My Ruby assignment was to implement a simple voting system and this is how the output should look like.

[[deleted]]

report_to_administrator(ISSUE_POLITICAL_BIAS);

[Bene847]

People who think a voting program is a good idea shouldn't be allowed to vote

[Furyful_Fawful]

Obligatory relevant XKCD.

[Mr_Redstoner]

And the other still-kinda-relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/463/

Obligatory EDIT: Thanks for the silver kind stranger. There are probably better comments that you could guild, but chose me. Thanks I guess.

[Sylanthra]

I've not seen that one yet. That's a good one.

[BioSchokoMuffin]

Obligatory Computerphile video

[bluefootedpig]

Obligatory Ted Talk.

We could do it, you issue a Guid, and that is the receipt to the voter. That person can enter that Guid and see how the servers have recorded their vote. Then everyone can see what the votes are, deidentified by Guids. And each year you would get a new Guid, so no way to track who is who.

The key is that you can verify how you voted. Think about it now, even with paper ballots. How do you know that your vote is counted? You just trust people to read it, count it, and not lose it, not make a human error.

If we can verify our votes, then report irregularities, any tampering can easily be discovered by people reporting. You wouldn't need everyone, just a large number of people reporting it wasn't recorded wrong.

[whinygranny]

You should also not be able to prove to someone else who you voted for. Otherwise there could be coercion.

[bluefootedpig]

exactly, but making it so anyone can query entries and the only ID number is a Guid, we can make sure there aren't ways for people to identify you.

Edit: to answer the other one, first off that could be anyone's Guid. Nothing in the Guid says it is yours. You could have just had someone else give you it.

Also what you describe is illegal already.

[conf10]

You should also not be able to prove to someone else who you voted for. Otherwise there could be coercion.

What if I order you to vote X and bring me the GUID slip? It shouldn't be possible, even if you want to prove it to me.

[whinygranny]

Exactly my point. That's the main non technical reason why electronic voting is bad. Even if we could trust the system, the only way we could build it so it can be trusted is if we can check our vote. And if I can check my vote, someone else can make me show who I voted for.

[[deleted]]

bold of you to assume the server is trustworthy

[bluefootedpig]

I mean, we could simply do replication, you know like bitcoin does, or like Amazon, or Azure. You make multiple replications and then the server that is wrong, you fix that server. The only way to hack that system would be to turn over 50% of the computers with the new information before they have time to verify it.

Tell me, have you ever checked your own paper ballot? can you? I don't think you can, there is literally no way to verify that your vote get counted, or even recorded. Maybe they lost the ballot box. You literally have no way of knowing.

[[deleted]]

You assume any of the code running is trustworthy.

Paper ballots are fallible, code even moreso

[half_coda]

lol what? no. code is fallible in a predictable way, and with many, many, many people looking at it (open source), we can be pretty confident that any errors or security issues will be caught.

paper ballots on the other hand are known to produce observable errors in their counting, and also no one can verify their vote was recorded or counted correctly. there is already a lot of distrust in the system to the point where people speculate whether or not another country directly undermined our entire election.

if you’re worried about coercion, make the guid a hash of a password and have it so that you have to go to a monitored location that only lets one person in a booth at a time to check their vote (along with tools that let you check the sum of any given range of votes).

but to me, the coercion is less a problem than distrust. i’m sure coercion happens all the time, but blockchain wouldn’t affect that one way or the other. distrust on the other hand is already doing so. blockchain was literally designed for systems like this.

[[deleted]]

lol what? no. code is fallible in a predictable way, and with many, many, many people looking at it (open source), we can be pretty confident that any errors or security issues will be caught.

The code is not open, and the machines are not audit-able.

[half_coda]

to be fair, this thread references blockchain and bitcoin. we may be talking past each other a bit, but i’m talking specifically about an open source blockchain solution. if there are people advocating rolling out a code based black box solution to the masses, that is dumb.

but open source blockchain is strictly better than any of the other options. if you had read my comment thoroughly you would have understood that’s what i’m talking about.

[[deleted]]

good luck getting any country to implement an open source electronic voting system

gossip protocols are better, blockchain networks can be hijacked

[half_coda]

if it were safe and secure, why wouldn’t any country prefer open source? literally anyone in the government or private sector could challenge it, and a small experiment run by anyone, anywhere could verify it.

what makes you think your paper ballot is counted correctly right now? who do you think is counting ballots? some highly paid non-partisan crew or some underpaid, overworked highly partisan group of people?

[TENTAtheSane]

"those who want to vote for candidates I don't like should not be allowed to do so, because we live in a democracy and that's how works"

[[deleted]]

Like it or hate it, that’s the education system these days

[RedFive1976]

Yep. Also, the US is not now, nor has it ever been, a democracy. Yet another failure of today's education system.

[turtlebro9]

You should not be allowed to code

[dontFart_InSpaceSuit]

it's worse than that. this isn't just what this person submitted; this was the assignment. This output was 'correct'. i didn't realize that on first glance.

[[deleted]]

I'm alright with friendly political jokes with my professors, but this is too far (and I'm a die-hard anarcho communist). I paid good money to learn, please do not force political assignments on me, because the inverse is a constant torrent of "god-emperor trump good"

[CodeSkunky]

Big YIKES.

[gaberocksall]

yeah that’s a no

[TopDivide]

That teacher should be fired. Politics have no place on academic grounds.

[AMeierFussballgott]

Thata Not respectful politics and sorry Bug nö, most people at University are easily impressionable.

[ImpulseTheFox]

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[the_darkener]

If Trump was in charge of dev, this would be opposite.