Can’t go back to the past – paper ballots

In David Dill’s article in the Stanford news, he believes that paper ballots is the gold standard we should stick to. But in reality, it’s not like we can go back to paper votes either, the amount of work of tabulating and counting the votes will only increase as the United States’ population increases.  The commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections during a panel about America’s voting technology crisis states: (46:30 in the video below)

Paper ballots also aren’t cheap. We have localities … Fairfax County, for example, they have scanning equipment and the ballots that they got printed. We are talking close to $100,000 just for ballot printing (…) It’s not realistic to expect hand counting after the election, it’s just an incredible task the amount of people and resources required. As Doug mentioned, it also isn’t just as accurate.

David Dill might be a successful computer scientist, but he would probably be a starving economist. The Country just can’t afford to spend $100,000 per county on 3,143 counties in the United States, that’s over 300 billion dollars per election.

The current systems just aren’t working

Dill also talked about how the voting systems can easily be hacked, and there is truth to the statement. The guardian reported in April 2015 that “Touchscreen voting machines used in numerous elections between 2002 and 2014 used “abcde” and “admin” as passwords and could easily have been hacked from the parking lot outside the polling place, according to a state report.” A computer scientist at tech research group SRI International stated that “The AVS WinVote machines, used in three presidential elections in Virginia, ‘would get an F-minus‘ in security.” With both our current system and past system realistically unusable, what do we do you might ask.

The Solution

The solution to this problem is end-to-end verifiable online voting. Follow My Vote hopes to be the lead innovator in this new technology. Through cryptographically secure voting, every machine has to be registered to a user who has been verified through a picture and government ID card along with an ID Key. Each user then has the ability to vote only once, but can change their vote until the poll closes. The blockchain technology allows an individual to audit their vote or the entire election if they wanted to.

About the author: David Brock is a Marketing Intern of Follow My Vote.

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Voting Laws & Requirements

Source: The U.S. Vote Foundation

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A consensus has formed around the proposition that polling, especially in multi-candidate presidential races, has become inaccurate and unreliable.

This judgment, rendered by respected experts, exposes the absurdity and corruption of the recent decision by the Commission on Presidential Debates to continue using polls to determine who will be on the stage in the fall of 2016.

Jill Lepore’s excellent article in the Nov. 16 issue of The New Yorker is only the latest in a series of authoritative pieces providing evidence of how “horse-race” polling isn’t working anymore – and explaining why. Dan Balz made similar points in a Washington Post article on Nov. 7. Michael Barone, the dean of election analysts, co-founder of The Almanac of American Politics, and pollster himself for nine years, made the case against polling on Nov. 11 in the Wall Street Journal. He also quoted his American Enterprise Institute colleague, Karlyn Bowman, saying that this may be “the end of polling as we know it.”

The New York Times has run several pieces on the subject, including an op-ed in June by Cliff Zukin, a Rutgers scholar who is past president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research.

Dr. Zukin concluded:

“We are less sure how to conduct good survey research now than we were four years ago, and much less than eight years ago… In short, polls and pollsters are going to be less reliable. We may not even know when we’re off base.”

The evidence abounds. It includes the Israeli and British elections and, on Nov. 3, the Kentucky governor’s race. The polls had the Democrat winning, but the Republican won in what was practically a landslide, 53% to 44%.

The reasons for the declining accuracy of polls are now well known:

• sharply falling response rates by voters called for their opinions,
• the difficulty and expense involved in reaching people who have abandoned land lines for cell phones (a law bans auto-dialing to mobile phones),
• and the near-impossibility of adjusting results to achieve the proper weighting of demographic groups and to determine which of the respondents will actually show up to vote.

As a result, Gallup, the premier U.S. polling organization, announced recently that it would not poll for the primaries this year and might not poll for the general election either.

But the main problem with polling is the uses to which it is being put – especially making it the main criterion for admission to debates. Lepore quotes Scott Keeter, director of survey research for Pew: “I don’t think polling is really up to the task of deciding the field for the headliner debate.”

