“The last thing I would do is trust a computer program,” says the owner of a car company developing self driving & rocket company building automation into rocket launches.
So you fully trust computers that can kill you and others without a thought, but you don’t trust a computer to do the insanely simpler task of “count paper?”
Also, musk and all the other disingenuous shitheads are complaining about any digital counting, including your preferred scantron ballots. They want very slow, flaw ridden human counting only, so they can inject chaos and noise into the electorial system and force the “congress picks the president” process in our constitution that will always favor the GOP.
Paper ballots are already used in 98% of all US elections, they are just counted digitally. These are not serious people with serious concerns.
Yes, it’s called a paper copy of the vote cast. The problem isn’t technical, it’s a trust issue.
You can’t trust an entirely digital process for voting, because either it’s not independently auditable, or it’s not anonymous. Our current system of vote counting requires an independent group of people counting a subset of the ballots in order to ensure the voting was done fairly. You can’t do that if the process is entirely digital.
The people in this thread aren’t just jumping on a Musk bandwagon, the dude is a moron and he is trying to sow doubt in the process.
I myself support the current scantron style system that we use in our local election offices here. You get the instant electronic counters, and you get a paper ballot that can audit that the electronic counters did their job correctly. There are many other ways to have a perfectly valid system, but this one is extremely robust against any sort of tampering.
Well, actually that’s correct, which is why there are various approaches to make it possible to trust an output of a computer program, verify it against that of other such computer programs, and so on.
But in my opinion the whole idea of voting sucks. It’s less democratic than sortition. With sortition minority positions are disadvantaged, but with most systems involving vote they are absolutely trumped (pun intended, though saying “harrised” would not be as far as I’d like).
Republics which used sortition have historically existed for very long spans of time. In Antiquity, in Middle Ages, during Renaissance. It’s harder to cheat with. Which also means it’s harder to sow distrust in.
And, well, humans are superstitious creatures and results of sortition are much more similar to how they see divine will.
Sortition is also more honest, it doesn’t abuse the human instinct of allowing politicians more than their rightful mandate when elected by a majority vote. When the reason a person holds some position is because a of a lucky die, the society looks at them more critically and they themselves know they won’t enter that river for a second time.
not to mention brain chips. Remember, every accusation is a confession with the MAGA crowd. I bet we’d find a few gems in the code for tesla and twitter now
That’s why you’re supposed to have paper backups. And you audit things.
Edit: I think you could even get a real time audit and still be electronic with backups
You go to machine and vote
It prints off a copy of what you voted and records it (this is the primary vote count)
You verify the paper ballot print off and take it to a second area to be recorded and kept for audits.
Put ballot in second machine which validates and counts the vote and externally shows a counter increase on the machine for votes counted (not who) so you also know this machine counted it for a total.
So now you have the proper vote tallies from 1. The audit of the correct amount of total records from 4. If there’s any cause for concern or for auditing, you can manually count the paper ballots.
“The last thing I would do is trust a computer program,” says the owner of a car company developing self driving & rocket company building automation into rocket launches.
To be fair, I wouldn’t trust a computer program for voting either, but I would trust and ride in an autonomously landing rocket.
Which is why I much prefer the scantron type fill in the bubble ballots, you get a full digital count with an easily cross referenced ballot.
So you fully trust computers that can kill you and others without a thought, but you don’t trust a computer to do the insanely simpler task of “count paper?”
Also, musk and all the other disingenuous shitheads are complaining about any digital counting, including your preferred scantron ballots. They want very slow, flaw ridden human counting only, so they can inject chaos and noise into the electorial system and force the “congress picks the president” process in our constitution that will always favor the GOP.
Paper ballots are already used in 98% of all US elections, they are just counted digitally. These are not serious people with serious concerns.
A computer that lands a rocket incorrectly is found out immediately.
A computer that tallies votes incorrectly may never be found out.
Of all the hot takes I’ve read on the internet today, this is one of them.
You do know that the electronic vote counts are audited, right?
There’s a process to validate that the machines are counting correctly.
Yes, it’s called a paper copy of the vote cast. The problem isn’t technical, it’s a trust issue.
You can’t trust an entirely digital process for voting, because either it’s not independently auditable, or it’s not anonymous. Our current system of vote counting requires an independent group of people counting a subset of the ballots in order to ensure the voting was done fairly. You can’t do that if the process is entirely digital.
The people in this thread aren’t just jumping on a Musk bandwagon, the dude is a moron and he is trying to sow doubt in the process.
I myself support the current scantron style system that we use in our local election offices here. You get the instant electronic counters, and you get a paper ballot that can audit that the electronic counters did their job correctly. There are many other ways to have a perfectly valid system, but this one is extremely robust against any sort of tampering.
Software that killed a pedestrian recently.
Well, actually that’s correct, which is why there are various approaches to make it possible to trust an output of a computer program, verify it against that of other such computer programs, and so on.
But in my opinion the whole idea of voting sucks. It’s less democratic than sortition. With sortition minority positions are disadvantaged, but with most systems involving vote they are absolutely trumped (pun intended, though saying “harrised” would not be as far as I’d like).
Republics which used sortition have historically existed for very long spans of time. In Antiquity, in Middle Ages, during Renaissance. It’s harder to cheat with. Which also means it’s harder to sow distrust in.
And, well, humans are superstitious creatures and results of sortition are much more similar to how they see divine will.
Sortition is also more honest, it doesn’t abuse the human instinct of allowing politicians more than their rightful mandate when elected by a majority vote. When the reason a person holds some position is because a of a lucky die, the society looks at them more critically and they themselves know they won’t enter that river for a second time.
What are you talking about?
Picking a random person. If looking up a word is too hard
not to mention brain chips. Remember, every accusation is a confession with the MAGA crowd. I bet we’d find a few gems in the code for tesla and twitter now
That’s why you’re supposed to have paper backups. And you audit things.
Edit: I think you could even get a real time audit and still be electronic with backups
So now you have the proper vote tallies from 1. The audit of the correct amount of total records from 4. If there’s any cause for concern or for auditing, you can manually count the paper ballots.