this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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Why is it possible to run out of something that could (should) be handled entirely digitally?
Because there is no way to prove without a shadow of a doubt that any digital system is 100% reliable. Are all voting machines completely tamper proof? Running unique code that cannot be run elsewhere, and is 100% open source such that the source can be viewed by anyone without exposing itself to risk that a smart enough bad actor can cause havoc? Do these machines need to be networked? Are all the networks completely identical and have 100% uptime? I could go on for hours about the flaws in software.
The general response is usually something to the effect of "well paper ballots and human counting is also flawed" to which my immediate rebuttal is, humans have to write the code and develop the hardware and if humans are flawed, so to will the code they produce be. Digital voting is just the same human error with more steps. Nearly all of the issues with paper voting are present in digital voting and then some.
You don't have me convinced and I genuinely don't understand how this could be the popular opinion. You absolutely can't convince me that with a well designed system it would be easy to cheat when compared to a piece of paper.
Why the hell would software need to be more complex than a few text lines that store the results of your selections? An amateur coder could create a simple multiple choice selection system in an afternoon.
Why does anything other than a local network need to be involved? It can literally function similarly to paper ballots and have a central recipient machine that collects the results that is then handed over to a ballot authority. Please keep going on for hours about the flaws instead of simplifying the problem.
A machine that is sitting in a voting hall is as easily tampered with as a paper ballot, and it's not going to be done by the average person. Anyone who could manipulate these machines could figure out how to mess with a paper ballot.
You can't 'run out' of a digital vote. You can't 'miscount' a digital vote. If both methods have issues, why choose the one that is OBVIOUSLY easier to manipulate? Oops! Someone misplaced the piece of paper you put in. The year is 2024 and all of the possible issues you've just brought up can be solved but it seems that it would be way too easy to actually have accurate vote counts and one less voter suppression tactic in the pocket of shady governments, so they won't.
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.