[FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[jon zingale]

Eric,

Yes, what are the next actionable steps? In an upstream post I wrote:

"Maybe a little flippantly and without dragging this entire post into design
details, the voting app needs little more than a Facebook like-button, a
Redis
server, authentication, and a light-weight rest API. If the idea were to be
taken
seriously, such an app could be written starting now for an election in four
years. It could be tested and verified by a trusted agency, like the NSA."

While the preceding quote effectively gets at the idea, I will further spill
e-ink in the hopes of saying something practical, but first... Given the
power
to do so, I might try redirecting a hundred billion dollars from next year's
military budget towards collaboration between big tech and government. The
acceptance criteria would include public access to the code and the platform
would be subjected to a week-long national hack-a-thon, complete with
outrageous
prizes and awards. Since this fantasy risks getting to far-out, let me reel
things
back a bit.

Let me begin with a mission statement: Our goal is to introduce a trusted,
reliable and secure digital voting option for U.S. elections. Determining a
metric for success will require identifying: the scale of the project (city,
state, nation)[1], collaborators with diverse skill sets and talents[2], the
strengths and weaknesses of the current voting options[3], the
state-of-the-art
for digital application design[4].

[1] Selecting an appropriate scale for the project will be crucial to the
adoption of the application. A full-blown application backed by industry and
government organizations (with lobbyists in D.C.) could easily find adoption
at
the national level. Since the sole collaborators maybe just you and I, we
may
wish to start small, targeting the city level. Planning for this latter
case, let's
be prepared to scale if excitement around the program builds. Perhaps
borrowing
from or explicitly using a crowd-sourcing model would be good, extending to
the
state or national level manifesting as explicit *stretch goals*. Getting one
or
a few city contracts for our application may be just profitable enough to
bootstrap the process.

[2] The program will benefit greatly from the help of a diverse talent pool.
We will need to design, build, test, and maintain the application. I
advocate
for seeking out individuals versed in building scalable critical
applications
and encouraging a transparent open-source development process. I foresee a
role
for trolls and white-hat hackers as it will be important to stress test and
subject the application to *our worst*. We will need philosophers, critics,
and
trouble-finders all along the development process. That said, impossibility
*proofs* ought to be taken with a grain of salt. We will need to lobby,
campaign,
and rouse excitement for the adoption of our application. It would be good
to
inspire competition because another group may just do it better, and
ultimately
this is what we want. It will be good to attract individuals that have a
history
with and have succeeded in: affecting policy, building grassroots movements,
and
selling the moon. It might be good to work with a business incubator or
apply for
an SBIR grant.

[3] You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to
run
faster than the guy next to you. By studying the integrity of the voting
systems
presently in use, we can know where to set the bar for success. For
instance,
that the meaning of the postal service is being over-loaded in the 2020
election
strikes me as a notable risk and a potential point of failure. Our
application
should be expected to do *just one thing*, and ideally the projects future
funding will be promised independent of political influence.

[4] As mentioned in the upstream posts, large scale web-based applications
are
here: the FBI-Apple encryption dispute, 20M concurrent Steam users, 1-click
shopping, etc... Our application doesn't need to be very fancy and it would
be
good to avoid failing like the Iowa caucus. We don't need a *big reveal* on
election night and then to impress the world as it flies along flawlessly.
The
opposite is needed. By the time the application is in production, it should
be
road-worn and rugged, the code probed and debated thoroughly on stack
overflow
and subreddits. This will not be the time or place for proprietary and
opaque
black boxes. The tech can be as impenetrable as an iPhone, as packet hungry
as
a Steam server and as intuitive as drunk shopping at 2 am on Amazon. The
time
period allowed the application should mimic mail-in voting rather than the
polls.
Votes could be validated slowly if need be. Perhaps, this may be one of the
only
reasonable applications for a block-chain protocol?

Jon



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