To clarify goals and questions, below are two lists of questions. Below is a list of questions that we ARE attempting to answer with this project, and below is another list of questions that we are NOT attempting to answer or resolve with this project. This clarification should help with focus, so that questions we are NOT asking do not become confused with questions that we ARE asking.

Questions to answer and focus on include the following:

Is secure over-a-network(online) voting possible? (Here 'secure' is defined as being 'as secure as a non-networked paper-ballot-voting-system.')
Is it possible for a voter to securely receive a ballot from a Vote-Office over-a-network(online)?
Is it possible for a voter to submit a ballot securely over-a-network(online)?
Is it possible for a voting-office to securely receive a completed ballot from the voter over-a-network(online)? [Including: verifying what ballot was used, verifying who submitted the ballot, checking for over errors in filling out the ballot]
Is there an effective equivalent of 'encryption' to allow non-tampering over-a-network?
Is there an effective equivalent of 'encryption' to allow privacy & security over-a-network?
Is a voting system practical and realistic to implement?
What is the best way, or what are the best ways, of concretely defining "over-a-network(online)"?
What specific instances are there of voting within systems and projects that share the same core processes of choice, voting, and decision making, coordination, etc., while covering applications beyond the single instance of, for example, US national presidential elections, and that cover more partially or entirely automated systems?

Questions that we are NOT attempting to answer and that we are NOT focusing on in this project include the following:

NOT: Can online voting be an absolutely effortless and perfectly ecstatic experience?
NOT: Can a person outside of the direct-voting-process be provably safe from any voter intimidation, coercion, brainwashing, threats, harassment, discouragement, etc?
NOT: Can a person make no mistakes while filling out their ballot? (Though some additional safeguards from this have been successfully used in some states.See reference.)
NOT: Can the physical offices of staff be absolutely impenetrable to a physical break-in or loss of records due to causes such as fires.
NOT: Can hecklers and trolls be prevented from criticizing, slandering, and defaming, the election and election process even when or where there is nothing legitimate to criticize?
NOT: Can all disinformation campaigns be eliminated/precluded/etc.?

Are there elements of the voting process that affect (encourage or discourage) participation in the voting process (from user interface to requirements for participation to schedules of voting)? An aspect or implication of this may be inadvertent or targeted discrimination against people for whom a given system of voting is more difficult or less likely to be used.
Is there a way to define voting as a more general operationally-defined process that leads to more timely and practical deployments of voting tools and features?

Concept: Universality, Voting-Procedures and Voting-Processes

The view taken here is that 'voting' is a science-like process. Voting is based on procedures, numbers, measurements, feedback, and data. Voting is neither based on nor negated by not-operationally-defined essences, reifications, fears, dramas, feelings, threats, wishes, trust, authorization, belief-ness, faith, tradition, habits, permission, labels, declarations, blustering, doubts, etc. A vote is like a physical piece of machined metal; A vote exists or does not exist with the measurable features that it has, and these measurable features are and must be measurable and confirm-able by anyone who measures it. The behavior and functionality of a vote is equivalent to that vote's repeatedly measurable features. Any group of people who carry out the STEM-math-science-data process of best-practice-voting have performed voting in a way that can be audited, measured, repeated, clearly discussed, debugged, and results published. No group of people can skip or shortcut required STEM-math-science-data processes without having skipped those required STEM-math-science-data processes. As with a surgeon washing their hands before surgery, "trust" is a term better used to mean that you trust the surgeon IS following best practice, though even then it is best to verify without trust that best practice is being followed. Under no circumstances can (so called) 'trust' replace or permit the skipping of best-practice-processes for people or groups, however much disinformation may demand and violently seek to enforce exemptions from best-practice-processes. In other words, if a person or group says "You MUST trust me, so I do NOT need to wash my hands before performing surgery on you, or processing your vote, in a best practice auditable way", you are by definition being subjected to violence, coercion, fraud, disinformation, and classically-defined tyranny.

(General best practice, systems engineering?)

Conceptual Note on Identification & Verification

Voter Identification, Voting-Office Identification, And One-Time-Pads

One way of looking at the use of one-time-pads when voting (entirely setting aside the topic of online or computer networks) is that having the voter (and the voting-office) produce a one-time pad during registration for use during an election the same as issuing a voter a form of voter-id (and also giving the voting-office a verification id that the voter can check). There are various advantages to using a one-time pad over a declaratory-seal-of-much-specialness or other fuzzy form of identification. Anyone can counterfeit a 'super-special-seal' (as on a coin, or a wax imprint), but you cannot counterfeit a matching one-time-pad. And the one-time-pad can be used with the same robustness whether it is in-person, a paper envelope in the mail, by telegraph or telephone, or over a network like the internet.

Like anything else, 'social engineering' and physical disruption are not prevented by a one-time-pad or a voter id. If the earth is destroyed by an asteroid, or a person is murdered or dies, or a voting office is hit by a tornado, or a persuasive neighbor influences and convinces the voter to not participate in the upcoming election by their own individual adult choice, or if there is too severe a weathering and erosion of institutions between which there are checks and balances leaving extreme ignorant volatility to lurch systems into collapse, these issues cannot be solved as part of solving the solve-able problems of verification and identification. Just as coordinating decisions in projects should not have a single point of failure, there is no single minimal function that is equivalent to architectures in contexts with multiple categories of diverse participants and institutions, however cumbersome or premature it may be to define individuals, participants, and institutions.

Proposed Steps for Secure Online Voting

This section is primarily a proof of concept, though it should be possible to implement. The emphasis here is on best-practice process, not on maximum convenience or maximum time-resource cost efficiency. So while this model may not be ideal to use directly in all situations, it may be seen (provided tests and audits) as an ideal to not stray too far from.

Rules & Assumptions (For Conceptual-Ideal Election)

Rule/Assumption 1: There is a physical voting-office, just as there would be in the case of an all-paper election.
Rule/Assumption 2: Problems must be solved in-person with the voter present and with that voter's proof of identification in the same way that the person would register to vote (and/or cast their vote in an in-person election).
Rule/Assumption 3: Empirical tests, hypothetical tests, and security checks should be done to demonstrate how this (or any) voting system measurably succeeds or measurably fails to work. In some cases falsifiability may need to be a criteria for types of requirements for voting and coordination systems. [E.g. "I just like it." or: "I just don't like it." or "It must (or must not) have undefineable_property_X." are not sufficient reasons to use or to not use a given voting process.]
Rule/Assumption 4: Voting issues must be definable and defined in measurable and testable ways. E.g. If this system does work, disinformation will be used to prevent it from working.
Rule/Assumption 5: If the context is critiquing the mechanics of casting/submitting ballots and votes, then a failure to agree on design and rules for an election (e.g. doing a run-off or not doing a run-off, how proportional representation is, etc.) should not be considered relevant to the context of submitting a ballot. (E.g. complaints about how votes are counted (or ignored) should not be used as an argument against secure methods to (the context of the mechanics of) casting/submitting ballots and votes.)

Question: Design Questions:

printable-document format vs. .csv format?
reading document
storing document
converting document
character sets allowed...
csv., dataframe, tensor
rsv format? (rows of string values)
file and directory delimited values

Steps (For Conceptual-Ideal Election)

Step 1: (During in-person Voter Registration: start registration [not-over-a-network/not-online]:)

Before the election ends: A person, e.g. in-person, with ID (identifiable as an eligible voter according to local rules), goes to the Voting-Office to register for the vote-over-a-network (with One-Time-Pad) (online voting) process.

(Note: There is a system-design-choice to allow (or not) registration for more than one election. This issue can be related to the format/type of the submitted ballot. For example:

A. ballots that have been (or can have been) designed at the time of registration, and

B. Standardized or truncated ballots containing just choices and not all the text of the ballot (possibly a choice (e.g. choice number) and the initials of the person's name as a second factor) and

C. whether whatever form of ballot is customized for each voter (e.g. with a custom-id, verifiable as going to and coming from that one voter) or whether the ballot is standardized (and verifiable as the standard ballot for that election or more standardized) )

Step 2: (During in-person Registration: Make one-time-pads.)

For a given single vote-ballot in a given single-election (note: multiple is another design option) there need to be four physical paper documents. One "pad" (as defined here) is two identical paper documents, one for each party (two parties, in this case: 1. The Voter and 2. The Vote-Office). Since there will be two "exchanges (people sending things to each other)" (one (1) where the blank-ballot is sent to the voter, and another (2) where the filled-in-ballot is sent by the voter to the vote-office), there need to be two pads. E.g. If the voter obtains a ballot from a compromised public ballot website or a fake website (disinformation) then that vote could be disrupted unless the problem is detected and the danger avoided.

(Alternately the voting-system could be streamlined to use only one pad for submitting a standardized public ballot, but this shorter process does not include the step for the voter to confirm that the ballot was sent by the vote-office and it also prevents the office from confirming that the ballot used was the same ballot sent by the vote-office to the voter. See below for more details.)

Using two one-time-pads has several advantages. To recap: one pad is for sending the voter a blank ballot (from the voting office), the second pad is for the voter to send the completed ballot to the voting office. This allows the voter to verify that the ballot they are filling out comes from the Vote-Office at which they registered, and that only someone with physical access to the physical one-time-pad created at the time and place of their registration has sent them this ballot. And this allows for a comparison by the Vote-Office, likewise, of the ballot sent and the ballot received. The benchmark for success here is for an over-a-network(online) voting system to be as-secure-as an in-person, all-paper, voting system. Just as it is possible (in theory) for a hostile group to physically take over a Vote-Office and issue people fake ballots, or send people fake mail-in ballots in the mail, this one-time-pad-vote-by-network proposal does not prevent such physical attacks on physical paper voting infrastructure. It does however create an extra layer of verifications that can be used during and after the vote takes place, which in theory could also be used to security-harden an all-in-person all-paper voting process to make it more secure and auditable (this may also relate to the use of and questions about asymmetric keys which are different from one-time-pads). (Note: Another additional or alternative method for some of these checks may be cryptographic signing (with optional multiple signatures) from trusted authorities (Vote-Office, federal or state agency, universities, 3rd party certifiers, etc).

