686
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
686 points (97.9% liked)
politics
19126 readers
1995 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I mean, that's pretty bad in itself. You'd think for a national election someone could find programmers able to make formats match and catch errors properly.
What were you guys voting on anyway? MySpace bands?
It's not that easy... There's a bunch of proprietary systems, each adapted to dozens of specific regulations.
Id say every 200 lines or so of code you make a mistake. Sometimes you hit the wrong key, sometimes you have a brain fart, sometimes there's some complex interplay that leads to occasional issues.
A good programmer catches like 90% of them. Giving time for self-testing catches another few percent. A rock solid design with high automated test coverage might cut mistakes by a factor of 10. Add in great qa (a low paid role with low status and easily cut for profit) and you might get 90% of whatever is left
There's no perfect code, and if you have to interface with another company jealously guarding their own implementation? They might give you a sample file and a short format definition. Is it correct? Can everyone read the spec and come away with the same understanding? Is there room for a bad actor to put their finger on the scales?
It's just beyond human capability to write perfect code, even in the perfect environment. And the ideal solution is redundancy - ideally you'd have like 5 teams running very different software in parallel for each vote and count, and you'd debug any situation where they don't all agree and recount.
But that would be ungodly expensive and politically impossible... There's room to do better, but there's no money in it
See, this is dumb. Not you, I mean. Program to format text documents and automate office paperwork, sure. I prefer TeX but YMMV. But how do you commercialise voting? Oh, "it's America". I guess.
There was a good Tom Scott that pointed out the problem of electronic voting is not just the reliability and trustworthiness of the systems, but the transparency for ordinary people to know it's trustworthy.
You can't achieve that perfectly with computers - not even with paper - but it's important. Obviously to me, that would mean having the system open source, with closed (for extra security) extra measures for auditing. I understand them not doing that, but the government not wanting the voting software and systems to be fully open to government? That just blows the mind ...though I kind of expected it.
As to redundancy and lack of bugs, there are some impressive programs out there by people who've got what it takes to make things very precise from formal definitions and so on (cf some of the Functional Programming community, amongst others, and certain un-bloated well-defined security things). Does the American government not have access to such people? Did they spend all their money on TV shows so they've none left for good programmers? And tallying election votes is not really the most elaborate of tasks, more one that needs formally defining very carefully. No ML professors left over from the dark ages who can write a formal spec as a PhD? How about all those NSA lot who are supposed to be able to make spyware so clever it slips between the cracks in Apple phones? I suppose that's a field more of try lots of things and hope some work, but still.
Sorry, rant over ;-)
The source being open doesn't mean you can tamper with it. It means you can see it (in this case).
Did you mean "can't"?
Open source lets the general public* audit it to know exactly what it's doing. So much of the world revolves around layers of secrecy and convenience-trust. Elections should not be so!
*Or members thereof
I meant "can". If the repo is read only you can't change the code.
Okay. I think I missed your meaning a bit then.
Agreed for sure. Open source doesn't (by its openness) mean people can tamper with it.