I see stories about how election is rigged or that there are security vulnerabilities and lots of people don’t believe the outcome. Why don’t they just open source everything so that anyone can look at the code and be sure the votes are tallied correctly?
Voting machines are the most utterly stupid thing ever created. Why don’t you use paper ballots as other countries do?
We do, there are very few counties in the US that are actually fully digital (stupid idea IMHO). The majority are paper ballots which are scanned into the machine for fast counting. The original paper the voter filled out is then stored in case it needs to be checked against the machine count for accuracy.
Interesting that it takes so ridiculously long to count then, in Germany the votes are counted on paper by hand and they’re down within maximum 3 days.
It only started taking more than one day recently. My conspiracy theory is that it is so we have to watch the news for three days instead, which makes them a ton of money.
Because there is too much money to be made in the business. Vendors are selected through a political process which is decided by what politicians benefit from the selection.
Don’t kid yourself - the people screaming about rigged elections don’t actually care about solving the problem. They know they lost and they are happy for the excuse to continue grandstanding.
Do you think most of the people in government know what open source means? The concept of facebook confuses them lol
I don’t know about most, but I think the number of people in government willing to accept bribes and kickbacks for picking a particular overpriced vendor is probably greater.
A lot of folks unfortunately think open-source software is much more vulnerable than closed-source software because anyone can inspect it. The great irony of it, as everyone here knows, the opposite is actually often true.
Our society is not able to understand modern technology. Most people haven’t even heard of concepts such as Open Source or Free Software. They have only been around for over 30 years, but ok.
I see people here are cheering for some proprietary app for Lemmy called Sync. It just makes me sad. I guess they don’t want security on their devices.
Everything made by the government should be Free Software. Public money, public code: https://publiccode.eu
I don’t think there’s a problem with people using Sync, I access Lemmy mostly through Windows!
People are happy about sync because they’re going to be able to use a UI they like, are familiar with, and has been refined over a really long period of time. It’s just a frontend, I think it’s way more important that the foundation you choose to build a platform on is open-source and can’t be pulled out from under you. If people prefer accessing through Sync, Chrome, or whatever else, it’s not really an issue as there’s always other options if any of them go sour.
I fucking love open source, seeing the rapid advancements in 3D printing, robotics, prosthetics and a host of other technologies as people build on each others’ ideas is amazing. The fact that a dude can use a brain-computer interface and machine learning to control a fucking exoskeleton he built in his residential house in his free time is like witnessing the future. But at the same time, also using closed-source software is not inherently a problem, and is often unavoidable.
And yes, it’s insane that people have to pay for access to information that they paid for. The fact that I have to pay money to see the standards of how to wire my home safely, that was drawn up with public money, is pure insanity!
The post was about voting machines and that we should be able to verify they are secure and that their software doesn’t have any malicious functionality. So why wouldn’t you want the same on your own devices? Shouldn’t our computers be secure too? Don’t we deserve to be able to control our devices and the software that runs on them? I think we do. I think computers should be secure and that we deserve privacy. But you can’t have any of those things with proprietary software. When using it, you are at the mercy of the person/company who developed it and they might not have your best interest in mind. Very often they only care about their interests and add things like spyware and DRM.
Only with Libre Software users have the freedom to control their devices (because of the 4 essential freedoms). Proprietary software is unethical, because it takes away those freedoms from us. It gives developers power over their users, which they often abuse. Developers should know better and give their users the freedom they deserve. That’s partially what makes me sad about Sync. Its developer is making a proprietary app for a Libre platform, probably because they just don’t know any better.
Another sad thing is that there are Libre apps for Lemmy. But some people still choose proprietary ones. They choose to not have freedom, security and privacy. Most of them do that, because they just don’t know any better.
Open Source is similar to Free/Libre Software, but it’s a corporate term that doesn’t mention those ethical issues.
You mentioned some of the amazing things people do with Free Software. But most software is proprietary. Imagine what we could achieve if i wasn’t.
Why Electronic Voting ls Still A Bad ldea, a video by Tom Scott:
Electronic voting could use open source software, but so can a machine that scans a marked ballot. The best practice is to have voters mark a physical ballot, then have them put it in a machine (running open source software) that scans and tabulates the results. If there’s a question about the integrity of the results, we can go back and count physical ballots.
That’s how they do it where I live!
Mail in voting baby! I want every U.S. citizen to have this right.
this video has 3 years.
3 years is a lot to somethings to be mature. He tells about Trust & Anonymity. You can’t trust anonymity 'coz you can trace the vote and bla bla bla. Well, you can trace the regular method too. Trust, you can’t trust the way the vote leaves the booth to the central. You know the Hash initiative? Even a small number change will be shown to everyone.
Well, you can trace the regular method too.
Not as efficiently and in mass. It’s like saying “you could gather personal data before the internet/social media”. Sure, there were mailing lists and some companies had personal data manually gathered but that was 0.00001% of what you can gather today for like 5$.
When it comes to data, scale and efficiency matter. As someone from a low trust country(Greece), any electronic voting is literally a threat to democracy, society and pretty much opens the window for a civil war. Which is why no political party even dares suggesting it.
And it doesnt take much for a society to become low trust, you only need 1 bad actor(game theory). Though Greece was never not a low trust society. But i think all countries would benefit from an electoral system like the greek one, where all political parties can have representatives on every ballot, there is tight control for ballot envelopes, everything is opened and counted in front of everyone, basically all political parties keep their own tallies, at a local and national level.
So if there is something fucky with the official results, it will be easily tracked and noticed. At least as long as you can have party representatives on every ballot. Obviously smaller parties cant do that. There have been conspiracy theories about neonazi votes not being counted, because literally all other parties despise them. And when i say neonazi, i dont mean “neonazi”, i mean literally a parliamentary party that had this as their symbol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(Greece)#/media/File:Meandros_flag.svg
And their second in command has a huge swastika tattoo, etc. At least their party became illegal and its leaders spent some time in prison but that only happened after they murdered a greek. As long as they were beating and killing immigrants, they were fine.
This video is 3 years old, Brazil’s electronic voting system is 27 years old and there hasn’t been anyone proving that it is a bad idea, unsafe, tamperable or anything of the sort.
I like Tom but this video really irritates me. It just seems like he’s pulling generic arguments out of his ass without any actual research.
There are probably two reasons:
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It wouldn’t change how the public thinks about them. People wouldn’t understand how voting machines work, even if they were open source. Do you expect normal people to look at and understand code? Also people who have lost hope in democracy and want to believe that the election was a hoax will continue to do so anyway.
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It’s probably more comfortable for the manufacturers of those machines to keep them closed source. Why would they show the world how they work? That would disclose potential flaws which is bad for their reputation. And it would make it easier for competition to emerge.
p.s. I agree that voting machines are bollocks.
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