SoylentNews

devlux writes:

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!

Original Submission