Facebook Funds 'Defending Digital Democracy' Initiative At Harvard (diginomica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Diginomica: A fresh initiative aimed at information sharing about election threats and dubbed Defending Digital Democracy has the financial support of Facebook and the academic muscle of Harvard behind it. Will the project succeed where similar initiatives have failed...? On 19 July and backed by a $500,000 initial grant from Facebook, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School launched a new, bipartisan initiative called the Defending Digital Democracy Project. The project will be co-led by Robby Mook, Democrat Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign manager, and Matt Rhoades, Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign manager. The hope is that creating a unique and bipartisan team comprised of top-notch political operatives and leaders in the cyber and national security world, the project will be able to to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.
The group will also assess new technologies (including blockchain) to secure elections, and wants to create an information sharing infrastructure modeled "on similar efforts within the tech industry to share tech intelligence." The article says Facebook's chief security officer "hopes that election officials who are wary of cooperating with the federal government will be more receptive to working with an independent group tied to Harvard and the tech industy," and the group also includes Google's director for Information Security and Privacy.

"Facebook plans to host state and local election officials at its D.C. office later this year to discuss the information sharing organization, and launch the organization in early 2018."

Comments

Let me guess

[Jarwulf]

'Defending Digital Democracy' means pushing some selfserving political narrative in the US rather than actually defending democracy in places companies like Facebook kowtow to like China.

Re:Let me guess

[TheRaven64]

Or places like the USA, where Facebook builds profiles about the issues of importance and opinions of the electorate, identifies the marginal voters in swing constituencies and the issues that will persuade them to change their vote, and sells this to the party that bids the highest. And, for an extra fee, will even put adds saying 'Candidate X supports {Issue that you think is the most important}' in their feeds.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Could use something like Proportional Representation, various versions of which are used in about one hundred countries.

I don't know much about US elections, but the Electoral College just sounds like one massive statistical sampling/rounding error.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

The main problem with democracy is not how you turn percentages into power, it's the percentages themselves. Most people don't spend sufficient time researching their options. Critical thinking and general knowledge about the world and its history is also very useful to make the right choice. I don't blame them since voting isn't their full-time job, and each vote contributes only 0.000001% of the decision. Democracy might work if everyone spent 1000 hours taking classes and thinking about their vote, but that would be insane so we don't. Unfortunately we end up with "garbage in, garbage out".

Re:Let me guess

[Rockoon]

Seems to me that the optimal governance method should always have a finite probability of "unseating the majority" on a regular basis even in the case that the "majority" appears to have(*) 100% support of those being governed. I do not favor "proportional representation" because it stands a real chance of getting stuck in a local maxima preventing a possibly infinite amount of higher expected value/utility.

(*) Appears to have won an election, or by some other observational metric.

Re:Let me guess

[swb]

Technical attacks on the integrity of the voting system almost seem like acts of desperation when the usual strategies of misleading voters through coordinated disinformation campaigns stop working.

The last election seemed to be an example of coordinated propaganda campaigns failing, despite presenting relentless anti-Trump messages (and Trump's own hapless behavior) failing to produce the desired outcome.

Part of me thinks it wasn't a repudiation of media manipulation per se, but that its effect was too localized on the subset of voters likely to vote Clinton, leading to a collective overconfidence. I can't decide if it was simply not supplying swing voters with enough empty reassurances that their issues were important (guns, immigration, etc) or whether the overconfidence led them to believe they didn't need to sway those voters at all.

But maybe we're reaching the stage where the "political message" is so disconnected from the voters and the structured and coordinated nature of the messaging so obvious and transparent that technical attacks on the voting system are the next logical step in assuring control without completely destroying the apparent democratic nature of the system.

At the same time, I can't discount the effects of coordinated disinformation campaigns disrupting enough voters to destabilize public opinion enough to swing close elections. Unfortunately the only way to fight that is to restore neutral credibility to the media and its constellation of experts. Unfortunately, as a collective they seem to suffer from a long-term campaign of ideological capture, eroding the public's willingness to accept their traditional role as filters and credibility validators.

Re:Let me guess

[Kiuas]

Consider where one candidate gets 60% and another gets 40%. The best system is almost certainly not one that gives 100% of the outcome to the 60%'r, but its still clearly better than giving 0% of the outcome to the 60%

Exactly because of this many countries (such as we here in the Nordics) have ditched the single candidate districts and moved towards proportional representation. It's not perfect either, but it works around this issues especially. Instead of the current binary '2 man enter 1 man leave' -from of Thunderdome politics you could just as well merge the districts so that instead of picking 1 guy from each district, you pick say, 10 and assign the seats so that the party that the 60 % party gets 6 seats for 6 of their most voted candidates and the 40 % party gets 4 seats for their top 4 guys respectively.

