I see stories about how election is rigged or that there are security vulnerabilities and lots of people don’t believe the outcome. Why don’t they just open source everything so that anyone can look at the code and be sure the votes are tallied correctly?
Why Electronic Voting ls Still A Bad ldea, a video by Tom Scott:
https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs
Electronic voting could use open source software, but so can a machine that scans a marked ballot. The best practice is to have voters mark a physical ballot, then have them put it in a machine (running open source software) that scans and tabulates the results. If there’s a question about the integrity of the results, we can go back and count physical ballots.
Mail in voting baby! I want every U.S. citizen to have this right.
I absolutely agree. Vote counting & tallying machines are fine, but you always want that paper trail.
That’s how they do it where I live!
That’s how it works in my state except you fill in the printed ballot by hand.
Brazil has changed to electronic voting since 1996 and faces none of these issues.
the only issue it faces is fascists trying to sow distrust.
Exactly. Every election you see a handful of right wingers claiming that the machines and/or code is unsafe and can be easily tampered with, but have absolutely nothing to back that up, and yet another election passes without anyone anywhere proving that our system is unsafe/a bad idea.
This Tom Scott video is terrible, should be renamed "why electronic voting is a bad idea (for fascists)
this video has 3 years.
3 years is a lot to somethings to be mature. He tells about Trust & Anonymity. You can’t trust anonymity 'coz you can trace the vote and bla bla bla. Well, you can trace the regular method too. Trust, you can’t trust the way the vote leaves the booth to the central. You know the Hash initiative? Even a small number change will be shown to everyone.
Not as efficiently and in mass. It’s like saying “you could gather personal data before the internet/social media”. Sure, there were mailing lists and some companies had personal data manually gathered but that was 0.00001% of what you can gather today for like 5$.
When it comes to data, scale and efficiency matter. As someone from a low trust country(Greece), any electronic voting is literally a threat to democracy, society and pretty much opens the window for a civil war. Which is why no political party even dares suggesting it.
And it doesnt take much for a society to become low trust, you only need 1 bad actor(game theory). Though Greece was never not a low trust society. But i think all countries would benefit from an electoral system like the greek one, where all political parties can have representatives on every ballot, there is tight control for ballot envelopes, everything is opened and counted in front of everyone, basically all political parties keep their own tallies, at a local and national level.
So if there is something fucky with the official results, it will be easily tracked and noticed. At least as long as you can have party representatives on every ballot. Obviously smaller parties cant do that. There have been conspiracy theories about neonazi votes not being counted, because literally all other parties despise them. And when i say neonazi, i dont mean “neonazi”, i mean literally a parliamentary party that had this as their symbol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(Greece)#/media/File:Meandros_flag.svg
And their second in command has a huge swastika tattoo, etc. At least their party became illegal and its leaders spent some time in prison but that only happened after they murdered a greek. As long as they were beating and killing immigrants, they were fine.
The issue isn’t trust. It’s the same as anything else electronic such as having a backdoor to encryption.
Anything physical requires a certain amount of effort to break in such a way that is widespread and without making it obvious.
But purely digital/online means that any bad faith actor with enough resources (such as nation states) can scale up the means and methods to manipulate it or break it.
I’m all for electronic voting for tallying with physical paper trails that can be used to verify the integrity of the digital results.
yeah this is how my state does it. You have a little clear window that prints out to a reciept type of roll and you can see it made your choices for each section. Still would like the system to be open source. Really though I can do it by mail now and that is the bomb.
The funny thing about this is that the way conservatives seem to want to verify is by hand counting the ballots, which is PROVEN to be less accurate than electronic counts.
This video is 3 years old, Brazil’s electronic voting system is 27 years old and there hasn’t been anyone proving that it is a bad idea, unsafe, tamperable or anything of the sort.
I like Tom but this video really irritates me. It just seems like he’s pulling generic arguments out of his ass without any actual research.
Importantly, Open Source is not feasible as a safeguard because there would be no way of verifying that the voting machine is running a build from the public source.
Even if it was the same source, you would have to also verify the compiler was not compromised. There are a lot of steps that need to be done.
That being said, open source would reveal the big easy to implement bugs and design flaws, as well as boost trust in the system. They should open up the source and allow audits.
This is a solveable problem, actually. It involves trusted computing platforms where various unrelated parties commit to various audit standards.
It could still, in theory, be compromised, but it would be a a lot harder to rig than anything at have today, since one would need a deep backdoor into multiple separate entities - the hosting company, and the source code repository, and the voting machine manufacturer, etc.