During the in-person one-time-pad-voter-registration: Two physical copies (e.g. QR codes printed on paper) of two one-time-pads are created (2x2 = 4 printed paper items); one set of the two pads are stored (not-over-a-network/not-online) by the local Vote-Office, the other set (pair) of one time pads is kept by the voter themselves (physically, not-over-a-network/not-online).

The software will print the one-time pads. The software will check (confirm, verify) the one-time pads. The software will erase thoroughly from memory (e.g. physically overwrite) any record of what the printed one-time-pads were. (Note, if this process is done not-over-a-network/not-online using a dedicated machine, the risk (attack-surface) of someone being able to take (exfiltrate) the one-time-pads is reduced. Especially if the custom machine does not have enough memory to store any old pads but can only process and re-write-over one pad at a time.)

Step 3: (During in-person Registration: Create Encrypted Ballot)

For the voting-office to send one ballot to one voter: The election office, not-over-a-network/not-online (enforced by software), uses the first 1:2 of the pair of printed QR codes to create an 'encrypted' version of the ballot for that one voter. Note: The ballot may be public, but it still needs to be verified. This illustrates the "verification" role sometimes lumped together with "security" and "encryption." The emphasis is not on 'hiding' the public ballot form, but on verifying that the specific ballot form that the voter is filling out is (identical to) the form that the local election office gave them.

Note: It may be desirable to have a 'verified public ballot' as opposed to a 'private ballot' which in theory could vary (for security and verification) from the standard public ballot (in a context of mapping out a potential attack space). In the case that a truncated-submitted ballot is used, some way may be desired to, e.g. make a short hash of the original ballot itself (e.g. to convert the ballot by OCR or perhaps have a QR code on the ballot (though a QR on a ballot received by a voter code could be forged, whereas a hash made by the voter of the whole ballot could not be). Perhaps having a multi-pass OCR hash of a public ballot submitted with the vote to indicate that the correct ballot was used (again, in the case of a truncated submission, for a full ballot return the whole ballot is there)(also see asymmetric signing keys). It may be possible to have both a public verified 'open' ballot format and some unique element for the voter to check that the ballot comes from the Vote-Office with the voters one-time-pad (such as a unique id code at the bottom or top of the ballot)

Step 4: (Voter Gets Not-Yet-Completed Ballot over-a-network)

During the election period (be that months, weeks, days, hours, etc.), a one-time-pad 'encoded' ballot is sent [from the voting-office to the voter] by whatever agreed upon ("electronic" or non-paper) method (website, email, SMS-text, mobile-app, S3, api-endpoint, etc.) in the form of a QR code. (note: document vs. .csv file format)

Note: As an example method for a 'personalized ballot,' a randomized process of frame-shifting the ballot so that where exactly on the page each person's vote-choices appears is random, increasing the entropy of the unique ballot (e.g. so that the voting-office can increase confidence that the ballot they receive back from the voter is the one they set).

Note: Public Ballot vs. Private Ballot vs. Hybrid

Public 'open' ballots over a network and verifiable, maybe multi-factor verifiable. (Asymmetric signed by voting office, asymmetric signed by other trusted groups: ngo, university, sister cities, etc. The idea being that 'multi-factor' significantly increases the difficulty of attack; a public open-ledger ballot on a block-chain type system may also be either an alternative or another multi-factor.
Send the vote (or allow them to download) a private ballot (or a public ballot)

Note: Another type of hybrid approach is to physically hand out general or unique ballots at the ballot office to the voter in-person, in the same process where the voter registers to vote.

Step 5: (Voter Receives the not-yet-completed ballot [over-a-network])

Voter Receives Ballot online.

(Note: There is a choice here between using a public standardized ballot or a per-person ballot (e.g. with a unique id number or such, to verify that the ballot-form sent was the same as that received, or a short-form vote which contains just the choices and not all the text of the ballot.)

Step 6: (Decrypt and print ballot [not-over-a-network/not-online])

Using one piece of software, the voter not-over-a-network/not-online (enforced by software, possibly hardware) 'decrypts' the ballot.

Step 7:(Print Ballot [not-over-a-network/not-online])

physically prints the decrypted ballot

Step 8: (Validate the not-yet-completed Ballot [not-over-a-network/not-online])

The voter not-over-a-network/not-online(enforced by software), inspects and validates that their digital scanned version of their not-yet-filled-out-ballot is the correct ballot-form intended for that election (e.g. not a tampered with or accidentally incorrect ballot). There are various and possibly multiple ways to check this (elaboration pending).

(Note: possibly the validity of the ballot could or should be checked during both steps)

Step 9: (Complete/Mark/Fill-in the Ballot with Vote-Choices [not-over-a-network/not-online])

The voter, not-over-a-network/not-online(using pen and paper), fills out the ballot (selecting their vote choices). (Details here may be important in some way: filling in a circle, selecting an option number, multi-factor, non-over-under-voting checks, etc.)

Step 10: (Digitize the Completed Ballot not-over-a-network/not-online] )

The voter, not-over-a-network/not-online (enforced by software), scans (e.g. by taking a picture) the completed-filled-in paper ballot, creating not a photo but a document or table of information (so that the one-time-pad can convert character by character). (Note: maybe some kind of mono-space font and dashes between lines to avoid spacing errors?)

Step 11: (Check Completed-Ballot for Errors [not-over-a-network/not-online])

The voter confirms that the information in their (the voter's) electronic scanned ballot is the same as the paper version of their (the voter's) filled out ballot. (Checking for errors.) (Note: Automated processes for checking ballots for standard mistakes.)

~ Step: An optional but recommended intermediate step here is to have a 3rd set of not-over-a-network/not-online-only software that will check the ballot before and or after it is filled out by the voter, such that this additional set of software can check for the "overvoting" (voting for both candidates) and "undervoting" (voting for neither candidate) issues as a safeguard (against accidentally-incorrectly filled-out-and-submitted ballots) and that perhaps Nevada has used successfully.

Question: Is there a way to optimize OCR? e.g. letter per box format? Alternatives to OCR?

various ocr applications that can be used
open source
safety, reliability issues

Reference:

"Roll Off at the Top of the Ballot: Intentional Undervoting in American Presidential Elections" December 2003 Politics & Policy 31(4):575 - 594 DOI:10.1111/j.1747-1346.2003.tb00163.x Authors: Stephen Knack & Martha Kropf University of North Carolina at Charlotte https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227617394_Roll_Off_at_the_Top_of_the_Ballot_Intentional_Undervoting_in_American_Presidential_Elections (end of reference)

Another ~'multifactor' check may be to both mark a vote-choice on the ballot also and give some information about that choice, e.g. mark candidate 2 and in a second field enter the first letter of that candidate's last name. If these do not match, the voter should be alerted to check their ballot selections. The voter, not-over-a-network/not-online(enforced by software), scans (e.g. by taking a picture) the filled-out paper ballot. (Question: ...print formats...)

Step 12: (Encrypt the Ballot [not-over-a-network/not-online])

The voter, not-over-a-network/not-online(enforced by software), uses the one-time-pad to 'encrypt' the completed ballot, producing a new QR code (which is then 'encrypted' ballot). All digital files of the unencrypted ballot are removed and the memory physically over-written on the voter's device. The paper copy of the voter's ballot can be saved for evidence or destroyed for privacy based on the voter's choice. (Note: signing signatures can be used with the printed ballot or QR-code to increase confidence that the ballot is authentic. This combines advantages of asymmetric encryption along with a physical printed paper trail for audits.)

Step 13: (Voter Submits Encrypted-ballot Over-a-Network)

Online: The voter sends their completed-ballot-QR-code (containing the voter's encrypted filled-in and checked ballot) to the local election office (sent by whatever agreed upon method (website, email, text, messaging software, shared storage (e.g. S3), api-endpoint, etc.)).

Step 14: (Initial Handling of Voter's Encrypted Ballot [Over-a-Network])

The local election office physically prints onto paper the QR code for the 'encrypted' filled out ballot, and then (double) checks (compares) to confirm that the physical print (of the electronically-sent QR code) is accurate/identical (to the QR code submitted by the voter), and (if printing is accurate) deletes the digital record and the memory is physically over-written.

Print
Check
Delete

Note: This step will most likely be done on a "computer" that is connected to a "network."

Step 15: (Processing the Voter-Submitted Ballot [not-over-a-network / not-online])

not-over-a-network/not-online, using a separate piece of software, the local election office "decrypts" the QR code for the 'encrypted' completed(choices-filled-in) ballot using the second(2:2) of the pair of printed (pad)QR codes for the one-time pad, and physically prints on paper the voter's filled-in ballot. (Note: one choice in designing the software is to directly-print-to-paper or to decrypt and display on a screen or possible save as a computer file) The voter's completed ballot is stored along with any completed paper ballot (e.g. mail-in ballots, or paper ballots delivered in person or filled out in person). (Note: Depending on the details, an additional step may be needed to convert the format of the QR code (or abridged format) to the same format as an in-person ballot. For example, if only the vote choice data are recorded in the QR code (or abridged format) the exact placement of each printed character on paper may be needed or useful for manual or automated ballot counting).

Question: How much data can a QR code contain?

Question: How redundant can a QR be for error-correction?

Question: Other pros and cons of qr codes?

