xfk-ghob-sxt (2025-03-06 23:02 GMT-5) – Transcript

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David Busby, David Busby's Presentation

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David Busby: body's ready. Says to make sure everybody's ready, but it's just me recording myself. I want to talk about voting systems electronic voting actually specifically because I'm in USA and there's only two vendors that do this in the USA.

David Busby: I've been thinking about this for a while and I even feel like I wrote some code for myself ages ago, but I'm unable to find it at the moment. And I am going to do some digging around maybe one of these days to try to find that that I was thinking about. But I thought, I'll just make a little video real quick where I at least Put the pedal to the metal here. Put out what I'm thinking about maybe just how I sorry think the universe should work. and I have something here that's just stupid keys that I made. I'm looking around in my data set and I have this thing called box pop from 2018, but I'm not doing any of that anymore.

David Busby: So, let's just start something or other, there used to be a spot where Google had some play canvas and I, don't know where that is anymore. So, I'm just going to make myself a new document. I'm going to call it box. I'll come back to why I'm calling that in a little bit. Got my Google shed here. So when we talk about electronic voting and oops let me do this thing I meant to do a second ago. Going to share my screen. It's finding my old code. I had this thing called box populi.vote way back in 2018. I never got anywhere with it.

David Busby: I talked to myself about it and, never made it anywhere. Now I'm talking about it in real life. I might have something on one of my other systems. I wonder if it is actually even still active. How long has this even been around? Here's another thing I found, but I was calling box. I'm Adosio. This thing says it goes back to 2011, but that was probably copied in. 2019 seems like a more reasonable thing. This is a structure for web apps that I make. holy s***, that website still resolves. I wonder what's there.

David Busby: Wow, this old ass web page is still here this is one of my OG web designs for Adosia. Look, if you're inclined, you can go back and you can look at how we did these rounded corners. It's not the modern CSS way, but this is a thing I've been thinking about. Vox touchscreen terminal in the P polling place, reasonably good election database. That's a polling database. Somehow I want to have a lot of transparency somehow in the system. And so electronic voting, that's the thing I'm talking about. One thing we want to talk about, people like paper ballots and I don't know how it works where you work live, but where I live we have a motor voter registration.

David Busby: And so you just get your driving license and then boom, you're registered to vote. You're in the system. although I think it might take one voting cycle to get you in there or something cuz I moved here Massachusetts and then I register got my driving license and then the first time I went to vote they were like hey we don't know who you are. You got to do a thing. I was like Fortunately, it was just like the city, so I was able to get on time for the next. But folks like paper ballots, that's like a requirement. inperson voting is another use case. let's tag this use case. Paper ballots. Got to do vote by mail. That's what we do. MA. I'll write an MA on there.

00:05:00

David Busby: I think Washington also does that. I used to live in Washington and I remember you would get your ballot and then you could either drop it at a dropbox next to the library or something or it just goes in the post. So, vote by mail is also really a popular way. I don't know if I'm on paper ballots, but there's a lot of noise on the internet and in media made that paper ballots is the only thing you can trust. So maybe we will just agree that that is true and say that that's okay.

David Busby: But something that I was always frustrating for me in I filled out my ballot and then I put it scribble on that, put that in another envelope that goes in the mail. I send that off and then maybe you get a little tear off piece at the top with some serial identifier on it or something and says " yeah, we counted your vote, but what did you count my vote as?" we got to have integrity in the system. I should be able to somehow, audit my own vote. And that's not anything anytime anybody's been talking about. They said, " you got to get paper ballots." That's all we can trust. Except all the paper ballots I send it off. So, goes into a private little room. A bunch of people who I don't even know go in counted and say, " my this guy voted for Bo Jiden or this guy voted for Donald Trump."

David Busby: but I get to see how my vote was actually reconciled into the system. Do I get to know that? and some people do lots of finger wagging and say, the system was rigged." So, how can you** prove the system is rigged? You sent your vote in and was your vote counted? You can look it up. It says, " yeah, we got your ballot, but did you get my ballot?" and put all of my, intention into that. Did that make it through to the system? So, anyways, people want to vote by mail something. And, I'm going to just call this you need a good voter role. And that's that's the first part of this. You got to have a good voter role.

