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 threadMatt BlazeMar 29, 2023

It would be great if we could safely vote online. Not only would it be convenient, it would also mean that a whole bunch of longstanding, very important, extremely difficult computer science problems had been solved. which would make all sorts of useful-but-currently-impossible things beyond voting possible, too.

But unfortunately, those problems haven't been solved (and may well never be). So we can't. Sorry.

Show threadJP Etcheber
@mattblaze But we just need a little more crypto to make it work! Just one more pull request oughta do it.
Mar 30, 2023 at 1:04amWeb