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This is still hung up on the premise that ‘the government’ will conspire to rig or manipulate it. The government isn’t an amorphous entity that responds to its

This is still hung up on the premise that ‘the government’ will conspire to rig or manipulate it. The government isn’t an amorphous entity that responds to its master’s demands: there are arms that operate independently, responding to legislation, rather than orders, and the people working there know that. They are public servants, not political servants. Also, the challenges of observability aren’t insurmountable in a digital system. They can be addressed through independent oversight and trusted platform concepts. People counting votes do make mistakes too. That’s why a vote isn’t counted by a single person - it’s counted by several to avoid human error.

autoexec 3y ago
> The government isn’t an amorphous entity that responds to its master’s demands and yet history tells us that governments do conspire and that the times we've been made aware of it happening after the fact are likely not the only times it has happened. In the case of voting machines the government doesn't even need to be directly involved. If all of the code used isn't open source and publicly available, if the hardware is closed and inaccessible to the public for auditing and review by experts, and if there is no paper trail to interdependently verify the results then the entire system is impossible to trust by design.
machina_ex_deus 3y ago
The government is the "Eve" of this protocol. What happens in practice is that the government is controlled by political parties, and these have enough leverage to put their confidants into sensitive positions. And the challenge of observability is that your adversary here, Eve, or the government, is the one providing the information. Therefore you can't rely on that information in the verification. Human error hardly matters. And normal elections shouldn't have razor thin margins, razor thin margins are already evidence of tampering. The irony is that instead they use the razor thin margins to justify ridiculous methods of counting. Several people are used to counting to prevent malicious opportunities, not innocent errors. Innocent errors have zero probability of changing anything.

autoexec 3y ago

> The government isn’t an amorphous entity that responds to its master’s demands and yet history tells us that governments do conspire and that the times we've been made aware of it happening after the fact are likely not the only times it has happened. In the case of voting machines the government doesn't even need to be directly involved. If all of the code used isn't open source and publicly available, if the hardware is closed and inaccessible to the public for auditing and review by experts, and if there is no paper trail to interdependently verify the results then the entire system is impossible to trust by design.

machina_ex_deus 3y ago

The government is the "Eve" of this protocol. What happens in practice is that the government is controlled by political parties, and these have enough leverage to put their confidants into sensitive positions. And the challenge of observability is that your adversary here, Eve, or the government, is the one providing the information. Therefore you can't rely on that information in the verification. Human error hardly matters. And normal elections shouldn't have razor thin margins, razor thin margins are already evidence of tampering. The irony is that instead they use the razor thin margins to justify ridiculous methods of counting. Several people are used to counting to prevent malicious opportunities, not innocent errors. Innocent errors have zero probability of changing anything.