Last month, I convened the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2023) at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center. As with IWORD 2022, the goal was to bring together a diverse set of thinkers and practitioners to talk about how democracy might be reimagined for the twenty-first century. My thinking is very broad here. … Read More “Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy” »
Category: voting
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Artificial intelligence is poised to upend much of society, removing human limitations inherent in many systems. One such limitation is information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making. Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that don’t do justice to their true desires. Artificial intelligence has the potential to … Read More “AI and Lossy Bottlenecks” »
Interesting analysis: This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We will show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting in themselves, also suggest that its fundamental design principle is worth investigating for application to leader … Read More “Security Analysis of a Thirteenth-Century Venetian Election Protocol” »
If an AI breaks the rules for you, does that count as breaking the rules? This is the essential question being taken up by the Federal Election Commission this month, and public input is needed to curtail the potential for AI to take US campaigns (even more) off the rails. At issue is whether candidates … Read More “AI and US Election Rules” »
Online voting is insecure, period. This doesn’t stop organizations and governments from using it. (And for low-stakes elections, it’s probably fine.) Switzerland—not low stakes—uses online voting for national elections. Andrew Appel explains why it’s a bad idea: Last year, I published a 5-part series about Switzerland’s e-voting system. Like any internet voting system, it has … Read More “Security Vulnerability of Switzerland’s E-Voting System” »
Well designed and well timed deepfake or two Slovakian politicians discussing how to rig the election: Šimečka and Denník N immediately denounced the audio as fake. The fact-checking department of news agency AFP said the audio showed signs of being manipulated using AI. But the recording was posted during a 48-hour moratorium ahead of the … Read More “Deepfake Election Interference in Slovakia” »
Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence. Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the US presidential election. Over the next seven years, a number of countries—most … Read More “Political Disinformation and AI” »
Imagine that we’ve all—all of us, all of society—landed on some alien planet, and we have to form a government: clean slate. We don’t have any legacy systems from the US or any other country. We don’t have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking. How would we govern ourselves? It’s unlikely that … Read More “December’s Reimagining Democracy Workshop” »
The UK Electoral Commission discovered last year that it was hacked the year before. That’s fourteen months between the hack and the discovery. It doesn’t know who was behind the hack. We worked with external security experts and the National Cyber Security Centre to investigate and secure our systems. If the hack was by a … Read More “UK Electoral Commission Hacked” »
The first Republican primary debate has a popularity threshold to determine who gets to appear: 40,000 individual contributors. Now there are a lot of conventional ways a candidate can get that many contributors. Doug Burgum came up with a novel idea: buy them: A long-shot contender at the bottom of recent polls, Mr. Burgum is … Read More “Buying Campaign Contributions as a Hack” »