10
votes
A look at VotingWorks, a nonprofit developing what it hopes will be “a publicly owned operating system for democracy"
Link information
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- Title
- Voting for transparency - Increment: Open Source
- Authors
- Chris Stokel-Walker
- Published
- May 26 2019
- Word count
- 1212 words
I literally just finished reading an article called Why Paper Voting Is Still Superior (How digital security is good enough for banking but not for elections), and then I see this article here on Tildes about someone still trying to build a better electronic voting machine.
Sometimes a screwdriver just isn't the right tool for the job. It doesn't matter if it's the strongest, straightest, best designed screwdriver in the world... it just won't hammer in a nail.
Voting does not need to be electronic. Paper works. It's simpler and it's safer.
Yes, we just need to come up with a catchy buzzword for paper voting, maybe a full re-branding, so that people will think it is something new and shiny.
“All new retro organic voting! Come vote like your grandparents did, using organic recyclable materials.”
I am so glad electronic voting got stopped in my country (The Netherlands).
Any software system will be fundamentally untrustable (see, e.g., this Tom Scott video), paper ballots are tested, sound, and perfectly practical. I don't mind waiting till the next day for the results.
Plus, this is tech solutionism at its finest. The mess of machines in the US seems more like an institutional/cultural problem than mainly a sofware issue.
The XKCD 2030 also applies. There is plenty of snakeoil vendors that will sell anything by adding every possible buzzword (blockchain, AI, Machine Learning, open source) to it (which also lets you up the price!)
Thanks, didn't know that one :)
I completely agree that a completely paperless system is a terrible idea; I am not sure why it needs to be one or the other. The purpose of a paper record is to be truly immutable record; it also mostly prevents silent voting manipulation. Neither of these intrinsically prevents significant "digitization", i.e. the results from both electronic and paper ballets are uploaded for public review. I don't believe that either form of voting is especially safe from tampering, so testing new ideas doesn't bother me to much.
I've never used a voting machine nor have I seen someone opt to use one. Everyone I've seen has voted on a paper ballot. I don't really see how a machine would help or why it is even necessary in the first place. My local voting district has a machine put out mainly for the disabled to use, but I don't think that is really has a place in voting apart from that.