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Old Skool Election Security

The only way to truly secure a computer is to turn it off and bury it under barbed wire — so in the post-quantum age, elections go back to paper. Every ballot is a paper ballot, counted by hand. It takes a couple of weeks; they did it before the calculator, and so can we.

You cannot secure a computer

The only way to truly secure a computer is to turn it off and put it in the ground, guarded by barbed wire. Everything short of that is a race you eventually lose — and in the post-quantum age, election security is paramount. What is at stake is the consent of the governed itself, and we will not gamble it on the hope that no adversary ever has a faster machine.

Paper ballots, counted by hand

So we go old skool. Every ballot is a paper ballot, and every ballot is counted by hand. Paper cannot be patched from across the world, runs no one else’s code, and leaves a physical record any citizen can watch being counted.

A couple of weeks is a fair price

Yes — a full hand count takes a couple of weeks. That is a feature, not a bug: a result you can trust is worth the wait. And it is hardly impossible. They counted the votes of a whole nation before the calculator was invented — with far more ballots and far less math than we need today. If they could do it then, we can do it now.

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