David Busby: you need to know positive identification of that voter and where they live so they're going to be. So positive voter ID. This is a requirement. there's noise made about whether or not the cit the voter is a citizen, whether or not they're qualified to vote. And I think that's solved right here. that's not a technology problem so much because these folks is going to show up with paperwork necessary when you register to vote. I don't think proving citizenship, proving this identity, proving this other thing and proving this other thing at the time of polling is the right answer.

David Busby: approve it when I register and then that registered voter who's been positively identified at that time gets to take that positive voter identification from olling mechanism from the voter ro chanism, me into the voter polling mechanism and execute one vote, one person, one vote.

David Busby: I feel like everybody agrees one person should get one positive voter ID on the voter role. I'm going to back the step up a second here because I'm talking about some things and I don't know if everybody's on the same page with me but there's two discrete components. There's more than that but there's two at the top level right. The first thing you have is the voter role slashregistration. This thing seems to keep wanting to suggest that though for me, thanks but you got the ro side of the thing who is the registered voter? That's one system that is, all of this is USAcentric. So in USA, it's very typically managed by a state election system unless it's a smaller level county or city or some other subadministrative area.

David Busby: polling, maybe they administer their own, but a lot of this stuff and even at the federal election layer that's executed by a state's or there's five commonwealth state or a commonwealth election department of the government there. the other side of it is you have the voter vote. You'll have to forgive my fingers. They've been drinking. voter poll side of the thing and that could be considered the ballot. So that's the other side of that thing. So on voter role we got to give positive voter ID when you register to vote. We need to know who you are. We need to know you're not double registering. We need to know that you're qualified to vote in that region. and sometimes there's interesting little things there that a region has you've just moved here.

00:10:00

David Busby: you haven't lived here for 30 days, and you have to live here for 30 days, and then you can register to vote, and you must be registered to vote 30 days before the election. So, if you move to a spot 45 days before an election, you can't meet those qualifications to be registered to vote for that region. And I don't know if you get to vote in your old region. I recently did move across the country and I was unable to vote in an election in the state that I moved away from. And then I landed here and I said earlier, I was not on the registration for the first election that I thought I qualified for being here. And we are a motor voter state.

David Busby: So, I don't know, maybe that's just I was a victim of the complexity of the registration mechanism. so on the positive voter ID, I feel like that's all we've really got to do on the registration side, make sure that they are qualified to vote. And on the oll pool, let's go on the voter polling side, you need to have an accurate ballot and that means things like it's got to have the right candidates. It's got to have the right what's it called? Any propositions or questions or whatever your state or commonwealth calls that mechanism.

David Busby: your county because you're here, your county may have some county level questions and your city may have some city level questions. so that means all necessary what should we call them options options federal also called AL national state SA SA1 subad administrative region one

David Busby: just as a note for yourself, your county, and your city, which I'll just say SA 3. Just making BS notes in my own head here while I'm riffing here in real time on what the system should do. I'm sort of looking at some of my notes from that 2019 directory that we saw, but I'm having to feel it out from code because I didn't even put a readme in there like a dumbass. So, here's my new readme. I'm going to put the word read me up there too. And you can see I'm scribbling a little markdown. This will make it into some code. I plan on prototyping these systems. So, you need an accurate ballot. you need to support those three use cases that are critical at the top.

David Busby: a paper ballot, but then paper ballot actually works itself for both in person and vote by mail. So, live real time and that's going to have a paper ballot and I want to have a confirmed receipt. I hope I spelled that I guess it have a red squiggle if I done it wrong. All right. And so then the other thing you got to do is buy mail. That's also a paper ballot. f*** this editor confirmed. Let's see. Man, I feel like that's okay.

David Busby: So maybe you can use the whole One thing I really want is online internet mode portal. I have this dream and you might have seen it from this old ass web page. Damn, I wonder if there were screenshots. Damn, I didn't put any screenshots. I kind of s*** the bed on this. This page has been here since last updated in 2011. H, but my directory for it was showing 2019. That could have been when I moved all the crap onto this server. I've been thinking about this for a while and I never bothered to publish it. shy about being on the internet anyhow, something like that. But no mas.

