WTF Bites
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@zerosquare FILE_NOT_FOUND
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@magnusmaster said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar Anyone who codes e-voting systems is too incompetent to know e-voting is a very bad idea. With e-voting you have to trust there are no bugs or backdoors on the hardware, OS, compiler, OS utilities and every single layer of abstraction and libraries your software builds on. And there WILL be bugs and backdoors. In my country the 2015 elections used e-voting for elections in the capital city, and the company that was in charge of the e-voting systems had the certificates they used to sign everything accessible from the Internet, so ANYONE could change the results. The person who found out this got arrested by the gov't and had his PC confiscated, but the courts ruled that the company in charge of e-voting was too incompetent to live. There are only three reasons for e-voting to exist: malice, stupidity or both.
The only way to have non-rigged elections is to de-anonymize votes. All voting is done on electronic machines. The voter checks in with commission/reception/whatever you have in your country, receives a unique voter number and password (maybe printed as some 2D code). They go to voting machine, type in/scan number and password, vote, get a receipt with following information printed: voter number (not stored in DB, only on receipt), ballot number (a unique number different from voter number), and their chosen candidates. If the printed candidates are different from who they voted for, they can go to commission, invalidate their vote, receive new password and try again. After elections, all votes (ballot numbers and selected candidates) become publicly available for external read-only SQL connections with some simple frontend for individual ballot finding, so everyone can check if their vote hasn't been altered (if they have a receipt, it's all they need to prove fraud), as well as check if official tallies match the raw data. This way, the only possible fraud left is voting as someone else and other voter registration shenanigans - which is less dangerous than miscounting votes because it has to be done before elections, not after, and so you don't know how much fraud you need to make your party win.
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The only way to have non-rigged elections is to de-anonymize votes.
Which is a horrible idea in and of itself.
Electronic voting is fundamentally broken, and it's a solution in search of a problem.
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The only way to have non-rigged elections is to de-anonymize votes.
Which is a horrible idea in and of itself.
I've never heard a convincing argument for anonymous votes that didn't include already living in a totalitarian state.
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Electronic voting is fundamentally broken
So is paper-voting. Source: I live in a country where every election is rigged to some degree, but you cannot prove anything because all paper trail disappears 30 minutes after they finish counting.
Edit: and in the one case where they had undeniable proof of voting fraud, the court dismissed the case because this one vote wouldn't change the course of election.
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- Voting rules are there to ensure you won't live in a totalitarian state.
- It guarantees you don't fear any repercussions for voting what you want to vote. Not from the state, your employer, your doctor, your husband ...
So is paper-voting
No. Paper-voting can be made to work, electronic voting can't. You saying you have an example where paper voting doesn't work doesn't change the fact you can easily make it work.
If you fear election fraud, go to your local vote office and take part in the counting as an observer.
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why don't you describe what the attack scenario is this is supposed to protect from?
It sounds like they think that they're protecting the data at rest (which is the purpose of encrypting an SQLite DB). Or that they have no fucking clue at all.
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@dkf Money is on "both".
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@topspin My money is on “incompetent” more than anything else.
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@cartman82 said in WTF Bites:
Javascript programmers get tasked to build a Windows native app.
High Security Electron.js Application with React.js and Golang for the Myanmar Election
How we used Electron.js, React and Golang to build a highly secured application used in the Myanmar Election. We describe our technical choices, their pros and cons.
- C++/C# are the official languages for building Windows Applications, but we still don’t know if it’s easier to work with.
- We need spend lots of time to learn and gain expertise in a new language, and we may not use it later on.
The cross-platform property allows us to build on Mac OSX and release it for a Windows machine, it will make the development process very easy.
We considered using some Node.js native modules, but we faced the same situation again; Node.js native module is written by C++ and this would require our team to spend excess time fine tuning C++ skills.
We decided we could still use JavaScript, but use another language to replace C++/C#. We chose Golang, because Golang is a cross-compile language and it has some advantages that we want:
For such a hipster outfit it's odd that they didn't mention blockchain even once...
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@carnage I assume an actual job will beat this out of me at some point, but the way I view it, you're not there to write an app, you're there to write code. If manglement decides right after you've moved the chair from the southeast corner to the northwest corner that the chair really did fit better in the southeast, then you're not getting paid any less and they know damn well why you haven't gotten around to the table yet.
That would quickly become quite depressing, with job satisfaction somewhere around zero.
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- It guarantees you don't fear any repercussions for voting what you want to vote. Not from the state, your employer, your doctor, your husband ...
- There were millions of Americans openly campaigning for their preferred candidates in last election (and every other election, too). Anonymous voting doesn't protect them - and yet you don't hear (too often) about bad things happening to them.
- Those who don't campaign openly, often still have political preferences, and often mention them in casual conversations at home, with friends, at workplace, etc. Anonymous voting doesn't protect them either - and yet you don't hear (too often) about bad things happening to them.
- If you never talk about politics ever, then yes, a non-anonymous ballot would expose you. But you'd get no worse treatment than the two groups above - and they don't have it too bad at the moment.
- If you witnessed fraud, pretty much the only way to do something about it is to publicly file a lawsuit in court. Voter fraud usually benefits one candidate/party over another. When you file such lawsuit, you've just publicly identified yourself as a supporter of one party and opponent of another - nullifying the anonymity of vote.
- If you read my post carefully, you'd notice that the only people who actually have knowledge how you voted would be you, the database administrator, and the commission but only if you retracted your vote. So no fear of doctor or employer. So it's not fully anonymous, but it's nothing like the Norway's public database of everyone's salary.
