@SeaRobb you one thing I don't understand is the no machines idea. The problem isn't that we used silicon, it's that the software is closed source and untrusted. If a fully open source voting solution were proposed that used computers but could be properly audited and have bugs documented and fixed in a transparent way, I think it would be far superior to paper ballets.

The real problem is transparency and trust not the specific medium.

The problem with machines is that they can automate the fraud, so stuff like LePen's vote count decreasing as the night wears on is plausible, computers can do anything - and efficiently.

Paper ballots are big and bulky and someone needs to drive around putting them in drop-boxes, and they get caught on camera and become movie stars in 2000 Mules.

In-person paper ballot voting is even better, ideally with that finger ink which is impossible to wash off.

Paper ballots are good because

you can require that they be stored for 7 years and then you can sue for a recount if you think they were mis-counted in some place.

What would be better would be a tear-off receipt on each paper ballot so that a person can check the status of their vote online after.

@cjd @SeaRobb yeah it's weird though because yes computers can be used fraudulently, but so can paper. Sure some may be caught on camera but if the system is opaque as it is today this is often explained away using some unknown internal process. The 2020 elections were rife with explanations for every shading thing we saw.

Some of the problems we have with the software that exists today are:

* we don't know who wrote it
* we don't know who funded it
* we have no idea how votes are recorded
* we have no idea how internet is being used
* it runs on windows (lots of unknown holes)

Not knowing who wrote it or funded it means we don't know whether or not there is political motivation to cheat. Not having any clue into the internals leads to questions of validity and integrity which are not addressable.

A fully open source solution has no political affiliations. Funding is done in the light of day. Any interested party could participate in development. You still have to work out who would accept community code and handle versioning, but maybe a dao could be used to prevent any one engineer becoming a controlling voice in the project.

@cjd @SeaRobb I'm old enough to remember the hanging chads.

I assume that whoever develops voting software does so because they want to steal elections, otherwise why bother?

DAOs and other blockchain type things are more reliable because they are not subject to the same political pressure. Yet still you see backdoored smart contracts being used for rug pulls.

@cjd @thatguyoverthere @SeaRobb
Computer-based voting is horribly complex and barely has any good arguments for it when it comes to local elections.

If we could make computers which couldn't be hacked by people accessing them, the world would be very different, and then for elections you would need a trust base, except basically no one knows how even a minimal computers can misbehave in it's entirety, exploitable glitches in retro hardware are still being found today.

They're just not the good tools for this kind of purpose.

On the other hand computers are very good when it comes to gathering people, which is the base of politics, and there already is some examples of it becoming an alternative to pure representativity.
They're also pretty good when it comes to increasing accessibility to data, browsing official archives before was a mess, it could still get better though.

@lanodan @SeaRobb @cjd I don't know that I agree there are no good arguments for it. I would say there are no good arguments for opaque, closed source, proprietary software to be used, but I don't think that means computers shouldn't be involved. I think making that argument seems unreasonable to the average person. Pandora's box is hard to close. I think the room for error is greatly reduced when computers are used as opposed to when they aren't, but that doesn't mean I think software and hardware are bug free or incapable of doing unpredictable things. I just think humans are far more buggy and prone to do unpredictable things, and there is no way to accurately audit the mental processes of a poll worker to determine if they made a mistake or interfered intentionally in the election process.

@thatguyoverthere @SeaRobb @cjd @lanodan the software standard for voting machines should be at least as high as the standard for video slot machines.

@Moon @thatguyoverthere @SeaRobb @cjd I think that would be horribly low but maybe I'm underestimating how important casinos can be.

@lanodan @SeaRobb @cjd @Moon at least how important money is the casino

@thatguyoverthere @SeaRobb @cjd @Moon Casino to me is where you go to recklessly try to convert money into fun.
But at the end of the day… well night, it's just a temporary thing and you can try to have some control over it, you can walk away.

Elections are horribly permanent, the years of a rockstar being able to do shit tend to last very long, specially when they tend to also be granted privileges as former elected person.

@lanodan @SeaRobb @cjd @Moon yeah I think the argument is just that the casino isn't going to accept software that they know could be hacked because money matters a lot to them. We should take our elections at least as seriously as they take their money.

@thatguyoverthere @SeaRobb @cjd @Moon Yeah, I guess from that perspective it makes more sense, that said I guess like any business, they can account for small amount of theft being done and they probably put a lot into making sure no one cheats.

Would we actually have trained people for software-based elections? Eeeh, I don't think so, specially as voters also need to have a bit of secrecy.