“The last thing I would do is trust a computer program,” says the owner of a car company developing self driving & rocket company building automation into rocket launches.
To be fair, I wouldn’t trust a computer program for voting either, but I would trust and ride in an autonomously landing rocket.
Which is why I much prefer the scantron type fill in the bubble ballots, you get a full digital count with an easily cross referenced ballot.
So you fully trust computers that can kill you and others without a thought, but you don’t trust a computer to do the insanely simpler task of “count paper?”
Also, musk and all the other disingenuous shitheads are complaining about any digital counting, including your preferred scantron ballots. They want very slow, flaw ridden human counting only, so they can inject chaos and noise into the electorial system and force the “congress picks the president” process in our constitution that will always favor the GOP.
Paper ballots are already used in 98% of all US elections, they are just counted digitally. These are not serious people with serious concerns.
A computer that lands a rocket incorrectly is found out immediately.
A computer that tallies votes incorrectly may never be found out.
Well, actually that’s correct, which is why there are various approaches to make it possible to trust an output of a computer program, verify it against that of other such computer programs, and so on.
But in my opinion the whole idea of voting sucks. It’s less democratic than sortition. With sortition minority positions are disadvantaged, but with most systems involving vote they are absolutely trumped (pun intended, though saying “harrised” would not be as far as I’d like).
Republics which used sortition have historically existed for very long spans of time. In Antiquity, in Middle Ages, during Renaissance. It’s harder to cheat with. Which also means it’s harder to sow distrust in.
And, well, humans are superstitious creatures and results of sortition are much more similar to how they see divine will.
Sortition is also more honest, it doesn’t abuse the human instinct of allowing politicians more than their rightful mandate when elected by a majority vote. When the reason a person holds some position is because a of a lucky die, the society looks at them more critically and they themselves know they won’t enter that river for a second time.
That’s why you’re supposed to have paper backups. And you audit things.
Edit: I think you could even get a real time audit and still be electronic with backups
- You go to machine and vote
- It prints off a copy of what you voted and records it (this is the primary vote count)
- You verify the paper ballot print off and take it to a second area to be recorded and kept for audits.
- Put ballot in second machine which validates and counts the vote and externally shows a counter increase on the machine for votes counted (not who) so you also know this machine counted it for a total.
So now you have the proper vote tallies from 1. The audit of the correct amount of total records from 4. If there’s any cause for concern or for auditing, you can manually count the paper ballots.