Note: If the ballot is processed on an not-over-a-network/not-online not-connected to a network computer then the chances of 'hacking' the vote are reduced (the 'attack surface' is reduced).

Enter voter data into the election-results-data-set.

Step 16: (Process Election Data / Count The Votes)

The printed ballot is counted with the other paper ballots of various kinds during the normal election ballot count process.

Step 17: (Publish Election-Results Data)

The election results are processed and published. (The publication of election results is perhaps not strictly part of the question of 'secure voting' but in practice it is likely often a requirement.)

Information-Entropy, One time pads, old pads, and random number generation.

The neglected topic of entropy often comes back to byte us. If: If someone wishes to save old one-time-pads(e.g. QR-codes). Or: If someone does not dispose of old one-time-pads(e.g. QR-codes). And: If one-time-pads(e.g. QR-codes) were not generated in a sufficiently random way, then by studying a collection of old one-time-pads(e.g. QR-codes) that were generated using a not-sufficiently-random process it could be possible (or even trivial) to 'hack' the one-time-pad(e.g. QR-code) generation process and thereby be able to disrupt many parts of the voting system.

Note: 2025.04.24 Sharing whitelist-ip information while sharing One Time Pad information may be useful.

Risks, Attacks & Security

Identifying Risks

Here we look at risks from bad-actors or bad-agents. A bad-agent may be human or automated, may be local or non-local agents such as foreign states / groups. (As of 2022 ransomware is popular, and it is possible that an election system could be targeted e.g. for ransom, so designing a distributed and attack resistant framework may be important.) An 'agent' may be anything from a single person to a group of people to an AI-bot, software suit, malware software, ransomware software, thinktank, etc. (or something unclear and not simple to identify) (note: other areas of risks should be explored, and may include: -1. Constant 'internet background radiation' -2. Unintentional user-misuse -3. Unintentional administrative bungling -4. Oversights and biases (e.g. setting up a voting system and obsessing so much over absolutely obscure vote secrecy that vote auditing and best practice domestic and international observation of the vote process is impeded, impracticable, or impossible) -5. practical feasibility vs. ideals in principle (possibly similar to "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good') -6. Software design problems that cause time, logistical, or reliability problems -7. Etc.

Note: It may be important to consider both (unsuccessful) attempted-attacks and successful attacks. An unsuccessful attempted-attack should likely be considered important and not ignored simply because it was not entirely successful. E.g. possibly considering attack-attempts to be the unit in attack-space, not successful-attacks.

Bad-agents

A bad-agent will intercept one-time-pads:

1.1 - The agent would need to be physically in the room during the QR code creation, to break into the gov. office, or to physically steal from the person, without anyone knowing the QR codes were stolen.

1.2 - The one-time-pads are never stored digitally anywhere, but are only physically printed by an not-over-a-network/not-online computer.

1.3 - If the voter loses the QR code the person should cancel the process.

A bad-agent will send the voter a fake blank-ballot:

additional step: there can be additional checks such as a passphrase chosen by the person which could not be electronically surveilled from any computer (e.g. written in pen on the QR pad)

A bad-agent will send the voting system a fake filled-in ballot (pretending to be the voter):

3.1 The bad-agent would need to have both stolen QR codes and a stolen ballot that was sent to the voter.
3.2 If a voter loses the QR code then that voter should cancel/restart the process.

A bad-agent will record a fake record of the vote from the ballot:

while a possible risk, depending on the online-voting system this process (a fake record of the vote from the ballot) is the same as for any paper ballot. Variants:
change existing record
corrupt original-record-creation process (bugs and loopholes in design)
manually interfere physically in vote office during process putting in false information
social engineering attack to the same end (e.g. impersonating a voter, pole worker, technician, etc.)

A bad-agent will act on the behalf of a participant without the voter's participation:

cast a vote
cancel or change registration
try to register or get registration information

A bad-agent will act on the behalf of the voting office without the voting-office's participation.
A bad-agent will attempt to tamper with a public ballot (e.g. a ballot itself, e.g. downloading a ballot to use).
A bad-agent will attempt to tamper with public ballot-confirmation information (e.g. public information posted about the ballot by the voting office, describing and understanding the ballot and ballot issues).
A bad-agent will attempt to tamper with voting instructions and information about voting procedures.
A bad-agent will attempt to tamper with vote reporting including any information put out by a Vote-Office or similar authority.
A bad-agent will attempt to disrupt the sending and receiving of vote information (including but not restricted to blank and filled-in ballots (e.g. voting times, places, registration, ballot items, etc).
A bad-agent will attempt general or specific disinformation attacks that negatively impact the overall voting and election processes and systems.
A bad agent will attempt to disrupt or disperse the population or geography of a vote (creating a need for refugee voting).
A bad agent will attempt to gain access to a system (network, server, etc.) as a goal in and of itself: e.g. to then sell or transfer that access to a separate attacker-agent.
A bad-agent will attempt to lurk undetected in the target system indefinitely, waiting and planning for a good time to act. (APT?) (see: canary; see: living off the land)
A bad-agent will attempt to re-purpose the voting system for their own uses.
A bad-agent will attempt to disrupt access to the voting tools and processes, from enrollment to voting to results reporting and verification.
A bad-agent will attempt to disrupt the network.
A bad agent may behave in ways that are indeterminately incompetent and malicious.
A bad-agent will attempt social engineering attacks.
A bad-agent will use disinformation.
A bad-agent will attempt to disrupt infrastructure that the election relies upon (electricity, post office, transportation, new-media, schools, etc.).
A bad-agent will attempt, or otherwise effect, the disruption or prevention of the study and communication of the security, data-hygiene, or safe-use, etc., of a feature, product, item, use, context, noun, verb, etc.

(note: There are bad agents but there are also other cases and factors which at times should not be confused with bad agents. For example a tester/developer whose goal is to find and fix issues working with other developers is not a bad agent. There are various appropriate and inappropriate factors in different contexts, not everyone can be divided into bad agents and innocent users. And the details and edge cases can become tricky to manage clearly and optimally. ) see book references

Description & Overview of Process-in-Principle

This is a proposed process for reasonably secure 'online (over a network) voting.' Part of this design is that the entire process is not on-line. Rather, physical printed materials and not-over-a-network/not-online computers are used to reduce the online attack surface. A person or bad-agent can feasibly steal or tamper with a file in a network-connected computer from a remote location, but a person or bad-agent cannot feasibly/easily tamper with or steal documents in a filing cabinet or from a computer connected to the internet. This particular solution is not a perfect-for-all-cases solution. E.g. This will not be easy to use for persons who cannot ever travel themselves to a gov. office or polling place.

The primary focus of this report is the question of whether casting a ballot/vote over-a-network(online) can in principle be done with sufficient security and soundness. Secondarily, this report explores 'practical and thrifty' variations which add in factors of feasibility, cost, equipment availability, and other real-world factors that communities around the world may face in actually holding an election (i.e. not everyone has ideal funding and resources with which to carry out the perfect election). Another way to look at this distinction is that we first look at an ideal voting system to aim for, and then look at realistic voting systems.

Implementation & Secure Voting

(see practical implementation as separate after proof of concept implementation) These are recommendations for a reasonably secure online voting system that should not be significantly more cumbersome than a physical paper voting system.

To improve accessibility, it is conceivable that some local voting systems would prefer to simplify some of the security step to allow broader accessibility:

voters who have no access to a printer
voters who cannot physically travel (e.g. elderly persons in retirement home or hospital), perhaps allowing a proxy to carry documents for that person.
institutions large or small such as retirement homes or other such community organizations are well placed to be involved where voters are not physically able to travel to poles.
Military overseas are another important group of voters who are both not physically able to travel overseas yet often close to bodies of administration and organization who can facilitate voting.
Coordinated Decisions for Field-Research -- data-informed decision making -- testing decision proposals -- modeling decision outcomes --

Security Section

Additional steps can be taken to increase security.

For example:

To reduce the possibility that local staff will accidentally connect to the internet or run the software on insecure or already compromised hardware, it should be possible to create a cost effective system where staff will run a custom made operating system (custom BSD or Linux or FreeDOS, etc.) that lacks the ability to use the internet. It may also be possible to use cost effective hardware such as a raspberry pi or microcontrollers. There may be safety advantages to using micro-controllers that lack overall computer abilities and thereby lack security risks associated with those.
Put safeguards into the software to at least try to prevent using the same one-time-pad more than once.
Known issues and areas:

memory issues: use memory safe languages
fonts: restrict and regulate character-set use
communications and fishing: don't use insecure systems such as email, SMS texts, http, ftp, etc.

Unique Ballots

At this time or at a later time [a printed copy of a unique ballot] (depending on choice, timing, etc. (e.g. if the ballot has been decided which is often not the case at the time of voter registration or if in terms of security level if the voter does not trust a physical breaking of the vote office and wants in advance a verifiable ballot) (not-over-a-network/not-online) a printed copy of a unique ballot (e.g. containing if not the voter's name the equivalent of a sha256 hash of the unique ballot). Either a unique ballot or a unique ballot identification number will be used on both ends, by the voter to check that the ballot they receive is authentic and by the office that the ballot received completed and sent by the voters is authentic. (Note: some combination of a 'signed' public ballot and a signed sender/recipient may also be possible) (todo: list pros and cons of using unique ballots (per voter)

Challenges:

One area that may cause issues is if the office or voter is 'unable' to scan or take a clear photo of the document, in the same way that some people are 'unable' (which ranges from people having legitimate physical or mental handicaps to people not bothering to try) to take a clear picture of their check for their bank (so a less secure non-printed option may be desired in some cases). It is also possible that OCR (optical character recognition) may not be good enough to perform a computer-automated visual reading of a printed paper ballot, but given the use of OCR to read more obscurely printed checks, sloppily written mailing addresses on envelopes, etc., this is possibly not a terminal obstacle.

