Computer scientists urge Clinton campaign to challenge election results | Hacker News Reader

Computer scientists urge Clinton campaign to challenge election results

cnn.it

10 pointsfloetic8 comments

Just an opinion on this subject as a whole:

I think that we are going to keep seeing very close elections in the future. The thing no one realizes yet, but I think will realize when we look back in fifty years is that we are evolving as a society again. Right now we're undergoing the burn down of the forest so that we can grow new again.

All that aside. Why not, as a default, have three sources confirming election results? 2/3 acceptance would be considered a quorum. We are moving faster towards technology, and we need some kind of impartial verification.

My infantile understanding of Blockchain tells me that it might be the right tool for the job, which could result in a 3/3 verification of election results.

As a citizen, I'm guilty of not asking the right questions. I don't know who makes the software running on electronic voting machines. Is it open source? If not, why not? Access to this code is critical for a fair and free election, and furthermore there shouldn't be anything seriously proprietary in that code (It's counting votes after all). I don't know what the reservations are for states that don't want to move away from paper ballots.

Blockchain would be a great solution iff a user friendly way could be devised to distribute private keys to authorized voters so that the same private key cannot be used twice in the same election and that lost private keys (or private keys of deceased people) are permanently disabled.

I really like where you're going with this, I wish I had good answers. I feel if something got out into the open, maybe the right brains have the answers.

Maybe it's the case that when you register to vote, you get issued a private key, and it rotates every year. I'm mostly just spitballing here.

They question is how do you know if the voter is authorized?

I agree with where your head's at....this isn't a good system. But who is qualified to devise a better one

That's how I feel. On one hand, I'm tempted to build open voting software where transactions are built on top of Blockchain and spread across many places. My big thing is that even if I succeed, how would I get that adopted? We would need a large state to be the example.

On the other-hand, I'm filled with apathy. Because of the way our country is run today, with lobbyists being over represented, I feel like a small fish in a big ass pond.

Ha yeah I don't think technology is the solution though. The solution is really good communication and empathy if you ask me, which is much harder....

I agree 100%. As time goes on, I think communication and empathy are going to disappear even more if we continue the way we are going now. Our society in the U.S. is so focused on the individual that I truly believe it's affecting our ability to have high emotional intelligence (if you believe in such a thing).

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