[FRIAM] Ranked Choice Voting app

[Jon Zingale]

Cody,

I'm inspired to contribute some thoughts to yours.  I feel that
whatever *fix* is imagined for voting, we should be prepared to
adopt it for a long time. The process of testing out new voting
schemes may take a few administrative cycles and may become
vulnerable to manipulation or degradation as the *concrete dries*.
I can see value in putting time limits on the experiment and taking
measures to protect this experiment from tampering by any given
administration. Precedence set by changing something as foundational
as voting demands careful thought. If voting systems be allowed to
change with fashion there will be vulnerabilities introduced, perhaps
similar or worse than the exploitations we are seeing in almost every
other aspect of government. To be fair, the present voting scheme already
appears corrupt or out-of-spec from my point of view. I do think it is our
responsibility to think about this problem.

Secondly, I would like to contribute some thoughts on the topic of
remote voting. Perhaps rather than solving the app based voting
issue perfectly, we could aim at having certainty for validating
votes that is better than already exists. It may be the case that
under a *phone app* voting system, we still end up with voters in
Florida that have been known dead for a decade. If we can assess
what the present error bars are then we can have a goal in mind.

There are certainly many truly good thoughts on cryptography
and as Neal Koblitz has pointed out in a bold non-paper paper
<https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018.pdf>,
one of the functions of the NSA is to act as consultants on cryptographic
practice. For our entertainment, let's imagine a collaboration between the
NSA and some large gaming company, Blizzard perhaps, where the goal is
to develop a *critical application* voting app. While I anticipate
aggressive
objections from some friam readers, there is something worth thinking about.
A friend of mine pointed out that when classic World of Warcraft was
recently
released, Blizzard was prepared to have over 500,000 simultaneous users.
These users are not making 15 one-time choices but rather orders of
magnitude
more choices. These choices are handled fairly consistently, with few
dropped
packets and with little lag (each of which is demanded by the online gaming
community). This suggests to me that there *are *industries, like the
gaming industry,
that have thought very carefully and for a long time about the problems of
large
scale concurrent user bases and verification of its user base. Surely the
tech is
out there, but I am unsure what the next careful steps ought to be.

Cheers,
Jonathan Zingale
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