(note: .csv files may have a standardizing role here)

(note: writing characters in a grid may have a standardizing role here)

Note: It might be possible to make a kind of hybrid document solution. There can be a QR code that gives template and instruction information as to what the fields are, then items selected (boxes filled, or circles filled in) can be identified without the use of OCR. In the case of write-in ballot areas, there may be various factors that make OCR 'good enough.' e.g. if any candidate receives enough write-in votes, that situation will make that popular name a more likely candidate for matching in the case of mostly illegible scrawling. And having one letter per box may also help legibility for write-in names.

The task of automated ballot-reading perhaps should be steered away from subtle character recognition of natural-language phrases and towards clear, easily defined, targets such as a binary check-box selection. An exception to this may be write-in ballots which do occur, where some other system may be needed (binary as in: checked-box vs. not-checked-box). Though even here, OCR and having the vote double-check to see that the OCR is correct may be sufficient. (Note: The direct use of .csv files may be ideal. CSV files can also account for write-in and other edge cases. Any 'field' to fill in can simply be included either as an item in the same row and or as a column heading).

About One Time Pads

A one-time-pad is not the same as a re-use-able 'code.' A re-use-able code 'encodes' a signal and is re-used, such that 'breaking the code' will allow decrypting the document. A one-time-pad is different; a unique one-time-pad is used only one time. A one-time-pad is a one-for-one set of changes for every character in the document, each completely random, with no pattern, and each one-time-pad is used only one-time. Even in principle you cannot 'break' a one-time pad however much you examine the encrypted document (unless the one-time-pad itself is somehow defective: to be a real one time pad it must be used only once and it must be unique and random). Unfortunately, the terminology can be overlapping and a bit unclear between the reusable codes and one-time-pads. For example, the terms 'encode' and 'decode' may be used in both cases, and the overall process and purpose is usually similar or the same.

Historically, a 'one time pad' was literally a pair of identical physical paper note-pads, two notebooks, with the same set of characters on corresponding pages 1,2,3 etc. in both notebooks. By analogy this is like two copies of the same book (such as two identical copies and identical editions of Alice in Wonderland), with the same exact characters on the same numbered page of each book). Each code (e.g. each page) was used only one time, hence the term "one-time-pad". In summary: a pair of identical physical paper note-pads, each page of which was used only one time: a "one time pad."

With a one-time-pad, every character (letter, number, symbol, etc.) in the document that you are encrypting is individually changed using just one character in the [one time]pad. There is no predetermining pattern or system behind the sequence of changes resulting from using a one-time-pad that can be outsmarted or 'cracked.' The only way to 'decode' a one-time-pad 'encrypted' message is with that one-time-pad; a one-time-pad is a one-by-one, one-for-one, one character at a time, change of what the original text says. There is no key. There is no password. There is no equation. There is no shortcut. Every character or unit of the entire document is individually changed into something else in an independent way.

One-time-pads are not as efficient and user-friendly as shorter and or 're-use-able' codes in some ways, but one-time-pads are more secure and more simple. Because there is no 'key,' there is no possibility in principle to 'guess the key.' The one-time-pad must be as long as the original text itself, unlike a 'password' or short 'key' that might be only eight characters long.

Low-Tech Security & Limited-Resources

Question: Is there a lower-tech version with reasonable security for geographic locations with limited resources?

Often fewer features and narrower footprint and attack-surface increase security, but in a system starting entirely with paper and pencil, in this case the meaning of 'less' may require more explanation.

Details: The first part of this report is a more abstract proof-of-concept about whether one-time-pad voting over a network is any less secure than one-time-pad secured voting over-a-network. However, in reality actual voters and voting-offices may refuse to use an ideal secure voting system (for reasons legitimate or illegitimate). It is entirely within keeping with computer science that there are multiple possible solutions to a problem, and while one solution may be perfectly fine in theory it is simply not practical or feasible to implement (often: requiring too many resources (including time as a resources), either relatively too many (resources-required) compared to another solution or too many as in that requirement simply cannot be met with known technology (e.g. taking a length of time longer than the age of the universe to solve the problem: in principle: problem solved! in practical reality: problem not solved.)). There should be a discussion of what a good-enough solution is, and how a good-enough solution may meet the practical demands of users.

focusing on accessible technology

Entropy randomness and pseudorandomness

for security
for parts of system
security and Turing-entropy units
standards for pseudo random numbers...given different mobile computer hardware. collecting entropy?
version checks: a way for users to see what version of software is being used...
decentralization and security: does distribution lack a middle for man-in-the-middle attacks?

Fingerprinting

how to give voters anonymity while also allowing them to connect

Part 2: Practical Secure Online Voting

Goal: Practical version of 'online voting' for realistic implementation

('online voting' is likely an easy to understand common term for a more general and abstract process of automated networked project decision coordination with broad applications.)

There is a difference between only the step of casting a vote being done online-over-a-network (to get the advantages of votes being cast from anywhere during a longer time-frame), and the entire election being held online, over-a-network. There are advantages and disadvantages to an online, de-centered, open-source, election-system. Advantages:

open source
audit-able
test-able
faster
cheaper
available to oppressed and under-represented groups
modular: voting and election do not only happen during governmental elections, that is just one instance of a more general process.

Some voting locations (or regions) may not have:

printers, ink, and paper
extra air-gapped computers
a physical location to securely store paper files
broadband wireless internet
a find-able standardized address for voters to find
a safe location to vote

Most locations can be assumed to have and required to have:

basic mobile phones
basic (not high speed) internet access

Writing down the numbers and confirming with a photo (no printers needed) may be able to replace a printed QR code system while still having a paper-backup form, if only as an option (e.g. you cannot hack into and change a piece of paper).

A separate air-gapped mobile device would be feasible, or perhaps a more decentralized system would be more secure. (note: 'certificate' model)

An alternative Thrifty-Protocol for Resource-Limited Situations/Geographies

(section under construction)

Practical Voting

Q: double signed interaction, with public and private key from both parties... from the 'election' to show you were allowed to vote (unless open to anyone) and verified by voter... ...maybe during remote registration... a swap of confirmed signatures.. Q: who is who over network...

The goal here (for this practical-tool section, vs. the above secure voting in principle) is more a practical-project and less abstract (proof of concept or standard-setting): How can a local community organize and carry out a best-practice auditible vote and publish the results using (widely available and) accessible technology (such as mobile phones)?

What are some of the factors that characterize a realistically resource-limited situation? Are there some general groups of common sets of constraints? E.g. Some groups may have a safe place for a voting office but no funds for extra equipment. Other groups may not have a safe place for any voting office or official positions (needing the management of the election to be virtual and decentralized).

Question: Can virtual distributed elections be best carried out with or without support from institutions such as universities? Or more generally, what roles do 'institutions' including legal institutions, have with a fundamentally STEM/math/engineering process of carrying out and publishing the results of elections which have no reliance upon culture or belief and yet the results of which for practicality must be integrated with the 'social' system that is voting? (probably a bad analogy example: you do not need social institutions to measure the temperature of the (for example) the air, but without 'institutions' around standards and measures and even media of communication it would be infeasible to physically or intellectually communicate and use that measurement-data. (E.g. go back in time a million years: you could measure the temperature of the air just fine, but how would you usefully-communicate that temperature-information to STEM-institution-less-communities of people and how would they use that information?)

Thrifty voting systems may make more use of available multi-factor authentication and less use of equipment-expensive methods (such as dedicated printing and scanning machines).

Depending on the details of the situation, there may be some option for physical printed documents, but there will most likely be more use of non-paper methods for a thrifty resource-slim and more user-friendly system, for example in cases where there is no possible way to use physical documents.

Other methods such as chains-of-trust may be useful to harden thrifty online systems.?

General Revisions for Thrifty-Secure-Voting:

use-able with only standard mobile devices possessed by voters
no physical printed copies, so a change from OCR and paper documents to basic characters in a file.
no separate air-gapped hardware
one pad per set of elections vs. two pads per single election (backup pads?)
more cryptographic signature use?

Topic/idea: use of one time pads plus signing signatures

use and issues with signing certificates

feasibility of one time pads: attack surface of initial sharing

Notes:

individual permission drop-off folders (cloud storage like S3)
anonymized ballots (storing data without direct connection to user information)
face-picture when sending in vote
vote by phone system, tied to that phone...(note: if you lose the phone)
'done by voter' means voter-side-software vs. vote-system/voting-office-side-software, not necessarily manually done. e.g. automated error checking. (better terms probably needed)

Ballot format standardization?

csv format: pads, ballots, votes
data format / presentation format
character type...ascii?

Proposed Steps for Practical Secure Online Voting (section under construction)

For a voting system to be practical, the requirements for implementation and assumptions about what resources voters have must align and align with reality.

This thrifty-and-pragmatic (if not perfect) system does NOT assume:

that there is a voting office either as a building or as human staff
that voting-areas can afford any equipment beyond voters having mobile phones
that a voting-area can afford a large staff to manage the election
that there are institutions for safe and secure elections

Step 1: (Election-Setup: [over-a-network / online])

scheduling
enrollment
standards protocols methods and procedures

Step 2: (Voter-Setup: During online registration time period [over-a-network / online])

Before the election ends: A voter registers for the vote-over-a-network (with One-Time-Pad) (online voting) process. This may be done entirely online for most-practical voting, or other elements may be added. (Note: setup questions for entirely online vote: How list of voters is selected or checked. Voter identification online... In theory the same online system as for current voter-registration may be used and considered sufficient.)

