Posted by
jon zingale on
Aug 20, 2020; 5:06am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Curmudgeons-Unite-tp7594434p7598380.html
Eric,
Yes, what are the next actionable steps? In an upstream post I wrote:
"Maybe a little flippantly and without dragging this entire post into design
details, the voting app needs little more than a Facebook like-button, a
Redis server, authentication, and a light-weight rest API. If the idea were
to be taken seriously, such an app could be written starting now for an
election in four years. It could be tested and verified by a trusted agency,
like the NSA."
While the preceding quote effectively gets at the idea, I will further spill
e-ink in the hopes of saying something practical, but first... Given the
power to do so, I might try redirecting a hundred billion dollars from
next year's military budget towards collaboration between big tech and
government. The acceptance criteria would include public access to the
code and the platform would be subjected to a week-long national
hack-a-thon, complete with outrageous prizes and awards. Since this
fantasy risks getting too far out, let me reel things back a bit.
Let me begin with a mission statement: Our goal is to introduce a trusted,
reliable and secure digital voting option for U.S. elections. Determining a
metric for success will require identifying: the scale of the project (city,
state, nation)[1], collaborators with diverse skill sets and talents[2], the
strengths and weaknesses of the current voting options[3], the
state-of-the-art for digital application design[4].
[1] Selecting an appropriate scale for the project will be crucial to the
adoption of the application. A full-blown application backed by industry and
government organizations (with lobbyists in D.C.) could easily find adoption
at the national level. Since the sole collaborators maybe just you and I, we
may wish to start small, targeting the city level. Planning for this latter
case, let's be prepared to scale if excitement around the program builds.
Perhaps borrowing from or explicitly using a crowd-sourcing model would
be good, extending to the state or national level manifesting as explicit
*stretch goals*. Getting one or a few city contracts for our application may
be just profitable enough to bootstrap the process.
[2] The program will benefit greatly from the help of a diverse talent pool.
We will need to design, build, test, and maintain the application. I
advocate for seeking out individuals versed in building scalable critical
applications and encouraging a transparent open-source development
process. I foresee a role for trolls and white-hat hackers as it will be
important to stress test and subject the application to *our worst*. We
will need philosophers, critics, and trouble-finders all along the
development process. That said, impossibility *proofs* ought to be taken
with a grain of salt. We will need to lobby, campaign, and rouse excitement
for the adoption of our application. It would be good to inspire competition
because another group may just do it better, and ultimately this is what we
want. It will be good to attract individuals that have a history with and have
succeeded in: affecting policy, building grassroots movements, and selling
the moon. It might be good to work with a business incubator or apply for
an SBIR grant.
[3] You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have
to run faster than the guy next to you. By studying the integrity of the
voting systems presently in use, we can know where to set the bar for
success. For instance, that the meaning of the postal service is being
over-loaded in the 2020 election strikes me as a notable risk and a
potential point of failure. Our application should be expected to do
*just one thing*, and ideally the projects future funding will be promised
independent of political influence.
[4] As mentioned in the upstream posts, large scale web-based applications
are here: the FBI-Apple encryption dispute, 20M concurrent Steam users,
1-click shopping, etc... Our application doesn't need to be very fancy and it
would be good to avoid failing like the Iowa caucus. We don't need a
*big reveal* on election night and then to impress the world as it flies along
flawlessly. The opposite is needed. By the time the application is in
production, it should be road-worn and rugged, the code probed and debated
thoroughly on stack overflow and subreddits. This will not be the time or place
for proprietary and opaque black boxes. The tech can be as impenetrable as
an iPhone, as packet hungry as a Steam server and as intuitive as drunk
shopping at 2 am on Amazon. The time period allowed the application should
mimic mail-in voting rather than the polls. Votes could be validated slowly if
need be. Perhaps, this may be one of the only reasonable applications for a
block-chain protocol?
Jon
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