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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: 2) by devlux on Saturday June 04 2016, @06:19AM
Come on, you guys were mostly all around to remember the joy that was the 2000 Presidential Election, weren't you?
That system works ok until there is a recount, or a dispute as to what the marks on the paper actually mean, or someone cuts off your tamper proof seal, swaps the ballots inside with ballots for a friend, then sticks a new seal on, or the sealed ballot box disappears all together.
Any place you involve people in a mechanical process you introduce human fatigue and error unnecessarily.
Adding more people to a mechanical process just increases the chance for human errors to occur.
Show me a human who can count ballots more accurately than a well configured and maintained machine, let's not even worry about speed here, just accuracy.
Vote counting is a mechanical process. If you're worried about the counting machine being tampered with, you build better locks around it and perhaps consider building a tamper proof counter.
Yet if you can certify that cast ballots are authentic and counted correctly, then the only place left to munge the system is in allowing unauthorized voters to be voting and that's why we have to also push for voter registration rolls and smaller voting precincts.
As an aside, if you're dead set on using dead trees for this. There is a paper based audit available doing the same thing we are (auditing the primary).
It's in the facebook page I linked in the original article. So even if you want to be obstinate and not get involved in the Democracy Counts project, at least get involved in something. :)
I need to make this my last post on soylent for a few days, arguing the points ain't getting the work done. I hope I've shown you that there is a right way to do something and if not I hope I've showed that you can at least do something.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Saturday June 04 2016, @06:36AM
Up in Canada we were flabbergasted that it took you guys a month to count ballots.
We don't have as many different votes going on at the same time, so are able to use simple paper ballots marked with a pencil. Except for close races, all of the ballots are counted within about 3 hours.
The voter is able to review the ballot and make sure it is properly marked (and free of stray marks). If there is a problem, they can request a new ballot.
My impression of the 2000 election fiasco is that voters were not able to verify that their ballot was properly cast. They were not able to request a new ballot if they only dimpled the paper.
Your electronic proposal has the same problem: the voter is not able to determine if the computer casts the correct vote. Sure they get a verification code; but the computer may have already broadcast that same code a minute ago, and instead broadcasts a different code. As far as I can tell, the only way to make sure the vote is cast correctly is a human-readable paper trail.