[FRIAM] Ranked Choice Voting app

[Gary Schiltz]

Whatever voting technology is chosen, it needs to be open source, both
software and hardware.

On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 8:52 PM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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