So is paper-voting
No. Paper-voting can be made to work, electronic voting can't. You saying you have an example where paper voting doesn't work doesn't change the fact you can easily make it work.
You can make electronic voting work easily too! The reason why electronic voting is bad in practice is identical to the flaw in paper voting - it's very hard or even impossible to detect fraud. If you get a reliable method of detecting fraud, you can get both paper and electronic voting perfectly safe. I've posted one idea how to detect fraud in electronic voting.
If you fear election fraud, go to your local vote office and take part in the counting as an observer.
- It's very hard to become observer in my country.
- With just single pair of eyeballs, it's impossible for me to see everything. And I don't know exact rules, but I imagine standing over someone's shoulder all the time and watching their every move might be treated as misconduct and get me kicked out - and if I don't do that, I have no way to really make sure no fraud is going on (reportedly, the most common method is ninja-editing ballots with additional candidates, thus invalidating them).
- Vote counting can take several days (for local elections in 2014, it took a whole week in some places). I can't afford skipping my daily work that much.
- It used to be illegal for an observer to record anything that happens during vote count. So even if I was a witness of fraud, it would be my word vs. everyone else in the commission. There was some change in voting law recently and it's now supposedly completely legal, but we have to wait for next elections to see how it turns out in practice.
- It's impossible for me as an observer to tell if the voting urn wasn't pre-filled with votes before voting started. So even a perfect watcher won't be able to detect the most obvious thing. The new voting law mandates transparent urns, but as I've said above, we've yet to see it.
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For such a hipster outfit it's odd that they didn't mention blockchain even once...
Which is a bit funny, because this is one setting where blockchains could actually make sense. Sort-of. At least more than 99% of the applications where they've been proposed.
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@gąska I can publicly endorse one party and then privately vote for something completely different, because votes are anonymous. That is an inherent part of a free democratic election process.
Only shit-tier countries have non-anonymous votes, and there's almost certainly causation to that. Like the former GDR: "Oh, you want to vote? Sure, go ahead. Did you vote for the party?!". And the argument "it will only be abused if you live in a country where it would be abused" is pretty darn weak.You can make electronic voting work easily too!
No.
I've posted one idea
Which gives up non-anonymous votes, so it doesn't qualify as working.
Even if they were to build the perfect e-voting system (which I have very high doubts they would), made it open source and had some math guys proof it correct: I might be able to check that and maybe even trust it. But the overwhelming majority of the population can't. Even if there is no possibility of fraud in the electronic system, there is no way for the general population to trust that other than "they said so".
My grandma can go register to observe the vote counting*. That is dead simple. There is simply no way she can herself verify the correctness of e-voting.
The election process is just too fundamental to democracy to give up essentials like anonymity or simplicity for stupid gimmicks.* She doesn't need to because there will be observers of all relevant parties anyway, which cross check each other. But she could.
Vote counting can take several days (for local elections in 2014, it took a whole week in some places). I can't afford skipping my daily work that much.
Why does it take so long? We vote on Sundays, voting closes at 6, preliminary counts are in at 8-9, almost all counting is done by the next day. The problem has almost perfect scaling for parallelization.
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With just single pair of eyeballs, it's impossible for me to see everything.
That's also not the point, usually. After all, you're not the only observer. The important bit is that there are enough observers from different political alignments to make miscounting difficult in all directions. You being there would add a bit to that, but it's not like you're the singular point of control or anything.
Of course, there's a problem if there are not enough observers to go around, or if a certain party manages to fill all the positions.
It's impossible for me as an observer to tell if the voting urn wasn't pre-filled with votes before voting started.
Aren't there observers also at the actual place where the votes are cast. It would be weird if the observers don't get to check the urns before the voting opens just for that. In theory, the urns should never be left alone and unobserved after that either.
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You can make electronic voting work easily too!
No.
Of course you can. Create a paper trail, as absurd as it sounds. Give one "receipt" to the voter, another is collected in an urn at the site of the voting machine.
After all votes have been collected, an unrelated agency randomly selects several sites where the paper votes are compared to the already calculated tally.
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@gąska I can publicly endorse one party and then privately vote for something completely different, because votes are anonymous. That is an inherent part of a free democratic election process.
The foundation of free democratic election process is making the people able to vote who they want in office, and putting in office candidates who people voted for, according to some predefined algorithm. Anything that doesn't directly deal with that is not inherent part of free democratic election process. They might be very important, they might even be essential, but they aren't inherent - as in you can totally have free democratic election process without anonymous vote. It might have downsides (still waiting for convincing argument against non-anonymous votes), but it's not
My point was that even completely public voting - which is NOT AT ALL what I proposed - wouldn't have as dire consequences as you make it sound. It doesn't matter who those activists ultimately vote for, as long as they can campaign for whoever they want and not face economical ostracism.
Only shit-tier countries have non-anonymous votes
If you live in shit-tier country, anonymity becomes much more important. See: Chinese Tor users. If they lived in USA and kept their browsing habits, they'd be proclaimed conspiracy freaks.
and there's almost certainly causation to that.
Just remember that causation is one-way relationship.
Like the former GDR: "Oh, you want to vote? Sure, go ahead. Did you vote for the party?!". And the argument "it will only be abused if you live in a country where it would be abused" is pretty darn weak.
You know what else can be abused only if you live in totalitarian state? Army. Do you want the government not have army?
