Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure I buy this argument. What needs to be transparent to people is how votes are counted, not the logistics of how they are communicated and stored. People are doing pretty well where other countries have much more complicated systems (look at Australia having used IRV for over a hundred years. IRV has many rounds of voting and is substantially more complex).

If your goal is full transparency of every component, I don't think a lot of people here could understand that. There's a lot happening and to understand everything at a low level takes a lot of expertise. Understanding at a high level "experts use fancy math to make my vote private and immutable" is easy but also requires a lot of trust. Something we have to do regardless of full transparency, because someone could in fact hire a bunch of people to rig things.

The problem is the breakdown of trust. Fox has been talking about voter fraud for well over a decade and while they do have clear examples, they are over inflated at their significance (sorry, one person counting twice does not constitute a rigged election with a million voters. It constitutes a mistake). The president has a devout fanbase and echos this rhetoric from a very privileged platform. The problem is trust. There's the old saying "trust but verify." The transparency is the ability to verify, but does not require that every person is able to. So don't needlessly tie your hands behind your back.

> Understanding at a high level "experts use fancy math to make my vote private and immutable" is easy but also requires a lot of trust.

A lot more trust than the current system, where voters and observers can at least believe what their eyes see. With a digital system nothing they see happening necessarily means anything! They can't verify it, and thus they shouldn't trust it.

I'm not sure this is meaningfully different than what currently happens. Can you expand on this more? Currently we don't have paper trails. We don't have good ways to verify that our vote was counted and that it has the correct value to it. An immutable data structure helps solve this, especially if it is auditable.

I'm all for paper trails, and I think they are necessary, but our current system isn't exactly transparent either. Logistically this is impractical. We've always relied on a subset of people to tell us it is trustworthy. I.e. the volunteers that count. If you can have that and do cryptographic arithmetic so that anyone with a computer can verify the results, that's more transparent, not less.

I mean I think there's this idea that people counting physical ballots in a rushed and hectic environment has high accuracy. That sounds like a naive assumption to me. But what is that error? 0.5%? 1%? For the most party elections are not won by that margin and when they are a recount is issued (and low and behold, numbers change slightly. Proving that the counting is imperfect but good enough).

I'm not defending the blockchain solution posted here but I do think the electronic voting aspect of the current system is at least as bad to lay people. Existing machines are often old, unpatched, and a big target that is mostly protected by people in the room looking for odd behavior or worse.

I think we need a more secure system to expand options for electronic voting and counting but it needs to have a paper backbone for true reliability.

Ah, when I say “current system” I mean paper ballots. I forget that the US sometimes uses machines :(

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