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Hey everyone! Sorry I've been quiet for so long.
The June 7th primary in California is rapidly approaching and I've been involved in a project to create an international standard for secure electronic voting. The design work is all done and our first application of the technology is to use it to detect and uncover fraud, specifically voting machine tampering. This project is happening in phases. The first phase happens June 7th. We will be conducting an audit of the primary, effectively a parallel election.
The main goal of phase one is actually to shake out the tech make sure it's as bug free as possible and also that the blockchain that supports this tech can scale to meet the demands of a real election.
If you're interested in novel ways of using technology to help secure elections we could really use your help, because it's crunch time now.
First of all, if you live in California, we could use boots on the ground. Some of our volunteers and probably a sizable fraction of the voters will be technically illiterate. We need people on hand who can quickly troubleshoot the hardware, reboot devices and even just demonstrate the tech and walk people through the process if needs be. We've tried to make it as simple as possible. Literally, scan a QR code and press 1 button corresponding to your choice of candidate. But as simple as we've made it the process could still be confusing to some especially in the heat of the moment. If you're interested in helping out by being boots on the ground for us go here... https://www.democracycounts.org or here https://www.facebook.com/notes/election-justice-usa/independent-citizens-election-audit-to-be-conducted-in-select-precincts-in-calif/889795561147138 You can contact Dawn on facebook to be put directly into the volunteer pipeline.
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Secondly, over the course of the weekend we will be conducting a "dry run" poll. The purpose of this is just to test the software on the widest range of devices possible. If you have an android or iOS phone, you just download the software and give it a try. Feedback on the install process, the UI, etc would all be very helpful. Details will be made available on our technical discussion page sometime in the next 24 to 48hrs. https://nxtforum.org/index.php?topic=11226.0;all
Thirdly, we are using the NXT blockchain for this. There are presently a lack of full nodes with open APIs. So even just downloading a full NXT node and running it for the duration of the primary (takes a few days to sync the blockchain), would be a huge help because it adds nodes to the network making it much harder to attack. You can download the software from here... https://nxt.org/ and if you want to you can get a recent blockchain snapshot (which speeds up the process of getting in sync with the network) from here... http://www.peerexplorer.com/#Download
Thank you everyone!
(Score: 3, Informative) by devlux on Saturday June 04 2016, @12:41AM
While I generally agree with you on the representative model of government being something that appears to fail and needs to be replaced I disagree with much of the rest of the comment.
A mobile app is a really bad way of doing this. A persons phone contains a lot of different applications on it. Including adware and malware.
Biometrics can easily be gotten around, and furthermore there really isn't any "standard" for biometrics. Each device has it's own "output", which usually looks like "Well I think there is an 80% probability that this is my owner" without any real concept of who the owner is.
At the moment the best we can hope for is to standardize the voting machines including hardware and software as well as he entire voting process and then require strict certification to the standards. The standard needs to be solid and it needs to provide a verifiable audit trail.
There should be a paper trail for the device from cradle to grave and the device should have baked in or at least soldered on crypto for which the keys are not accessible to even the OS. It should amount to the OS presenting the crypto chip with something to sign and the chip signing it. By using a public / private key pair, we can uniquely track the activity of each machine and by requiring everyone who interacts with the machine except the voters to also present a crypto signature that is verifiable and public, we can know who did exactly what to the machine at any given time.
That's our long term goal.
For the purposes of the primary we are just verifying that A) The tech works and scales properly, B) We can use the statistics gathered to show discrepancies between official results and our own results. The assumption being that certain kinds of discrepancies would be evidence of something amiss.
As mentioned before, we control these devices or at least our volunteers do, so it's not just a situation of everyone who participates downloading an app.
The call for help was to try and validate that the process for installing was simple enough that your average volunteer can install it and the voting process itself was simple enough that those who are less than technically literate can manage to vote using the tech. Finally, if anyone is in Cali and would like to be a volunteer, we would love to have you come on board.
Thanks!