A broken clock etc etc
Also, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/
A classic. By the way electronic with paper trail gives you faster counts, a way to validate the results and recompute them by hand when there’s an issue.
And doing voting over multiple days and/or by mail in ballots gives you time to count everything.
The people pushing for same day and only that day with all votes counted that day just ignore the logistics and practicality of having people vote. Or, I suspect, rather like that it makes it impossible for highly populated areas to have their votes counted while lower populated areas votes are counted.
I’ve seen pushes for mail in ballots to be held and not counted until Election Day and then only those ballots counted by the end of Election Day counted. Which is absurd. Do mail in, count them up to and after. Or count them up to and give people with mail in ballots access to them a lot earlier. So they can be accurately counted leading up to Election Day.
Of course the logistics of having people able to monitor those ballots over a larger period of time is tricky too. Hence why they’re often not counted until day of and so, by extension, result in ballots not being fully counted for a few days.
One day only in person voting is purposeful suppression of votes.
Also, am coder, 100% agree with xkcd. I’m still amazed the Internet itself works.
It is theoretically possible to devise a mathematically secure electronic voting system using cryptography, but only if everyone can follow instructions perfectly and people can understand how it works and why their vote is secure. In other words, not in any way that would work in real life.
The principal benefit of pen-and-paper voting is that it is really easy to convince people that taking a ballot paper into a booth, marking it, and then depositing the ballot into a locked glass box which is later counted in front of a room of independent observers is a secure way to run elections. It is impossible to convince the average voter that cryptographically secure voting schemes are actually immune from tampering.
Edit: I never understood why we have “election days”. Why not have an “election week”?
I’m still amazed the Internet itself works.
Same here. FWIW, it’s built on older, slower, less-reliable tech, which forced ridiculous amounts of resiliency into every layer of the design. It’s still amazing, but perhaps slightly less so if we look back 40 years. I’m convinced that some parts are running just fine over infrastructure no better than wet string.
Having multiple days of open voting would be a game changer for some people. It can be absurdly difficult to actually get the day off, depending on the employer, and I’ve had ones try to treat it as a “perk”, like it shouldn’t be the damned baseline that we’re able to actually take part in the democratic process they’re parading around like a shiny bauble.
Personally I think they should do something like opening the polls on October 1st and then have November 1st be closing day, and all through October we take a page from the aussies and just have a rolling cookout/party at each of the polling places.
Ya get your “I voted sticker” any time in the month and can walk right in for beer and hot dogs and heck maybe even some of Kronk’s spinach puffs if that one guy can make Babish’s recipe work like he said he was gonna at the planning meeting for who’s bringing the goods, and best of all, it’s rolling for a month, so you’ve got every opportunity to stop in and cast your ballot, or just to come back with your “I voted” sticker to keep enjoying the festivities!
This is our most sacred institution as a nation, we should be making a celebration out of it!
In Minnesota, the law requires employers to give employees time off (of their choosing) to vote. At my previous job where they were anal about time in the office, I made a point of voting in the middle of the day which would require another commute. When I got the nasty email about “break too long”. I just replied with a link the statute. And made sure all my co-workers knew what their rights were.
The people pushing for same day and only that day with all votes counted that day just ignore the logistics and practicality of having people vote.
Oh, I can assure you that-
Or, I suspect, rather like that it makes it impossible for highly populated areas to have their votes counted while lower populated areas votes are counted.
I never should have doubted you.
Blockchain technology based (BBVS) could be safer but regular EVMs are still hackable
Trustless systems are always better than centralised systems especially when the government in power is also in authority to decide whether they continue to stay in power.
US has been blessed till now.
But look at Russian or North Korean elections. They also use paper ballots
I am confident that Putin is not gonna last if they go for a blockchain based voting system.
The problem is not being secure; it is convincing people that it is secure. Even the stupidest person understands that marking off a paper in a booth and then depositing it in a locked box is secure. The voting method must give voters confidence that their vote was counted, the election was fair, and the results are legitimate.
That gives so much more opportunity for human intervention.
A good locksmith is all it takes to manipulate the votes.
Even if you keep it under tight security and surveillance they can bribe the security.
“Hacked by AI” fucking lol
Reminder that this fucking moron is pushing Twitter as a financial tool. He wants you to use X like you would use your credit card.
