Thread by @mattblaze

Voting security involves a difficult and complex set of problems.

Now that November is finally over, I hope (and am cautiously optimistic) that we can more calmly discuss making US voting more accessible and secure.

A REALLY great place to start is here: nap.edu/catalog/25120/…

Some of it is counterintuitive. Most voting machines are, frankly, pretty crappy. We COULD try to make them better, but we'll never make them good enough to rely on. Fortunately, there are rigorous auditing methods that let us get reliable elections with UNRELIABLE machines.

So election security experts are focused less on improving the software and hardware (ultimately a fool's errand) and more on improving the election process (e.g., by incorporating audits as a routine part of the election certification process).

How to achieve this and whether it can be done depends on some specific properties of the voting system and the processes around it. (The important part is that it produce an archive of reliable paper ballots that reflect the voters' true choices).

I've also written a bit about this stuff. See, for example: georgetownlawtechreview.org/wp-content/upl…