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i've always thought the way to do this would be to combine paper based ballots with multiple counting apparatus that are operated by the competing parties and t
by a-dub 5y ago
i've always thought the way to do this would be to combine paper based ballots with multiple counting apparatus that are operated by the competing parties and the state.
i fill out my slip and i run it through the red machine, the blue machine and the county machine. they all display a hash/sum of the total counts thus far, i verify each machine has the same thing on its display, i put my paper into the lockbox at the end and done. then when the election is over, the counts agree or they don't, and if they don't there's a big public rescanning.
of course the big threat is coercion. if one of the parties put a camera on their machine that sees me put my slip in, or they're counting ballot sequences, they can match my vote to my identity... but... since each party has representatives present to watch over their machines, they also can also check the machines of each other for those sorts of things. (ops and election watching become one and the same)
it would just be cheap document cameras and socs with open source software. totally doable, i think. you could even have like, different hardware architectures for each group if you wanted to protect against nationstate level hardware attacks.
also, i'm sure there are things in that rich literature of voting crypto that could also help with obscuring voter identity... but hey, this would be a good start.
it's not blockchain, but it takes one of the biggest ideas from cryptocurrency, i think. (double/triple entry accounting)
- alistairSH 5y agoThis is (very roughly) wheat we do now on most US elections. There are reps from all parties involved in manual counting and dispute resolution.
- a-dub 5y agosure, but there's this notion of "oh the election is crap because shady things happened in the back room." if you have three counts, which shouldn't get out of sync in the first place, then the margin for contesting the election shrinks considerably! although, of course, there is no technical fix for someone who trolls the process if they don't get what they want. i do think there's value in making it feel a lot more like there's less blind trust in times of contentious elections though. maybe it would just be theater and not really achieve much more than what we have today in terms of real security, but if by showing realtime hashes of the counts that agree as a voter scans their votes in each machine, especially if one of those machines is operated by people they trust, increases trust in the process, then it seems a great net win.
- alistairSH 5y agoI trust people (as a group; individuals can be real dicks) more than a literal black-box that can’t really audited because the software is proprietary. As noted elsewhere, election fraud with paper doesn’t scale well. With software, it might (depending on implementation).