
Team at Rice builds machine to transform the way we vote - reckel
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Team-at-Rice-builds-machine-to-transform-the-way-10821587.php
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benaloh
This is an exciting new application of "end-to-end verifiable" voting
technology -- together with many other high-assurance features. Voters can
check for themselves that their votes have been properly counted without
having to trust voting equipment, venders, or officials.

More information can be found at
[http://traviscountyclerk.org/eclerk/Content.do?code=News.Sta...](http://traviscountyclerk.org/eclerk/Content.do?code=News.StarVote)
and [https://www.usenix.org/conference/evtwote13/workshop-
program...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/evtwote13/workshop-
program/presentation/Bell).

~~~
ScottBurson
Ah, thanks for the link to the actual technical details (the Usenix one).

I'm not an expert in this field and I haven't studied this design in detail,
but at first glance it appears to have been done very carefully and to take
into account all the important requirements around verifiability, anonymity,
and hacking-resistance. Looks like good work.

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bhickey
[https://thevotingnews.com/team-at-rice-builds-machine-to-
tra...](https://thevotingnews.com/team-at-rice-builds-machine-to-transform-
the-way-we-vote-houston-chronicle/)

------
mzw_mzw
"The drumbeat of election rigging and foreign hacking of voting machines" \--

None of that happened.

~~~
mynameishere
It was indeed hilarious to watch the media collectively spin two narratives at
the same time: 1) The "emergence" of "fake news" and 2) The "hacking" of the
election.

For anyone who wasn't watching: Unnamed sources in the CIA claimed that the
DNC, a noted private organization, had their email hacked by Russian sources
of some variant. The emails detailed among other things the collusion between
the media and the DNC to work against Bernie Sanders and Trump. The media,
once again collectively, made this seem like the _election itself_ was somehow
hacked, with the obvious purpose of delegitimatizing the guy who beat their
favored candidate.

Julian Assange says he got the emails from an internal leak.

Okay, so no matter how you look at it, pretty much every major source of news
was spewing forth genuinely fake news in torrents of excess. Meanwhile, they
were also going on and on about what they called "fake news" coming from two-
bit bloggers of the "alt right", as well as some scammers who gamed Facebook's
algos or some bullshit. Pure Chutzpah.

~~~
dragonwriter
> For anyone who wasn't watching: Unnamed sources in the CIA claimed that the
> DNC, a noted private organization, had their email hacked by Russian sources
> of some variant.

It wasn't just the CIA, it was the consensus of the entire US intelligence
community. And it was reached after private cybersecurity experts
(CrowdStrike) reached and publicly announced similar (but somewhat _more_
specific as to the exact Russian government actors involved that the public
statements from the intelligence community) conclusions.

> The media, once again collectively, made this seem like the election itself
> was somehow hacked

No, it didn't. In fact the media often explicitly stated that that was not, in
fact, the case (often also citing specific government sources who articulated
high confidence that that was not the case.)

> Julian Assange says he got the emails from an internal leak.

Which claim the media also prominently reported.

> Okay, so no matter how you look at it, pretty much every major source of
> news was spewing forth genuinely fake news in torrents of excess.

Even in your distorted description, there is no account of anything that would
be "genuinely fake news"; at most there is a suggestion that entirely factual
news was reported in a way that created a false impression of a different
event, and that itself rests on your omission of some and distortion of other
relevant facts.

