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Comment by fdefitte | Hacker News Reader

This makes total sense. When a country is creating public software, it should be open source by default. This is the only way to create trust. In the long run, open source and closed source government software will probably differentiate dictatorships from democracies

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> differentiate dictatorships from democracies

At first glance I thought this was hyperbole, but after reflection I'm not sure it's even an exaggeration. Too much critical infrastructure of power (voting, census, taxation, reporting, compliance) runs of software for us to accept anything less than full transparency from our governments.

There’s always holes. How can we know for sure the binaries running on the voting machines are compiled from the open source repo?

It’s turtles all the way down.

> How can we know for sure the binaries running on the voting machines [..]

As far as elections are concerned, give me paper ballots every day, and make sure you count them by hand with plenty of Mk I human observers present.

You happen to be a moderator on Stack Overflow by any chance?

Could you not compile them on the voting machines itself? But yes, there is always going to be some level of trust involved, and the bar for manipulation seems to be lower than re: manual counting.

Turtles all the way down. Can you trust your compiler?

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

This problem can be solved by the bootstrappable builds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41368835

But do you trust the processor? Which can also be backdoored internally to start rewriting instructions on the fly?

You use different CPUs and compare the result. Also, you can try this: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor

This is called "security through compartmentalization", i.e., you don't trust one single entity. The only approach that works.

There's reproducible builds project for that. (Except too few people will know how to actually verify it.)

That's not really a "hole" - rather it's the idea not covering every possible form of corruption.

In Brazil there is black box testing. Party officials can choose a sample of a few ballots per polling location on election day, where a simulated election is run, with all inputs recorded on video. The machines have to tally the right votes for the input given at the end of day. These are machines that would be used for voting, and the party officials are parties unrelated to (and in a way, antagonistic with) the voting authority.

I think it's a pretty solid scheme.

Yeah this is why you shouldn't use voting machines. Paper voting is already great. Whoever is trying to sell you a voting machine does not have your best interests in mind.

Very few people have any change of understanding machine voting systems. With paper voting we get much better transparency of the voting procedures. Any form of machine voting is terrible for transparency and democracy compared to just plain old paper voting.

I'm generally open to the idea of more frequent elections with cheaper voting.

If you agree, here's a petition: https://publiccode.eu

Thanks, I just signed.

Free and Open Technology for a Free and Open Society

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software%2C_Free_Society

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