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The going conspiracy reason is that it's because the "Left" is using mail-in ballots to commit election fraud. To be fair, I still don't understand how we can h

by zo1 6y ago

The going conspiracy reason is that it's because the "Left" is using mail-in ballots to commit election fraud. To be fair, I still don't understand how we can have such manual, potentially-manipulated and mistrusted voting systems in 2020. Like, how difficult would it be for everyone to vote in a secure, cryptographically hidden and verified manner, using some sort booth/app/device/website with proper identity verification linked to your government identification databases? It's beyond scary and infuriating that with all this technology and really smart people around that we still have to have papers, mails and random fallible/corruptible volunteers doing the counting.

nojvek 6y ago
Anything that’s only electronic is ripe for fraud. Securing digital things is really hard. For something as important as elections we absolutely need a paper trail. Physical things that both parties can verify exist and are simple to understand. In an ideal world, we’d have a hybrid system. Everyone gets a paper with an ID cryptographically hashed with their voter id. They vote electronically and mail/in person hand their paper with a cast ID that’s also cryptographically signed with their voter id and vote cast. Like how two factor TOTP works, the verification of cast ID can be done totally offline. That way you have a two factor audit system. A fast digital tally backed with a verifiable paper trail for every vote. If paper tally is not within 1% of digital tally, then you have a discrepancy and people ought to vote again. Sure it would take a while to verify paper trail but a couple of days of two factor counting is totally worth it for an important thing as election that decides the fate of a country.
- noworriesnate 6y ago
  Exactly. And even cryptography can't keep files from being deleted. When someone deletes files, it's not immediately obvious what they're doing, even to software developers. When someone throws a bunch of ballots in a trash can, it's immediately obvious what they're doing to anyone.
germinalphrase 6y ago
We absolutely could have trustable, reliable, verifiable voting systems. It is done all around the country. That it is not universal is because - I imagine - the parties want the gamesmanship.

by zo1 6y ago

nojvek 6y ago

Anything that’s only electronic is ripe for fraud. Securing digital things is really hard. For something as important as elections we absolutely need a paper trail. Physical things that both parties can verify exist and are simple to understand. In an ideal world, we’d have a hybrid system. Everyone gets a paper with an ID cryptographically hashed with their voter id. They vote electronically and mail/in person hand their paper with a cast ID that’s also cryptographically signed with their voter id and vote cast. Like how two factor TOTP works, the verification of cast ID can be done totally offline. That way you have a two factor audit system. A fast digital tally backed with a verifiable paper trail for every vote. If paper tally is not within 1% of digital tally, then you have a discrepancy and people ought to vote again. Sure it would take a while to verify paper trail but a couple of days of two factor counting is totally worth it for an important thing as election that decides the fate of a country.

noworriesnate 6y ago
Exactly. And even cryptography can't keep files from being deleted. When someone deletes files, it's not immediately obvious what they're doing, even to software developers. When someone throws a bunch of ballots in a trash can, it's immediately obvious what they're doing to anyone.

germinalphrase 6y ago

We absolutely could have trustable, reliable, verifiable voting systems. It is done all around the country. That it is not universal is because - I imagine - the parties want the gamesmanship.