For entirely-online-voting there is the challenge of selecting who on the internet may participate. A kind of hybrid may involve e.g. sending snail-mailed to voters (or picked up with ID from an office) to use to authenticate their online connection. note: using signing-signatures

While the thrifty/pragmatic-protocol is designed to avoid extra printer hardware, the option still exists to hand-write one-time pads, which for an election with fewer than five or 10 choices on the ballot would be practical to write down on wallet sized note (and check electronically (OCR) to make sure it is correct). A short-form ballot one-time-pad good for several ballots may be hand written and OCR-checked on a wallet-card sized card or paper.

(Question: How reliable is OCR? Is OCR reliability an issue? Is this a strong argument for all-digital and no-conversion process? (can still be printed or saved records etc.)

A short-form or truncated ballot may contain: e.g.

the number of the option-choice and perhaps
a first/last letter in the candidate's name (which could also serve as a check, similar to an empty choice check, if the name-letter does not agree with the number option). (also a check against a vote left empty?) Note: Write-in may be an issue for the truncated ballot.

Note: Ways to make sure a one-time-pad is not being used a 2nd time...a log of already used one-time-pads to check against...?...or a small hash?

The idea of a non-recoverable system, disposable, that you would restart if something went wrong, but no back-doors, side doors, etc. voter...re-register...multiple registrations?

note: https://sqrl.grc.com/pages/getting_started_with_sqrl/

Question: one time pads vs. signing keys for transmitting ballots Also: multiple party signing keys?

Step 3: Voter Obtains Ballot Online

3 options:

a publicly posted signed ballot (verifiable)
a ballot including a unique personal id sent only to that one person
both
some kind of redundancy and checking between sources and agreement of online ballots. (e.g. .edu hosting, or distributed software held by voters?)

During the election period (be that months, weeks, days, hours, etc.), a one-time-pad 'encoded' ballot is sent by whatever agreed upon method (website, email, text, snapchat, S3, api-endpoint, etc.) in the form of another QR code. Part of this process is an at-the-time randomized process of frame-shifting the ballot so that the location on the page where each person's vote-choices appear is random.

Step 4: (Voter Gets the not-yet-completed Ballot)

Optional ways to do this:

A. posted on several public sites and signed and can be compared/verified
B. collecting from (and perhaps compared across) various sources by voting software, e.g. a minimal and secure mobile device software application ("app") (For the most-resource efficient system, individually sending personalized ballots should perhaps be avoided. Question: What are the factors around this? Does a ballot need to be individualized? How does it need to be individualized?)

Step 5: (Voter Validate the not-yet-completed Ballot)

The voter on-line inspects and validates the ballot. Most likely by checking and comparing multiple sources,possibly signing keys, maybe multiple signing certificates. There could be both manual and automatic options to balance ease of use with manual thoroughness. (note: Finding universities to host copies of the final ballot may be a good option. But this step may not be feasible or necessary.) (Something like a blockchain (immutable ledger) for all users of the voting system may suffice as a good-enough decentered immutable portable verified storage system.)

Step 6: (Voter Completes the Ballot, Marks Votes)

e.g. csv format of data (vs. pdf type doc) Question: id such as biometric data?

~ step: an optional intermediate step here is to have a 3rd set of not-over-a-network/not-online-only software that will check the ballot before and or after it is filled out by the voter, such that this additional set of software can check for the "overvoting" (voting for both candidates) and "undervoting" (voting for neither candidate) issues as a safeguard (against accidentally-incorrectly filled-out-and-submitted ballots) and that perhaps Nevada has used successfully.

See Article:

Step 7: (Check Completed-Ballot for Errors [done by voter])

sanitizing inputs
adversarial inputs
impossible options (more than one option selected where only one can be)
no-vote blanks
too few for multiple selections, possiby make vote choices clear so that one selection is required for each question.
test-process errors (something breaks processing)

Step 8: (Encrypt the Completed-Ballot [done by voter])

Details depend on the file system being used. Question: If an anonymized blockchain system is used, is there a need to encrypt the submitted ballot? e.g. could the ballot have an anonymized id?

Step 9: (Voter Submit encrypted-ballot over network)

Question: recommended methods? Some kind of MFA? immutable ledger system? - frozen ledger (duplicated with hash checks) - dynamic ledger Online: The voter sends (by whatever agreed upon method (website, email, text, snapchat, S3, api-endpoint, etc.)) the new QR code (containing their encrypted filled-in-and-checked ballot) to the local election office.

Step 10: (Process the Encrypted Voter-Submitted Ballot)

thrifty encryption choice? Arguably this is a key area if one-time-pads are not being used, or not in the same way as the proof-of-concept.
format of ballot (file format: csv?) (voter checks on status?)
decrypt
data-entry: vote into system
an advantage, possibly a significant one, is the ability to skip optical text recognition and keep all data in a stable digital format.

Step 11: (Process Election Data / Count The Votes)

(storage: distributed? immutable-ledger?)

Step 12: (Publish Election Vote-Results-Data)

automated?
what to anonymize?

Step 13: (Publish Full Election Report)

documentation on system architecture
policies
rules
enrollment
method of vote-counting
security audit of system
security audit of election
questionnaires and poles
rules for margins, recounts, challenges, runoffs, etc.
open source system code
anonymized election results
election schedule

Notes:

Question: Background tests and checks during the whole process?

(election-results publishing...parts of process)

for whom
overview
winners according to rules?
types of analysis
description of system
open source code

Note: It is not clear that saving the QR codes serves any function, nor is there any need to carefully dispose of a QR code after it is used (if each is only used once).

What kind of software (singular or plural) would be needed to arrange a secure election?

Voting and the byzantine general problem

Immutable-Ledger Data-Structures (blockchains):

Could some form of blockchain constructed by election participants be used as a decentered election results platform?
General record and evidence chains. (admittance of observers, reports, events, etc.)
Note: while 'blockchains' per-se have gotten a lot of bad press, there are various ways to accomplish the goal of having distributed redundancy.

Resilience:

One strategy: Part of an online system may be to increase the number of channels by which people can try to vote, and possibly have a backup-pad. Thereby, if bad-agents shut down the main channel for sending in votes (which may be a single point of failure) the process will not be disrupted.

Is there a formal way to map the attack-surface areas of, and to compare, different systems of voting?

A Practical Election Management Package

Features of a practical voting software package:

secure messages between office and voter? (one time pad?)
secure voting platform (receive ballot) 2.1 voter registration 2.2 send or assign ballots 2.3 fill out ballot 2.4 submit ballot
Processing votes 3.1 receive votes 3.2 validate votes 3.3 decrypt votes
process votes
produce results report
schedule election
publish results report
automation of parts and all parts of elections
elections including/between non-human project elements (AI)

Mode of Voting Offices

Mode 1: single physical vote office
Mode 2: meta-population of physical vote offices
Mode 3: remote vote office(s)
Mode 4: decentralized vote office (distributed among voters)

Maybe each 'election' will have a different signing key to verify?

software platforms/languages:

(Project)

"Pseudocode for voting infrastructure"

including how to create randomized representative voting districts
including how to do ranked choice voting
including how to do (term) ? representational voting
boundaries of population and geography of vote
(make) rules for voter participation/qualification in an automated voter system

Question: Known formatting issues that make voting more difficult for the voter?

(mitigation of insecure local voting headquarters)

lack of physical voting office
lack of secure physical voting office
lack of clarity about voting area or district
2nd step of recording / publishing vote:
Uuid type random key-field
Fuzzy time stamp (month year?) unix epoch
decentered data storage
decentered decision making
decentered feedback and analytics

Holding elections in repressed areas not 'allowed' to hold their own elections

distributed self-organization
privacy and security
auditable publication with private information not exposed
it should be possible for an area to willingly hold an election and publish the results for them to be scrutinized as a fair and due process election without exposing security concerns or identities of any specific people involved
diasporic communities -"philes"?(sp?) (term Neal Stephenson term? distributed communities based on projects/interests/views?)

Pros and cons of methods of vote tallying:

decentralized vote handling...

Managing Elections vs. managing Open-Source Projects

git
book: "Working in Public" by Nadia Eghbal, Stripe Press
studies of 'tragedy of commons'

...

Using a distributed ledgers (blockchains or modified blockchains) to store results:

e.g. university trusted node anchors
maybe full-chain so no retroactive?
slower but more robust?
smaller number of participants? (or pooled participants?)
containing hash and voting record?

Using smart-contracts to manage processes through elections

Possible Multi-factor Authentication Tools:

(how much the system is data-slim... e.g. ascii cli vs. multi-media gui bloated)

voice print
picture of hand (for fingerprints)
one time pad
specific device tracking
device gis location
ip / mac address details (vpn issues?)
separate confirmation login (to confirm vote record (device, voice, etc.) after it has been processed and recorded)
face-selfie (time GIS stamped picture of person casting vote)
video of a participant(person) voting (more secure than static selfie?) or smaller-file 'encoding' (e.g. auto-encoder) of video of person voting?
timestamps? (timestamp plus geolocation?)
finger prints
wearable bio-signatures?
language use metrics...(unique to person)

Specific Deep-fake and NN-generated-photo detection

deep-fakes / cheap-fakes
fake account setup
malicious files (fake or altered pictures for deception)
user login protocols
adversarial input to automated systems(in sense just like SQL injection attacks...but SQL never being used in particular)
GPT LLM concerns (be specific)
authentication topics:

(plus)

public security log data/meta-data to be inspected by anyone about the system

Additional Questions:

What additional vote process transparency information should be included with vote results publishing? https://github.com/lineality/Auditable_Elections_Projects

Scale and Decision-Making

process indeterminacy and iteration in decision making

Japanese vs. American decision making

Case Studies:

Case Studies in Election Resilience to Disruption:

(related issue: geopolitical violence & cybercrime?) (types of sources, books, articles, news...)

Estonia?

