{"id":8596,"date":"2020-10-20T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-20T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8596"},"modified":"2020-11-10T07:47:26","modified_gmt":"2020-11-10T12:47:26","slug":"technology-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8596","title":{"rendered":"Technology & Elections"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"vote,<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

A set of articles in the current issue of Wired <\/em>discuss the part technology can play in improving our elections. Skeptical, all things considered? You should be. Still, here\u2019s what to watch for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Candidates and Facebook<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

James Barnes, a Facebook employee embedded with the Trump campaign in 2016 (think about that a moment), has had second thoughts and is now working to promote Joe Biden<\/a> at the political nonprofit Acronym<\/a>. It produces digital media campaigns for progressive candidates and causes. By the end of summer, though, very few voters were undecided, so their campaigns weren\u2019t making converts. One can only hope that the Trump campaign\u2019s October efforts to outspend Biden on Facebook ads in several battleground states, according to this CNBC <\/em>story<\/a>, will fall flat too.
Read: <\/strong>PW Singer\u2019s Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Voting Process<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be a state election official is to be plagued with nightmares. \u201cWe all knew we were headed into what would be a contentious election year,\u201d said Arizona\u2019s Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, in a model of understatement in this Wired<\/em> article<\/a> by Lily Hay Newman. Plus, they know they have a derailing technical problem or two: In Georgia\u2019s disastrous primary, for example, all 159 counties were using new machines<\/a> for the first time. Plus, the pandemic. Officials have had to scramble to find polling places. Traditional venues\u2014schools, community centers, churches\u2014balked. Experienced poll workers? A vanishing species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Texas election officials and a team of university-based computer scientists, Wired<\/em> reports<\/a>, have devised a way to use advanced encryption technology\u2014homomorphic cryptography\u2014to improve our notoriously vulnerable voting machines<\/a>. (Just using the term, I\u2019ve already approached the limit of my understanding of how it works.) The machine assigns a lengthy ciphertext to each vote and prints out a short identifier, akin to a bit.ly link. Voters can use these to verify their votes are \u201cin there.\u201d Part of the beauty is that votes do not need to be decrypted to be counted, so privacy is maintained.
Read:<\/strong> James McCrone;s Faithless Elector<\/a><\/em>, about a member of the electoral college who doesn\u2019t stick to the script or McCrone\u2019s brand new book, Emergency Powers<\/a><\/em>, about how far someone will go to hang on to the presidency. Hmmmmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secure Vote Counting<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this election, several states will use \u201crisk-limiting audits\u201d to validate results. These methods link the scale of the audit to the victory margin. If a candidate wins big, even a small sample of randomly selected ballots can confirm the results. In closer contests, a larger sample is needed. Bottom line:<\/em> Unfortunately, processes, equipment, and practices vary widely, state to state, and nationally, the lack of investment in improving them contributes to a loss of faith in our elections that eventually damages every one of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A set of articles in the current issue of Wired discuss the part technology can play in improving our elections. Skeptical, all things considered? You should be. Still, here\u2019s what to watch for. Candidates and Facebook James Barnes, a Facebook … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Technology & Elections - When counting votes by hand seems preferable to letting the machines do it, what does the future hold?","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[268,35,186,104],"tags":[1421,1753],"class_list":["post-8596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-real-life","category-technology","category-the-morgue","tag-james-mccrone","tag-voting"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2eE","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8597,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8596\/revisions\/8597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}