Hello, Akira, On Aug 14, 2023, Akira Urushibata <a...@wta.att.ne.jp> wrote:
> The machines may be rigged to give a certain candidate advantages. This is unfortunately true even if they run freedom-respecting (transparent and obedient) software. There's no way for voters to tell, at the time of voting, whether the machines are running binaries that correspond to published sources, even if they're published. The solution for this is not voting with machines running free software, it's robust voting protocols with human-understandable and human-verifiable audit trails. Computers do not provide that, they're rather one of the several untrustworthy components, and one that cannot be verified. Even freedom-respecting software and hardware wouldn't cut it: they'd be obedient to the *user*, by definition, and the *user* is not the *voter*, but the electoral *committee*. OT material follows. Robust voting protocols enable voters to trust the process and the results even without trusting the committee, but relying exclusively on computers for any part of the process requires placing infinite trust on them and on those who make them. For trustworthy elections, we need processes that produce trustworthy outcomes even if we distrust the machines (if we use machines at all), and even if those who made or ran the machines or any other part of the process were violent terrorists who would pursue, torture and exterminate whoever they could determine to have voted for their opponents. > Donald Trump claimed in 2020 that voting machines were rigged. So did Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018, and again 2022, to the point that the minions who invaded the Brazilian congress, supreme court and presidential office on Jan 8th this year held signs demanding the source code for the voting machines, in Portuguese and English! But joining either side of this dispute is a bit of a distraction, and a very dangerous one. Claims that the machines are vulnerable are not disputed by demanding evidence of fraud. It is possible for the machines and for the voting protocols to be vulnerable even in the absence of fraud, or even suspicion thereof, let alone evidence. Furthermore, evidence of fraud may be impossible to get when the voting machines are designed to make fraud possible, massive and undetectable. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and absence of evidence of one occurrence is not evidence of impossibility of any. I hold a conspiracy theory :-) that Trump and Bolsonaro are both denouncing the vulnerabilities of the voting machines under the influence of groups who wish to ultimately *discredit* the notion that they are vulnerable, so that, when these groups *do* manage to defraud elections (in their favor, presumably), people won't give credence to that possibility, and people and organizations who would be expected to denounce their fraud would have already discredited themselves by joining the groundless opposition to their groundless claims. Would those who believed the potential denouncers' previous claims of invulnerability of the process start believing opposing claims so much like those they disputed before? Would voting scientists who know better about the vulnerabilities of the present voting machines have got used to disregarding the potential denouncers' claims as unfounded? It's quite machiavellian, if you ask me. -- Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/ Free Software Activist GNU Toolchain Engineer Disinformation flourishes because many people care deeply about injustice but very few check the facts. Think Assange & Stallman. The empires strike back _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss