OTTAWA – A smug man from Canada wasted no time this morning chastising Americans for re-electing terrifying liar and felon Donald Trump, despite the fact that he plans to vote for terrifying liar and asshole Pierre Poilievre in the next Canadian election.
Matt Hunter, a 36-year-old barista, took time away from attending a Poilievre rally to rant about how stupid Americans were for falling for Trump’s fascist bullshit.
“I just can’t believe that someone could look at a petty asshole running on slogans, lies, and faux outrage and think, ‘Yeah, this guy will be good for the country,’” Hunter laughed, taking a quick second to repost an “Axe the Tax, Build the Homes, Fix the Budget, Stop the Crime” tweet on X. “It makes no sense. Luckily we up here in Canada have more common sense. Pierre says so.”
“When Poilievre becomes Prime Minister next year, he’s gonna stand up to Trump. They’re so different in ways that I can’t even describe. Don’t even ask me what those ways are. Just trust me, bro. He’ll bring Canada home again.”
I haven’t met anyone yet who was pro Trump and didn’t have a “fuck Trudeau” bumper sticker or flag or whatever.
But I do live in Alberta where there are just straight up genuinely people, in droves, that are pro trump antivax idiots.
The other day several people all in a group tried to convince me that electronic voting was unreliable and only hand counting votes could be relied on…
I love my province, but I feel an incredible sadness for most of the people that live here.
Electronic voting is an absolute security nightmare. As a software engineer, the relevant XKCD sums up my position nicely: https://xkcd.com/2030
As an engineer, you should know that no system is perfect and there are several trade-offs and threat models to consider. And electronic voting can’t be discussed in a vacuum, but measured against existing voting systems which are also full of their own kinds of issues and risks.
Trust the engineers.in the actual software domain then, electronic voting is a terrible idea. Not because it cant be done well, but because it wont be done well.
The counting machines are more than sufficient.
Trust the engineers.in the actual software domain then
Yes, which I am. Though who I’d trust the most here are the cryptography researchers that dedicate their life to researching electronic voting systems.
wave that’s literally me minus the research into electronic voting systems in particular. do not implement voting systems in software. see my initial response. its not about the technical underpinning of if we could. This isn’t a discussion. literally every person worth their weight in the space will tell you the same thing.
its the in-feasibility of doing it well and its completely unnecessary. our current system is more than sufficient using paper ballots that prevent all sorts of fuckery and are auditable. its impossible to hack a paper ballot without a ton of effort manual and physical access. its incredibly easy to hack counting machines and any electronic implementation and it only takes 1 mistake to expose everything.
there is absolutely zero reason to expose voting systems to a digital threat vector and the loss of the paper audit trail would be catastrophic for verification.
The current system gives you the best of both worlds, easy counting and a verifiable paper trail for verification after the initial counts are in. quick answers and incredibly hard to game.
the loss of the paper audit trail would be catastrophic for verification
Which is why researchers of electronic voting defend the use of Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT).
But anyway, “this isn’t a discussion” is consistent with statements like “there is absolutely zero reason to expose voting systems to a digital threat vector” so I guess there are things we seem to agree on.
And any researcher who is advocating for the paper trail should trivially realize that soon as you add that, then you literally have the system we have today with counting machines and we dont need to invite all the issues with electronic voting.
As i said take it from people who actually write software as a career. We’re literally telling you its not worth the effort/risks.
It’d be prohibitively expensive and borderline impossible due the fact you’d need to audit hundreds of millions of lines of code.
We’re literally telling you to not pay us to do that work because its a bad idea.