But voting machines are insecure?
He wants you to use X like you would use your credit card.
I won’t even use xitter like social media. Why in hell would I consider it as a credit card? Oh, I get it. The target audience is the idiot army.
He wants you to use X like you would use your credit card.
I should have seen this coming.
That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. In October 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. (wikipedia)
Aw man, he’s trying to build Paypal? Again?
Wow. I actually agree with Elon Musk about something for once, what a shock!
Tom Scott has a very good video explaining why electronic voting is terrible all around and it will probably never be secure.
Tom Scott’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Tom Scott’s video via the Computerphile channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI&t=1s
It is actually possible to have a cryptographic structure that allows independent verification of the counts. Of course we will never have that because Repubs prefer buggy ES&S machines. (IIRC those are also the ones Kemp used to rig elections in GA.)
But is scantron voting electronic voting? Is mail in voting and early voting electronic voting? Is being ID’d on the voter registry because you know your SSN and address, name, signature, without having to use yet another ID electronic voting?
I think the supposed risk to electronic voting machines is that there would need to be thousands of them, are distributed, somewhat unattended, and operated by people that don’t know them.
The possibility of an exploit or misconfiguration increases, and the ability to compromise someone supervising one of the polling station increases.
If there is are centralised systems, fewer higher skilled people would be required to secure/monitor/run the system. It can also be airgapped.
While some of these risks are also applicable to in-person and mail-in voting, these systems have been around for ages, are not proprietary, and anyone can figure out “how it works” and can make sure “how it happened” matches.
As soon as you get into cryptographic vulnerabilities and security, 99.99% of people would be lost in the woods
The rest of the questions, I feel, are more systematic things.
Seems to work alright for Estonia, they have had an option to vote electronically since 2005. If I can sign legal documents, pay bills and do other government related stuff electronically, why suddenly voting is a huge problem?
Because what you vote is supposed to be anonymous…
If you ignore the anonymous part, then it’s obviously not an issue.
The only real risk comes if their voting server that decrypts votes would be compromised and no one would realise it. As with any electronic service there of course is some risk, nothing is 100% secure, but I would personally take that risk to vote electronically.
Here’s an overview how their process works, feels pretty solid.
Off topic, but… Can we retire this idiom? It’s in this thread like 3 times and it’s always used by people uncomfortable by the fact that someone they don’t like made a good point.
We should retire the idiom because people are using it as intended and everyone understands it as intended?
That’s loads of BS. Manual in person voting is easily scammed, just look at voting in Russia. Fuck this shit, everything should be 100% digital.
Paper voting leaves a literal paper trail unlike electronic voting that’s always a total black box in all countries that have tried it.
Look, mate, paper voting simply doesn’t work. And Russia is not the only example.
Manual in person voting is not easily scammed on a scale that can swing an election. The slow, inefficient, in person, physical process is a security feature.
I don’t get what’s wrong with paper ballots sent by mail. It’s convenient and easy, with a paper trail for recounts. It’s worked great in Washington for decades.
There’s no way to guarantee privacy. An overbearing spouse, an anti-union boss, or a judgmental pastor could all insist on seeing the votes marked as they prefer.
A voting booth was invented for this very reason.
it absolutely is not easily scammed at all.
every single piece of paper is numbered and tracked. (tickets and stubbs, basically). all counting is done by multiple people and watched by anyone who wants. political parties are banned from voting premises.
even better: early voting, in person, up to a week or two before. no crowds.
errors happen about 1 in 1,000,000 with a maximum of a couple hundred, and are caught immediately.
there is no scamming. all of the USA’s voting problems are self-created.
Manual in person voting is easily scammed, just look at voting in Russia.
Let me check. *looks through window* It’s not the biggest source of voting fraud. Biggest source of voting fraud is Venedictov’s box - Digital Electronic Voting.
Fuck this shit, everything should be 100% digital.
Sobyanin approves.
Not just digital but trustless decentralised blockchain based so it’s impossibly hard to manipulate
It’s pretty rich that one of his stans is harping about how the Left “steals elections”, yet his guy literally tried that in the last election cycle. Then there’s also Bush v Gore. But yeah, it’s those crafty lefties doing the stealing!
