Re:Darpa wants help cracking the election security problem
by darawk on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @04:38AM
(#20623375)
So, you believe that because a small group of people are kinda sorta overseeing this process over a long period of time, it is secure? Large groups of people watching intently are deceived extremely effectively and reliably by magicians all the time. I see no reason to think that the mere fact that some random citizens are "overseeing" the process makes it in any way secure.
And any way, we don't have to theorize:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/upshot/mapped-why-voting-...
The point is: a properly designed cryptographic voting system would make all of this provably secure. We wouldn't need to rely on witnesses paying attention, any citizen would be able to verify the integrity of the entire election on their home computer. That is why electronic voting is the best system.
Re:Darpa wants help cracking the election security problem
by jakeogh on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @05:25AM
(#20623612)
Nope. You never can audit most of it. Especially the hardware and firmware at vote time.
And that's a false arg anyway, even if you could "audit" it (ask the hardware nicely to not lie to you:), it's still a (really) bad idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
Re:Darpa wants help cracking the election security problem
by darawk on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @05:35AM
(#20623670)
> And that's a false arg anyway, even if you could "audit" it (ask the hardware nicely to not lie to you:)
If individuals can audit their own votes, the hardware cannot lie.
Re:Darpa wants help cracking the election security problem
by jakeogh on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @05:38AM
(#20623694)
You then have a trivially broken voting system.
Re:Darpa wants help cracking the election security problem
by darawk on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @01:54PM
(#20627670)
I know why you think that is so. But I have already explained elsewhere in this thread why you're wrong. So why don't you look into it a little for yourself.
Re:Darpa wants help cracking the election security problem
by jakeogh on Wednesday August 07, 2019 @02:49AM
(#20632475)
Nothing you wrote negates the requirement of incoercibility. In all instances, the check can lie to you OR the vote system is broken.
Electronic (aka proxy) voting is a requirement on the checklist to skip physical presense.
Done correctly, it is insanely difficult to swap out an election box. Where would you do it?
At the polling station, where members from ALL political parties are present? Volunteers are present too. All together watch the voting process, following through to opening the ballot box, and performing the initial count.
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=faq&do...
How, then, are election boxes to be secretly swapped?
On top of this, all ballots are serialized. Each voting station has multiple voting boxes. Voting boxes are sealed. How are you going to compromise them?
What I find astonishing, is how intensely some people seem to want to use computing for everything. Paper ballots, and the process used to employ them, are incredibly secure. Incredibly.
Its a problem that absolutely, positively does not need to be solved. At all.
Yet people are consistently working very diligently to do so, and the only real reason for that is one. Profit.
And we don't need that motive in an election counting process.