This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
You're honestly quite close to the core question. Generally, when people talk about digital elections, there are a couple camps. First, there are the academics who work on describing some properties that we might want from a voting system and checking to see if they can make the math work. Then there are the people who imagine the most theoretical of possible attacks (and believe me, I've seen a lot of theoretical attacks on systems, some of which have actually grown up to be real) and simply declare the problem impossible from first principles. Folks in this latter camp should properly say that message security is impossible, because there are endpoint security problems, and besides, the median user can't do the math that would be used in their head. Secure over-the-air updates are impossible, because then Apple or whoever has a valuable secret that will surely be compromised. Certainly, secure cloud storage is impossible; I can imagine quite the conspiracy happening, and besides, is the median user going to understand it? Well, maybe someone can figure out storage, but private cloud compute? Impossible. Do you know how many vectors of attack there could be?!?!
You speak of banks, and that is good. Did everyone just forget to tell banks that what they wanted to do was impossible? They can't possibly just let people log into their account from anywhere. They might be running an operating system for which the vendor has stopped shipping security fixes five years ago, with the user having installed "free_legit_photoshop.exe" or the like. They can't possibly just let a little piece of plastic and some numbers be a form of payment accepted across the world. I have theoretical attacks!
I'm well aware of a variety of specific problems for digital voting, but my main position is that one must discuss actual specifics in this domain, because there are a wide variety of possible specific conceptions. A lot depends on 'how much you want to prove', so to speak. Most people want to immediately jump all the way to 'proving the most', thinking that if you can't solve every problem in a way that lets me vote from my couch while wearing underwear, using just a web form, and question marks for authentication (because racism, probably), then any form of digital anything in elections is completely impossible. But honestly, one can easily propose digital components for elections that retain the same basic form, such that the digital component actually restricts behavior. For example, suppose for now that you still had to show up in person to vote, but instead of a weird, flimsy piece of paper being all that you have for your voter registration, you were instead issued a smart card or other hardware token that you needed to bring with you. That hardware token can be used in combination with those fancy maths that I linked to in order to quickly and accurately provide guarantees of eligibility to vote, no double-voting, etc. Hopefully, one of those fancy maths works can even allow for neat paper backups that manage to satisfy receipt-freeness while maintaining a significant level of auditability. I think some of them are getting close, but we'd have to dig into specifics.
Sure, there might be other political concerns that make such a proposal difficult (honestly, simple secrecy in voting concerns should be enough of a political difficulty to rule out a large swath of the most expansive proposals rather than even getting to technology considerations), but that's pretty irrelevant when what I'm generally hearing is a weird set of first principles-style claims that literally anything digital and related to elections is flatly impossible due to vague theoretical concerns.
The same banks massively bungle their software upgrades, locking people out of their accounts, logging them into other people's accounts, losing their transactions, etc.
E-voting is feasible. You can probably come up with a system that:
But why would someone implement it? Banks earn money by making their services easier to use. Governments don't earn anything from e-voting. Political parties don't earn anything from e-voting
Yep. They've realized that the optimal amount of problems is not zero, and consumers are still plenty happy to use their products over other banks who could say, "We're not offering that stuff, because we're more committed to your security." There are parallels here to elections. The optimal amount of election problems (even things like someone not being able to vote because of an edge case, tech-related or otherwise; who remembers the tempest in a teapot I think in 2016 when a video went viral on social media of a group of would-be voters showing up late to a polling station and getting pissed?) is probably not zero either, and one of the most major considerations for designing an election system is to ensure that it is viewed as legitimate by the electorate (within that margin of error for the optimal amount of imperfections being nonzero).
This is a much more real concern in my mind. I haven't followed politics enough in countries who have adopted whatever version they have adopted in order to have a sense for what political dynamics incentivized them to do so. I'd super love an explainer from anyone who does. But I would note that this is completely in the bucket of "political problems", not "tech problems".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link