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.
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2013/02/how_secure_is_the_pa.html
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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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