Matt BlazeMar 29, 2023
Piece by @yaelwrites on how "Democracy Live", a peddler of discredited Internet voting systems, has attempted to buy credibility by laundering paid-for endorsements of its inherently untrustworthy products through universities.
https://cyberscoop.com/democracy-live-research-online-voting/
Online voting provider paid for academic research in attempt to sway U.S. lawmakers 

Democracy Live directed academic research to demonstrate its product's security and used that material in lobbying campaigns.

CyberScoop
Show threadMatt BlazeMar 29, 2023
Just to be clear, experts (who disagree about all sorts of things) are virtually unanimous that online voting is inherently too risky and untrustworthy for use in US civil elections. It is well beyond possible with the state of the art, and would require several fundamental breakthroughs in computer science before we could even try it. See, for a good discussion, the National Academies "Securing the Vote" consensus study, which is unequivocal about this. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25120/securing-the-vote-protecting-american-democracy
Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy

Read online, download a free PDF, or order a copy in print or as an eBook.

The National Academies Press
Show threadChris is.
@mattblaze I'm curious; I'm not disagreeing with this claim, but I wonder how you feel about the safety of electronic voting (via, say, disinterested third party applications like ElectionBuddy) for lower-stakes voting scenarios?
Mar 29, 2023 at 10:48pmWeb
Show threadMatt BlazeMar 29, 2023
@offby1 one of the reasons trustworthy civil elections are so hard is that there are a lot of requirements - vote secrecy, public accountability and transparency, auditabilty, non-transferability, etc. If your election doesn’t require all the properties of civil elections in democracies, you may be able to use less secure voting systems that aren’t suited to civil elections.
Show threadChris is.Mar 30, 2023
@mattblaze that was roughly my intuition on it too. I'll have to think to see which of those properties hold for our situation.