Open source Voting System
Politics aside if you were to create an open-source voting system how would you design it to be efficient, secure, and tamper-proof?
I was thinking of something like using blockchain This would create a provable mathematical audit trail for each transaction then. Combined that with using your SSN and a unique ID from the voter registration. You would have proof of every valid vote basically 2fa. Then data will be exported to a write-only USB drive once an hour.
@omnipotens Electronic voting can't be audited the way paper voting can. The last election should make it obvious what happens when a large portion of the population can't trust the voting system and that's what you get with electronic voting.
Also: you don't (and should not!) need an SSN to vote. The US has no unique ID numbers.
@omnipotens @swiley
Have you watched Tom Scott's video about electronic voting?
@omnipotens @swiley regarding SSNs, we still have situations where multiple people have the same SSN.
https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your-ssn-one-7-6C10406347
Of course this is a flaw with the SSN system itself, as they don't want to do anything about this to prevent it.
Also, not every American has a SSN, though functioning in society without one is next to impossible. When my kids were born, i was not required by law to sign them up for a SSN (but had I chose not to, it would have made life hell)
@omnipotens @swiley That said, presuming that the feds actually fix the idea of a SSN and make the digits sufficiently long enough so that name/number collision do not happen, there's still the issue that Americans are not required to have one.
You aren't even required to have legal state-issued ID to prove your identity in many states. Even if you have state-issued ID, they aren't biometrically linked in any way to you except photos (which are easily fooled)
@matt @omnipotens We wouldn't want a biometric link anyway. All that does is create hassles for people who's biometrics change and make it easier to defraud people trying to authenticate you because every where you go you leave biometric information.
@swiley @omnipotens Biometrics markers, by their nature, should not easily change in the first place.
If you're thinking DNA, that's one biometric marker, but its not the only one.
@matt @omnipotens I was thinking of fingerprints actually but it really doesn't matter.
@matt @omnipotens
There are serious problems with having a single ID number that's used for official things like this. We're already seeing how easy it makes fraud and how that affects people. It used to be illegal to use the SSN for anything other than social security, there was a good reason for that.
@omnipotens @swiley I'm of the mind that you need to use biometric markers to make an ID bind to a specific person. Something that cannot be easily altered, and something that doesn't readily change over a person's lifetime.
Of course, then you open Pandora's Box for a myriad of reasons.
@omnipotens @matt That sounds extremely unpleasant and I'm sure you could still find ways to forge a correct scan with eg contacts.
If we really wanted a national ID than the federal government should be running a key server. No one reasonable wants this because it would create a huge mess and we absolutely should not be tying it to biometrics. Biometrics are worse than requiring a shared secret to authenticate because you can at least choose who you share the secrete with and change it if you think it's been compromised.
@swiley @omnipotens one problem with the 2fa approach:
I wouldn't expect some numbskull in Kentucky to understand any of this.
@matt @omnipotens 2fa is a whole separate issue. Now you're requiring people to run certain OSes or use specific private networks to authenticate.
People in Kentucky are just as dumb as people in virginia. Hopefully you see why even if we had a national ID you couldn't expect it to actually refer to individuals 100% of the time. Fraud happens and the world is messy and the cleanup is way too slow for whatever automation you'd want to build for it anyway.
@swiley @matt No I am not requiring them to run any OS. Right now when I go and vote I show ID. All I am adding is a randomized voter registration number. When you vote. you put in your id and your voter registration number. If those two match then it's a valid vote. It will just add another layer of difficulty to slow corruption. I am not even saying it's a full-proof idea but its a start.
@omnipotens @matt Maybe it's different where you live but that's essentially what they do here IIRC:
You're authenticated by the volunteers running the Poll and they issue you a serialized ballot.
@omnipotens @matt Signiture validation is somewhere between meaningless and potentially a good excuse for throwing away votes.
I sign my credit card purchases with a PR Nonce for this reason.
@omnipotens @matt Regardless *I* don't want to deal with maintaining a national ID.
The problems caused by having an SSN are enough of an annoyance.
@omnipotens @matt
You need an SSN to pay taxes. It's not required for anything else. They're not unique, they're trivial to forge, and they should not be used for anything other than social security accounts.
@swiley @omnipotens Actually, you do not need a SSN to pay taxes. You need a taxpayer identification number, which *can* be your SSN.
https://www.self.inc/blog/possible-pay-taxes-without-social-security-number
@omnipotens @matt Right, but we don't have a unique identifier and I'm pretty sure most people would be against having one.
@omnipotens @matt You job needs your SSN so it can fill out tax forms (for social security.)
Same with the banks, they'll accept an ITN instead.
@omnipotens @matt Furthermore an SSN doesn't mean you have a right to vote anyway. Visa holders are given SSNs and still aren't allowed to vote.
@omnipotens https://www.usa.gov/who-can-vote
I don't see an SSN on this list.
I don't think paper audits are fool proof. The reason electronic voting is a problem is that *you have to convince the skeptics that it's correct.* Most of the people skeptical of your voting scheme may not even understand PKI and other ideas necessary to judge it's correctness. The result is a mass rejection of the results like what we had last year.
@swiley Not to mention when they do a paper audit they do not check the validity of the votes cast only the number of votes. If they see the same person voted 10 times there is nothing they can do as the task is to count them not investigate them.
@swiley Well every legal citizen that is allowed to vote has a social security number that is unique to the person. As for paper audits are full proof is the biggest lie ever told in my opinion. If money can be counterfeited so can ballets. We can still use both but I believe the answer is in technology. With 2 systems the offline voting machine and a registered voter chain. Each transaction can be matched and tagged as valid duplicated or not in the system.
.