No system is 100% secure and while Georgia in particular seems to have some improvements they should be making, it’s important to be rational about implications the existence given vulnerabilities have on accuracy of an actual election.
Why does the IRS have the technology the positively identify a citizen remotely to allow them access to information that's arguably more sensitive than a vote and yet we can't use this tech for that purpose?
Why is this the second time that a Dominion machine was found by a third party to fail under scrutiny by security experts and CISA _then_ comes in to investigate whether the exploits were, well, exploited amidst the well-documented "fortification"?
Why doesn't Georgia want to update these vulnerable systems before the presidential election?
Why aren't all elections given a third-party statistical forensic analysis?
Why, if the machines _are_ flawed (as we found out in 2022), did Dominion win a slander case against Fox et al?
Why in the ... is Dominon, a private company (and apparently a poor dev shop), the bastion of our democracy?
I think the implications are pretty clear.
“The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.” -JFK
Even thinking of the possibilty of self-auditing, it leaves a large hole in the conceptual capability of validating the aggregate numbers.
What I'd like to see is a human-to-human system, even if electronic (a la "venmo me"), where groups of people gather, discuss the issues, and cast their votes to eachother in a tree. The recievers meet and transfer their counts to the root of their branch, and so on to the tree's root.
Every group knows their aggregate count, and even if you made the values of each node in the tree public it may be possible to keep the actual votes private outside of the individuals that make up each of the leafs.
IMO, our current method of deciding what we should do with our collective power to be hopelessly outmoded. After all, that's the whole point of the federal government, to coordinate the pool of our resources towards common goals greater than we, either individually or as a (US)state-sized entity, could accomplish alone.
If we can effectively solve the problem of distributed consensus (hmmm, where have I heard that term), what purpose then do our "representatives" hold in a system where we can directly voice our will for the future direction of our union and the allocation of its resources?
In a system where we can instantly share our desires on some motion, and can shed the pomp, circumstance, and huge machinations of a once every [insert term here] concensus ceremony, we coud directly drive towards executing on a daily basis if we so desired.
This could even open up the possibility that individuals could delegate their opinion to one or a group of subject-matter experts they feel an alignment with under specific topics, forming subject-oriented representatives rather than popularity-oriented.
The thing is that these are ideas(maybe good, maybe bad), ideas can be tested, and in a fast-moving system ideas can be iterated on quickly and driven by data. We've found this methodology to be extremely effective in so many facets in our lives that it astounds me we don't consider a similar approach to improving the lot of all humanity in this crazy world.
It’s getting more common to shift the system towards their ability to move unilaterally. In my home state, for example, this last legislative session they changed the referendum law to be non-compulsory on their part, with the argument that citizens are weaponizing it to stall land developers.
That was the only political redress we had available as it is becoming more common for the capital-captured legislature to ok plans that are unhealthy for the continued thriving of our communities in the name of money. As an example, severely oversubscribed water shares in the face of ultra high density housing is becoming a serious problem that they conveniently ignore when approving developments.
There are definitely more and lesser measures that would facilitate a shift back towards the citizenry, but it feels like less and less of a possibility every day our options get diluted in small ways.
This is the worst idea ever and would allow voter intimidation tactics from organized groups. "Show us who you voted for (and it better be the right person) or we ostracize you from our church/club/family." There's a reason the ballot is secret, and it's for the protection of the voter.
Sure, I get how divisive politics are, but I find it frankly pathetic the contributions that our own politicians and media have purposefully made in forming a view in the public's mind that someone who thinks different is a mortal enemy. Because of how it's become we're told that we either shouldn't or can't talk about such things in the places where we engage in the majority of our face-to-face human interaction: work and family.
The problem of "protecting" the voter is not insoluable and I find the absolutist view of absolute secrecy as the only solution to be a cop out.
No? You are presenting a hypothetical danger to voting, whereas your idea would lead to many, many individual votes being manipulated. People could be paid for their vote, intimidated, beat up, killed and everything in between.
The individual vote being secret is fundamental to democracy. You can't have a democracy without secret voting.
Remember: it's not just about your immediate social circle. What if the government wants to make sure you vote/don't vote in the next election, since they know your last vote?
>You can’t have a democracy without secret voting
You could before 1890 in the US, and plenty of other countries, what’s changed?
About 25 percent of voters voted by mail in the 2020 election. Mandatory secrecy that couldn’t be enforced for a quarter of voters didn’t ruin our democracy. I’m not sure secrecy should be mandatory, maybe it should be optional.
And yet the government doesn't know for sure. There is plausible deniability, and always a bit of uncertainty.
> You could before 1890 in the US, and plenty of other countries, what’s changed?
No, you couldn't before 1890 in the US. It wasn't a democracy in the modern sense.
> About 25 percent of voters voted by mail in the 2020 election. Mandatory secrecy that couldn’t be enforced for a quarter of voters didn’t ruin our democracy.
Mail-in voting has multiple measures in place to ensure secrecy of vote. Yes, technically they could be worked around, but so could any other voting method - the important part is that the government would have to expend massive resources to do this on a broad scale, which would quickly become public.
> I’m not sure secrecy should be mandatory, maybe it should be optional.
No, you guys should stay a democracy.
I’m referring to citizens being allowed to confirm their ballot on record, verifiably, and publicly if they so choose. It’s already completely legal to share filled out ballot photographs in 30 states…(in 5 of them only photos of mail-in ballots allowed)[0].
