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zk3hf9dB on scored.co
22 days ago2 points(+0/-0/+2Score on mirror)1 child
There is a way to make voting actually work.
Here's how you do it.
1. Publish the voting rolls publicly in the form of a relational database with a common format. Take a snapshot of that database at the time of the election and freeze it in time so that anyone can see what the voting rolls were. If you want to vote, you must expose who you are, where you live, etc... And people who want to influence or monitor elections should be allowed to access that data freely.
2. Publish the votes publicly. Don't publish who voted which way, just that ballots were cast, which precinct they were in, etc... Anyone can count votes and see which precincts voted which way, etc...
3. Give voters their "vote ID" that shows which vote is theirs in the vote database. As long as they don't tell anyone what their "vote ID" is no one can tell how they voted. But if they wanted to do some sort of validation, they can get together with trusted friends and share their vote IDs with each other to ensure no one has duplicate vote IDs and that the votes were recorded the way they wanted them to be.
4. The database of voter-vote relation is kept secret. Only in the case where fraud is suspected are investigators allowed to inspect that database. It will map every vote to every voter so that they can see how the votes were cast and counted. We can track who accesses these databases and how and do all the normal sorts of things you do with sensitive data.
5. You can introduce public programs that can be run against private databases to validate that the votes are valid. IE, it can look for any duplicate vote IDs or vote IDs that map to voters not in the correct precinct or duplicate voter IDs. If the program says "All Green" then we know the vote-voter database is valid. If not, then it can publish a summary of what is wrong with it, like the number of people who voted twice or more, and the number of duplicated ballots, etc...
RE security and privacy: There's ways to keep people from abusing public data. For instance, people can publish a special phone number in the voter DB that is only used for voting stuff. If someone calls them with offers for roof repair, then we know who is abusing the database and how.
The fact that we are NOT doing this tells you that everything is fraudulent. This technology has been around since the 80s. There is no reason why anyone shouldn't be doing this today.
Excellent post. A couple suggestions: publish a list of same day registrations/votes the day after the election. #4, the Flock camera database abuses show that some public servants can't be trusted with this sort of access. Perhaps the db access is something that is made public, so we can see the who, when, where and why of queries.
Votes should happen within an 8 or 12 hour period. If you're not present in your community, your vote doesn't count. If you can't take time off work, your vote doesn't matter because you are practically a slave.
Regardless, data is not a new concept and there's ways of managing it and tracking who changed what and how.
Here's how you do it.
1. Publish the voting rolls publicly in the form of a relational database with a common format. Take a snapshot of that database at the time of the election and freeze it in time so that anyone can see what the voting rolls were. If you want to vote, you must expose who you are, where you live, etc... And people who want to influence or monitor elections should be allowed to access that data freely.
2. Publish the votes publicly. Don't publish who voted which way, just that ballots were cast, which precinct they were in, etc... Anyone can count votes and see which precincts voted which way, etc...
3. Give voters their "vote ID" that shows which vote is theirs in the vote database. As long as they don't tell anyone what their "vote ID" is no one can tell how they voted. But if they wanted to do some sort of validation, they can get together with trusted friends and share their vote IDs with each other to ensure no one has duplicate vote IDs and that the votes were recorded the way they wanted them to be.
4. The database of voter-vote relation is kept secret. Only in the case where fraud is suspected are investigators allowed to inspect that database. It will map every vote to every voter so that they can see how the votes were cast and counted. We can track who accesses these databases and how and do all the normal sorts of things you do with sensitive data.
5. You can introduce public programs that can be run against private databases to validate that the votes are valid. IE, it can look for any duplicate vote IDs or vote IDs that map to voters not in the correct precinct or duplicate voter IDs. If the program says "All Green" then we know the vote-voter database is valid. If not, then it can publish a summary of what is wrong with it, like the number of people who voted twice or more, and the number of duplicated ballots, etc...
RE security and privacy: There's ways to keep people from abusing public data. For instance, people can publish a special phone number in the voter DB that is only used for voting stuff. If someone calls them with offers for roof repair, then we know who is abusing the database and how.
The fact that we are NOT doing this tells you that everything is fraudulent. This technology has been around since the 80s. There is no reason why anyone shouldn't be doing this today.
Votes should happen within an 8 or 12 hour period. If you're not present in your community, your vote doesn't count. If you can't take time off work, your vote doesn't matter because you are practically a slave.
Regardless, data is not a new concept and there's ways of managing it and tracking who changed what and how.