00:15:00

David Busby: So, I wanted an online internet voting portal. I feel like Traders are doing online trading. They are trading on a daily basis massive amounts of money. By which I mean to just highlight. We have these secure encrypted systems that can communicate with each other that do very very important things with millions of different individuals, millions of dollars, more than that on a daily basis. And we sort of all just put a whole lot of trust in that. you've swiped your credit card on a little widget that's plugged into somebody's phone.

David Busby: and you're like, "This ought to work, and you go to the internet and you can go to a website and click a couple of buttons and commit to a loan for a piece of property that's worth a million dollars or 300,000 or some kinds of numbers. You can take out a big loan. You can have a trading account and trade lots of dollars on options as an individual, right? All of these things are worth hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars and they're happening with millions of people every day on these internet encrypted systems. So just seems reasonable that a similar kind of infrastructure with this reasonable level of encryption we could all trust somehow.

David Busby: Maybe voting is more important than that. But I think that the total of those activities that occur over the course of a whole year and then voting that happens one or a couple of days or if you have mail in there's a lot more options. that's hard to quantify either one of those, but both worth a whole lot of value, and modern encryption technologies seem to be doing a very good job of keeping those transactions protected.

David Busby: So I feel like they should be able to keep votes protected somehow. So yeah, that's this basic design. it would be very hard to make a voting terminal, some hardware, online internet voting portal. It would be really the Bees knees. if you could get some registration mechanism from your state election agency, as your voter registration, and they send you the thing and they say, " and here's your ballot." And magic. Because we haven't figured that all out yet, right? This is phase one of infinity.

David Busby: and here's your ballot. And you can go to this special governmentrun website, fill out the data, and that registers your ballot in the system in real time, So, you could vote online in real time from your f***** sake, you do it from your mobile phone. if you can buy a house with your mobile phone, you should be able to vote from your mobile phone. Maybe I should just write here the mobile phone voting. Put this as a question mark. Vote at Home home online. Is online hyphenated anymore?

David Busby: portal at polling place and maybe we got to wind it all the way back here. We say Lots of people like to finger wagon say paper ballots is the only way. I obviously not smart enough to know the right answer there, but seems like any of these things could be an online voting mechanism that allows you to generate a PDF that you mail in I say PDF. Let's take the brand out of there. Generate printable document. gosh.

00:20:00

David Busby: I'll just say PN PDF because I do care about what the text stack is. I did mean printable and I sure did mean document again. my fingers have been drinking. and then you could just mail that s*** in. Mail and I'll leave the profanity out and that's how your voter is counted. But then afterwards, voter poll, that's where the voter gets their opinion Critically important, register my opinion. And then there's the vote count, ballot count.

David Busby: is there any other fun words that people call this? ballot count, resol resolution. I don't know. They say something like this. And so now we got to have a system that somehow this whole voter polling mechanism with an accurate ballot that's maybe live in real time and is able to be confirmed and received and all that other stuff gets over here.

David Busby: Real time audit trail is another thing I'm thinking about. you got it'd be cool if we were having folks vote online. Then their vote could get registered in the system when they've filled out an online portal and then they have the printable document that they can visually look at and verify. And then they fold that up and they mail that in.

David Busby: And now the election department's got a real time vote from somebody. They got a paper confirmation from that person that they've sent in. And you could just at home print two copies of your s***. And so now you've got your own little voter ballot receipt, right? You've got the word receipt on any of this, D. confirmed receipt. And I'm going to write the word retained receipt. That's a feature set I think we need to have.

David Busby: So now I don't just fill out my ballot with a little square or a little oval shape with number two pencil and then mail it in and then say, I hope they counted me." All right. I should be able to say, I was vote some secret code that only I know that, doesn't map back to me." I'm the secret vote. One, two, three, four. One even secreter. One, two, three, four, five.

David Busby: or I can go and look myself up and I can see that they made sure that they counted my vote for you whoever I picked, whichever a****** I picked. As if I'm not picking some a**** not to sound too jaded. So real time would be Audit trail. this is a in confirmation. and Okay, guys, got maybe it's my drunk fingers, but I got put on my glasses so I can see this.