I hope my state modifies it’s laws to allow this, currently it’s outlawed - as it is in Georgia. One commentator suggested members of the public would manually validate some of the ballot QR codes and easily detect fraud, but Georgia outlaws it - I think that’s bad law. In spite of this variation on how “secret ballots” are implemented by member states, US is still a democracy, which you seem to agree.
There is a balance that has to be struck between election transparency and voting secrecy. Where I live, all recording of any ballot and in any polling location is outlawed. I think the only recording that should be illegal is that of other peoples ballots - as where and when you voted is already of public record, and I think one should be free to share their own ballot however they choose.
[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/can-i-post-photo-of-my-ballo...
Can you explain why the private vote only works when all votes are anonymous? If you know every other vote you can determine which it is, but even if a couple of votes are unknown you can't determine it 100% anymore. So why does it need to be all?
> I’m referring to citizens being allowed to confirm their ballot on record, verifiably, and publicly if they so choose. It’s already completely legal to share filled out ballot photographs in 30 states…(in 5 of them only photos of mail-in ballots allowed)[0].
This won't surprise you, but I think it's a big mistake. This makes it easy to pressure people into taking photos of their ballots to prove they voted "correctly".
> One commentator suggested members of the public would manually validate some of the ballot QR codes and easily detect fraud, but Georgia outlaws it - I think that’s bad law. In spite of this variation on how “secret ballots” are implemented by member states, US is still a democracy, which you seem to agree.
If it's really outlawed, I agree that it's bad. There should be a process for anyone to become an election observer and check for irregularities, as long as the secrecy of the vote is kept.
> There is a balance that has to be struck between election transparency and voting secrecy. Where I live, all recording of any ballot and in any polling location is outlawed. I think the only recording that should be illegal is that of other peoples ballots - as where and when you voted is already of public record, and I think one should be free to share their own ballot however they choose.
I understand your reasoning, and I can't disagree fully. But the danger of voter intimidation and suppression is real and is growing. Honestly, some of the photos from your last election absolutely shocked me - seeing people in military gear at voting booths and dropoff stations is terrifying, especially when they start recording people who they believe might be against them. Those people could follow and kill you because you look like you vote differently from them! The way to full-on authoritarianism is very, very short from your current state of affairs. While things are in such a bad state, any further movement towards weakening the secrecy of the vote could be the final nail in the coffin.
As you alluded to further down, if it is not illegal for people to publish a photograph of their ballot or a recording of their vote submission - then they can be coerced into doing just that. The idea of a secret ballot providing systemic protection against coercive influence only really works by requiring all ballots to be cast in secret, in my opinion.
>This won’t surprise you…
You are certainly not alone in the opinion that allowing ballot photographs to be made public is a big mistake, and maybe it will prove to be.
The citizens making a show of force toward voters is concerning, and I wish things were more civil and less partisan… but indeed, tensions have been escalating for several years.
Even if it is an unfounded belief and evidenced of outcome changing election fraud doesn’t exist, a growing minority of citizens losing confidence and loudly calling into question the integrity of elections is a very dangerous development.
In recent elections, election administrators on both sides of the aisle from several states have displayed incompetent failures to follow electoral processes that are designed to ensure transparency and fulfill audit requirements. This, of course, only makes matters worse. I hope it’s mostly online sensationalism and this sentiment will be quelled… bc when significant minorities of a population start to dispute the authority of leadership, stricter authoritarianism tends to be the government response, which tends to lead toward civil unrest and violent events. I share the concerns you warn about.
You're implying something not grounded in established fact, and then questioning why the rest of society has responded as if it's not true.
The issue seems pretty apparent here, but it's not one anyone else can help you with.
“If an attacker changes only the QR code, voters have no way to detect the change by looking at their ballots, since voters can’t read the QR code. The change might be detected in a manual recount or a risk-limiting audit (RLA) based on a review of the printed text, but that is unlikely given Georgia’s weak audit requirements, which have recently been further diluted.”
Also it’s a poor decision by Georgia to not install security updates until after next election, but that’s the state’s position currently. I watched some of the Georgia congressional hearings regarding election security, audits, and safe guards after the 2020 election and it seems like their board of election was a total shit show. It seems like paper ballots and counting could prevent all of the problems or alleged problems they experienced in the last two major elections.
The scenario they exposed as possible is : voter receives a printout paper ballot with the vote selection printed correctly in text, but the included QR code has modified selection(s). That paper is then fed into the reader/scanner/tabulation machine. No further confirmation.
The whole point of the printout is for voters to confirm their selections, the whole QR code step is a design flaw. Just print regular ballots with filled in circles that can go through a standard tabulation machine and still be read/checked by humans if you really need to add a (required) touchscreen interface to the process.
“If an attacker changes only the QR code, voters have no way to detect the change by looking at their ballots, since voters can’t read the QR code. The change might be detected in a manual recount or a risk-limiting audit (RLA) based on a review of the printed text, but that is unlikely given Georgia’s weak audit requirements, which have recently been further diluted.”
It seems very unlikely that lots of votes getting changed would get noticed to me. Maybe I have a misunderstanding of the process. An RLA would help, but Georgia has had difficulty in conducting audits due to incompetence of officials and people not following process rules, QR codes seem like unnecessary complexity.
Yeah that’s pretty strict. It seems at least remotely plausible now. But still, I doubt the content of the QR code data is encrypted (probably cryptographically signed) especially given the vote is already written in plain text. And if votes of any significant percentage could make a difference were being switched someone would have a video (assuming the QR code data contains the chosen vote in plane text)