4 ms·

Realistically how often lay people who distrust the system currently audit the votes?

heavyset_go 5y ago
The last election had volunteers from both sides of the aisle count votes, while a ton of normal people watched them as observers. Last year, we saw a lot of Trump supporters who were convinced the election was stolen act as election observers. The process is easy for them to engage in, as well as to observe, because they're literally just counting votes. Anyone can observe and see for themselves that nothing nefarious is going on, and they don't need to be experts to do so.
- darawk 5y ago
  > The last election had volunteers from both sides of the aisle count votes, while a ton of normal people watched them as observers. Last year, we saw a lot of Trump supporters who were convinced the election was stolen act as election observers. The process is easy for them to engage in, as well as to observe, because they're literally just counting votes. Anyone can observe and see for themselves that nothing nefarious is going on, and they don't need to be experts to do so. And how did all that work out for public trust in elections? The problem here is that, even if you personally can go validate your local election, anyone can just claim the fraud was somewhere else. A cryptographic voting system allows any citizen to validate the entire election. The value of this is very significant. Right now a right wing website can just claim say, the CA elections were riddled with fraud. The only way to even approach "disproving" that is to request data from the city/state officials...who those people do not trust in the first place. A publicly auditable voting system would short circuit all of those issues. It doesn't need to be interpretable to every single person. What it does need to have is no specific plausible fraud narrative. Right now Trump et al can simply claim ballot stuffing, or any number of other kinds of fraud. Disproving that requires access to records that most people cannot obtain, and so the narrative can retain credibility for those disposed to believing it. It's true that most people will not understand the cryptography underlying an auditable voting system, but they don't need to. In order for someone to implant a fraud narrative, they will need to come up with an explanation for how the fraud occurred. Once they do that, it will be relatively straightforward to debunk those narratives in a clear way, that, critically, does not rely on faith in trusted third parties.
  - acdha 5y ago
    > A cryptographic voting system allows any citizen to validate the entire election. Really? Think about what we saw when the Republicans tried to claim the 2020 election was rigged and ask how a massively complex distributed system would change that. When someone argues that fake or dead people voted, the blockchain doesn’t help – you can show transactions but that doesn’t and cannot show that they were made by people who were eligible voters, and privacy makes it important that this never change. This is the same reason why blockchain systems like supply chain management fail: if you trust a third-party, you don’t need a blockchain. If you don’t, layering overhead on top won’t change that. Similarly, I really don’t see how the argument that people don’t need to understand cryptography to trust the system. You’re talking a massive, complex software system run in thousands of locations and, as we’ve seen, absence of evidence will simply be cited as proof that people covered their tracks well. Look at how many people believed conspiracies based on the hex gibberish or Windows security settings which various Trump acolytes were pushing — they had no trouble coming up with explanations which many people believe long after the subsequent debunkings. The underlying problem is that a blockchain system still depends on trusted third parties. You need to verify that someone is eligible to vote and that their vote was accurately recorded. Think about all of the claims over the years about machines recording votes for a different candidate than the user selected, moving buttons right before someone clicked, etc. – there’s no way to solve that by adding more software. Did a bunch of people get bused in to vote for someone else? A blockchain cannot solve that – you need a trusted third party, and calling them an oracle doesn’t mean that’s not what they are. What does work is the current system: the fact that bipartisan witnesses watched people being checked against voter rolls, paper being counted, and recounted, etc. meant that most people accepted the results. It’s not perfect but it works well and the fact that it’s distributed means that flaws or cheating don’t scale the way a digital system would. The danger we face now is from ideologues perjuring themselves, and a blockchain won’t change that because the problem is that they don’t want to accept the results and are actively trying to subvert the system. A blockchain won’t help with the new rules being put into place to allow political interference or suppress voters, but it will distract from the things which might.
    - darawk 5y ago

The last election had volunteers from both sides of the aisle count votes, while a ton of normal people watched them as observers. Last year, we saw a lot of Trump supporters who were convinced the election was stolen act as election observers. The process is easy for them to engage in, as well as to observe, because they're literally just counting votes. Anyone can observe and see for themselves that nothing nefarious is going on, and they don't need to be experts to do so.

darawk 5y ago
> The last election had volunteers from both sides of the aisle count votes, while a ton of normal people watched them as observers. Last year, we saw a lot of Trump supporters who were convinced the election was stolen act as election observers. The process is easy for them to engage in, as well as to observe, because they're literally just counting votes. Anyone can observe and see for themselves that nothing nefarious is going on, and they don't need to be experts to do so. And how did all that work out for public trust in elections? The problem here is that, even if you personally can go validate your local election, anyone can just claim the fraud was somewhere else. A cryptographic voting system allows any citizen to validate the entire election. The value of this is very significant. Right now a right wing website can just claim say, the CA elections were riddled with fraud. The only way to even approach "disproving" that is to request data from the city/state officials...who those people do not trust in the first place. A publicly auditable voting system would short circuit all of those issues. It doesn't need to be interpretable to every single person. What it does need to have is no specific plausible fraud narrative. Right now Trump et al can simply claim ballot stuffing, or any number of other kinds of fraud. Disproving that requires access to records that most people cannot obtain, and so the narrative can retain credibility for those disposed to believing it. It's true that most people will not understand the cryptography underlying an auditable voting system, but they don't need to. In order for someone to implant a fraud narrative, they will need to come up with an explanation for how the fraud occurred. Once they do that, it will be relatively straightforward to debunk those narratives in a clear way, that, critically, does not rely on faith in trusted third parties.
- acdha 5y ago
  > A cryptographic voting system allows any citizen to validate the entire election. Really? Think about what we saw when the Republicans tried to claim the 2020 election was rigged and ask how a massively complex distributed system would change that. When someone argues that fake or dead people voted, the blockchain doesn’t help – you can show transactions but that doesn’t and cannot show that they were made by people who were eligible voters, and privacy makes it important that this never change. This is the same reason why blockchain systems like supply chain management fail: if you trust a third-party, you don’t need a blockchain. If you don’t, layering overhead on top won’t change that. Similarly, I really don’t see how the argument that people don’t need to understand cryptography to trust the system. You’re talking a massive, complex software system run in thousands of locations and, as we’ve seen, absence of evidence will simply be cited as proof that people covered their tracks well. Look at how many people believed conspiracies based on the hex gibberish or Windows security settings which various Trump acolytes were pushing — they had no trouble coming up with explanations which many people believe long after the subsequent debunkings. The underlying problem is that a blockchain system still depends on trusted third parties. You need to verify that someone is eligible to vote and that their vote was accurately recorded. Think about all of the claims over the years about machines recording votes for a different candidate than the user selected, moving buttons right before someone clicked, etc. – there’s no way to solve that by adding more software. Did a bunch of people get bused in to vote for someone else? A blockchain cannot solve that – you need a trusted third party, and calling them an oracle doesn’t mean that’s not what they are. What does work is the current system: the fact that bipartisan witnesses watched people being checked against voter rolls, paper being counted, and recounted, etc. meant that most people accepted the results. It’s not perfect but it works well and the fact that it’s distributed means that flaws or cheating don’t scale the way a digital system would. The danger we face now is from ideologues perjuring themselves, and a blockchain won’t change that because the problem is that they don’t want to accept the results and are actively trying to subvert the system. A blockchain won’t help with the new rules being put into place to allow political interference or suppress voters, but it will distract from the things which might.
  - darawk 5y ago