Books:

"we are all targets", "sandworm" "Fancy Bear Goes Phishing" "people's history of computing" "cult of the dead cow"

An annotated history of how election design effects election process:

Case Studies in Disrupted and Problematic Elections:

(international?)

Case Studies in Failing to agree locally on election rules:

-(Q: how far back in time?)

book: The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by David Stasavage https://www.amazon.com/Decline-Rise-Democracy-Antiquity-Princeton/dp/0691177465

interesting group-organization models study
history of 'mandates'

Case Studies in Long Term Technical Design Issues:

SN https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-914-notes.pdf

Goals, Rules, Policies, Procedures, & Methods, Statements (etc.)

Rules-And-Procedures Statements-&-Documentation for Elections

As part of an election, other publicly stated 'open' policy and procedure information is important in addition to the ballot itself.

rules, policies, and procedures for how rules, policies, and procedures for voting are made, unmade, and changed
time and data on opening and closing of poles for a given election
times places methods for ways of voting allowed
rules, policies, and procedures schedule for repeating elections
specific schedule for repeating elections (e.g. this is a run-off vs. this election is held every 2 years)
rules for calling elections
Repeating or other type of election
Place of election
Government Structures and Levels
Vote-Office information (location, head?, contact, reporting?)
Chain of Command within and above Vote-Office

Rules, Policies, and Procedures

rules, policies, and procedures for contacting media or watchdogs about suspicious anything (emails, threats, voter intimidation, etc.)
rules, policies, and procedures for eligibility and voter enrollment
rules, policies, and procedures for selecting election-staff
rules, policies, and procedures for voter-registration
rules, policies, and procedures for per way to vote
rules, policies, and procedures for election audits (required audits, optional audits)
rules, policies, and procedures for election-results-challenge
rules, policies, and procedures for recount (automatic recounts, type of recount, etc.)
rules, policies, and procedures for overruling-election-results e.g. by gov. branches, evidence requirements
rules, policies, and procedures for chain of custody of election materials, equipment, etc., Provenance
rules, policies, and procedures for announcing and publishing results
rules, policies, and procedures for reporting information about the vote: procedures, voter enrollment and participation numbers, etc.
Should there be a 'log' of who makes changes to procedures and how?
rules, policies, and procedures for open and transparent observation of election and ballot counting & processing
rules, policies, and procedures for exit polls (what collected, from whom, released when)
rules, policies, and procedures for meetings and correspondence transparency around voting infrastructure and offices and resources
rules, policies, and procedures for foreign domestic local and internal interference with the attacks on the election process
rules, policies, and procedures for voter registration
rules, policies, and procedures for voter identification
rules, policies, and procedures for evaluation of best practice, performance, and ethics: standards, guidelines, benchmarks and audit materials
rules, policies, and procedures for raw vote results (including ranked-choice etc.)
rules, policies, and procedures for choosing vote calculation method
rules, policies, and procedures for vote calculation method (e.g. how different numbers of candidates are handled, e.g. 2 vs. not-2)
rules, policies, and procedures for specific-used vote calculation method
rules, policies, and procedures for the storage of records from past elections
rules, policies, and procedures for "stateless" voting machines (as in computer-state, memory-state, configuration-state (not political))
rules, policies, and procedures for election observers
rules, policies, and procedures for canvassing
rules, policies, and procedures for advertising
rules, policies, and procedures for auditing, vetting, and guarantors: items to be audited: ballot counting, whole voting system, audits themselves, security
rules, policies, and procedures on best practice
rules, policies, and procedures on rules
rules, policies, and procedures on disinformation & nihilism
rules, policies, and procedures on interactions between separate or connected groups holding elections.
rules, policies, and procedures for post-election analysis, challenges, and moving on.
rules, policies, and procedures for initiating an election
rules, policies, and procedures for scheduling

Best Practice Examples

never record any private information in an internet or public exposed system, e.g. use a random id.
managing open source development best practice

Question: A. What is the relationship between secure end-to-end messaging and voting systems? B. Provenance: What is the relationship between origin-verification of files (including media files) and voting systems?

Issue/Task: user interface for setting up an election

Features Tools & Deployment

(2025.01.03)

What are the minimal needed features?
What are the minimal tools needed for those features?

Question: Standardized .csv Ballot Format (for decision coordination): ideal?

including information about the ballot signing key information possible vote customization information vote choices etc. Question: ways to make sure the .csv ballot is not mis-read or garbled e.g. maybe including item number, vote choice, and first letter/number of vote choice name in the vote, may prevent arbitrary misinterpretation of votes Question: possible requiring of ballot being completely filled out

digital signature etc.
checksum etc.

Data

maintainable operations

Sustainable data operations:

(rows and columns?/.csv-db?)

minimal, modular, maintainable functionalities, features, and tools
modular database units

maintainable system tool and techstack

history of tool, hardware, os, software, dependency, extinction
history of maintainability, vulnerability, performance issues

Guidelines and Standards for Maintainability

Training for managing maintainable project spaces

simulations
testing and evaluation
breaking down skill areas such as foundational 'identification'

project settings and configurations:

should have theory-of-mind/sally-anne skills (true/false)
alignment on projects scope is default/automatic (true/false)
churn is neutral/good (true/false)
communication about project scope is neutral/bad (true/false)

issue simulation

churn
panic
abstraction fantasism

Data Formats Data Structures externalization serialization and read-able serialization

it may be important for data structures such as dictionaries of lists (to use the python terms) to be able to be exteranlized,shared and loaded and stored in a read-able printable format.
non-transparent, non-inspectable, none-step-trace-able formats may be optimized for computation but not suitable for a system where communication is the highest priority
externalization without binary serialization
maybe field length and type meta-data handling

Automating/managing speaking-time at events such as debates

Defining and classifying bad actors

Types of bytes in coordination data

Pre-empting type conversion issues

Practical Model 2:

Similar to baseline secure model with these changes.

allows registered phone number use:

ballots can be exchanged by ~sms or
possible voice print ID: e.g. similar to online-voter
registration credentials

Practical Model 3:

Use of block chain ledger

Practical Model 4:

speculation: ways of using smart contracts as a framework for parts of the election? Is technology mature enough? Security issues?

practical model 5:

Using existing online registration systems

A note on election security and registration security: Does it make sense to have lower security standards around registration for voting than casting of votes? A similar or perhaps identical question is: Does it make sense to have a less security system for registration than for voting? E.g. in Pennsylvania in 2022 you can register to vote and change your party-registration, address, etc., on a simple website with no additional security, no MFA multi factor authentication, no personal in face verification, no biometrics, no mailing address sent verification, etc. And I have never heard anyone complain about the insecurity of this registration system, and a proposal to use the same system for voting immediately results in a vitriolic hyperbolic uproar of arm-waving indignation. Personally I think online registration should be more secure. My overall point here is that both registration and voting should be discussed and implemented as they relate to each-other, and not treated as if they are unrelated with inconsistent security considerations. If the standard for security is good enough for registration, that should be the same standard for voting.

Voting, Contracts, and Smart Contracts:

What are the feasible properties of smart contracts that relate to elections, either for their use in a particular situation or as a discussion to elucidate needs and functions?

Voting office setup: Computer, OS, and Network security

What OS, what network architecture, and what cyber security strategies should/could voting offices use?

topic: stateless machines
topic: air-gapped machines
topic: not-networked Operating Systems
topic: memory throttling

Education

skills and fitness for projects and collaboration
~civics
STEM literacy
general non-automatic-learning areas
instruction
surveying and analysis
certification
curricula
data on skill proficiency and fitness

Perception-Abstraction and disruptive effects of some processes of observation

while it is unavoidable that any level of STEM is not more than it is, with things not discovered being not yet discovered, and while Kuhn type situations may have pronounced ambiguous periods, and much may be nuance and grey areas, that said, there often are situations where legacy-momentum tech-stacks and norms that are unambiguously inappropriate perpetuate themselves. While it is not possible (as Shakespeare noted (~"There's no art To find the mind's construction in the face")) to read into the minds of people to discern what they are really aware of or intending, practices and project areas can be more visible, and as in Definition Behavior Studies, while a mind may hide awareness, project-practices cannot hide: non-automatic perception and clearing with legacy-momentum cargo cults may think that it is STEM and be called STEM and indignantly demand to be called STEM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn

STEM & Navigation: Northstars and Gifts That Keep on Giving

timelines
schedules
feedback

Inherent in STEM is using data to identify bad-engineering acts/actions,practices,and procedures; identifying bad-engineering and best practice prevention and remediation involves values that overlap (however marginally, and with whatever nuance) with ethics, social values, team values, family values, sportsmanship, morality, civics, political philosophy, economics, and ecology. <2025 11 02>

STEM, Productivity, Collaboration, Projects: Agile, Kahneman-Tversky, Externalization, System Collapse; System & Definition Studies: STEM, Definitions, System Collapse, Computer Science in Productive Collaborative Projects:

(2024.11.25)

STEM has 'values' for project being productive or not in a context of long term sustainability, non-fraud, and non-system-collapse
STEM-Productive-Projects include/require values/functionality including: Agile, Kahneman-Tversky, Externalization, Non-System-Collapse in terms of System & Definition Studies

Management Administration Political-Philosophy, Political Science, and STEM

General STEM
General System Collapse
Kahneman-Tversky
Kahneman-Tversky Coordinated Decisions
Definition Behavior Studies
General Coordinated Decisions
Values, Productivity & Sustainability
Fraud, Collapse and Criminality
System Health, System Immune-Systems, System Epidemiology
Heterogeneity of Equilibria
computer science stem statistics and logistics

State: Project State, STEM-State, Nation-States, & Statistics

2024.12.30

Institutions in Checks & Balances

What institutions need to officially or more-officially be part of the montesque cook adams jefferson franklin madison interlocking set of check and balance institutions? There may be a 'boot-strap' stage of minimal ~data-structures, but the overt goal is long term maintainability, and based on past data more than the bootstrap is needed (unofficially or officially) for that: 'civil society' 'academia/education / RAND' 'trade associations' 'libraries and theaters' 'STEM Standards (like NIST)' 'foreign policy ~thinktanks' 'market-exchanges with a justice-system'

Scaffolding & Reaching & Learning about Process

Disturbance Regime Management in Data Ecosystems

Heterogeneous Equilibria & Distributions

invisible until learned 'objects'
illusions and mirages
attacks: disinformation

Population Statistics and Individual Statistics

Institutions and Representation

Outlining a System Literacy Curriculum:

General accessible literacy areas:

Project Management

Decision Making

Data Science & Hygiene

System and Definition Studies

STEM

The goal here is to define areas of common issues as clearly as possible. We should be wary of using terms that could be defined in variable or broader ways, e.g. 'scope' 'alignment' 'goals' are quasi-synonymous for the whole exercise, so probably should not be used as the name for specific sub-parts; in real life, sometimes these broader terms are used to refer to or imply specific sub-items, sometimes this may be practical, and sometimes they may be problematically vague and indeterminate.