David Busby: voter trail, ballot count resolution, mail my thing get an audit trail, mail in confirmation, and then I think something else that would be a cool feature, and this might be my wrap for today's rant on Vox, that's my name, Vox for this. my thing would be when these votes are counted, when the system is integrated, there's two major parties in the USA. Depending on how you like squint and look at it, maybe there's four. and then it would be cool. There's also the state agency that runs the election that's involved.

David Busby: And then possibly you've got some independent auditor if that doesn't happen very frequently in USA but there's some other countries that I think it's like a UN observer or something like this that might look at elections sometimes. So, that's enough letters for multi- agency reporting, we'll call it. And so that would be where you would send your thing to a party political political.

00:25:00

David Busby: f*** this. whole party B, C, D. I'm done with this. Anyways, you send it to those four parties and then you send it to the state election you guys agency. And then you also sent it to What did I say? independent observer. I'm going to just run spellch check later. I'm kind of done with this. But that would be like the need feature set there. So now I've got a nice voting system. if all of my dream on this thing that I've outlined here, I've talked to a bunch of other nerd friends that I have who think that this project is incredibly too big for anybody to try to take on.

David Busby: And that's why I decided to do this voter role registration. You got to get positive identification of voters on the thing and we need to make sure that one person gets one vote and that vote can be verified and authenticated and counted. I label this section use case because I think this is common requirement. I hope I spelled that right. This is just based on what people They want paper ballots. In-person voting must be supported. We do that in the Vote by mail also must be supported. We do that in the USA. I think that going to 100% electronic is not viable. let's just write that down. 100%

David Busby: Auto corrected me. Yeah, probably spell check that s***. what? And then this is the stuff I'm saying it needs. We got to have good positive voter ID. Already said that accurate ballot. All these different types of regions that do this, I got question one at my state. My county's got a school something or other going. My city's got local water assessment kind of s** going that we got to vote on, stuff like this. So, got to be able to support that and also be able to have a mechanism that can construct the right ballot so that Essex County, Middle Sex County, Sussex County can all get the right ballot. All the other counties that I love. Sure.

David Busby: would be really awesome to get an advisory count in real time. Should I say advisory? as people be able to vote and may be able to vote electronically, possibly from their mobile or desktop or something, produce that paper ballot, send that in. But you could get real-time advisory feedback even from larger counties. Los Angeles, San Francisco, things like this. but I want to be able to confirm my receipt. I voted in Massachusetts. I've never been at a spot where I filled out my ballot, told them who I wanted to be in what spot. Sometimes you feed it into a machine.

David Busby: used to feed it in a machine and in the ballot procedure at OD to school like this and then my papers gone, and I never knew what happened after that. That was California. Then I'm in Washington. dropping it in the thing by the mail at the library. Hope that it works, and you could never know. I'd love to be able to get that confirmation. I'm going to just confirmed receipt and retain receipt. Man, this s***'s a big deal to me. So, text color. It has highlight color, What are we going to do? Nah, This s***'s important. Big red. That is an ugly red. Sorry. What's up?

00:30:00

David Busby: out also ask none just doing that. this is also the same s* paper ballot confirmed receipt. So the state agency sends you something. The agency mails to What? E O T E R. the agency mails to the voter and they got a paper ballot and there's confirmed receipt and maybe the agency gives you one I mean I don't know how on mailin voting you'd be able to have a copy of one you filled out and a copy you can retain and make sure they're the same because you could make a mistake a human would make a mistake between two mail one in and then retain one and go this doesn't match there's got to be a better way I don't know what it

David Busby: quite yet, but maybe the brain will figure something out. I'll be doing more videos and drinking. agency mails to vote conservancy online. yeah. The online one is like maybe instead of mailing me the ballot, I can do something online and get duplicate copies of pieces of paper that I can know are for sure and legit PDF, mail that s** in and print it off of my home machine and mail it in or go down to Kinko's or Packmail or whatever it is you got in your neighborhood. print it from work, something like that. And then this last one is the mechanism for the tally.

