fushuan

I think they were joking.

Nothing alike. Voting is a trust issue, and while we have several trust based systems, it’s very hard to implement a system where even if the users don’t trust the system itself they can trust the result it produces. That’s the issue with electronic voting, trust that is placed in manual vote counting volunteers supervised by representatives of every party is small, because you only need to trust that each box was counted correctly. When you aggregate all those small trusts into a singular system, which even if divided in machines, is still a singular entity, then it’s impossible to trust the centralised system enough, and it must be incredibly robust to prove to every individual that their vote was cast correctly.

I proposed a system like that in my last comment, but I still wouldn’t trust such a system simply because the risk someone phishing the machines on voting day is so high, even if it has close to zero probability, that we can’t risk it.

The whole system is built on trust. With regular voting, we trust that there are enough people counting and validating each voting box that there won’t be much tampering. Each group only has to validate their own box, and so the trust required for it is not that high. We also know that each physical vote introduced in the box is there.

With machine voting, even if you use local machines that give results to humans, which then are inputted in a bigger database for counting, the entity doing the initial count for the district “box”, is singular, and there is no way to manually check unless there’s a bunch of humans watching every anonymous “ballot” of that box are registered correctly. You can’t really do that when the ballot is an “anonymous” input in a machine, there’s no paper trail verifiable by the small trusted human group we used to trust.

Even if there are a bunch of machines, trust is lost. Now imagine the actual useful proposals where you can vote from the phone Yada yada. Trust is completely lost.

The only way to be able to validate is for your vote to have an ID, that you and only you know is yours, and for each vote ID to be public. That way each individual person can validate that their vote is being correctly counted in their district, and trusted individuals can correctly corroborate that the amount of imputed votes makes sense with the amount of people registered to vote in that district.

That puts at risk that people without tech expertise wouldn’t know how to validate or even store their secret ID so others don’t know it’s them, and that we would need to trust the government that they don’t store a database of ID - citizen.

And yeeeeeess, blockchain based ledgers would be good for nonce (secret ID) based voting, but even if that tech works well, socially is still hard to implement as stated before.

If company is gonna lock downs extensions and force SSO on us, making Firefox non-viable (not that I’m allowed to install it anyway)… Fuck it edge we go, they have a Microsoft SSO stack anyway, it’s not like Microsoft isn’t tracking what I’m doing already lmao.