Ah I see. Thanks for clarifying. I see now that it was mentioned but yeah, I lost sight of it while reading.
I’d be interested to hear more about how governments currently deal with it. It seems kinda obvious to me that we wouldn’t want to trust that there is no state-level hacking going on, and that we’d want something like what you propose in the post where you can know it’s random without having to trust people. I always assumed they had some sort of fancy math-y solution, but from what you’re saying it sounds like maybe they don’t.
I’ve volunteered during an election before and some of the things they do with ballots are:
Never interact with ballots without the presence of a member of both parties.
Transport ballots in locked boxes where the transporters don’t have keys (and it would be obvious if the lock was cut).
Record everything on video.
Keep track of every ballot given out and every ballot that didn’t come back.
Hand-count some or all of the machine-counted ballots to make sure the results match.
Notify everyone whose vote was counted (in case they didn’t actually vote).
For voting machines, I think there are audits involving paper print outs + chain of custody rules, but I don’t know the details. I’ve only ever lived in states with paper ballots.
I think the load-bearing part is “always have a member of both parties present”, which is sort-of similar to what I’m suggesting in the post. If you don’t have a single party you trust to count ballots, then make both of them do it (and record everything so you can prove it if one of them complains).
Ah I see. Thanks for clarifying. I see now that it was mentioned but yeah, I lost sight of it while reading.
I’d be interested to hear more about how governments currently deal with it. It seems kinda obvious to me that we wouldn’t want to trust that there is no state-level hacking going on, and that we’d want something like what you propose in the post where you can know it’s random without having to trust people. I always assumed they had some sort of fancy math-y solution, but from what you’re saying it sounds like maybe they don’t.
I’ve volunteered during an election before and some of the things they do with ballots are:
Never interact with ballots without the presence of a member of both parties.
Transport ballots in locked boxes where the transporters don’t have keys (and it would be obvious if the lock was cut).
Record everything on video.
Keep track of every ballot given out and every ballot that didn’t come back.
Hand-count some or all of the machine-counted ballots to make sure the results match.
Notify everyone whose vote was counted (in case they didn’t actually vote).
For voting machines, I think there are audits involving paper print outs + chain of custody rules, but I don’t know the details. I’ve only ever lived in states with paper ballots.
I think the load-bearing part is “always have a member of both parties present”, which is sort-of similar to what I’m suggesting in the post. If you don’t have a single party you trust to count ballots, then make both of them do it (and record everything so you can prove it if one of them complains).