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.
@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.
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@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 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.
@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.
@swiley @omnipotens one problem with the 2fa approach:
I wouldn't expect some numbskull in Kentucky to understand any of this.