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Report: White House delaying release of voting machine security study (www.reuters.com)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 16 points 1 month ago (1 child)

I don't know if I wholly agree. I think there's something interesting about the idea of using a (standardized, open-source) cryptographic system to prove that your vote was counted without revealing who you voted for.

But that would have to take place in a political system where people were acting in good faith, which is not what America has.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    That can never work because the incentive to manipulate that system and then claim the results are fair because of it’s theoretical power of accountability, which it was sold on, cannot be broken and therefore we MUST accept the results is too great.

    The moment someone cracks it, they become the new lords. Same problems as the current system.

    Paper doesn’t have this problem, because you can see the paper. You can count paper with machines, but you can also verify with humans and - importantly - humans without PHDs.

    Voting is the literal keys to the empire. I’m not letting some billionaire vibecode his way into the white house…again

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I’m not letting some billionaire vibecode his way into the white house…again

    That literally never happened. He simply told people what they wanted to hear and told them who to blame for all of their issues. Those being easily verifiable lies didn't make a difference to enough people.

    There wasn't a high tech exploit, or even a low tech exploit. Just the human exploit. The same thing that results in 99% of technology "hacks", social engineering. The human is always the weakest link.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    This is.... All wrong?

    Sure, if someone manages to "crack" a cryptographic system, they may be able to manipulate results, but like...that's really unlikely. And even when it does happen, a lot of times there are a lot of constraints on cracks of cryptographic systems that mean that the system still offers a lot of protection even if it should be revised (e.g. a crack may mean it only takes 5 years to crack something that we thought would take til the end of the universe to crack or something like that)

    Paper is also manipulable? Like you can just forge someone's signature or have a different peice of paper and say it was theirs even if they voted for someone else really. Vote counters are fallible, what if someone casts two paper ballots counted by two different people? There are all kinds of ways paper ballots can be defrauded.

    But vote fraud needs done at scale and really only works when the state is absolutely flailing in it's ability to maintain order.

    A much simpler solution with many other benefits is to simply stricture society so that government positions are positions of service, not power...which is what all democracies claim to strive for in the first place, however disingenuously it is made when it's empires and settler colonies. But that is the key: one doesn't even need to be voted in if there is only service and not power in the role. They can just...sign up and will be thanked for helping society run.

    Edit: also lmao at the idea of vibe coded cryptographic voting.

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