David Busby: I didn't even use the word tally right there, Tally me f****** banana, though. Is that how you spell Tally. Hi. Put that s** in** banana plantains, too. I guess they're good. I love them. and this mechanism we want to be able to support real time audit trail political party man let's just collect all correct all this s*** political party come on you f*** why aren't you highlighting for me to copy there we go state electron agency election agency and an independent observer should all be supported

David Busby: And sort of what I mean by all of this is, the voter at the end of the day should be able to look at when your vote gets counted by the universe or some agency responsible for that vote tally, it should land in multiple independent systems. And then you could go and look at your own individual vote in the system to see, what did this system tell me my vote was? And it'd be really, really cool if back one level. Vote Alley data dumps.

David Busby: be really really cool if at the end of all these guys could give us a boat tally data dump so that you could see so we could all see here's that Audi trail it was an Audi trail s*** broke down and it's been a mechanic for the last four weeks and so these data dump

David Busby: I'd be able to get a big old data dump. 7 million people live in my state. It's not 7 million people that vote, children, people who don't care about voting. But we should be able to download what is it like the people 40% of half of eight is four. 40% of seven. I'll just say 3 million without trying to think too much about it. But I should be able to download a file that contains One line of text for every vote and then columns going across for every single item that was on the ballot. Excuse me. And then with my magic sauce, I should be able to just magic sauce with some kind of mechanisms for my voting ballot, my registered ballot. I should be able to find my line item.

00:35:00

David Busby: I should be able to invite six of my friends over to sit around my computer and look at a three millionline text file and they would each be able to look up themselves in the same text file and be like, " there's mine and it matches my s***. and there's mine and it matches mine." and then that's the kind of mechanism all everybody could trust that you could see your s*** was in there tallied up, because this file is big ass text file, not anybody but a reasonable number of people that exist in the universe and especially in USA would be able to write scripts in their favorite programming language, Python or JavaScript or something very popular in 2025, and parse through that whole file and run with their own tally.

David Busby: And if that thing's an accurate data dump and you see the news agency and the state election agency says, " we had a million votes for Bo Jiden or Donald Trump, million votes here, million votes there. you'd be able to download that same data dump and go, " f***** sake. I downloaded the copy of the data set from political party and they counted such and such a number. I downloaded from B and they counted such and such a number." the thing is on a system like this A B C D agency independent observer data sets you download from all of those cats should match up if they've all been able to register and count all the votes accurately. Now we got six counts and especially on something like this parties ABC this is competitors agreeing with each other if that matches up. You know what I'm saying?

David Busby: this state election agency, they're supposed to be independent, they're supposed to be independent. But now we got six basically we got six jerks that don't like each other. And if all that data sets agree and all that data sets available to the gen pop and we can download it and you can write a Python script and your friend who's a computer goober who you trust can look at it and say, " yeah, s*** checks out." Then you can trust the voting system. That's the end of the stuff. Everyone sees the audit trail. I'll just call it Fat ass data dump. All the votes. I'll say that. And then did just sort of riff on this.

David Busby: I say one voter per row in options votes per row, right? it would be a columns on the spreadsheet. So the next one of these Thanks for paying attention to my ran Stop Thanks for paying attention to my rant. Next one, we're going to come around, I'm going to riff on some of the ideas on how to execute some of the stuff. I'm probably going to start off talking about the voter role. we're going to do that one Then the next I'm going to talk about r polling mechanism, how to ask the voter the question.

David Busby: The third one I'm gonna come around and do just a top level riffing on how to count the tally me banana. Get that audit trail and get that data dump so folk can trust the system. if the proletarian can't trust the system, we've got a huge problem and we need Very important. that's a top level importance. Thanks for coming to my rant.

Meeting ended after 00:39:13 👋

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Vox - Part 1/n

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Transcript

xfk-ghob-sxt (2025-03-06 23:02 GMT-5) – Transcript

Attendees

Transcript

00:05:00

00:10:00

00:15:00

00:20:00

00:25:00

00:30:00

00:35:00

Meeting ended after 00:39:13 👋