> With a computer, you flip a bit and there's no record
That’s a turn of phrase I didn’t expect on HN.
Do we work in a field where programs don’t have logs, gateways don’t exist, checksums and securing data integrity is not a thing ?
That’s a turn of phrase I didn’t expect on HN.
Do we work in a field where programs don’t have logs, gateways don’t exist, checksums and securing data integrity is not a thing ?
Personaly I don't think I do, yet even at my personal level I have anecdotes of ink just fading out of paper, or countless of widespread voting frauds from decades ago.
I have the feeling we are putting paper and physical media handling to a higher standard because we don't know as much about it.
It takes a concerted effort to change paper ballots.
For instance some paper elections in Africa have crazy high voter prticipation when not so many people showed up.
That’s an extreme and we could point the finger at blatant corruption. We’re not at these extremes, but where are we on the spectrum?
For instance we don’t have any clear idea of how much corruption we have, to the point that “perceived corruption” is the best approximation.
What I’m going at is, to evaluate how much trust we put in an electronic voting system, we’d need better views at the current system than “paper is better because it’s physical” (that’s not your argument, I take a less nuanced position as example)
Yes, that's the field of voting machine construction - it's lowest-bidder garbage built by and sold to people with no concept of reliability.
The closest parallel we have is DRM, and the track record there is.. less than stellar.