NY's ballot initiative system (trying to find the actual text of the ballot measures is nearly impossible) makes the whole system a little shakey. And part of that as well is the scope of elected positions for minor things (what the hell is a Comptroller and why are we voting for one); they basically are a power transfer from the executives to the party machine to allow them to essentially give positions to people favored by the (unelected) party apparatus, which give toeholds to higher positions.

excursionist 7y ago
> is pretty much infeasible unless you have formally verified hardware as well, which is not even possible even for commercial vendors Why is it not possible? Formal hardware verification is probably more common than formal software verification.

yifanl 7y ago

How do we verify that our hypothetical perfect software is what's running on the voting machine?

deadmetheny 7y ago

We have this. It's called a paper ballot.

gpvos 7y ago
It's not entirely unhackable, but way better than anything based on electronics.

JohnFen 7y ago

> we could develop an unhackable "Unhackable" is an unachievable goal.