But this also has the 'downside' from the point of view of the established american parties that it makes gerrymandering a lot more difficult because it means you no longer get to engineer the districts so that the other side gets no power at all despite getting close to half of the votes.

Re:Let me guess

[OhPlz]

Great! If someone runs on a platform of murdering half the population of the world to combat global whatever, they absolutely should get a chance to win. This will be awesome.

Re:Let me guess

[OhPlz]

You either believe that the federal government should intrude so deeply into our lives that they control our access to health care, or you don't. There isn't much of a middle-ground. This isn't a power that is given to the federal government under the Constitution.

Re:Let me guess

[CanHasDIY]

Democracy is certainly not the best system. However its still a pretty good system. The best system probably involves some dice rolling.

I'm a fan of the Constitutional Republic myself.

Consider where one candidate gets 60% and another gets 40%. The best system is almost certainly not one that gives 100% of the outcome to the 60%'r, but its still clearly better than giving 0% of the outcome to the 60%'r.

How about when both candidates combined receive less than 50% of the total vote, including voters who abstain?

FWIW, in the last US Presidential election, 51% didn't vote at all, and of those who did, 6% voted third party; that means neither D nor R candidate actually received anything close to half the total vote.

Clinton and Romney's managers?

[turkeydance]

what losers.

We don't need new tech to secure our elections

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

The group will also assess new technologies (including blockchain) to secure elections

The most ingenious idea I have ever seen for securing ballots follows a few simple steps:

1. Assign a unique serial number to all ballots printed.
2. Use a scantron system to record the choices and serial number.
3. Let the voter either keep the ballot or a carbon copy.
4. As the votes are tallied, the serial numbers and choices are posted online on a government website so that voters can verify their vote.

Motor voter laws are probably the single biggest threat to our process aside from the lack of a solid ID requirement at the precincts. Set aside any views you have on politics and culture for a moment and just consider these facts:

1. In some states, illegal immigrants--by state policy--can get driver's licenses.
2. You can register to vote at the DMV without any form of ID showing you are a US citizen.

If any system dealing with PII, finances, etc. in your life had such a low barrier on security, would you use it? I don't think you would.

Re:We don't need new tech to secure our elections

[Zak3056]

3. Let the voter either keep the ballot or a carbon copy.
4. As the votes are tallied, the serial numbers and choices are posted online on a government website so that voters can verify their vote.

If you can verify your ballot, so could someone who could put pressure on you.

Vote for $CANDIDATE or something bad happens to your job/spouse/children/whatever is a serious potential problem.

but there's also stochastic compliance

[epine]

No, my idea doesn't work, because the Mafia can do the same thing in reverse: gather up all the receipts associated with "paid" votes, then randomly test ten (a $10,000 cost-of-doing-business fee), on penalty of worse-than-death.

I think that would reduce the enforcement cost enough to turn paying for votes into a cash-flow-positive business model.

Bear in mind that delivering on penalty of worse-than-death is not cheap (either in time now, or potential for time later). If all the rabbits are trembling enough, you won't need to do this.

Step 1 to protecting democracy

[El Cubano]

The hope is that creating a unique and bipartisan team comprised of top-notch political operatives and leaders in the cyber and national security world, the project will be able to to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.

Step 1 to protecting democracy:

Don't riot when someone with different political views comes to your campus. For comparison:

• Bernie Sanders visits conservative Christian university and gets treated like a human being and is allowed to speak: video
• [insert name of conservative politician/pundit] gets invited to [insert name of university] then disinvited after students riot (e.g., UC Berkeley)

Once the universities begin to act like a) they have a role in our democracy (we are actually a representative republic, but I am not going to split hairs), and b) start working constructively to improve it, then we may have something worthwhile.

Re:Step 1 to protecting democracy

[avandesande]

I love how more recently formal liberal darling Richard Dawkins had a radio interview cancelled by Berkley students because he is 'abusive towards Islam'

Re:Step 1 to protecting democracy

[dhawton]

What happened wasn't protesting... What happened was the very definition of rioting. And if someone is a troll, do they still not have the same freedom of speech that everyone else enjoys?