Notices by Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social), page 2

TIL that there's something called "Silicon Valley Bank" at the same moment that I learned that every assumption I would have made about something called that would have turned out to have been correct.

One of the things about election security is that there's no shortage of well-intentioned people who don't understand that they're engineering a complex system with multiple design requirements and non-obvious failure modes. They think "I can solve this one problem with X", without realizing that X introduces 2 new problems.

I often say that election security is by far the hardest technical problem I've ever encountered. Why? Four reasons:

1) Contradictory critical requirements, particularly vote secrecy vs. transparency.

2) No truly neutral trusted third parties.

3) Election do-overs are generally impossible, so the ability to merely detect problems is insufficient. You have to reliably prevent them.

4) Much of the technology than can manage the complexity of elections is inherently untrustworthy.