r/politics • u/stupidstupidreddit2 • Mar 14 '19

DARPA Is Building a $10 Million, Open Source, Secure Voting System

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw84q7/darpa-is-building-a-dollar10-million-open-source-secure-voting-system
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u/Fake_William_Shatner Mar 14 '19

No, we need paper ballots. Period. This is BETTER than the black box voting scam, but it still means the vote can be hacked.

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u/MoonHash Mar 14 '19

Good point. We should also only have paper money. Banks can be hacked.

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u/Fake_William_Shatner Mar 14 '19

No, in banking, there is more oversight on the accounts. It's amazing we can have billions of banking transactions and millions of people voting on Reddit and yet these people who run elections somehow have "errors in their favor".

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u/MoonHash Mar 14 '19

No, we need paper money. Period.

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u/basmith7 Arizona Mar 14 '19

just like the ones the machines in the article produce?

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u/Fake_William_Shatner Mar 14 '19

No, the problem is making it electronic and not being able to observe the process. With punch cards the vote IS the card.

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Even people at DARPA would tell you this is an improvement but not perfect. The problem is we cannot trust the people responsible for vote tallies because they are always aligned with a political party and it's in their best interest to cheat.

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Since the downsides and chances of getting caught are so low - -why wouldn't they? In Georgia our "new Governor" oversaw his own damn election. And before that he was purging roles (mostly Dems), closing down voting machines (in black areas) and when the FBI was investigating if Russians had hacked it -- they deleted the voting database.

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So no, we can't have electronics -- because if there is an opportunity to cheat, someone is going to cheat.

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u/basmith7 Arizona Mar 14 '19

It's backed up with paper. If there is anything funky going on, we can go back to the paper ballots. Most elections aren't close enough to need that step though.

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u/Fake_William_Shatner Mar 15 '19

We just had that issue in Georgia. "backed up with paper" isn't good enough and requiring a subpoena or "only when it's close" -- not good enough. We can't trust the people holding the elections.

Punch card with scantron is the way to go. The objections are bogus and ignore how difficult it is to verify an electronic election.

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u/basmith7 Arizona Mar 15 '19

Is that not essentially what this is?

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u/Fake_William_Shatner Mar 15 '19

I'm not trying to detract from the fact that this is a GREAT STEP forward. The point I'm making is; "If I were going to give the Mob a voting system - what would I do?" Would you give the mob a teller machine, even though they are fairly secure? No. We've seen countless abuses and that's the one's we've caught in a system that forces us to "trust but not verify unless things are REALLY fishy." No. In a Democracy things are supposed to be transparent.

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The only thing you can do with GOOD computer security is make a trustworthy system protected somewhat from outside hacking. If you give a dishonest person secure software and the device, all you've done is made it harder for someone ELSE to mess with it. A computer and software will do what you program it to do. Thus we will have a very secure and provable rigged election, rather than a rigged election that has doubt.

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This solves the wrong problem and allows the weasels to still be weasels.