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Screenshots of the app the caused the Iowa caucus failures (twitter.com/varun_mathur)
12 points by Mizza on Feb 4, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



One has to repeat that any time someone has the amazing idea to use any kind of digital voting. The real problem with digital voting isn't to get it to work or secure it — although they can't even do that — the problem is, that the results can be always questioned by the losers. You can build a mathematically secure thing with all bells and whistles and the common joe can still say it was fake because he doesn't understand it. Veryfing all digital systems are doing what they should in a transparent way is non-trivial and might even be impossible.

The job of an election isn't just to decide things, but to find agreeable consensus — so a decision has to be so clear, most people can accept it even if it goes against every fiber of their body. And this form of trust in the correctness of the process works much better with paper ballots than anything else, because large scale manipulation is extremely resource intensive to pull off without being seen and it is easier to trust fellow party members when they oversaw the process and didn't find manipulation, than it is to trust a few technical experts who sre unable to substancially check anything anyways, because they themselves have to trust so many things.


And also paper ballots have been in use for a very long time, and has had attacks against it, and counter measures implemented. It's a tried and true method that's hardened against a lot of attacks simply due to the shear history.

Electronic voting has only been around for a couple decades at best (and that's generous). It is definitely not hardened by time.


Did anyone save the screenshots? Tweet has gone down.


@varun_mathur "deleted my tweet about the #IowaCaucuses app (which was starting to go viral..), and which was based off comments on @BriannaWu’s thread about the app. I believe nobody here knows anything about it and there is rampant misinformation currently"

"It is best to wait. I got fooled."


Pete Buttigeg literally invested in the dark money corp that built it and is now claiming he won because there are no results.

They are rigging the primaries against Bernie just like they did in 2016.




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