Collaboration Tools

Project Areas

Goals, Scope Alignment: definition items (2025.01.19)

extremely frequent problem areas (constant disturbance regimes)
extremely invisible; hard to see, hard to communicate about, hard to learn about,

Goals & Scope Alignment: definition items (2025.01.22)

Process, Values, Collapse & Ecological Productivity
Schedule
Users & Stakeholders & Needs & Goals Evaluation (of users)
Features: User-Features & Subfeatures (or hidden features)
Scope & MVPs (Minimum Viable Products)
Tools & 'Tool Stack / Tech Stack'
Feedback & Tests, Ecological Effects, Communication & Iteration (~agile)

Project Areas & Problem-Examples

v19 2026

Process: Workflow Type, STEM Integration & Data-Definitions, Values, Agenda, Methods, Policies (including for predictable issues problems and collapse elements: scope-churn, panic-halting, planning-blackout), Coordinated Decisions, (Data/System)Ecology: Collapse & Productivity (default option: Agile, Kahneman-Tversky, Definition-Studies), for macro: Mapping/Modeling, Strategizing, Navigating, Decision-making, forming conclusions, planning, initiative-taking, leadership, etc.

process/policy areas may be seen as preventable-predictable-collapse-areas; each is an area of preventable mistakes that are not automatically self-preventing and that must be deliberately prevented. Problems that are not automatically visible or understandable can repeat indefinitely. Using process and policy can significantly help prevent and navigate recurring problems that are not automatically visible.
not accounting for different workflows (e.g. frontend, backend, data-science, production machine-learning, R&D, test-reporting, etc.) will lead to delays and failures that should not have occurred. In the absence of communication and learning, these failures may be invisible and repeat indefinately because they are not seen and understood.

Schedule: (Duration; Start date; Iteration Interval)

timelines that need to be short but are never articulated or planned for are unlikely to usually spontaneously match the needed short scale planning needs.
timelines that need to be long but are never articulated or planned for are unlikely to usually spontaneously match the needed long scale planning needs. -- undiscussed timelines risk being indeterminate, fickle, and unpredictably changing for no apparent reason, raising the liability of churn and repeatedly returning to square one.
standard, common, errors: laxity about and absence of schedule fitness will increase the likelihood of standard, common, entirely predictable basic schedule problems, including: -- sequence errors: putting first steps such as planning, brainstorming and early-drafts at or towards the end of the timeline, and putting end-steps first -- not scheduling planning time -- not using planning time -- not scheduling feedback and the use of feedback -- not using feedback-time or feedback -- brittle-schedule: not accounting for predictable delays -- best-case-scheduling: between a best-case, expected-case, and worst-cast schedule, only considering the best-case -- miscalculating durations -- ignoring scheduled timelines -- refusing to communicate about schedules -- trying to force planners and team-members to stop asking and talking about schedules -- having indeterminate schedule plans -- having simultaneous paradoxical schedules plans -- using nihilistic disinformation to discredit the value, function, and meaning of a schedule -- suddenly changing a schedule (or trying to), often at the last minute (such as the moment before everyone leaves a meeting) -- not having in-scope the possibility that the above violations of basic logic and common sense are possible and likely (in reality they are common (both possible and likely)). -- Classic inversion of planning & execution priories: A 'hurry up and wait' pattern where first you impatiently blitz to start a project without planning and then the policy flips 180 degrees so that no deadlines exist and people work indefinately on whatever whim of the moment.

Users: Stakeholders & Needs & Goals Evaluation (of users) -- not having and coordinating with users/stakeholders and their needs significantly raises the probability that the project will not improbably spontaneously meet their unknown and possibly unarticulated needs by accident. -- not properly doing a needs and goals evaluation significantly raises the risk of goals being either incorrectly identified, or having goals indefinitely changing or rotating between amorphous unexamined but often entirely predictable areas.
Features_Goals: User-Features & Subfeatures/Under-The-Hood Features including design factors such as Categories of Types of Systems, Data-Types, Data-Structures, Structured Vs. Unstructured Data.(E.g. tech-stack and resources may be implicit for higher-level goals or explicit for resource-defined needs); lexicon: clarify jargon vs. description;

From a user-story standpoint, what is this project making?
From an Under-the-hood standpoint, what needs to be made and how for the project to be maintainable?
Are these known? Do these need to be researched? -- If you do not have a clear articulation of what you are doing (for a user/stakeholder to meet their clarified need) then it is unlikely that the possibly unknown goal will be accomplished in a maintainable way meeting the need of the user/stakeholder. -- If you do not distinguish between and elucidate both user-story level features and sub-user-story level features (features/subfeatures) then quality, efficiency, and maintainability will be undermined.

MVP: 'MVP's (Minimum Viable Products); Deliverables Checklist; Tools, 'Tool Stack / Tech Stack',

Each MVP must not be an invocation of a reification-hallucination.
Iteratively proceeding with transparency and feedback to align and fine-tune is appropriate and time-tested in many projects.
Articulating incremental MVP (minimum-viable-product) goals and stepping stones is an important part of progressing and communicating incrementally and/or progressing maintainably and sustainably.
Articulating incremental MVP (minimum-viable-product) goals and stepping stones is a skill in and of itself. -- Without timely iterative MVP deliverables, feedback from the user about features and usability will be significantly hindered. -- Without data and feedback about initial MVP outcomes, blindness will strangle the management of the project, coordination of people, and the management of resources.

Feedback_Learning: Learning, Tests, Communication, Signals, Error-Data (how are errors, mistakes, et al handled and used), Documentation & Iteration, Organizational, System, and 'Ecological' Effects, (~Agile); Documenting-teaching-learning(skills); present skills, future skills (learning) (Including routine checks such as "Is there anything to improve, do more of, do less of, start doing, or stop doing?")

Based on what signals will you define failure and orient to measure productivity?
Whether formal or informal there must be effective ways of communicating what has been done within the project-team and between the project-team and the user/stakeholder.
Long term maintainability involves communication (including with 'future you'). -- Failing to clearly map and communicate the differences between jargon terms and goal descriptions will result in mis-alignment between people and nonsense in planning. -- The default patterns and processes of drift will misalign the team and user-stakeholders on many levels, making even detection of the misalignment a challenge. -- Learning directly and indirectly related to the specific project is necessary. If you do not learn that a user/stakeholder's need is not being met then long term failure is highly probable. If you continually learn and develop useful skills then long term successes are more probable.

Managing general project areas as per the details and needs of each project (as described by that project's general project areas) is best practice for positive and sustainable aligned process and project outcomes.

https://www.economist.com/business/2026/06/11/too-many-people-are-shockingly-bad-at-prioritisation

book “The Octopus Organisation”, by Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner
CaraCaS
2017 Donald Sull of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his co-authors
"Timothy Ballard of the University of Queensland and his co-authors asked participants to pursue two competing goals, and varied the monetary rewards on offer."
"paper by Moty Amar of the Ono Academic College and his co-authors found that indebted consumers prioritised paying off small debts ahead of larger debts with higher interest rates. A tangible sense of progress was more important to them than the rational choice."
Many firms accumulate so many priorities that they suffer the “peanut-butter problem” of attention and resources being spread too thinly across all of them. When Niels Christiansen, chief executive of Lego, took charge of the toymaker, he found lots of examples of this. “We had 100 key enterprise risks. How can you look after 100 different risks without being risk-averse on everything you do?”

All sorts of frameworks exist to enable better prioritisation. The Eisenhower matrix is a classic time-management technique for individuals, which involves categorising tasks into quadrants. An urgent and important task belongs at the top of the queue. An important and non-urgent task is the sort that you need to make time for. If you are doing non-urgent and unimportant tasks, you need to take a long hard look in the mirror.

The action-priority matrix is another way of dividing tasks into quadrants, this time based on impact and effort. Product teams often use a scoring model called RICE (reach, impact, confidence and effort). MoSCoW is a framework for teams to distinguish between must-have, should-have, could-have and won’t-have features. Google pioneered the 70:20:10 rule for how to allocate resources to innovation: 70% on the core business, 20% on adjacent activities and 10% on totally new ideas. (If the thought of choosing which prioritisation framework to prioritise paralyses you, just choose one at random.)

Parts of project/product management that are often overlooked:

Policy: Disable Auto-Pilot
Needs & Goals Evaluation & Disambiguation
Not Skipping Planning, Orientation & Navigation
Incremental Movement with Review
Preliminary-Start, 'Feature' scope evaluation, & a process to halt excessive scope/load (As John McCarthy noted in the 1950's about software targets 'easy things are hard.' It is often not possible to tell the work-scope/work-load of a feature unit preliminary work has been done. So, evaluation of the scope of a feature requires review of preliminary work.)

