Hacker News Reader

Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

What makes you think people will accept The One True Machine from the feds is any better?

Source code. If they don't like it, they can audit it themselves.

Or, you know, they can do what they always do - take a piece of totally benign information (in this case source code), confidently and wrongly contend that it's a back door for the socialists and scream about it on fox news.

How will they know the source code they're reading is what's on the machines?

An important part of elections is for people to understand and trust the process. Paper is easy to understand; you and a bunch of your neighbors counting paper votes is easy to trust. Maybe mix in a machine to speed up the process that is also verified by hand.

Yet I can't help but think nothing will convince those who so easily believe in a vast conspiracy to alter election results spanning multiple states with different political leanings and cultures.

You can use homomorphic encryption that allows the vote (after-the-fact) to be auditable but secure and allows individuals to validate that their vote was counted accurately.

Microsoft has a project that seems to work in this direction:

https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard

Ah yes, the average citizen will definitely trust that "homomorphic encryption" isn't just some nonsense made up so the election can be rigged.

The difference is that with something like ElectionGuard - as long as the encrypted result is publicly available - you would remove an entire class of complaints that people have with the current system - individuals would be able to validate that their personal vote was counted appropriately, and you would be able to audit the authenticity of every vote without disclosing/revealing who individuals vote for. Unlike the current system which allows opportunity for fraud and is not always auditable (at least not immediately), the actual voting infrastructure and procedures do not matter as much if we can independently verify the authenticity of the _outcome_.

Many of the people who believe in election fraud do so because the leader of their tribe said there's election fraud and social psychology leads people to tend to believe the things that the leader of their tribe says. This is a human condition issue, not an evidentiary issue.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of why so many people don't trust this election, and it has nothing to do with the technology. They don't trust it because the loser of the election has made up baseless claims of fraud - so that he can continue to line his pockets with his supporters' donations. And those supporters are in far too deep now to accept that they've been hoodwinked for so many years.

Giving up secret ballots has its own issues. Always worth considering, but giving people a way to verify their own vote could lead to vote buying: "vote for X, keep your mouth shut, and show me the verification for $$$".

I’d wager money that “homomorphic” gets interpreted as “gay power rangers” by easily 30% of the voting public in the United States.

The thing that really keeps elections secure, practically, is adversarial observers. If you want people to have faith in the election, this is the system to explain, and demonstrate. You can even go be an observer if you like.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the conspiracy theorist mind. Observers for Trump still lied about fraud after being granted tons of audit/observation access.

You vastly underestimate the imaginations of conspiracy theorists. And the gullibility of those who follow them.

Source code, binaries, and a reproducible binary build system. If you don't modify your compiler to enable reproducible binaries, YOU'RE AGAINST DEMOCRACY.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com