RE: Children Hack the Election and “F**k With the Public” at DEFCON – #NewWorldNextWeek
Distributed ledgers are publicly auditable. I see no reason that individuals couldn't audit the vote themselves, personally.
When I worked in market research, we did audits of our marketing efforts. We'd take 10% of the calls an individual made and verify them by calling them back, and this provided a statistically accurate representation of each marketer's work.
Individual people wouldn't have to audit the entire vote to have a very reliable grasp of the accuracy of the whole. Concerned groups would be more able to conduct audits.
I am not a fan of government agencies, such as FDA, EPA, and so on. I know they are but vectors for corruption, which allows the very problems they're created to avoid to flourish.
I think concerned people should be able to just hire some work done, and if the science shows problems, then tort actions should be brought against offending parties. If Bayer knew they'd be on the hook for the medical bills for the victims of glyphosate, they wouldn't have touched Monsanto with a pole a thousand feet long.
The less government the better, and the less corruption there will be. Keep government out of audits. Then they'll be honest.
So every cast vote would have the voters name and address next to it?
Not unless that was necessary to cast the vote in the first place. For audit purposes, only such identifying information as is required on Steemit would be necessary.
It would be necessary to call the voter and verify that their vote was cast and recorded correctly. To prevent one person from casting multiple votes, it would be wise to use voice recognition software to monitor the calls, and where multiple votes were verified by what appeared to be the same person, then requesting the opportunity to meet with them in person to verify a vote would enable observing them while verifying the votes involved.
Unfortunately, should such interview be declined, affected votes would necessarily be unverifiable.
Also, sensitive identifying information needn't be plaintext, but could be encrypted. A means of audio contact would be all that was necessary in order to verify the authenticity of votes.
Then we're back to this though:
"Voters being able to verify that their vote was counted sounds nice, but I’m thinking that would ultimately be quite meaningless, since the establishment could just make up voters who vote in its favor. “But a state only has so many people living in it, so the establishment can’t just make up voters.” Well, maybe not after the fact…"
I disagree that independent verification would be unable to reveal unverifiable votes.
How could phantom voters be added to the rolls and cast votes that could not be detected by public auditors?
Not sure what I said that you disagree with.
By "public auditors," do you mean voters who call other voters?
Independent auditors are groups or individuals that conduct verification and are not officials or agents of government.
What you said that I disagree with is:
Independent verification would detect such vote fraud. This would only be meaningless insofar as proof of vote fraud was meaningless.
While I do not propose particular mechanisms to prosecute election fraud, that has not been the topic. I reckon such mechanisms are either extant or can be effected.
But how these (supposedly) independent people know who is a legitimate voter and who isn't? I mean, again, voice changing technology exists, and the government could simply make voters up.
Let's take the last point first. Fake voters cannot answer the telephone and verify that they cast a vote.
If those fake voters are given phone numbers that some team somewhere answers, this is a higher level of fraud that is vastly more expensive than simply making them up, as is done now.
Voice changing technology is a further expense and complication, and it's easily detectable. If a voter being called to verify their vote is using a voice changer, that vote is not verified.
An individual who wants to verify votes can access public records to compare those individual voters they call to their public record. Voter registration records are public records.