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Comment by Retra | Hacker News Reader

>It's just standard programmer NIH hubris; we think we can do it better, therefore we should.

It's not NIH at all. Electronic voting has not been implemented sufficiently. It could be done. It's not about doing it better, it's about doing it at all. It's not-invented-anywhere hubris, and that's plenty of reason to do something.

People aren't much harder to manipulate than machines, and they're also just as transparent. There is no fundamental reason to believe computers can't be more secure than humans when it comes to collecting data and tallying it.

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To be done sufficiently, you need to not only prove that your system is fair, reliable, scalable, tamperproof, anonymous etc., but also that you system actually runs. That combination is nigh impossible. That is the fundamental reason, bootstrapping that trust. Imagine you have a 100% open source system, cryptographically verified etc. How do I know that is actually what is running in the voting box?

Secure multiparty computation.

You trust that the right software runs, because unless multiple mutually distrusting parties runs the EXACT SAME software in the same configuration, nothing will happen at all - and they'll hopefully never agree to collude on running anything but the officially agreed upon version.

https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...

So who do you trust enough to be distrusting parties? This to me seems to be the same problem as making it proof of work: if the incentives are big enough, the scheme collapses. Look at the creativity that lead to caging and other forms of voter suppression

Contesting political parties. That's exactly how it's done in many countries already.

Not sure. I did consider the risk of bureaucracies becoming cemented within the participating organizations, leading to a harmful drift in values.

But you really only need each department to live for as long as the vote is active, so you can dismantle them and reassemble them afterwards each time. Hopefully that would prevent the establishment of dangerous practices and attitudes.

Whoever is managing it must be held accountable, and must work in full transparency.

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