[grondilu]

I'd rather say it's a good idea but it also is a technical problem that is not yet convincingly solved. It is clear though that open source by itself is not a solution, for the very reason you mention (how can one be sure about what code is running on a machine one doesn't own?).

That being said, from times to times articles show up about someone who claimed to have invented a viable solution. So we should not diss the idea and keep an open mind. Eventually someone will find a solution.

[specialist]

"Eventually someone will find a solution."

First define the problem.

I demand the Australian Ballot: private voting, public counting.

After studing this extensively, I believe there is no way to digitize elections and preserve the Austalian Ballot. Because there is no digital equivalent of the physical secure one-way hash (shuffle) of dropping ballots into a box.

Any crypto- blocko- based system has to design for the whole election. Not just the voting. Including pollbooks, which record when ballots are issued to voters. Including precinct-based election counts, because every single precinct gets a different ballot (say 500 voters).

Maybe someone will prove me wrong. Cool. Then show me. The burden of proof is one them, not me. Otherwise, stop wasting everyone's time with technophilia sideshows. We've got real democracy with real work to do.

---

Alternately, any proposal has to replace the Australian Ballot with something new. Some ideas which would simplify the problem space:

- replace winner takes all with Approval Voting;

- issue separate ballots for federal, state, county, and local elections;

- decide that time-boxed privacy, where the secret ballot is preserved until an election is certified and then made public, is sufficient

- supplant our current loose voter ID regiment some kinda of U2F futuretech.

[nobodyorother]

pvote.org seems like a decent solution, it's <500 lines of code that needs to be audited.

That doesn't handle auditing the machines themselves, but as the 2016 US presidential election recount found in Wisconsin, the tamper-evident machines showed evidence of tampering, so maybe we're closer to knowing whether the trusted systems we use to count votes are trustworthy.

Of course, the current machines are still Diebold ("Premier Election Solutions"), so who knows. Ken Blackwell will make sure only the right folks vote, anyway, just like he did in 2008.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> pvote.org seems like a decent solution, it's <500 lines of code that needs to be audited.

Quoting from the website:

"Pvote is small. The current version is 460 lines of Python. It uses Pygame for graphics and audio."

So, add to that 130000 lines of pygame, 1.5 million lines of cpython, 14 million lines for gcc, 20 million for the linux kernel, ... and you haven't even begun to list all the stuff you would need to audit?