Anonymous voting in a well-functioning society gives you almost nothing. Voter fraud, on the other hand, can have extremely bad consequences. Sacrificing a teeny tiny bit of anonymity (reminder because I've learned already that people on this forum need constant reminders of everything - I DO NOT PROPOSE MAKING IT PUBLIC WHO EVERYONE VOTED FOR; I JUST PROPOSED A HALF-ANONYMIZED DATABASE THAT MAKES IT POSSIBLE FOR THE PERSON WHO DID VOTE WITH PARTICULAR BALLOT TO KNOW HOW HIS BALLOT WAS COUNTED, WHICH REQUIRES THE STATE TO KNOW FOR A SPLIT SECOND WHO VOTED FOR WHOM BUT NOT REQUIRE THIS INFORMATION TO BE STORED PERMANENTLY ANYWHERE) - for the sake of making sure election fraud doesn't happen. Making election fraud impossible is much stronger guarantee of never becoming shithole country than anonymous votes.
You can make electronic voting work easily too!
No.
What's this thing that makes electronic voting impossible to make fraud-free that doesn't apply to paper voting?
I've posted one idea
Which gives up non-anonymous votes, so it doesn't qualify as working.
But only a teeny tiny fraction of it.
Even if they were to build the perfect e-voting system (which I have very high doubts they would), made it open source and had some math guys proof it correct: I might be able to check that and maybe even trust it. But the overwhelming majority of the population can't.
But it takes only one person in the entire country to file a lawsuit so the court can invalidate entire election. And if you haven't noticed, my idea has nothing to do with open-sourcing and proof-reading - all it's about is checking if the voting results haven't been tampered with.
Even if there is no possibility of fraud in the electronic system, there is no way for the general population to trust that other than "they said so".
How's that different from paper vote counting commissions?
My grandma can go register to observe the vote counting*. That is dead simple. There is simply no way she can herself verify the correctness of e-voting.
Can she open Google? Then she would have no problem verifying correctness of e-voting under my proposed system. And if she can't, we could set up booths at election offices where assistants would check people's votes for them.
Vote counting can take several days (for local elections in 2014, it took a whole week in some places). I can't afford skipping my daily work that much.
Why does it take so long?
What do you think?
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@gąska The fact that you have a broken election system in your country doesn't mean all election systems are broken. Besides, if your country is fucked up to the point of not allowing measures that would make its elections non-broken, what makes you believe that if they switched to electronic vote, they'd do it in a non-broken way?
I could go through your list of restrictions and compare to my country, basically all that would show is that your system is broken but it can be made non-broken without switching to electronic vote.
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@gąska The fact that you have a broken election system in your country doesn't mean all election systems are broken.
American system is reportedly just as broken. Reportedly, because thanks to no-paper electronic voting and 100%-anonymous paper voting, there's no way anyone can prove anything. There was quite a bit of fuss about voter registration shenanigans and busing in voters from out of state in 2016, from what I remember.
Besides, if your country is fucked up to the point of not allowing measures that would make its elections non-broken, what makes you believe that if they switched to electronic vote, they'd do it in a non-broken way?
Have you even read my original post here? I never said anyone would ever want to implement it (depending on how much voter fraud is going on currently, elected officials might have very strong incentives to make election fraud hard to detect). I just described one possible system where any instance of voter fraud would most likely be immediately detected, and it just happened to use electronic voting machines.
I could go through your list of restrictions and compare to my country, basically all that would show is that your system is broken but it can be made non-broken without switching to electronic vote.
On surface, it's very similar to USA. We have commissions, we have independent observers, we have anonymous ballots, we have ID check. It's just that these are believed (because we can't prove anything) to be ineffective measures in eliminating voter fraud. The only way to make sure election fraud doesn't happen is make sure the ballots weren't tampered with and the tallies are correct. The only way to make sure ballots weren't tampered with is for voters to have a way to find their ballots after counting is over. The only way to make sure tallies are correct is to make (anonymized) raw data publicly available. You can do both with paper voting, but electronic voting machines offer a way to make it practical.
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@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
they assume you'll click on a notification
It would be nice, but lately that action would have the effect of clearing out any other notifications for whatever thread it's in.
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Anonymous voting in a well-functioning society gives you almost nothing.
Anonymous voting protects against the following scenarios:
- Before you vote, a thug in a mask with a gun shows up at your door and says, "Vote for candidate Bob or you're dead." This thug could have been sent from Bob's campaign, Bob's political party, a business that Bob is friendly to, a terrorist group whose cause aligns with Bob, etc. Not that it really matters to you.
- Another thug offers you $10,000 to vote for Bob. As before, this thug could represent any number of interest groups.
Now, with anonymous voting, you can vote for candidate Alice or whoever else you favor, and then tell the thug that you voted for Bob. Without a means of proving you voted for someone else, the coercion attempt is powerless.
However, if each voter is given a receipt that can match a person with a vote, then the thug can demand that receipt and make good on the threat/reward.
Anonymous voting doesn't just protect against a corrupt government, but against coercion from any source. You are correct that it does nothing for other types of voting fraud (miscounting, "misplacing" ballots, ballot box stuffing, etc.), but it is an important countermeasure to a specific type of threat. You may respond that these kinds of threats don't happen in a well-functioning society, but I would say that anonymous voting created that society by making those threats ineffective. Now, if we can get people to stop taking selfies of themselves with their ballots, we can keep it that way.
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@gąska The fact that you have a broken election system in your country doesn't mean all election systems are broken.
American system is reportedly just as broken. Reportedly, because thanks to no-paper electronic voting and 100%-anonymous paper voting, there's no way anyone can prove anything.
Then change it for a system that can prove that (or at least that makes it harder to conceal it). The next question is, can that system be a paper-only, entirely anonymous one? And I'll direct you back to what I said, the fact your system or the US one are broken don't mean there is no way to make such a system work. There are many examples.
I just described one possible system where any instance of voter fraud would most likely be immediately detected, and it just happened to use electronic voting machines.
