this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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Then why don't you create that system?
And then proceed to convince every American that it is good and reliable and will work because it only takes a vocal few to stir question about it. And it only takes a single person finding a small flaw that can probably skew results. And that one flaw that allows someone smarter than you or I, has the power to throw question into our already shaky political system. And you as the producer of the system are entirely liable.
We are already fighting about trust in our voting system, to add the complexity of computerized systems is not going to sway the vast majority of people.
Yes you absolutely can. Look up flipped bits, look up rounding errors. Look up lossy data. Look up bit overflow. There are many many ways computers miscount things. Hell, many calculators have incongruent output to each other because they do math in a slightly different system.
Those are easy to mitigate, even on a hardware level... But of you really needed to you could even do it on a software level.
For integer numbers... Suuuure
What the fuck does compression have to do with this? Guess you needed to pad your text
Even a 32bit processor will not overflow unless you go above 2 billion, and even if you were using 16 bits, that's what the overflow bit is here to indicate... And if you're coding using anything but assembly this isn't anything you need to worry about
There are genuine concerns with digital voting, but you're missing every single one of them with this response.
Sadly we live in an age where non-tech people, a bit like LLMs do, can say all those words and not understand them.
I genuinely think using PDP-11 level (in feel, can be more performant) machines as our PCs (with hardware accelerators for cryptography, some sound and some graphics) would be beneficial for the humanity. Limit them to things they can use differently from a squirrel using a wheel.
My point was not that these examples are issues to be concerned with in a voting system. Instead I was pointing out that computers fail at counting all the time. It's also not even my full argument. You dissected one portion of my response and still missed the point I was making.