Read more at: ivn.us

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Talk to most people about Bitcoin and several things come to mind: a secretive inventor, illicit marketplaces and the failure of one of its largest exchanges. Not exactly the kind of images most entrepreneurs want to be associated with.

But it turns out that currency might not be the most exciting thing to come out of the Bitcoin craze. Instead, it’s the technology that makes Bitcoin work, known as the blockchain, which will be truly revolutionary.

Before leaping ahead, a word on how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin, of course, is a digital currency that can be used like cash to pay for a growing number of goods and services. When someone uses Bitcoin to, say, buy a pizza, that transaction is recorded on a “block,” or a file of data. Once a block is full (determined by time — on average every 10 minutes — rather than quantity), the next block to be created incorporates computer code that refers to the preceding block — thereby building a permanent string of records known as the blockchain.
Read more at: forbes.com

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For a brief period in November 2000, it looked as if the future of the United States was going to be decided by chads—hanging door chads, swinging door chads, perforated chads, and yes, even the occasional dimpled chad.

When the electoral contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down to only a few hundred votes in the state of Florida, all anyone could talk about were the tiny perforated circles on election ballots voters pushed to indicate their selections.

The entire thing was, unquestionably, an epic mess—the voting system of the most technologically advanced country on the planet melting down for all the world to see. It was a wake-up call that the U.S. needed to take drastic measures to transform the way people voted in the 21st century.

This newfound focus on improving the country’s elections didn’t just extend to looking for more reliable balloting machines. With an increasing number of people using the Internet on a daily basis, the 2000 election sparked an interest in developing technologies that would let people vote online with their own personal computers in the comfort of their own homes.

If implemented correctly, the proliferation of online voting could solve one of the biggest problems in American democracy: low voter turnout. The 2014 midterms boasted the lowest voter turnout in 72 years. In the three most populous states in the country, less than one-third of voters submitted ballots. For off-year and primary elections, the percentage of Americans who go to the polls is even lower. During Texas’s primary election in March of last year, only one out of every 10 registered voters bothered to show up.

Low turnout leads to political polarization because the most ideologically extreme voters on either side are the most likely to participate. When politicians know they’re mainly accountable to rigid partisans, the country gets politicians more interested in shutting down the government to win political points than making compromises in good faith. Making it easier to vote by moving the action from a polling station to your pocket could only increase turnout, especially in the primaries.

Yet 15 years after the 2000 debacle, online voting in the United States has barely advanced.

The state of Alaska’s Department of Elections set up an online voting system, but no one else has replicated it. A program backed by the Department of Defense to enable online voting for Americans living overseas was scrapped in 2004, eight months before it was scheduled for deployment, due to security concerns.

Making online voting work is infinitely harder than it initially seems. However, in the past few years, there’s been a renewed effort to solve the conundrum of online voting using a most unexpected tool: Bitcoin.

Source: kernelmag.dailydot.com

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At its most fundamental core, the ultimate goal of any true democracy is to best represent the will of the people. And it is of absolutely paramount importance to note that the democracy should not only represent the will of some people from a particular demographic or sub-set of the population; the democratic process should account for the views, opinions and desires of as many eligible citizens as possible.

And while this may sound like such an obvious truth, there has been a growing problem with voter apathy and dwindling voter turnout in many democracies all around the globe. This is all while so many other nations are desperately fighting for the opportunity to elect their own governments in a fair and transparent manner. For some, the reason why they choose not to vote is that they are not engaged with the political process, disenchanted with apathy and corruption. They do not feel that the political process is relevant to their everyday lives.

In the “Viral Voting” report issued by WebRoots Democracy, many of these issues are explored in the context of the United Kingdom, but they can be just as applicable in many other places around the globe. In particular, the report takes a look at the youth vote and what it will take to encourage more young people to visit the polls. This is not a new topic and it has been stated many times before that the future of democracy should embrace e-voting technology.