And I've said that some current systems already offer (almost) that guarantee, with the added bonus of in-between possible computer-related
(remember the post that started that discussion...), and anonymous voting (whether you think this is necessary is irrelevant, the point is that the current systems offer that on top of everything else).In other words, your proposed system is worse than many existing ones.
I could go through your list of restrictions and compare to my country, basically all that would show is that your system is broken but it can be made non-broken without switching to electronic vote.
On surface, it's very similar to USA. We have commissions, we have independent observers, we have anonymous ballots, we have ID check. It's just that these are believed (because we can't prove anything) to be ineffective measures in eliminating voter fraud.
Clearly, this means your system is broken (and the US may be also broken). Forbidding people to witness the counting, non-transparent ballot boxes (OK, you said it recently changed), or having counts that last several days are huge red flags for me. You don't need electronic vote to fix those.
The only way to make sure election fraud doesn't happen is make sure the ballots weren't tampered with and the tallies are correct. The only way to make sure ballots weren't tampered with is for voters to have a way to find their ballots after counting is over.
No, the only way is to allow them to track their (and other people's) ballots from voting to counting. Your proposal is adding a huge black box in between casting your vote and counting it. If people in some countries (such as yours) don't believe that having observers is enough to ensure correctness, what makes you believe that those people will trust a highly complex and system with computers and so on to do so? If they don't trust voting officials who tell them "the count is accurate", why would they trust IT officials who tell them "the counting machine is trustworthy"?
The only way to make sure tallies are correct is to make (anonymized) raw data publicly available.
Such as what happens when counting is public.
You can do both with paper voting, but electronic voting machines offer a way to make it practical.
I don't see what's not practical in current (well implemented) voting systems.
Basically, like most IoT stuff, you're seeing a real world situation where one instance of it doesn't work properly and doesn't use electronics. Instead of seeing how to fix that instance, you jump on the "no electronics" bit and claim that the only practical way to fix it is to add electronics, and you totally miss other ways to fix it.
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I wouldn't bother with memory left at process exit when was otherwise still accessible.
My apologies, no offense meant. People using leak detection tools to actually detect leaks rather than "oh noes I must frees every bytes of teh memories!" are an extreme rarity in my experience, but I shouldn't have assumed.
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Anonymous voting protects against the following scenarios:
For a more realistic scenario, replace the thug by your husband (wife...), and a gun on the head/bribe money by lower level threats/incentives.
One huge argument against vote for women was it was discussed was that women would vote like their husband/father, not because they think like them but because they wouldn't have any choice (since a lot of other things in their lives required approval of those) (OK, part of the argument was also crass sexism saying that a woman's poor little brain was too simplistic to handle politics and that they would imploring ask their husbands who they should vote for...).
Anonymous voting is one of the thing that alleviate that problem.
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clicking on the ball
You are clicking on the tip?
Congratulations sir, you have won the thread!
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Anonymous voting is one of the thing that alleviate that problem.
It's also one argument against producing receipts of votes, even if just handed out to the voters themselves. Receipts would make buying votes much more easy and reliable, similar to other "low-level" threats that employers could force on their employees. With anonymous votes and no way to prove that one voted either way, anybody can claim to have voted one way if need be.
Edit:
'd, I think.
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Anonymous voting in a well-functioning society gives you almost nothing.
Anonymous voting protects against the following scenarios:
- Before you vote, a thug in a mask with a gun shows up at your door and says, "Vote for candidate Bob or you're dead." This thug could have been sent from Bob's campaign, Bob's political party, a business that Bob is friendly to, a terrorist group whose cause aligns with Bob, etc. Not that it really matters to you.
- Another thug offers you $10,000 to vote for Bob. As before, this thug could represent any number of interest groups.
You know what else protects against this?
Now, with anonymous voting, you can vote for candidate Alice or whoever else you favor, and then tell the thug that you voted for Bob. Without a means of proving you voted for someone else, the coercion attempt is powerless.
However, if each voter is given a receipt that can match a person with a vote, then the thug can demand that receipt and make good on the threat/reward.
There is some merit in it. Although this whole scenario sounds highly hypothetical, much more so than double-bottom urns. Especially if police were around.
Anonymous voting doesn't just protect against a corrupt government, but against coercion from any source. You are correct that it does nothing for other types of voting fraud (miscounting, "misplacing" ballots, ballot box stuffing, etc.), but it is an important countermeasure to a specific type of threat. You may respond that these kinds of threats don't happen in a well-functioning society, but I would say that anonymous voting created that society by making those threats ineffective.
You're forgetting one thing - that in a well-functioning society, we also have police and courts. Police are very effective in stopping immediate threat, and courts are very effective at stopping unrightful exclusion (see: protected class discrimination lawsuits). I'm very confident we could replace the safety given to us by completely anonymous ballots, with other measures that give just as much safety - which would allow fighting election fraud in a much better way.
Now, if we can get people to stop taking selfies of themselves with their ballots, we can keep it that way.
I wish this was more widespread phenomenon. Then I wouldn't even have to prove my point.
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Do you want the government not have army?
In an ideal world, yes. I would love it if no countries needed armed forces and no standing army was kept up
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Anonymous voting in a well-functioning society gives you almost nothing.
Anonymous voting protects against the following scenarios:
- Before you vote, a thug in a mask with a gun shows up at your door and says, "Vote for candidate Bob or you're dead." This thug could have been sent from Bob's campaign, Bob's political party, a business that Bob is friendly to, a terrorist group whose cause aligns with Bob, etc. Not that it really matters to you.
- Another thug offers you $10,000 to vote for Bob. As before, this thug could represent any number of interest groups.
