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If there was a whole new voting system built from scratch, couldn't it be designed to use some sort of integrity key in combination with each voter's personal k
by jb775 6y ago
If there was a whole new voting system built from scratch, couldn't it be designed to use some sort of integrity key in combination with each voter's personal key? Kind of like how some CDNs have an integrity attribute to ensure the CDN's source code hasn't been manipulated.
- ahupp 6y agoOne of the tricky things with voting is that a provably trustworthy system that voters don't understand is worse than an imperfect system that is totally transparent. Voting is only useful to the extent there's trust in the system.
- TheDong 6y agoI don't think that ends up working for voting machines because those are two different problems. With the CDN, the user receives source code and they want to verify the source code is unchanged. Checking a hash of the data they received is sufficient. For a voting machine, what's the analogue? If I walk up to a voting machine with an integrity key, how do I check that the source code it's running has a given hash or is signed with a given key? If the voting machine itself shows the code or does the check, obviously a person who compromised the machine can fake that bit. If I have to remove the hdd and verify the data on it, and take apart the voting machine to verify there's no second hard drive... well, that seems like it's well out of reach of any voter verifying it. Integrity keys, hashes, signatures, blockchains, etc can verify digital data, can verify the contents of data that servers serve... But they don't seem to solve the problem of "what code is this machine running", and that seems to be the important problem for voting machine code.