Elon Musk calls for an end to electronic voting.
(twitter.com)
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Computers were introduced to voting during my early comp sci days. I knew instantly it was a huge mistake. The people who introduced them knew what they were going to do. Cheat. Fast and efficiently. They were not need then and are not needed now.
And the fact that one of the companies was headquartered in Venezuela under Chavez should have been alarming enough. Would Americans have allowed a Cuban company under Castro to audit our elections? No, but I guess times change.
Birds of a feather...
Read about the Ken Thompson Hack
No computer is safe
Trustless
What we need is review and tabulation of every single ballot by all parties on the ballot.
Copied my tweet to post here:
In an election several yrs ago, I went into the voting booth and made my choices on an electronic machine. I always check my choices before clicking to register. When I checked, every choice had switched to the opponent of my choices. Thinking I had made a mistake, I chose again and the same thing happened! On the 4th try, my choices finally registered. I did nothing different. It was the machine. When I walked out of the booth, I loudly (not yelling) told the poll watchers about what had happened. I also told everyone in line to check and recheck their choices before registering their vote.
This election, (actually every election from this day forward), if you're forced to use electronics, video the entire process. Make sure you include the 'unique' ballot number. While it might not help immediately, you and others may provide enough video evidence for the courts not be able to toss out election shenanigan lawsuits.
I know, I know. Probably wouldn't make a difference anyway.
But, it might.
Thanks for this! Will share it with everyone, including those in line to vote!
I hope that includes tabulators and networking of results as well.
It's more than an individual machine manipulation.
The system is designed to allow access to alter whatever they want
It's just basic common sense.
Unless it serves a purpose...
Paper Ballots and oil-fueled cars, Elon.
Do it
Or you know, we could use a blockchain. Like they were designed for
XRP or btc
Yes but ...
How would you ever know if your vote had been accurately passed by the machine into the blockchain system? You would need to ask a machine to display the blockchain records for you and that could be lying as well.
Like any other blockchain, you query the database.
It would be public, but with zero-knowledge-proof based so the voter can confirm their vote was accurate, and that it was processed. Can't lie in math.
Do you even know how a blockchain works? It's a public reciept list processed by a decentralized group of validators.
Anyone could see that their vote was tallied near instantly. There could never be any vote fakery if it was linked with standard identity documents (which would be like NFTs that couldn't be sold)
We have the technology, whole blockchains are already governed via voting already. It's used for validating parts back to their original factory, and ties in where the materials came from. It's just an advanced reciept system.
We've seen the fuckery happen with paper ballots. You have to trust people and trust hiring, and trust management. With blockchain type tech, it's trust-less, there is nothing to trust since it's mathematically self regulating
You are on to something, we need to push this blockchain technology further as it could be the potential solution to election fraud we've been waiting for
We need this installed ASAP to ensure no election is ever stolen in America ever again
But that can be made not to work. So it is not reliable. Sample program in no particular language:
Voting Enter Trump or Biden: If response="Trump" then Add 1 to TrumpVote Set cheat flag to True Else Add 1 to BidenVote Set cheat flag to False End
Counting If cheat=True then Add 1 to BidenVote Else Add 1 to BidenVote
Basically, a flag is set somewhere in the record that triggers the counting program to interpret the votes differently. Any checks on the database will look OK and only a detailed examination of every bit in the record will show up something unrecognised but most of the record will be hard to decode anyway.
The program is a bit simplistic because other candidates would also be present and the "cheat" might not be applied depending on some criteria - like Trump exceeding 95% of the Biden vote, for instance.
It is like the voting record that logged a vote for either all Republicans or all Democrats and Trump was listed as a RepubIican so did not match. Clue: the lower case "L" was actually an upper case "I" thus ensuring that those who voted Republican down the ballot would not automatically include a vote for Trump. Stuff can be hidden in all kinds of ways.
You still just don't get it. You can download the entire blockchain yourself, query it yourself. There's no middleman.
You would be able to see via your ID, what your vote was. The system is transparent, verifiable, all while retaining privacy for the users.
Which is why these types of systems should be open source, and run in a decentralized manner. Unlike the dominion digital voting, which is not.
This is like saying you can never rob a bank because the door of the safe is two feet thick and the lock is unpickable. But people can still rob banks!
Let's assume that blockchain is perfect and there is no way to add or misrepresent the data in there. That is a tall order, but let's move on. How do you count those records? Let's go down the Stalin route: "It is not the people who vote that count but the people who count the votes."
New sample program:
For Each Blockchain_Record
If Candidate Biden or Trump then Add 1 to Temp
Else Add 1 to Candidate_Name
End
Biden = 0.52 * Temp
Trump = Temp - Biden
Print Results
Biden wins by four percentage points and the blockchain was perfect regardless of votes.
The details of that program could be hidden anywhere. It could even delete itself after use. What do all those 350+ Services all do on your Windows PC? What do all the dlls do? How many hidden segments does the disk have? Does inserting a USB stick do more than you might guess?
This link shows the lengths that some will go to and imagine if there was money in it.
Then there are yet more options, suppose, as now, people take local vote tallies to central offices on a portable storage device of some sort. The aggregating of those results could also have corruption built in.
The problem with a computer is that so much is hidden. The Chinese even built hardware bugs into SuperMicro motherboards, for instance.
But in this case the bank is everywhere, and unless you rob every single bank within the "blocktime" you have failed.
This is what the miners do. They replicate and transmit the "reciept list" around the planet to all nodes everywhere. Then one is randomly selected (via mining process) to stamp the block. Tell me how you can predict a compromised player can predict they will be selected when there are millions of millions of miners out there right now?
This code would be transparent to everyone. And they would call it out. Who can "change" the code to be that? You'd have to convince every single node / miner in the network. How are you going to do that?
With Dominion hack, you change one centralized server and all others update. That is not possible with decentralized computing architecture
K I'm starting to think you don't understand what "open source" means.
Those aren't open source. Most blockchains are. I'd be against a closed-source blockchain because it's SOURCE CODE is CLOSED. Whereas OPEN SOURCE is OPEN and visible to everyone.
Man you are really not reading my words at all are you? Your ID is your "NFT" to be able to vote on a matter in a public database. That's it.
Are you suggesting we can trust paper ballots and the people involved more than real cryptography?
It's not with a blockchain because every interaction is immediately auditable.
However, people can see the "reciept" of that program doing harm. And those viruses / bugs are closed source by design.
There is no reason for me to plead with you to understand. I am simply trying to say you have mistaken this technology for what the old CENTRALIZED computer systems have done. Please, if you want to understand, look into DECENTRALIZED and TRUSTLESS systems and atempt to understand them. I understand your concern but frankly you are gravely mistaken as to how this type of technology operates.
Blockchain type systems for voting (have already been proven to work, and are working right now as we speak) could save us from the "trust the ballot counters" nonsense we experienced last time.
I don't think I am the one missing the point here.
I will try and make things simple for you. Imagine the blockchain records indicated that Biden got 100,000 votes and Trump got 200,000. Who won the election?
Biden did by 200,000 votes to 100,000.
See how it works and not a single blockchain record chain was hurt in this example!
That could explain why Paul Nakasone, former Head of the NSA, just joined the board of Open AI.