Now, with anonymous voting, you can vote for candidate Alice or whoever else you favor, and then tell the thug that you voted for Bob. Without a means of proving you voted for someone else, the coercion attempt is powerless.
However, if each voter is given a receipt that can match a person with a vote, then the thug can demand that receipt and make good on the threat/reward.
Anonymous voting doesn't just protect against a corrupt government, but against coercion from any source. You are correct that it does nothing for other types of voting fraud (miscounting, "misplacing" ballots, ballot box stuffing, etc.), but it is an important countermeasure to a specific type of threat. You may respond that these kinds of threats don't happen in a well-functioning society, but I would say that anonymous voting created that society by making those threats ineffective. Now, if we can get people to stop taking selfies of themselves with their ballots, we can keep it that way.
And yet "Take a selfie with your ballot where you vote on X or you die" works with today's technology.
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"Take a selfie with your ballot where you vote on X or you
diewill be friend-zoned" works with today's technology.FTFY
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@gąska The fact that you have a broken election system in your country doesn't mean all election systems are broken.
American system is reportedly just as broken. Reportedly, because thanks to no-paper electronic voting and 100%-anonymous paper voting, there's no way anyone can prove anything.
Then change it for a system that can prove that (or at least that makes it harder to conceal it). The next question is, can that system be a paper-only, entirely anonymous one?
I say it cannot. I've made my case. Either prove that it can, or show flaw in my reasoning that it cannot.
And I'll direct you back to what I said, the fact your system or the US one are broken don't mean there is no way to make such a system work. There are many examples.
I don't know a single voting system where it's PROVABLE that fraud doesn't happen.
I just described one possible system where any instance of voter fraud would most likely be immediately detected, and it just happened to use electronic voting machines.
And I've said that some current systems already offer (almost) that guarantee
Such as?
with the added bonus of in-between possible computer-related
(remember the post that started that discussion...), and anonymous voting (whether you think this is necessary is irrelevant, the point is that the current systems offer that on top of everything else)....are you arguing against your own point? I thought you're trying to show me that existing system is sufficient, or something?
In other words, your proposed system is worse than many existing ones.
Really? How so? And don't tell me "computers". Everything that a computer does in my system, can be done by hand by election commission. It's just that it would be orders of magnitude more costly than using a computer - hence why I proposed a computer to store the votes. Also, manual way is inherently less anonymous, since more people would know who you voted for.
I could go through your list of restrictions and compare to my country, basically all that would show is that your system is broken but it can be made non-broken without switching to electronic vote.
On surface, it's very similar to USA. We have commissions, we have independent observers, we have anonymous ballots, we have ID check. It's just that these are believed (because we can't prove anything) to be ineffective measures in eliminating voter fraud.
Clearly, this means your system is broken (and the US may be also broken). Forbidding people to witness the counting, non-transparent ballot boxes (OK, you said it recently changed), or having counts that last several days are huge red flags for me. You don't need electronic vote to fix those.
You don't, but you need ballot tracking.
The only way to make sure election fraud doesn't happen is make sure the ballots weren't tampered with and the tallies are correct. The only way to make sure ballots weren't tampered with is for voters to have a way to find their ballots after counting is over.
No, the only way is to allow them to track their (and other people's) ballots from voting to counting. Your proposal is adding a huge black box in between casting your vote and counting it.
You can do it all manually, if you want. The end result is, there's a public database of all votes, and it has to match everybody's receipts.
If people in some countries (such as yours) don't believe that having observers is enough to ensure correctness, what makes you believe that those people will trust a highly complex and system with computers and so on to do so?
Hey, I'm still in theoretical world! I'm not talking about real world. I'm talking about the theoretical minimum necessary to ensure no voter fraud happens. And this minimum is letting the voters see their votes after counting.
If they don't trust voting officials who tell them "the count is accurate", why would they trust IT officials who tell them "the counting machine is trustworthy"?
The beautiful thing about my system is that YOU DON'T HAVE TO! There's a public database of all votes. This database is authoritative to determining who gets the seat. This database has to contain each and every vote made, and each vote has to show the same info as on receipt. The only trust required to make the system work is the trust of the court that your receipt is real.
The only way to make sure tallies are correct is to make (anonymized) raw data publicly available.
Such as what happens when counting is public.
From what I've heard, the work of voting commission is pretty chaotic, and it can sometimes be quite hard to make sure everyone adds up votes correctly. AFAIK they cannot take the ballots afterwards and recount them themselves - they can only observe if the counters to a good job. And observers must be at site, and have only one take, whereas if there was public access (not necessarily electronic database - we could allow the public to visit election offices after elections and let them recount votes as many times as they want, but the logistics would be horrendous), then many more people could do the count, meaning much bigger chance of fraud getting detected.
You can do both with paper voting, but electronic voting machines offer a way to make it practical.
I don't see what's not practical in current (well implemented) voting systems.
Let me rewrite my statement in the most unambiguous way possible: you can ensure that ballots weren't tampered with and the tallies are correct, when every step of the procedure I proposed was done manually by people in election office, but doing every step of the procedure I proposed manually would be very hard and very expensive, whereas you get equivalent assurances that ballots weren't tampered with and the tallies are correct, if most steps of the procedures are done via computer systems, at a much lower cost - so low that it would be entirely practical to implement it in real world.
Basically, like most IoT stuff, you're seeing a real world situation where one instance of it doesn't work properly and doesn't use electronics. Instead of seeing how to fix that instance, you jump on the "no electronics" bit and claim that the only practical way to fix it is to add electronics, and you totally miss other ways to fix it.
You completely missed my point. The core part of my proposal isn't voting machines - it's public vote database and voting receipts. With these two, you don't have to trust either the election clerks nor the computer system to have trust in election process.
