I see stories about how election is rigged or that there are security vulnerabilities and lots of people don’t believe the outcome. Why don’t they just open source everything so that anyone can look at the code and be sure the votes are tallied correctly?

    • sumofchemicals@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Electronic voting could use open source software, but so can a machine that scans a marked ballot. The best practice is to have voters mark a physical ballot, then have them put it in a machine (running open source software) that scans and tabulates the results. If there’s a question about the integrity of the results, we can go back and count physical ballots.

        • Virkkunen@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Exactly. Every election you see a handful of right wingers claiming that the machines and/or code is unsafe and can be easily tampered with, but have absolutely nothing to back that up, and yet another election passes without anyone anywhere proving that our system is unsafe/a bad idea.

          This Tom Scott video is terrible, should be renamed "why electronic voting is a bad idea (for fascists)

    • dhdds@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      this video has 3 years.

      3 years is a lot to somethings to be mature. He tells about Trust & Anonymity. You can’t trust anonymity 'coz you can trace the vote and bla bla bla. Well, you can trace the regular method too. Trust, you can’t trust the way the vote leaves the booth to the central. You know the Hash initiative? Even a small number change will be shown to everyone.

      • xNIBx@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Well, you can trace the regular method too.

        Not as efficiently and in mass. It’s like saying “you could gather personal data before the internet/social media”. Sure, there were mailing lists and some companies had personal data manually gathered but that was 0.00001% of what you can gather today for like 5$.

        When it comes to data, scale and efficiency matter. As someone from a low trust country(Greece), any electronic voting is literally a threat to democracy, society and pretty much opens the window for a civil war. Which is why no political party even dares suggesting it.

        And it doesnt take much for a society to become low trust, you only need 1 bad actor(game theory). Though Greece was never not a low trust society. But i think all countries would benefit from an electoral system like the greek one, where all political parties can have representatives on every ballot, there is tight control for ballot envelopes, everything is opened and counted in front of everyone, basically all political parties keep their own tallies, at a local and national level.

        So if there is something fucky with the official results, it will be easily tracked and noticed. At least as long as you can have party representatives on every ballot. Obviously smaller parties cant do that. There have been conspiracy theories about neonazi votes not being counted, because literally all other parties despise them. And when i say neonazi, i dont mean “neonazi”, i mean literally a parliamentary party that had this as their symbol

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(Greece)#/media/File:Meandros_flag.svg

        And their second in command has a huge swastika tattoo, etc. At least their party became illegal and its leaders spent some time in prison but that only happened after they murdered a greek. As long as they were beating and killing immigrants, they were fine.

      • Adama@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        The issue isn’t trust. It’s the same as anything else electronic such as having a backdoor to encryption.

        Anything physical requires a certain amount of effort to break in such a way that is widespread and without making it obvious.

        But purely digital/online means that any bad faith actor with enough resources (such as nation states) can scale up the means and methods to manipulate it or break it.

        I’m all for electronic voting for tallying with physical paper trails that can be used to verify the integrity of the digital results.

      • Virkkunen@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        This video is 3 years old, Brazil’s electronic voting system is 27 years old and there hasn’t been anyone proving that it is a bad idea, unsafe, tamperable or anything of the sort.

        I like Tom but this video really irritates me. It just seems like he’s pulling generic arguments out of his ass without any actual research.

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Importantly, Open Source is not feasible as a safeguard because there would be no way of verifying that the voting machine is running a build from the public source.