cryptonector

Some day the safeguards will have to be removed so we can use the LLMs defensively.

Well that's creative!

It's a losing battle. Give it time and this attitude will go away by the sheer weight of AI-coded open source they really cannot say no to just because there is no human-coded alternative available that is good enough.

Pragmatism is the opposite of tribalism. GP is a pragmatist, therefore not a tribalist.

Mileage taxes on EVs.

TIL. Want. I'm going to buy some for myself. This video brings back memories of amazing restaurants in Japan.

For sure. The thing is that there are several problematic areas (registration, in-person voting mechanics, early voting, precinct-based vs. county-wide (or worse), mail-in ballots, etc). You can't fix everything all at once, or maybe you can, but you have to focus on each problem area separately because they are separable and it's easier to address the problems that way.

> because even the local officials running the show don't know the rules.

Or because they do.

> having the voting source code public and auditable seems like a good way to build trust

It's not the source code that matters. It's the whole architecture, design, supply chain, and implementation as in down to object code _including_ firmware.

Excellent point!

I agree, but if your location has abandoned hand-counts then justifying the extra expense and extra logistics complications can be infeasible. Thus in some places it is easy to justify taking a detour through machine counts + immediate partial hand-count random sampling statistical audits designed to detect machine malfunctions with high probability.

Surprisingly there has been little to no partisanship in _this_ HN post's commentary. That's quite refreshing. I suppose you're talking about discussion in Brazil. But you know, a few years ago this thread would have been extremely partisan here in the U.S.

Paper ballots definitely have security problems too, it's just harder to compromise an election with many polling locations if it uses paper.

E.g., a counter can put a bit of pencil lead under a fingernail and mark overvotes on ballots they don't like, thus causing them to be adjudicated or not counted.

The problem of addition (or deletion) of votes is solved by having a paper pollbook to go with an electronic pollbook, plus doing reconciliation.

Election integrity is about finding all the attacks that can reasonably be expected, and detecting or -even better- preventing them. But it's a tougher problem than this one-sentence summary makes it sound.

Right, because the person coercing the voter wouldn't know of this little trick and wouldn't make sure the voter doesn't do it. Riiight.

> How? Any possible scheme I can think of that could theoretically allow a tabulation machine to behave differently on audit ballots than it does on real ballots, can also theoretically be mitigated via audit procedures.

An audit will only mitigate that if a) you have paper ballots you can check, b) the audit happens very soon after the closing of the polls. If an audit takes place a month later, that's a lot of time for the elections administration to create all new ballots to replace the originals with, so the audit has to come very soon after the election.

It's easier to restore the security of elections run with paper ballots because people can get involved locally. It's not possible to steal numerous paper-based elections in a row -- at some point the thieves' energy/funding runs out and security can be restored. With a digital system, if the system is changed to be vulnerable, or if it always was, then there is no way to recover.

GP means inefficient in the sense of cost. Paper ballots add costs. Partial manual audits / hand-counts add costs. Full audits / hand-counts add a lot of cost, and in particular hand-counts require a lot of staff in order to yield results on election night.

The costliest item is counting by hand, so... don't. Use ballot scanning and counting machines and then implement a timely partial manual audit to demonstrate that the BMDs and BSCDs functioned correctly.

> Intentionally limiting access to accessible voting is problematic.

I offered nothing of the kind, except as to civilians residing abroad, and even then, I don't think there should be any obligation to provide online voting -- having to travel to a consulate is not too unreasonable.

> It's not reasonable to tell people "too bad," fly back to the US as much as 3 times per year. They pay taxes and are subject to US law even though they're overseas, so they get to vote.

Vote... where? In what state, in what county, in what precinct? The correct answer is that they should not have to pay income taxes while residing abroad, but also not get to vote while residing abroad.

For military the situation is simpler even if the personnel have no US-side residence: use the state/county/precinct of last residence. The same can apply to civilians, but I'd rather let them not pay state and federal income taxes while residing abroad.

> Ballot management becomes error prone. My county alone has 25 ballots due to the different combinations of state house, senate, Federal house, municipalities, and _all_ the special districts. (4 members to the board of directors of the Anytown West Memorial District, a.k.a. cemetery, because they had a property tax assessment when they built the thing in 1950)

That's a small county :)

> Still, if you had the authorities to announce a product of large primes - whatever that means - how do you know they announced the correct primes and not something they made up? I'm afraid any clever cryptographic scheme you come up with falls the victim of the same dilemma: if you can check that your vote was counted right, you lose anonymity. Also how do you check no fake votes were added?

My take is that one should be able to check that a blockchain has not been altered/substituted, and the way to do that is by being able to record encrypted running tally blockchain heads, but this gives you no indication that the published blockchain faithfully represents the cast votes so you have to add paper ballots and an immediate partial manual audit of the paper ballots checked against the digital cast vote record.

> I'm all trusting the people writing voting software to do their best, actually.

You are aware of malicious hacking.

And then you can be coerced again, and again, until the vote is final.

There is no "US voting system". Each of the 50 States have their own systems, often several systems, and where there are several systems it's the counties that pick a system that suits them.

Registration of such voters can be audited and checked carefully to limit their numbers (since they must be inherently limited), and ballots can be delivered to them, or voting equipment can be brought to them (e.g., elderly care homes). I'm not sure much can be done to make voting by the permanently confined secure. For military the military itself can help a great deal. For civilians overseas, either come back to vote, vote at a consulate, or don't vote -- I don't think it's necessary to bend over backwards for civilians who choose to be overseas unless a country has a huge proportion of its population residing abroad.

> Public doesn't need to know the details. Production of paper, printers is quite complex and so production of the pen. Yet people are not concerned about that when voting and we don't publish schematics of a printer that printed the ballots.

Except that people know what paper looks and feels like, they know how it absorbs ink, they know its various properties, they can _read_ whatever is printed on them, and they can see that the marks they make (or a ballot marking device does for them) are faithfully visible on the paper. With paperless machines there is nothing comparable.

Elections results have to be final at some point, and after that point no further retraction/changes can be made, therefore you can be coerced.

You'd have to go to your elections authority's location, and very few could do it w/o overwhelming the vote verification rate capacity, and very few would.

Cryptocurrencies mostly are pseudonymous, and, really, not even that. Certainly bitcoin is at best pseudonymous.

Thanks. Right, this is zero-knowledge proofs. I expected as much. I think that ZK can be made to work for secure voting, though I don't believe that the public can be expected to understand it. I'll have to read this, but I suspect that there is a way for possessors of secret keys to choose to decrypt ballots and violate ballot secrecy.