A Vote Note & the Post-Truth Fairy

This last week, this popped through my door

I have no idea what one of these entities does, but I don’t think it’s someone who commissions crime?

For all the current faults of the UK, and there are many, at least I don’t live in a place where obtaining photographic ID is considered to be beyond the capabilities of ordinary people¹. One should, I suppose, be thankful for small mercies.

Although I did learn something new this last week. Apparently, in 2021, a library in the UK hosted an event for kids in which one of the “performers” went by the name of Rainbow Dildo Butt Monkey.

Yes.

Prepare the bleach for your eyes, or look away now.

The library ‘apologized’. I bet they did. But did nobody notice something just a tad awry when they were given the list of performers when organizing the event?

“Ah yes. Rainbow Dildo Butt Monkey sounds perfect for the kids”

So on the one hand we seem to take election security seriously in the UK but, on the other, we seem to have lost all notion of what the phrase “age appropriate” means.

But only today I learned from the world’s most wanted needed Stochastic Terrorist, Libs of TikTok, that some people in the US also seem to struggle with the meaning of the phrase “age appropriate”.

One might get the impression that the good Senator is talking out of her ass.

Twerking Tiara, that bastion of decency and good taste, is promoting a bill that will see “queer pleasure based sex education” taught in schools. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but do we really send our kids to school to learn about masturbation or anal sex?

Twerky Mack describes schools as a “safe space” where kids can learn about these things. Which rather begs the question “safe for whom?”

Yes, Jimmy/Jemima, right after your lesson on why calculus is racist, we’ll be discussing the best lubes.

Perhaps “safe space” is another of those phrases, like age-appropriate, or election integrity, that has been rendered meaning-fluid by the magic of the Post-Truth Fairy.

Now, if you’re a consenting adult into a little bit of uphill gardening, or chasing the chutney ferret, then it’s absolutely no business of mine what you get up to in the privacy of your own homes. You do you, and do your partner, in whatever way seems best for you both².

And I know through the magic of smartphones that kids can see all sorts of even worse stuff as they munch their way through a bowl of rice krispies in a morning. But I’d kind of like there to be at least one place, a school maybe, where kids have a genuine safe space from all the overt sexualization they’re exposed to.

Which brings me to today’s question. Did the (presumably) good people of Rhode Island know that Twerky Mack was intent on giving kids the low-down on the various techniques of sexual pleasure when they voted for her?

This is one of the problems with ‘democracy’, which is something we don’t really have in a very serious way. We get to occasionally vote for someone to be in office for some period of time and have no real idea what kind of things they’ll end up promoting (unless you’re naïve enough to actually believe an election manifesto).

At least at the end of this term of office there is a chance of voting someone out and installing another goon, who we hope is, at least, no worse. This is better than the alternative of having the original buffoon permanently installed. It’s ‘democracy’ of a sorts.

When the demos expresses their will, via opinion polls and the like, it’s often at odds with the ethos of the ruling elite. In such cases the will of the people is described as “populist”. Populism is described as ‘democracy’ when it aligns with the will of the ruling elite, but described as a “threat to democracy” when it goes against that will.

But what, if in your enlightened beneficial elite wisdom, the will of the people, the demos, can’t be trusted?

One thing you can do is to tinker with things like election integrity.

You could, for example, introduce mass mail-in ballots, which just so happen to be heavily in favour of the candidate you want. Prime the electorate to expect this in the months beforehand, effectively outlaw any questioning of the election result, and you’ll get away with it.

We never see this kind of thing happen in ‘western’ democracies, though, because we know how to conduct free and fair elections in a properly secure manner and would never indulge in these kinds of shenanigans.

I was involved in an EU-funded research project (about 20 or so years ago now) that looked into whether electronic voting could be made secure enough. It involved quite a few research institutions, both industrial and academic, across Europe. One of the aims was to see whether a greater degree of democracy could be achieved by allowing people to express their ‘vote’ on individual topics (referenda-style) so that the politicians would truly know the will of the people (or at least have a much better idea of it).

The problem with electronic voting is that it’s really bloody difficult, and maybe impossible, to properly secure.

When you’re designing any system that’s going to have security requirements, it’s a good idea to set out the security goals that, ideally, you want to achieve. For elections we would have the following as a kind of minimal set.

• Only authorised people can vote

• A vote cannot be altered once cast

• A vote should be both authenticated³ and anonymous

• Vote counting must be accurate and auditable

• Voting should be private so that one cannot be pressured

These are not necessarily all independent of one another. Nor is it necessarily a complete list of desirable properties.

If you’re not interested in getting the best possible solution for these, consistent with other constraints, then you’re not interested in a fair election.

Constraints might be things like cost or convenience. In general, in security terms, the more convenient you make something, the less secure it tends to be. Implementing the ‘best’ security can also be expensive. It’s also a general rule that perfect security is unachievable, so what you’re after is trying to design a system that is too hard to subvert in terms of practicality and cost (it’s kind of like trying to make the ‘costs’ in both financial and resource terms prohibitively expensive when compared to the benefit to an attacker from a successful breach).

One of the best ways, and perhaps the best (although still not perfect) to achieve a decent level of election integrity is through in-person voting, on paper, with appropriate government issued ID, in a secure voting booth where no-one can see how you voted, and with a monitored and auditable vote count. It is a really good compromise between the security requirements (which it meets very well) and cost and convenience.

It’s therefore bizarre to me, as someone who has spent a couple of years of my life trying to figure out how to properly secure elections, that I see people arguing that things like a (very) relaxed approach to voter ID or mass mail-in ballots are sufficient to meet the initial security requirements of a fair election.

These people are, very clearly, not interested in a fair election process.

But they’ll claim otherwise. It’s yet another example of the Post-Truth Fairy sprinkling xer magic fairy dust over reality.

A suitable punishment for undermining election integrity? I’d probably suggest an hour-long session with the Rainbow Dildo Butt Monkey but these folk would probably enjoy it.

1. As I understand it, the argument in the US is that the noble person of colour has been rendered incapable, via the magic of systemic racism, of obtaining appropriate ID. Requiring voter ID is, therefore, seen as yet another tool of whiteness and white supremacy.

2. Always assuming you’re not in some sort of polycule

3. Which means, in this context, that the user (and others) can check whether the (authorised) vote recorded was the vote cast without knowing who cast it.