SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
[Continues...]
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, @08:32AM
Question, why was my above comment modded troll?
I'm genuinely curious as to what was said there that warranted that mod?
I've never had a troll mod before and furthermore it's is one of the least troll like post I've ever made,
Would whomever made the mod please explain the thought process behind it?
Thanks!
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Saturday June 04 2016, @05:11PM
I did not mod that post a Troll, but have studied trolling theory after being accused of being a troll myself.
Essentially, there is enough wrong with your post that somebody decided your were being deliberately obtuse.
-Trolling the web: a guide [urban75.com]
By Steve Spumante
(Score: 2) by devlux on Sunday June 05 2016, @12:41AM
Guess I just don't see anything wrong with the post. Care to clarify on what you see as being wrong or trollish so that I can watch out for it in the future?
Thanks!
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Sunday June 05 2016, @01:29AM
I already responded to the part I had specific knowledge in (because I have worked in a previous election).
You mostly ignored the central point of the post you were responding to (simply saying they were wrong because they have to write down the code manually).
I am not sure if you are familiar with the Talk the DRM analogy [craphound.com] was referring to. (Note: I was thinking the receipt could give out several dummy codes...but then how does the voter know which one is the correct one?)
Then you start building strawmen with dead people voting, and claiming that counting is hard.
I am not sure you understand how many people actually count the ballots in Canada. Ridings are broken up into polls of less than about 500 people. Each poll gets 2 (paid) people to watch the box all day and count the votes before sealing it. When I was counting, two ballots got stuck together, and we still finished counting in less than 2 hours. (We knew 1 ballot was not counted because they have serial numbers (that are torn off when the ballot is given out).)
It may be expensive to employ that many people, but that is the price of democracy.