{"id":10991,"date":"2014-12-22T12:47:36","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T20:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bradblog.com\/?p=10991"},"modified":"2014-12-22T12:46:52","modified_gmt":"2014-12-22T20:46:52","slug":"a-terrible-idea-the-full-failure-of-e-voting-e-counting-open-source-and-internet-voting-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=10991","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;A Terrible Idea&#8217;: The Full Failure of E-Voting, E-Counting, &#8216;Open Source&#8217; and Internet Voting [VIDEO]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This guy, Tom Scott of Computerphile, is right on the money in <i>every<\/i> respect, when it comes to electronic voting &#8212; be it via touch-screen computers, paper ballot optical-scan systems or, God forbid, Internet Voting.  If I was British, and younger, and better looking, and smarter, this would be me&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><center><iframe width=\"420\" height=\"236\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/w3_0x6oaDmI\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/center><\/p>\n<p>After almost 11 years at this, it&#8217;s great to see that at least a few folks are <i>finally<\/i> getting it. While many understand <i>some<\/i> of the problems of e-voting, too many still think those probs can be solved with &#8220;paper trails&#8221; or &#8220;open source systems&#8221; or Vote-by-Mail or, somehow, even Internet Voting (via phone, tablet or elsewhere). Scott clearly understands, and smartly explains in the short video above, why the problems of electronic voting and tabulating <i>cannot<\/i> be solved by <i>any<\/i> of those methods, no matter how much many otherwise well-intentioned folks may <i>wish<\/i> they could be.<\/p>\n<p>Scott starts off by citing the extraordinary <a href=\"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=10900\">failure of Gov. Chris Christie&#8217;s emergency Internet Voting scheme<\/a>, hurriedly (and disastrously) implemented in 2012 in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond that, he goes on to make a number of spot-on points, though all of them are predicated on one key notion that, while it may still be true in Great Britain, is becoming more and more of a distant memory in the U.S. every day: An election where everyone in the public is allowed to observe the removal of <i>hand-marked paper ballots<\/i> from the ballot box, and watch them being counted right then and there, is the most secure and &#8220;trustworthy&#8221; election possible &#8212; at least based on hundreds of years of vote counting in democracies&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>As mentioned, that point is becoming a distant memory in the U.S. For evidence, see the <a href=\"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=10962\">recent &#8220;recount&#8221; of the last U.S. House race to be called<\/a> from the November 4th election, between Martha McSally (R) and the incumbent Rep. Ron Barber (D) in Arizona&#8217;s 2nd Congressional District. Aside from the electronic vote-counting irregularities in the race, the contest, which originally ended with a margin of less than one-tenth of one percent, was recently &#8220;recounted&#8221; by the same computer optical-scan systems that tallied the hand-marked paper ballots in the first place (either correctly or incorrectly &#8212; nobody can know for certain without an actual public hand-count of those ballots). In addition to using the same computer systems to tally the ballots again in the &#8220;recount&#8221;, the process itself was also done largely in secret. (The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.azcentral.com\/story\/news\/politics\/2014\/12\/17\/mcsally-barber-election-recount\/20536189\/\">final results were revealed by a state judge last week<\/a>, with the Republican who was said to have won the initial tally by 161 votes declared as the winner of the &#8220;recount&#8221; by 167 votes out of some 220,000 cast. Sadly, there is little reason for voters to have confidence that those final results reflect the <i>actual<\/i> will of voters in AZ-2, since the hand-marked paper ballots cast in the district were never tallied, publicly or otherwise, by actual human beings.)<\/p>\n<p>With the hard fact about the necessity of public counting in mind &#8212; what we describe as <a href=\"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=7417\">&#8220;Democracy&#8217;s Gold Standard&#8221;<\/a> around here &#8212; Computerphile&#8217;s Scott goes on to note these other very important points (among others):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&bull; There is no reason to simply &#8220;trust&#8221; anybody or anything when it comes to elections. &#8220;Trust&#8221; has no place in democracy or vote counting.<\/p>\n<p>&bull; &#8220;OPEN SOURCE&#8221; USED WITH ELECTRONIC VOTING AND TALLYING SYSTEMS IS <u>NOT<\/u> A SOLUTION!<\/p>\n<p>&bull; When it comes to the madness of Internet Voting, as Scott explains: &#8220;It is a <i>terrible<\/i> idea, and if a government ever promises to use it, hope they don&#8217;t manage to use it before you get a chance to vote them out.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If I could hire this guy to take over <a href=\"http:\/\/www.BradBlog.com\">The BRAD BLOG<\/a>, I would. He&#8217;s 100% on the money on these points and, because he&#8217;s British, he sounds way smarter than I do when he shouts about them.<\/p><p style=\"margin-block-start: 0.9rem; margin-block-end: 0.9rem;\">[<i><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/PsychoticusRexx\/status\/545658925337440256\">Hat-tip @PsychoticusRexx on the Twitters&#8230;<\/a><\/i>]<\/p><p><center><i><b>* * *<\/b><\/i><\/center><center><b>Please <a href=\"https:\/\/BradBlog.com\/Donate\">help support The BRAD BLOG&#8217;s<\/a> fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system and much more &#8212; <i>now completing our ELEVENTH YEAR!<\/i> &#8212;  as available from no other media outlet in the nation&#8230;<\/b><\/center><\/p>\n<p><!--BB-DONATEPITCH-START--><\/p>\n<div style=\"background:#f5f0e0; border:2px solid #6b5a2e; border-radius:6px; padding:10px 14px; text-align:center; font-family:Georgia,serif;\"><span style=\"display:block; margin:0 0 8px 0; color:#3a2e0e; font-size:0.95em; line-height:1.5;\"><strong>The BRAD BLOG<\/strong>, <em>The BradCast<\/em> and <em>Green News Report<\/em> are all 100% independent and 100% listener and reader supported!<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/Donate\" style=\"display:inline-block; background:#6b5a2e; color:#ffffff; padding:6px 18px; border-radius:4px; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:none; font-family:Georgia,serif; font-size:0.9em;\">Please CLICK HERE to help support our work today!<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!--BB-DONATEPITCH-END--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This guy, Tom Scott of Computerphile, is right on the money in every respect, when it comes to electronic voting &#8212; be it via touch-screen computers, paper ballot optical-scan systems or, God forbid, Internet Voting. If I was British, and younger, and better looking, and smarter, this would be me&#8230; After almost 11 years at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,28,136,357,50,126,166,348],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-10991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arizona","category-election-reform","category-great-britain","category-internet-voting","category-new-jersey","category-rights-and-freedoms","category-touch-screen-vote-hopping","category-vote-by-mail","bb-type-bradblog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10991\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10991"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=10991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}