this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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I haven't met anyone yet who was pro Trump and didn't have a "fuck Trudeau" bumper sticker or flag or whatever.
But I do live in Alberta where there are just straight up genuinely people, in droves, that are pro trump antivax idiots.
The other day several people all in a group tried to convince me that electronic voting was unreliable and only hand counting votes could be relied on...
I love my province, but I feel an incredible sadness for most of the people that live here.
Electronic voting is an absolute security nightmare. As a software engineer, the relevant XKCD sums up my position nicely: https://xkcd.com/2030
I'm talking about electronic counting machines. Which have been repeatedly demonstrated to be far more accurate than counting by hand.
As an engineer, you should know that no system is perfect and there are several trade-offs and threat models to consider. And electronic voting can't be discussed in a vacuum, but measured against existing voting systems which are also full of their own kinds of issues and risks.
Trust the engineers.in the actual software domain then, electronic voting is a terrible idea. Not because it cant be done well, but because it wont be done well.
The counting machines are more than sufficient.
Yes, which I am. Though who I'd trust the most here are the cryptography researchers that dedicate their life to researching electronic voting systems.
wave that's literally me minus the research into electronic voting systems in particular. do not implement voting systems in software. see my initial response. its not about the technical underpinning of if we could. This isn't a discussion. literally every person worth their weight in the space will tell you the same thing.
its the in-feasibility of doing it well and its completely unnecessary. our current system is more than sufficient using paper ballots that prevent all sorts of fuckery and are auditable. its impossible to hack a paper ballot without a ton of effort manual and physical access. its incredibly easy to hack counting machines and any electronic implementation and it only takes 1 mistake to expose everything.
there is absolutely zero reason to expose voting systems to a digital threat vector and the loss of the paper audit trail would be catastrophic for verification.
The current system gives you the best of both worlds, easy counting and a verifiable paper trail for verification after the initial counts are in. quick answers and incredibly hard to game.
Which is why researchers of electronic voting defend the use of Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT).
But anyway, "this isn't a discussion" is consistent with statements like "there is absolutely zero reason to expose voting systems to a digital threat vector" so I guess there are things we seem to agree on.
And any researcher who is advocating for the paper trail should trivially realize that soon as you add that, then you literally have the system we have today with counting machines and we dont need to invite all the issues with electronic voting.
As i said take it from people who actually write software as a career. We're literally telling you its not worth the effort/risks.
It'd be prohibitively expensive and borderline impossible due the fact you'd need to audit hundreds of millions of lines of code.
We're literally telling you to not pay us to do that work because its a bad idea.
As I do... but I'd rather not take it from software engineers because we are not experts. I'd rather listen to real experts, the folks who research this topic as their career.
Noted.
smile then you're simply clueless. Send me your sources I'll tear down your supposed experts if it gets you to stop spreading this nonsense
Interesting. Which claim would you be interested in reading the sources?
I don't think I would trust any of my own code ngl
I like my bubble of Edmonton. The rest of the province scares me
My antivax sister in law moved there two years ago
There's no shortage of those kinds here in Ontario. I'm sure it's not nearly as many, but I'm only trying to point out that, it's not a uniquely Alberta phenomenon.
It genuinely confuses me that people can have their whole identity be defined by "Trump good, Trudeau bad"
Are people really this uninteresting? I mean, I have opinions on politics, even US politics. I don't feel strongly enough about any of them to put a bumper sticker about it on my car, nevermind buy or fly a flag about any of it. I don't even put political signs on my lawn (nor do I allow anyone else to). I just have so much going on that I can't be arsed to advertise that I even have an opinion on what's going on in politics.
I try to always vote, and show up for every election, unless there's a very good reason why I can't (like being very ill, injured, hospitalized, etc). But I am not my political views, and I can't understand people that build their identity around a politician. Surely something else you do is important? No? Okay then.
It's kind of interesting that someone's personality boils down to "I am evil"