@Penguincoder I have no degree in Computer Science. I graduated International Relations. However I am still really passionate about FOSS due to the way it brings real world democracy into technology.
While there are some places in which technology has no place (particularly voting), I believe that technology can help our societies become more open, transparent, involving and better functioning.
There’s nothing wrong with using technology in voting, it just has to be done in an open, verifiable way.
The problem is how difficult it is to ensure it is open and verifiable. Not to mention how much easier it is to scale up attacks on digital voting systems.
If I want to forge enough paper ballets to swing an election I’m going to need a few hundred people in on it, with a group that large, someone is going to squeal, or get caught doing something dumb and uncover the conspiracy, if I want to forge digital ballots, well, I just need one person with know how and the right exploit.
It is certainly possible to make a digital voting system that is immutable once the votes are submitted, it is nearly impossible to make one that ensures that the votes being submitted are legitimate.
It’s a lot of effort and increased risk to roll out an acceptable electronic voting system, it is much easier and safer to just keep using paper ballots.
Believe it or not those are all solved problems
The largest blockers to implementing them for voting are no longer technological, they’re political
We can absolutely cryptographically verify your voting choice from your phone, and have you and everyone be able to verify when it changed, where, on what device, etc, while also preserving the anonymity of the voter.
(Edit: while also making it far easier to combat fraud by making elections trivial enough to go “ok, everyone go check and resubmit your choices!” And immediately validate the majority of the votes as valid, minus those who don’t have internet access who would still need to travel)
Problem is, there are a lot of very powerful organizations who would suddenly lose much of that power if voting were in any way convenient and accessible to everyone.
Every time someone confidently claims that we can cryptographically verify voting, they are deliberately or ignorantly keeping the complexity and necessity of verifying the verifier runtime, the data source, and the communication channels out of the picture.
Cryptography doesn’t solve voting verification problem, it obscures and shifts it.