Anonymous voting protects against the following scenarios:
For a more realistic scenario, replace the thug by your husband (wife...), and a gun on the head/bribe money by lower level threats/incentives.
One huge argument against vote for women was it was discussed was that women would vote like their husband/father, not because they think like them but because they wouldn't have any choice (since a lot of other things in their lives required approval of those) (OK, part of the argument was also crass sexism saying that a woman's poor little brain was too simplistic to handle politics and that they would imploring ask their husbands who they should vote for...).
Anonymous voting is one of the thing that alleviate that problem.
More like, women voting rights have proven that anonymous votes aren't needed. How many married couples do you think don't know who each other has voted for?
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Thank you! Thank you! I'll be here all workdays from 9 till 5!
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After elections, all votes (ballot numbers and selected candidates) become publicly available for external read-only SQL connections with some simple frontend for individual ballot finding, so everyone can check if their vote hasn't been altered (if they have a receipt, it's all they need to prove fraud), as well as check if official tallies match the raw data.
Also the thug with the shotgun can ensure you actually voted for the corrupt politician so he doesn't have to break your arms.
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@blakeyrat it's funny how Mr. There-Are-No-Nazis-In-New-York-Fuck-Off-With-Your-Privacy-Nonsense worries about someone wanting to use threat of violence to coerce people into doing things their way.
And if you read carefully, you'd know that the database would be keyed by a unique number that only lets you tie it to the voter if you have the voting receipt with that number, and know who this receipt belongs to.
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See: Chinese Tor users. If they lived in USA and kept their browsing habits, they'd be proclaimed conspiracy freaks.
Wrongfully, as we have learned, but that's besides the point.
Making election fraud impossible is much stronger guarantee of never becoming shithole country than anonymous votes.
No, anonymous votes are one part in preventing election fraud.
A perfect count of who voted for what isn't interesting if the party makes sure 100% of the population will be scared into voting for them.Why does it take so long?
What do you think?
No idea, the only thing I can think of are incompetence or malice. Maybe to give you a false pretense to want to switch to e-voting.
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@blakeyrat it's funny how Mr. There-Are-No-Nazis-In-New-York-Fuck-Off-With-Your-Privacy-Nonsense worries about someone wanting to use threat of violence to coerce people into doing things their way.
What the fuck is the link between those two things? Is this... an insinuation than I'm a hypocrite? What even is this?
And if you read carefully, you'd know that the database would be keyed by a unique number that only lets you tie it to the voter if you have the voting receipt with that number, and know who this receipt belongs to.
And this solves the thug scenario... how?
The thug just says I have to have a receipt that proves Corrupt Joe got a vote. He doesn't care if I stole it from some grandma. If I come back without one, he'll beat me just as if I came back with one that says Honest Bob got a vote.
Read up on elections in history. This kind of vote coercion happened all the time. (It still does in shitty countries.) We didn't start anonymizing ballots for no reasons, we did it because it solves a real problem. Hell, read up on how the Nazis came to power. Why do you think all those brownshirts were wandering the streets on election day?
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Then change it for a system that can prove that (or at least that makes it harder to conceal it). The next question is, can that system be a paper-only, entirely anonymous one?
I say it cannot. I've made my case. Either prove that it can, or show flaw in my reasoning that it cannot.
I've already proven it can, by pointing to existing systems where no one complains about voter fraud. OK, sure, they're no provably fail-proof, but with any human activity, you'll never get this (even your system can only works assuming the implementation is perfect and bug free, and none of the intermediate systems e.g. hardware, network... has any issue either).
I don't know a single voting system where it's PROVABLE that fraud doesn't happen.
Most of Western Europe doesn't have any kind of significant fraud, or doubt as to whether there is a fraud or not. Doesn't mean it's provable (again, humans...), but if you believe your system is provable, you are highly deluded (again, hardware security etc.).
I just described one possible system where any instance of voter fraud would most likely be immediately detected, and it just happened to use electronic voting machines.
And I've said that some current systems already offer (almost) that guarantee
Such as?
Most of Western Europe manages it. France, that I know more than the other, is a good example.
with the added bonus of in-between possible computer-related
(remember the post that started that discussion...), and anonymous voting (whether you think this is necessary is irrelevant, the point is that the current systems offer that on top of everything else)....are you arguing against your own point? I thought you're trying to show me that existing system is sufficient, or something?
I mixed up my words... I wanted to say that your system does not add anything to existing ones, and it also adds computers and (partially) removes anonymity. So it is no better in some aspects (fraud) and much worse in other (introduces countless new points of failure, is less anonymous).
No, the only way is to allow them to track their (and other people's) ballots from voting to counting. Your proposal is adding a huge black box in between casting your vote and counting it.
You can do it all manually, if you want. The end result is, there's a public database of all votes, and it has to match everybody's receipts.
No. You don't need a central database, it doesn't need to be public, and you don't need to be able to track an individual vote, just to ensure that one given vote has not been tampered with. Which you get by having the ballot paper entirely visible from the second it is put into the box until the moment it is counted, and this is what you get e.g. in France.
Hey, I'm still in theoretical world! I'm not talking about real world. I'm talking about the theoretical minimum necessary to ensure no voter fraud happens. And this minimum is letting the voters see their votes after counting.
OK, fair enough, let's stay theoretical. I'm still saying that you're wrong. What you need is to ensure your vote hasn't been tampered with, which you can get by ensuring that no single vote in a large box with other votes has been tampered with. Same result, no computer, perfect anonymity (within the set of votes in that specific box...).
