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An important aspect of voting systems is that, while you want to authenticate that each voter is allowed to vote, you also want strong protections against disco
by aeturnum 6y ago
An important aspect of voting systems is that, while you want to authenticate that each voter is allowed to vote, you also want strong protections against discovering who voted for who. I understand why it seems like cameras would be a good idea, but it's very easy to imagine how such a system could be abused.
Can you tell a camera's field of view by looking at it? Could your grandparents? Trusting systems that secure the vote is much easier when they are designed resist being changed to abet oppression.
- WalterBright 6y agoThat's why you have voting booths. Voter goes in booth with ballot, closes curtain, comes out with ballot, ballot goes in counting machine. That way, you can: 1. verify who is voting 2. verify trail from voter to count 3. no extra votes 4. no discarded votes
- aeturnum 6y agoSure, it's a good system. But, of course, if you had a camera, voters might reasonably be worried that you would combine the footage with vote order and figure our who voted when.
- WalterBright 6y agoSure, the counter would have to be set up so the order of the votes cast is not retrievable. Any display should be only the total of votes counted, not the tally for each item on the ballot. This doesn't seem hard at all to do right.
- aeturnum 6y agoI agree that you could easily design a system where you could have video of everyone dropping their ballots into a ballot box and it would still be impossible to associate a particular vote with a voter. However, that's not the standard. The standard is avoiding the appearance of being able to track votes. I don't trust the people who make voting machine software or the government. You don't know that your voting tabulation software correctly anonymizes the results and you shouldn't need that technical knowledge to feel safe. The correct approach is to make a system that guarantees what we want and would be impossible for a bad actor to abuse.
- WalterBright 6y agoThe gold standard would be an auditable ballot trail from voter to final tally. Any gaps in that leads to suspicion of error and fraud. That leads to bad things, as recent events amply illustrated. Yes, it can be done while still having a secret ballot.
- loveistheanswer 6y ago>The correct approach is to make a system that guarantees what we want and would be impossible for a bad actor to abuse. No such system is possible
- WalterBright 6y agoWe can do a heluva lot better.
- PoignardAzur 6y agoScrap the voting machines. Manual counting (with randomly picked volunteers) is the only solution that guarantees trust in the process. As the recent US elections showed, voting machines are open to the opposition saying "we only lost because the machines were hacked against us".
- toast0 6y agoCounting machines are fine as long as you can do a hand recount. The machines people are upset about in 2020 are actually pretty reasonable; unlike the machines people were upset about in 2000 which didn't create a paper trail.
- jhayward 6y ago> Manual counting (with randomly picked volunteers) is the only solution that guarantees trust in the process. This is naive. The Georgia Presidential election was hand-recounted, twice. The loser still claims it was stolen, incited an insurrection that sacked the Capitol while Congress was certifying the winner. When one party is solely dedicated to power, not democracy, none of your ideals or safeguards mean anything. They just don't care what anyone thinks as long as they can hold power.
- dheera 6y agoWhy not just have two vote count machines made by different manufacturers and just ensure that they produce the same counts?
- mhh__ 6y agoMoney
- dheera 6y agoHmm ... could we do voting with NFTs and get rid of this mess, and all the paper waste? 1 NFT = 1 vote and you get the NFT by presenting ID in person at the police station.
- mschuster91 6y ago> you also want strong protections against discovering who voted for who. You also want protection against discovering who voted at all!
- tsimionescu 6y agoNot at all, the fact that someone voted (or didn't) MUST be recorded, otherwise you can't check whether there has been multiple voting.
- hef19898 6y agoYes, but you don't need to keep that record. Unless, of course, voting is mandatory.