this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
650 points (97.7% liked)

Today I Learned

28733 readers
566 users here now

What did you learn today? Share it with us!

We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.

** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**



Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Partnered Communities

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] jaennaet@sopuli.xyz 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Open-source means anyone can look at the code, be it on their machine or at the repository.

Yeah good luck with that. There probably aren't more than a few hundred people, thousands at best, in the world who understand the mathematics required for properly pulling off electronic voting, because it requires some sort of zero knowledge protocol – you want tamper-evident votes, but you don't want anybody to be able to connect a specific vote to a specific voter, and you also need to eg prevent the same person from voting multiple times, while also making sure that only citizens can vote.

Here, read this 2025 article on Estonia's system: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/506.pdf

Super simple. Yeah, sure anyone can look at the code, but 0.00001% of the people looking at it will understand it, and even fewer can actually spot any potential problems because the systems are so damn complex. And what's worse, you can have holes in your voting system that you don't know about until way after a vote, and then you may not have any way of knowing if the vote was valid or not

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

The point of laminated receipts, is to allow a voter to give physical proof if something is wrong with the digital system. If there are enough people who reveal their votes, they can use it to force an investigation. By having every physical ballot laminated by default, people can just toss it into a storage box and not worry about it falling apart if something comes up some years later.

[–] jaennaet@sopuli.xyz 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

What do you even need the digital system for at that point?

Like, did you even bother to look at that article? Electronic voting is incredibly complex, and if you end up having to rely on physical receipts anyhow because you can't be sure the result is right, why even bother?

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 1 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

The digital part is to make it so that voting is fast and convenient. People are busy critters, so we want them to vote, preferably by quickly filling out a form on their smartphone and instantly sending in their vote.

As they do so, they can order a voting station to print out the physical ballot, which can be picked up or sent by mail to the voter. That ballot exists to verify that the digital voting is intact, if people start feeling like something is up. If people have good vibes about the voting, they won't show their ballot on social media. However, if someone like Elon is fucking with things, people can assert that he is a cheesehead, and have the receipts to prove it.

It ain't perfect. But it is important to try to at do "mostly good", rather than being fundamentally sucky. As it is, the logistics for getting people to the booth, weird rules, and concerns like ICE intimidating people are issues.

Also, America isn't Estonia - it is a much larger nation, so there are more resources all around to tackle the problem. Heck, Estonia probably wouldn't mind becoming support staff and selling a license to make a fork of their system. FDR's administration invented social security, did the Manhatten Project, and many major social works. Government, when it is willing to, can pull off major feats. So the same philosophy can apply to voting systems.

A well designed voting system can last centuries, if we are willing as a society to put in the effort.

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

The digital part is to make it so that voting is fast and convenient

But it wouldn't be, would it? People would still have to line up and wait for their laminated receipts. The entire point of your "digital voting" system is defeated by this one element. If there's a physical component required anyway, might as well do the more secure version, and have everyone voting physically too.

As they do so, they can order a voting station to print out the physical ballot, which can be picked up or sent by mail to the voter

I'm struggling to imagine the sheer amount of paper going through the postal services with this set-up. At this point it kinda' sounds like you're a lobbyist for some paper company. New York City Hall alone passes 50-100 bills per month. And you want people to be voting on their city, state, and federal bills and laws!

It ain’t perfect. But it is important to try to at do “mostly good”, rather than being fundamentally sucky

I'm sorry to say this, but this systems is fundamentally sucky.

It requires the exact same things to go right as representative democracy, but introduces so many things to go wrong....

Also, America isn’t Estonia - it is a much larger nation, so there are more resources all around to tackle the problem

Estonia is the most digitised country on the planet, what are you even talking about, mate...?

[–] jaennaet@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

They're so enamoured with their idea that they just completely refuse to listen to reason, and they clearly don't know what the fuck they're talking about – classic Dunning-Kruger situation.

BUT THE LAMINATED RECEIPTS

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 2 points 46 minutes ago

Lamination is the KEY, dude!