If they don't trust voting officials who tell them "the count is accurate", why would they trust IT officials who tell them "the counting machine is trustworthy"?
The beautiful thing about my system is that YOU DON'T HAVE TO! There's a public database of all votes. This database is authoritative to determining who gets the seat. This database has to contain each and every vote made, and each vote has to show the same info as on receipt. The only trust required to make the system work is the trust of the court that your receipt is real.
You still don't get it. Why would you trust that the database is accurate? Why would you trust that what you see in the database is really what goes into the count? Why would you trust that the random number on your receipt is your vote and not someone else's vote? All these require trusting that other humans have made the right choices, because almost no-one will ever be able to verify the integrity of the full system from end to end. Why would you trust these people more than other kind of officials?
One key feature of transparent elections is not only that they are accurate, but that people trust the process to be accurate. The easiest way to achieve this is to make the process simple enough that basically everyone can actually check that it is the case. Putting computers, cryptography, databases and other complicated techs in-between is a sure-fire way to ensure you will never get the same level of trust.
From what I've heard, the work of voting commission is pretty chaotic, and it can sometimes be quite hard to make sure everyone adds up votes correctly.
We can count votes here, there are very few (if any) complaints about not being able to do 1+1+1+...
AFAIK they cannot take the ballots afterwards and recount them themselves - they can only observe if the counters to a good job.
The ballot papers are sent to a central office here, so a recount would be feasible (of course, someone could tamper the votes after they've left the public voting station, but that's one more hurdle to get through).
And observers must be at site, and have only one take, whereas if there was public access (not necessarily electronic database - we could allow the public to visit election offices after elections and let them recount votes as many times as they want, but the logistics would be horrendous), then many more people could do the count, meaning much bigger chance of fraud getting detected.
That is true, but it comes back to the trust issue above. Like someone else said (sorry, scrolling up to find out is
), one individual cannot check everything but as long as several observers do their own individual bits, and there are observers from all parties, then the mutual distrust between power groups ensures that every group trusts the result to be fair. That is actually quite a nice feature...every step of the procedure I proposed was done manually
You're still hung up on the idea that your voting identification scheme is the only way possible, and focussing only on the implementation. I disagree with your basic idea, using (at least one) real world example.
More like, women voting rights have proven that anonymous votes aren't needed. How many married couples do you think don't know who each other has voted for?
I don't know, and the beauty of the thing is that you cannot know either, because we have anonymous voting. If you want a very concrete example: I don't know who my wife voted for at the last election. I have a very strong inkling, because we talked together and share a lot of things (well, duh!) so I am 99.9% sure she voted like me, but I don't actually know for sure, and I have absolutely no way to access this information.
That is the entire point: anonymous voting guarantees that there is no way to be absolutely sure of the way someone else voted. Most people don't need that guarantee, granted, but that doesn't mean it's useless.
(as a side note, since my country uses "put a ballot in the envelope" and not "make a tick next to your candidate's name", this means the "selfie in the voting booth" method can't work, since nothing would prevent you from changing the ballot after taking the selfie)
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Making election fraud impossible is much stronger guarantee of never becoming shithole country than anonymous votes.
No, anonymous votes are one part in preventing election fraud.
It also opens up the system to other kinds of election fraud. All in all, I believe anonymous votes do more harm to than good on election fraud front, even though it might make things better in other ways (to which I'm not entirely convinced either).
A perfect count of who voted for what isn't interesting if the party makes sure 100% of the population will be scared into voting for them.
My system assumes a society that's not that scared.
Why does it take so long?
What do you think?
No idea, the only thing I can think of are incompetence or malice. Maybe to give you a false pretense to want to switch to e-voting.
The more I think of it, the more I'm convinced I should have left the entire voting machine out of my plan. Y'all have not be so focused on electronics and we could have an actual conversation about pros and cons of my idea. You go in, one clerk checks your ID and gives you two identically-numbered ballots, you mark your candidate(s), another clerk checks if ballots are identical, stamps them both for authenticity, takes one and leaves you with the other. After voting is done, each office publishes a list of all vote numbers and who they voted for, so everyone can go and see if their vote was counted correctly. Do you have the same objections to this system as the one I proposed earlier? Because it's identical to the system I proposed earlier - the only thing that changed is that election clerks now know who you voted for, and checking if total sum matches partial sums requires driving million miles or more.
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Why does it take so long? We vote on Sundays, voting closes at 6, preliminary counts are in at 8-9, almost all counting is done by the next day.
Why does it take so long? In our country, the news networks have announced the winner before the polls even close.
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Making election fraud impossible is much stronger guarantee of never becoming shithole country than anonymous votes.
No, anonymous votes are one part in preventing election fraud.
It also opens up the system to other kinds of election fraud.
As in? Have you examples that can't be solved in any other way than by removing anonymity?
My system assumes a society that's not that scared.
Oh, so a spherical cow in a vacuum. Well, if you go along solving problems for an hypothetical world that isn't ours, go ahead.
The more I think of it, the more I'm convinced I should have left the entire voting machine out of my plan. [...] Do you have the same objections to this system as the one I proposed earlier?
Yes, why would it change anything? You've still broken a useful feature of voting without showing that this was the only way to fix whatever you've decided was the main problem.
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@hardwaregeek That happens in the US too, which really fucks over western States due to time zones.
One of the reasons most (all?) counties in Washington State switched to by-mail voting by default. The turn-out was shit because by the time our polls opened for national elections the news were already predicting a winner with like 80% confidence in States that are 3 time zones ahead of us. And that was hours and hours before most people were able to vote due to a break in work or whatever. (We also had similar problems when voting for American Idol.)
And imagine what the turn out in Hawaii would have been.
