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Why I bought a voting machine on eBay
- piokoch 6y agoI am not sure if in that particular case going with electronic/internet solution is really make any sense in view of potential risks. Voting happens once a few years only - it costs, but comparing to overall costs of running democracy (government, judicial system, the Police, etc.) this is nothing. Not that traditional process cannot be altered - communists won election in Poland in 1946 by falsify it, however they had all secret police working on it backed by Soviet tanks - but this is much harder and doing it en mass is nor practical.
- rbecker 6y agoNotably, we know about the Polish falsification. Electronic systems have the potential to be subverted far more covertly.
- Moru 6y agoObligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- dzhiurgis 6y agoMy phone has NFC hardware. My national Id, passport and drivers licence has NFC chip. Most people have a bank card with NFC. It's a bit shit they didn't put a hardware button (like YubiKeys do) on them, but. That's pretty much blockchain as far as I am concerned.
- notRobot 6y ago> That's pretty much blockchain as far as I am concerned. Elaborate?
- polynomial 6y agoThis is my new favorite quote.
- dzhiurgis 6y agoCryptographically signed transactions...
- snovv_crash 6y agoI've seen NFC cards the thickness of a standard credit card with built in capacitive touch keypads, 7-segment displays and even finger print readers. The only reason these haven't been rolled out is cost and that the current system is "good enough".
- dzhiurgis 6y agoI don't think you need any of that. Just a capacitive sensor to enable the card is enough. Pure contactless was a mistake as anyone can use it remotely.
- snovv_crash 6y agoI'd honestly like a PIN for high value transactions, and the value of the transaction to be displayed on the card. The reason is that the terminal is untrusted hardware from my perspective, it would be easy for someone to sneak in a fake display for wrong values, or do PIN harvesting.
- swiley 6y agoUntil almost everyone can audit the software themselves computerized voting defeats the point of having a democracy.
- rbecker 6y agoSo you audit the software. Then you enter the voting booth, and there's a voting machine in front of you. Bet your democracy it's running the same software?
- Shared404 6y agoPretty sure they were advocating for using physical ballots, not voting machines.
- pmoriarty 6y agoI got a physical ballot last time I voted, but when I went to submit it, it was placed in to... an electronic vote counting machine. This also defeats the point of democracy. Machines can not and should not be trusted for voting, no matter what fancy schemes are dreamt up for to make them supposedly verifiable. Voting can not be legitimate unless machines are taken completely out of the loop and humans are the ones doing all the vote counting by hand from end-to-end. Yes, there can still be fraud, but it will of necessity be quite limited and relatively easy to detect than if voting and/or vote counting was done by electronic means.
- bloodorange 6y agoA well known instance supporting your case: https://www.ndi.org/e-voting-guide/examples/constitutionality-of-electronic-voting-germany https://www.ndi.org/e-voting-guide/examples/constitutionalit...
- Shared404 6y agoI concur with you both, I badly phrased what I was trying to say. Thanks for saying it properly.
- dt3ft 6y ago..but they fixed it with blockchain!!!!! xD
- Chris2048 6y agoTo be fair, they ask two specific kinds of engineer for the first two, then ask a "software engineer". hmm. they might as well ask a "hardware engineer" about aircrafts and elevators.
- retox 6y agoCan someone please make a browser add-in to hides any comment, on any site, that contains a xkcd link; they're almost always low quality.
- CheckBlanket 6y agoThis article seems well below the usual standards of the BBC. It devolves into a soup of disjointed quotes under strange headings (all H2s) towards the end. There's almost nothing worth reading here.
- shever73 6y agoIt almost looks like they published the outline instead of the actual article! It's terribly written.
- jacobush 6y agoI was ready to vote you down, but the article was hilarious at the end. Would read again, it's absurd comedy at the end.
- dajomu 6y ago"Wife teases"!
- dotancohen 6y agoWife teases? I could not believe that got left in there. Definitely a draft, and somebody had opened the wrong window when context switching!
- mint2 6y agoEqually strange is “Deer peering” as a tagline for a section. It Has zero connection to the actual subject matter, hacking and security.
- tweetle_beetle 6y agoWow, you're not wrong. I couldn't help but look up the journalist's name as it's the type of name that you might give a fictional parody character. I was surprised to see that the website of the BBC's first cyber reporter has so much horrible third party stuff on it - https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=joetidy.co.uk https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=joetidy.co.uk
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- polynomial 6y agoPossibly raising the question, so what do people concerned with mail-in voting buy on eBay?
- pjc50 6y agoBallots? Discarded US bulk mailsort machines? All- or mostly-mailin ballots are concerning to me for many reasons which overlap with electronic voting: not secret, much easier for third parties to get involved in, etc. However at least the physical ballots have to exist and can be hand counted if necessary. Then there's the possibility of selective sabotage of postal service in opposition areas ...
- at-fates-hands 6y agoYou also have the possibility of a myriad of other issues with it: The mail-in ballots of more than 84,000 New York City Democrats who sought to vote in the presidential primary were disqualified, according to new figures released by the Board of Elections. One out of four mail-in ballots were disqualified for arriving late, lacking a postmark or failing to include a voter’s signature, or other defects. The Post reported Tuesday that roughly 30,000 mail-in ballots were invalidated in Brooklyn alone. The high invalidation rate provides more proof that election officials and the Postal Service were woefully underprepared to handle and process the avalanche of mail-in ballots that voters were encouraged to fill out to avoid having to go to the polls during the coronavirus pandemic, critics said. Over 80,000 mail-in ballots disqualified in NYC primary mess: https://nypost.com/2020/08/05/84000-mail-in-ballots-disqualified-in-nyc-primary-election/ https://nypost.com/2020/08/05/84000-mail-in-ballots-disquali...
- jgeada 6y agoYou do realize selective sabotage of physical voting locations also happens, right? It isn't as if we're not replete with examples of voting locations being removed or relocated somewhere inconvenient in battleground locations controlled by the party that might lose an open election.
- 6y ago
- christophclarke 6y agoTom Scott has a great video about the issues with electronic voting, chief among which is a lack of trust and understanding by the general public of how electronic voting would work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs