Matt Blaze
Election security is hard, and US elections have some unique problems and constraints (we have, overwhelming, the most complex ballots in the world, for example). There are non-intuitive tradeoffs everwhere.
An excellent resource for understanding US election security, especially as it relates to technology, is this 2018 National Academies consensus study, "Securing the Vote". It was published eight years ago, but is still current.
Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸
@virtuous_sloth @mattblaze for me, a Californian, I regularly vote for school boards at all levels of education, judges, local and state officials (usually legal or financial responsibilities), regional boards for water or transit, sheriff, prosecutors. On top of that, it's usually 10-20 direct ballot measures like approving bonds or changing the state constitution on every ballot.
Bruce Elrick
@mattblaze
Do you have a list of all the things Americans vote on?
Here in Alberta, Canada, we have:
1) federal elections: candidates for Member of Parliament of Canada
2) provincial elections: candidates for Member of the Legislative Assembly or Parliament of a province
3) municipal elections: city councils (not sure what the rural equivalent is), mayors (usually the weak kind that are functionally counsellors at large), & school board trustees
4) occasional referenda
Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸
@mattblaze I want to underline what you said about complexity.
My family are dual citizens, Canadian and US.
My daughter turned 18 and was entitled to vote in both countries.
Her first ballot in Canada had 1 choice: member of parliament.
Her first ballot in California had 81 choices: dozens of local, state and federal elected positions as well as a wall of local and state ballot measures.
Matt Blaze
That said, there has been significant progress in securing elections since the NASEM study was published in 2018. Paperless "DRE" voting machines have become largely obsolete, greatly reducing the attack surface of elections in most states. And statistically rigorous post-election audits are starting to be performed as a routine part of elections in more and more states.
There's still quite a bit of work to do, but US elections have been getting steadily more secure and robust.
Bruce Elrick
@evan @mattblaze
I wonder if the sheer number of decisions ends up hiding what functionally ends up being less actually agency, mostly in terms of a lack of diversity in the choice options.
Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸
@philip @mattblaze Not to mention!
Philip Mallegol-Hansen
@evan @mattblaze Not to mention the party-specific elections?! Which were totally unexpected news to me.
Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸
@oddhack @mattblaze Here in Quebec, they are separate elections. The municipal one has had the most choices I've had to do so far -- four. City mayor, city council, borough mayor, borough council.
Jon
@evan @mattblaze does Canada not elect local and province officials, or run those elections separately from federal offices? It seems convenient to the voters to get it all done with at once - the multiple special elections in California to replace Swalwell are somewhere between nuisance and botheration (especially since I'm voting by fax from the EU, now).
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