I see stories about how election is rigged or that there are security vulnerabilities and lots of people don’t believe the outcome. Why don’t they just open source everything so that anyone can look at the code and be sure the votes are tallied correctly?
Voting machines are the most utterly stupid thing ever created. Why don’t you use paper ballots as other countries do?
We do, there are very few counties in the US that are actually fully digital (stupid idea IMHO). The majority are paper ballots which are scanned into the machine for fast counting. The original paper the voter filled out is then stored in case it needs to be checked against the machine count for accuracy.
Interesting that it takes so ridiculously long to count then, in Germany the votes are counted on paper by hand and they’re down within maximum 3 days.
It only started taking more than one day recently. My conspiracy theory is that it is so we have to watch the news for three days instead, which makes them a ton of money.
…does it take ridiculously long? I’ll admit I’m not usually on the edge of my seat waiting for election results, but it’s usually just a couple days after voting closes I think. Some places accept mail-in voting way after the election technically closes so they technically take longer to count votes, but that’s more the exception than the rule.
In Washington we have all early voting results and some of the early results from that day by the time polls close on election day. Then an update each day with those processed that day with the remainder that trickle in over the next couple of weeks (e.g., mail in ballots from overseas, challenged ballots that need to be “cured”) until the election is certified.
Most places where there is a delay, it is intentional and written into law/regs–like, that each ballot and its signature has to has to be verified by a human before it can be scanned. And, if, hypothetically, a party wanted to cast doubt on an election, they could send representatives to challenge each and every ballot and slow the process down–and simultaneously cry foul that the process is taking so long. But no one would do that, right? /s
My state only does paper ballots and voting by mail. I completely agree that voting machines are completely unnecessary.
I’m with you, The Tom Scott Video @puppy linked is amazing, goes over good reasons against electronic voting machines. Paper Ballots are great because the counts are done in the presence of all parties and by multiple people. It takes a while, but it’s a good example of technology not always being a viable option for everything.
As said in the video, not everyone would understand code. The only reason why people vote is because they trust in the system. If they don’t trust in the system they don’t vote. They could open the code up and show people, but it wouldn’t dispell fears of those who aren’t knowledgeable about computers.
Because there is too much money to be made in the business. Vendors are selected through a political process which is decided by what politicians benefit from the selection.
Don’t kid yourself - the people screaming about rigged elections don’t actually care about solving the problem. They know they lost and they are happy for the excuse to continue grandstanding.
I think this is closer to the real answer than the comments about “so and so will still complain.” That said, does anyone know if there is any companies making open source machines? Cause if not, there’s our primary reason why elections don’t use them.
Heck, they even complain about riggory when they win. It’s literal rabble-rousing.
How do you know that what’s open sourced is what’s installed and running? Someone should verify it and then you’ll have to trust that person as well.
Both open and closed source software share this problem, so this doesn’t really answer the question.
I meant to say that open sourcing doesn’t make it immediately trustworthy. You have to place the trust somewhere. If you can’t trust that the open sourced code is what’s running, it is effectively the same as running closed source software.
Do you think most of the people in government know what open source means? The concept of facebook confuses them lol
I don’t know about most, but I think the number of people in government willing to accept bribes and kickbacks for picking a particular overpriced vendor is probably greater.
XKCD put it really well years ago here
I know it’s supposed to be a joke, but all I feel when I stumble upon this one is guilt. I mean… if a doctor did what we’re doing in IT on a daily basis, it would be classified as a criminal ofense.
Why Electronic Voting ls Still A Bad ldea, a video by Tom Scott:
Electronic voting could use open source software, but so can a machine that scans a marked ballot. The best practice is to have voters mark a physical ballot, then have them put it in a machine (running open source software) that scans and tabulates the results. If there’s a question about the integrity of the results, we can go back and count physical ballots.
Mail in voting baby! I want every U.S. citizen to have this right.
this video has 3 years.
3 years is a lot to somethings to be mature. He tells about Trust & Anonymity. You can’t trust anonymity 'coz you can trace the vote and bla bla bla. Well, you can trace the regular method too. Trust, you can’t trust the way the vote leaves the booth to the central. You know the Hash initiative? Even a small number change will be shown to everyone.
Well, you can trace the regular method too.
Not as efficiently and in mass. It’s like saying “you could gather personal data before the internet/social media”. Sure, there were mailing lists and some companies had personal data manually gathered but that was 0.00001% of what you can gather today for like 5$.
When it comes to data, scale and efficiency matter. As someone from a low trust country(Greece), any electronic voting is literally a threat to democracy, society and pretty much opens the window for a civil war. Which is why no political party even dares suggesting it.
And it doesnt take much for a society to become low trust, you only need 1 bad actor(game theory). Though Greece was never not a low trust society. But i think all countries would benefit from an electoral system like the greek one, where all political parties can have representatives on every ballot, there is tight control for ballot envelopes, everything is opened and counted in front of everyone, basically all political parties keep their own tallies, at a local and national level.
So if there is something fucky with the official results, it will be easily tracked and noticed. At least as long as you can have party representatives on every ballot. Obviously smaller parties cant do that. There have been conspiracy theories about neonazi votes not being counted, because literally all other parties despise them. And when i say neonazi, i dont mean “neonazi”, i mean literally a parliamentary party that had this as their symbol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(Greece)#/media/File:Meandros_flag.svg
And their second in command has a huge swastika tattoo, etc. At least their party became illegal and its leaders spent some time in prison but that only happened after they murdered a greek. As long as they were beating and killing immigrants, they were fine.
There are probably two reasons:
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It wouldn’t change how the public thinks about them. People wouldn’t understand how voting machines work, even if they were open source. Do you expect normal people to look at and understand code? Also people who have lost hope in democracy and want to believe that the election was a hoax will continue to do so anyway.
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It’s probably more comfortable for the manufacturers of those machines to keep them closed source. Why would they show the world how they work? That would disclose potential flaws which is bad for their reputation. And it would make it easier for competition to emerge.
p.s. I agree that voting machines are bollocks.
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