this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Electronic voting is a terrible idea. Lil' bits of paper with representatives watching the vote counters is a pretty solid system. There's no problem there that needs to be fixed.
I say this as a Canadian who has volunteered as an observer in federal elections. I know Americans have their thing going on, but seriously. Paper ballots all the way.
As a software development expert, I take issue with
That's way off base.
She under-stated the hell out of that.
Our average practitioner is bad at both their own job, and at the jobs of those whose lives their shoddy work complicates.
Anyone trusting us with their lives or livelihood should be very very alarmed.
We're also now producing artificial intelligence tools that allow us to do equally shoddy work, but now in dramatically greater quantity.
Edit: Let's say this is 60/40 sarcasm and sincere, and I'm not sure which is the 60%...
I work with some of the best, and I've worked with plenty of the worst. I've also been both, on different days.
this Lemmite is, indeed, a software development expert
Lemmite? I was always figured Lemmings seemed the most appropriate name for Lemmy users.
I have never volunteered to count or observe elections. However I am a professional programmer, and I absolutely agree, electronic voting opens up tons of new attacks, whereas paper voting "security" is basically a solved problem at this point
We don't have a unified thing. We definitely don't.
oh it's a thing
Ok, i made an edit
Brazilian elections continue to be fine for decades, this fear mongering is precisely what the right does whenever they lose.
If code was impossible to make safe banks would still be doing manual labour and ATMs would've been phased out.
Financial transactions are logged and the logs maintained for a certain number of years. You can definitely use a similar system for voting when the stakes are low - local elections, for example. But an electronic voting system cannot be both secret and verifiable. In practice you make finding out how someone voted as hard as possible, and hope that a future government will not put in the effort to crack your system. All of which is completely unnecessary when paper ballots exist, and can be both secret and verifiable.
Local elections are not low stakes. Most of the services you receive are from the municipality you live in.
Just because they're less polarizing doesn't mean the stakes are lower.
'Low stakes' as in 'the new mayor isn't sending everyone who didn't vote for their party to jail'.
Works fine in french election abroads.
But yes vote by mail is best.
I've been there too. It's works pretty good. Voting machines don't always for whatever reason, even though it's a simple problem.
I don't really buy the conspiracy theories, but it should be waaay down the list of things that need automation, since elections are only occasional.
This is naive me, but having a robust, online voting system would make it a lot easier for direct democracy.
But we would also have to pressure politicians into using that system.
I actually question if direct democracy would be good, after the amount of exposure to typical voters I've had, lol. Representatives can be questionable, but at least they know what they're deciding on.
Autocracy is just completely awful and depressing, though. No doubt about that.