In the WebRoots report, Head of Citizenship and Political Participation Programme at Demos Jonathan Birdwell indicates that only 44% of those aged 18 to 24 voted in the 2010 election, while 74% of those over 55 voted. This gap is incredibly significant. It’s not that young people don’t care about the future of their respective countries. They may not be voting in the same proportion as older generations, but many are actively poltical in more informal ways. The challenge is engaging this demographic so that the voting process can once again be relevant to them.

Read more here.

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Online voting requires independent accountability. Blockchain is the best available protocol to guarantee that accountability: a decentralized ledger that can certify any kind of event that happens online. Any user, without the need of requesting permission to an organization, can validate and count every interaction or vote that was made by an online application. Who votes remains anonymous but how many votes is verifiable. By combining this protocol with the open source application DemocracyOS (backed by Y Combinator) we could offer an online solution for voting that could guarantee transparency and openness. This is the key to online trust and a leap civic tech needs.

In one sentence, describe your idea as simply as possible.

Provide support to Open Source voting software DemocracyOS to register online votes in the Blockchain making them unchangeable and verifiable by third parties.

Briefly describe the need that you’re trying to address.

Online voting is still perceived as polling and registering votes in the blockchain can build trust in this process by making the counted votes verifiable by anyone (even if they don’t use or access DemocracyOS). Any implementation of electronic voting can benefit from this technology being available for free with its entire source code available, hopefully becoming a standard for such action. Online civic participation benefits from transparency (open source) and trust (blockchain) by having a robust combination of these technologies.

What progress have you made so far?

DemocracyOS is one of the most active open source efforts to deliver a debate and voting platform. The application has been under development for 3 years with a strong community that contributes daily to its source code (github.com/democracyos) and a hub platform for quick and easy setups. Blockchain use has grown exponentially in the quantity of transactions since 2010 (mostly for commercial applications that support Bitcoin) but as the technology matures new applications are developed. DemocracyOS development and designs team has been exploring it as a way to certify events in time (contracts, transactions and votes) as a side project. We now see it as a core feature of our software and a useful development for other civic tech apps that can benefit from it.

Read More Here: http://pi.vu/66aT.

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By better understanding how our ancestors utilized standard cryptographic theory we can better understand how the science of hiding information has changed our lives and our civilization. With this change came radical shifts in ideology and sociological environment as well as in our government and everyday lives! Give the following article a read and learn a little about what it takes to keep something hidden from someone and expand that though to how much more complex that must be to achieve in this day and age.

Cryptology is a young science. Though it has been used for thousands of years to hide secret messages, systematic study of cryptology as a science (and perhaps an art) just started around one hundred years ago.

The first known evidence of the use of cryptography (in some form) was found in an inscription carved around 1900 BC, in the main chamber of the tomb of the nobleman Khnumhotep II, in Egypt. The scribe used some unusual hieroglyphic symbols here and there in place of more ordinary ones. The purpose was not to hide the message but perhaps to change its form in a way which would make it appear dignified. Though the inscription was not a form of secret writing, but incorporated some sort of transformation of the original text, and is the oldest known text to do so. Evidence of some use of cryptography has been seen in most major early civilizations. “Arthshashtra”, a classic work on statecraft written by Kautalya, describes the espionage service in India and mentions giving assignments to spies in “secret writing” – sounds like an ancient version of James Bond?

Fast forwarding to around 100 BC, Julius Caesar was known to use a form of encryption to convey secret messages to his army generals posted in the war front. This substitution cipher, known as Caesar cipher, is perhaps the most mentioned historic cipher in academic literature. (A cipher is an algorithm used for encryption or decryption.) In a substitution cipher, each character of the plain text (plain text is the message which has to be encrypted) is substituted by another character to form the cipher text (cipher text is the encrypted message). The variant used by Caesar was a shift by 3 cipher. Each character was shifted by 3 places, so the character ‘A’ was replaced by ‘D’, ‘B’ was replaced by ‘E’, and so on. The characters would wrap around at the end, so ‘X’ would be replaced by ‘A’.

Read More Here: securityblog.redhat.com.

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