The solution to this is to keep the polls open a full 24 hour day, and start all timezones at the exact same moment (and close them all at the same moment) but that isn't going to happen. Even then you'd have similar problems, because most people aren't going to wake up at 4:00 AM just to get their vote in early.
Vote-by-mail is less "secure" technically because the thug can verify your ballet, force you to seal the envelope and take it to a mailbox themselves (to ensure you don't swap it out or invalidated it before mailing it), but it's preferable to a turnout of 2% due to shitty national news networks calling elections 20 minutes in. (And a significant number of people had signed up for absentee voting before the switch, anyway. Which is an identical process.)
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@hardwaregeek said in WTF Bites:
Why does it take so long? We vote on Sundays, voting closes at 6, preliminary counts are in at 8-9, almost all counting is done by the next day.
Why does it take so long? In our country, the news networks have announced the winner before the polls even close.
Why does it take so long? In Soviet Russia, results are announced before voting even begins.
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@blakeyrat said in WTF Bites:
Also the thug with the shotgun can ensure you actually voted for the corrupt politician so he doesn't have to break your arms.
Ah, democracy à la Russe. It's one-man-one-vote; Vladimir Putin is the man, and he has the (only) vote (that matters).
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@hardwaregeek said in WTF Bites:
Why does it take so long? We vote on Sundays, voting closes at 6, preliminary counts are in at 8-9, almost all counting is done by the next day.
Why does it take so long? In our country, the news networks have announced the winner before the polls even close.
I was talking about preliminary counts. Projections are available 3 minutes after voting closes.
Making them available earlier would mess with the voting process, so on election day you aren't allowed to publish projections before voting closes.
Of course, you have a lot of these in the days and weeks before the election.
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@blakeyrat said in WTF Bites:
@blakeyrat it's funny how Mr. There-Are-No-Nazis-In-New-York-Fuck-Off-With-Your-Privacy-Nonsense worries about someone wanting to use threat of violence to coerce people into doing things their way.
What the fuck is the link between those two things?
I have no idea whatsoever what a connection is between being afraid of someone using political preference information to pick targets of their violent acts and being afraid of someone using political preference information to pick targets of their violent acts. No fucking clue.
And if you read carefully, you'd know that the database would be keyed by a unique number that only lets you tie it to the voter if you have the voting receipt with that number, and know who this receipt belongs to.
And this solves the thug scenario... how?
The thug just says I have to have a receipt that proves Corrupt Joe got a vote. He doesn't care if I stole it from some grandma. If I come back without one, he'll beat me just as if I came back with one that says Honest Bob got a vote.
And where exactly would you meet this thug? Why would there be no police around?
Read up on elections in history. This kind of vote coercion happened all the time.
I never heard about it happening in USA. And USA had over 100 years of non-secret ballots.
(It still does in shitty countries.)
All kinds of things happen in shitty countries. None of those things would disappear if votes were anonymous.
We didn't start anonymizing ballots for no reasons, we did it because it solves a real problem.
Citation needed. Preferably of events before USA implemented secret ballots in 1890.
Hell, read up on how the Nazis came to power. Why do you think all those brownshirts were wandering the streets on election day?
Did you know that Germany had secret ballot ever since 19th century? Did you know that it didn't do jack shit to prevent Nazis from doing what Nazis do?
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It also opens up the system to other kinds of election fraud. All in all, I believe anonymous votes do more harm to than good on election fraud front, even though it might make things better in other ways (to which I'm not entirely convinced either).
I could not disagree more.
And your solution is "police"? From people buying votes, peer pressure, any other kind of strong or not quite so strong incentives, the police are going to enforce all of that? The ways to abuse non-anonymous votes are endless and range from obvious to subtle.Do you have the same objections to this system as the one I proposed earlier?
Yes, because it's still not anonymous, so it gives up a useful feature in search of a problem.
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Did you know that Germany had secret ballot ever since 19th century? Did you know that it didn't do jack shit to prevent Nazis from doing what Nazis do?
The Commies didn't, and they got this super satisfied population where >95% voted for the party.
And what is up with the idea that bad things are only bad when they happen on national level? "Hey, take a selfie of you voting for [or, alternatively, "show me the receipt"] Trump / Clinton or I will unfriend you / kick your ass / some other trivial threat" is not a problem?
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still waiting for convincing argument against non-anonymous votes
I can think of several situations in which your public actions might be different than what you would do in the voting booth.
Imagine being a Catholic in Northern Ireland but favoring continued union with the UK. Some of your neighbors have killed people for that.
You're a black conservative who, being conservative, favors Trump (reluctantly, because he's an idiot, but he's the only conservative candidate available), but you work for a #BLM nutjob.
Abusive family situation. You pretend to favor A to avoid getting more abuse, but you actually want to vote for B.
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And where exactly would you meet this thug? Why would there be no police around?
Like I said, for a more realistic situation, replace thug by spouse.
"Yes officer, my spouse said that I'd better vote for their candidate... no, they didn't specifically threaten to beat me up or anything, but you don't know them, I know they will do something to me... no, I don't have any proof of anything, but they told me so, why don't you believe me?"
That is assuming in the first place that the person will want to go the police at all. We can't get domestic violence victims to go to the police, but you live in a wonderful world where they would go to the police for being coerced in their vote?
There are all the more subtle ways to influence people as well. "Yes, you can get a free taxi to the voting station but in order to do so you have to show us your voting slip -- that's just to ensure you're not free-loading to go to the mall, we don't care about who you vote for... Oh, btw, have you noticed how nice my candidate is?"
This form of influence already exists and is hard to contain, having to show a proof of who you voted for would make it even more effective on weak-minded people.
