News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Votes could be counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers. Parent comment

Re:Votes could be counted as fractions instead of as whole n... by closeparen on Tuesday November 01, 2016 @12:52PM (#12847653)
Banks, hospitals, airlines, rail systems, and automakers are all on the hook - if their system does the wrong thing, someone will notice the unbalanced books, bodies, or wreckage (other banks, Treasury, NTSB, NHTSA), and the institution will suffer serious harm.

How will you know if an electronic voting system produces a wrong result, except by running a paper voting system in parallel?

Do municipalities choosing voting machine contractors have incentives aligned to promote election integrity? Can they critically evaluate security properties of what they're being sold?

I don't think so.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Votes could be counted as fractions instead of as whole n... by devopsproject on Tuesday November 01, 2016 @01:29PM (#12848113)
> the institution will suffer serious harm

The republic is experiencing significant harm. If it was not, people would not be talking about it.

> How will you know if an electronic voting system produces a wrong result, except by running a paper voting system in parallel?

Audits? Open Source? Checksums? Hashes? We have many tools to verify the integrity of electronic data (I also never claimed it had to 100% digital)

> Do municipalities choosing voting machine contractors have incentives aligned to promote election integrity? Can they critically evaluate security properties of what they're being sold

If the choice is federally verified company A or federally verified company B, then yes.

[ Parent | on HN ]