How do you engineer around the misinformation vector thou? That's the hard problem.
How do you engineer around the misinformation vector thou? That's the hard problem.
"In a Democracy, the real rulers are the dexterous manipulators of votes, with their placemen, the mechanics who so skillfully operate the hidden springs which move the puppets in the arena of democratic elections. Men of this kind are ever ready with loud speeches lauding equality; in reality, they rule the people as any despot or military dictator might rule it." - pobedonostsev
At the end of the day, whoever either spends the most money yelling out a megaphone, or gets the most attention yelling, gets elected. Except for times like Trump exploiting the modern news/press cycle for his own benefit, most election winners are the one who spends more money. I think the last time the lesser spend won a presidential election was Carter running against Ford. Goldwater got spanked as well, compared to spending.
Voting machines sound great but that it's solving a problem by doing things the same with tech.
The coordination and effort required to go door to door stealing ballots out of mailboxes or taking van loads of ballots from a post office, in a day and age where every block has dozens of cameras. There is also a step where you get a code, and you can log in and see how that ballot voted.
Think about the amount of money required to pay people to vote, say people will do it for $10, and everyone you ask that doesn't do it also keeps their mouth shut. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars to influence state level elections and millions for country wide elections.
The beauty of mail, is that while there are attack vectors, they are expensive, easily noticeable, and have a very high barrier to entry.
On the other hand, say you have a perfect voting machine, I'm skeptical, but I'll give you that, it's certainly possible. Now, lets assume that they have to either be stored in a warehouse with armed guards, or reimaged every time they are used. There's a simple attack vector there of only one or two people you have to turn. This is the old crypto breaking with a pipe wrench vector, though cash money is probably just as easy. That is the same failure that paper has, but you have to go to hundreds of thousands of places to get that done. You can probably keep a couple people quite, but a few thousand?
Paper by mail has a very high tamper barrier and is available now. States could do it in November
I would like to see spot checks - pick a few precincts at random, and compare the electronic totals to the paper.
However you don't have to setup/store machines, and people can vote over a few days which means better access to everyone.
You can solve both with good education but public education will never teach people to think critically about government en-masse because the committees of bureaucrats that decide the curriculum and the teachers that teach it get a government paycheck at the end of the day. They're not gonna be inclined to go all out when it comes to teaching people about things like gerrymandering, propaganda, etc. This is not for any nefarious reason or the result of any conspiracy, people just tend to see the good but not the bad when it comes to their source of income. The incentive system is simply not set up in a way to produce voters who think critically.