I've had at least two journalists (from reputable places) ask me about hacking papal elections and/or how we can apply the security for electing popes to US elections.
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I've had at least two journalists (from reputable places) ask me about hacking papal elections and/or how we can apply the security for electing popes to US elections.
Just no.
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The papal election is surprisingly secure, and I imagine we could take some lessons from it.
For example, the people who count the votes are selected at random, so it's almost impossible to bribe the vote counters.
How Secure Is the Papal Election? - Schneier on Security
Spanish translation Portuguese translation As the College of Cardinals prepares to elect a new pope, security people like me wonder about the process. How does it work, and just how hard would it be to hack the vote? The rules for papal elections are steeped in tradition. John Paul II last codified them in 1996, and Benedict XVI left the rules largely untouched. The “Universi Dominici Gregis on the Vacancy of the Apostolic See and the Election of the Roman Pontiff” is surprisingly detailed. Every cardinal younger than 80 is eligible to vote. We expect 117 ...
Schneier on Security (www.schneier.com)
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@BlueDot This is just stupid.
There are fewer than 200 people voting, they all know each other, and they're locked in a room together
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"Stupid" is a bit harsh.
Obviously we can't lock all American voters into a room while we count their votes, and that's not the lesson I suggest drawing from the Schneier piece.
Paper ballots are a Good Thing, because they can be recounted by hand. That could be part of a minimal standard for fair elections.
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Doing an election canvas at scale does require expertise, and machine counts, but some hand counting of a subset of the ballots (to validate the machine count) should be a part of every election. And selecting people at random for that low-skill task wouldn't be a bad thing. It would create a group of ordinary citizens who've seen with their own eyes that the count was fair, which could help counter the anti-democracy propaganda.
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@BlueDot @mattblaze I’d like to slightly challenge your assumption that machine counting is required. Australia counts about 17 million votes each election - all on paper and by hand - and there is nothing in the system that wouldn’t scale to ten or twenty times that size, which would be required for a near 100% turnout in the USA, given more people to do it (which you have, by definition.)
(One thing that is required that the USA does NOT have is a properly funded, widely trusted, entirely politically independent body that runs elections, like the Australian AEC.)
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@whybird @BlueDot Here's a sample ballot and voter information pamphlet from San Francisco from 2020. It's 233 pages long, and lists all the ballot questions. There are 38 questions (making this a small ballot for California), using four different voting methods (vote for one, vote for k out of n, ranked choice, and yes/no).
Good luck tallying that without a machine.
https://sfelections.sfgov.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Voting/N20_VIP_EN.pdf
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@mattblaze @whybird @BlueDot I like to use California ballots to jump scare Europeans. Never fails.
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