The Problem-Checklist Approach to Project Areas:

Defining Agile-Type Areas of Projects as a set of predictable recurring problems, such as can be checked for after each iteration of a project, and that evaluation used in future planning: I.e. Here are lists of known issues; Are any of these happening? If so, there are likely invisible problems that are entirely solvable on the level of process, communication, and (except for extremes) universally accessible skills and practices. The approach here is not to try to micro-manage a one-size fits all positive-definition that should apply to everything (all projects, teams, and workshops), but rather a negative-definition of problem-areas that every unique project in a unique situation in a unique place needs to (and can) figure out how to address.
Schedule-issues may be the most demonstrably relatable for any participants (if also not easy to communicate about smoothly even in extremely remedial ways). It may be helpful to think of a kind of 'schedule object permanence' in a kind of project-space-sally-anne test. Some people are skilled at perceiving and managing schedule-object permanence space, many people are not, but likely ~all people are able to learn basic schedule object permanence skills and have basic fitness. A key problem is that many people do not understand the possibility of there being a lack of schedule-object-perminance-space fitness (and other project areas), assuming that all world fitness is automatic. The concept of not-automatically-learned-skills, is itself not automatically learned.

Psychology of Explanation

Narrow-Model vs. Edge Cases
Context vs. General
Linearity and Nonlinearity

Advocacy and support tools for 'process'

Policy on Feedback, Errors, Mistakes, & Transparency: a process for reporting feedback (there needs to be a process and team-cultural permission to handle feedback and data): [2025.04.27]

handling the predictable 'culture vs. data' conflicts: -- rejecting [data, feedback, results, process, policy,] as being [disloyal, disrespectful, contrary to hierarchy-status, conspiracy, disobedience, etc.]
Handing perception issues in goals choices -- attractive reifications and abstractions (especially when undefinable)
Definability of targets, goals, tasks, and solutions.
An awareness of frequent but by default invisible areas of project mis-definition and mis-alignment and breakdown (project areas above)

moving from aspirational brainstorm definitions to implementable and maintainable definitions

Psychology of following through, dealing with discouragement

Very Routine Problems:

schedule-confusion: treating/describing early step as later steps (not uncommon)
skipping steps: trying to jump to later steps without doing early-stage steps (not uncommon)
indeterminate goals: constantly changing, appearing and disappearing, vague placeholders and proxies (not uncommon)
no-plan: project description areas were, are, and likely will be empty; they need to be filled in. (not uncommon)
lack of alignment around a Discovery & Identification Phase (not uncommon) ‘Where are you? -> Where are you going? -> How do you get there?’ You cannot skip the first part.

General Project State: (2025.01.27

team project state (Agile, Kahneman Tversky, 6sigma)
organizational project state (companies, libraries, schools, offices, labs)
institutional administrative project state (municipal, regional) (crossing: public sector, private sector, academic (Hobbes, Locke)
STEM project state (reproducible research)
AI Project State (stateless or stateful architects)

Aligned Collaborative Productive Projects

2024.09.14,15,16,17,18,19,21 Agile-Kahneman-Tversky-STEM-Productivity

Questions on Collaboration Tools.

Timeline: Could Agile-Kahneman-Decision tools have been built in the 1960's?
Features: What User-Features/Functionalities are needed for a project to use best-practice satisfying the standards of (if not using all methods of) Agile Agile-Kahneman-Tversky-Decision Project-Product Management?
Tools: What tools are needed to effect what features? (E.g. In 2024 what if any tools could a non-clearweb business/ngo/institution/municipality/etc. use to effect Administration and productivity tools Agile Agile-Kahneman-Tversky-Decision best practice Project-Product Management? [GGA answer: None that I know of in 2024])
2024 tool availability
'technology' role as in 1936 computable numbers paper: 'manual human' vs. 'automated'
STEM, Collaboration, Productivity, Participation, Externalization, Definitions, and Projects

alignment
project management
collaboration
productivity
externalization
cutups
distributed scope setting
distributed goals setting
distributed task setting
distributed task cutups

System Empathy, Project-State Empathy

empathy, communication, and modeling
non-coordinating scatter-imaging (not pejorative)
situational understanding

Collaborative Project Measurable Skills & Fitness Areas

Starting and stopping running processes
separating data hygiene best practice from reifications, fads, and disinformation

tool sets

message tool
task planner tool
vote tool (where are alignment procedures?)
schedule and scope? ...
tasks, kanban, task-lists, misc task datastructures, project-task-management tool
voting, forms, questionnaire, survey, tool
features: sub-story(implicit), normal-story, macro-story
"ticket" tool
messages, instant messenger tool
analysis, review, audit
reporting?

instant message browser
task (kanban) browser
vote-feedback survey browser
team-role-project-alignement-sync tool

?

productivity tools
collaboration tools
use of git

projects stats:

scope, goals alignment stats
scope, goals, values, consistency stat
goal-setting stat
goal-meeting stat
schedule-setting stat
schedule-following stat
deadline-setting stat
deadline-met stat
fitness, disinformation, toxicity stat
life-long-learning stats

Basic Project/Task Description Fields:

Policy
Scope (user feature, sub-features)
Schedule (days)

Bad Proxies for Agendas & Policy

hybrid fragments
abstraction reifications
short term artifacts (lack of policy?)
likely no simple 'fix' for setting long term policy?

Status Tracking & Reporting (Progress & Productivity Monitoring)

(not group-monologue support) (handshakes and confirmations)

Signal Confirmation
Scope Confirmation
Completion-Confirmation?

health, problem identification, epidemiology, diagnostics

problem_diangostics

Munich & Project Management: 1930's vs. Agile -- Case Study Munich Agreement Issues ~ collapse diagnostics ~ fitness diagnostics ~ information epidemiology

psychology, anthropology, of STEM and project management

decisions
project planning
bias from illusions (not known to be illusions)
cultivation of illusions
sport addiction
panic
agile-churn
fear of data and love of reifications
'blank stair' vacant-policy where there is zero identification of, recognition of, response or reaction to, or response to questions and feedback about clear (especially trivial or solvable) errors and problems (with or without their long term impacts). Blandly and blindly accumulating liabilities with no apparent consciousness of the trajectory of failure where such awareness is learn-able is a serious problem the correction of which is a high priority imperative.
STEM values, policy, and perception vs. unproductive default values and perceptions: the whole area of feedback, data, and ~agile alignment in projects relates to skills that must be learned and a default reaction that is dangerously unproductive: errors and feedback are by default repellant in a sport-ego-something-supersticious-ignorance modality of 'saving face' and potemkin village building. 'Policy' is a key concept area for learning and perceiving new areas of distinction that do not exist by default: long term matters, finding errors is not bad, feedback exists, feedback is an asset, alignment exists, alignment is an asset, solving-problems exists, solving-problems is an asset. [2025.09.12] ''' The idea that you should not use process because you lack perfect eternal knowledge about a situation is strongly invalid. An analogy may be like saying "I won't ask the waiter for their recommendation if I don't know what's on the menu, because I don't know what's on the menu' is strategically incoherent: asking, communicating, and iterating is time tested "process" for both mostly known situations and especially for volatile and unknown situations. Another analogy might be saying, "We can't use a random-walk heuristic navigation process because we don't know where things are located, and/or locations might change beyond our control." This is strategically inverted and backwards: process is especially important when static knowledge about static conditions is absent, not the other way around. (2025/05) '''

The phenomena of minds being unsettled by looking 'lower' than a layer of abstraction that they have learned to handle, ranging from 'showing ankles' significant disruption from anatomical lack of trained familiarity to 'math-phobia.'

Long Term Codebase Maintenance

Codebase Maintainer will likely need to be both an occupation and a cost, which some institutions will struggle to afford. [01.2026]

STEM Values

"Can"
"Should"
https://github.com/lineality/definition_behavior_studies
Are long term maintainability, auditability, productivity, and survival, a lack of system-collapse, 'STEM values' or is STEM nihilistically 'value neutral' and absolutely disconnected from any aspect of values, ethics, morals, health, etc.?

alignment with reality: General alignment with reality

As known, participants will fantasize about fictional reifications.

common perception problems and pitfalls

causality perception
the 'sweet tooth' or 'channel surfing' problem, or 'eternal quest' problems
people ignore details and endlessly search for a 'feels perfect' solution on entirely entertainment-stimulation criteria.
rebellion
KT areas

STEM pathology psychology

religious pathology
sport pathology

Common Bad Practices

See: 2.2.5 Mismanaging Standard System Policy Areas 2.2.5 Mismanaging Standard System Policy Areas: is bad, is wrong, it causes system collapse, it should not be done, and I will not do it. For example:

Mismanaging Split substantiations: for example 'they are all good' 'they are all bad' 'they should be dealt with by cramming them together or splitting them apart"
Golden circle asymmetry / inside outside asymmetry, deleterious effects include:

causality,
schedules,
contracts.

System inversion (is a standard data artifact)
Basal distal disjunction (is a proxy(model) for (operationally defined system) 'violence')
Negative choices and definitions (do not ignore them)
Turning on and off (running) system processes ((for example) comparing policy from Roman Catholicism, South Korea, and Judaica)
Half-dark dichotomies (more on that later)

Needs, Goals, and Products

topic: contracts and coordinated decisions
contingency-logic-agreements: if else while break (cross-team?)

Needs and Goals

standard areas

scope management and default bad expansion

alignment management and default bad drift apart

Decision Task Attributes:

needs and goals array: past, present, expected future, goal future, ideal future
schedule items

Information Infrastructure, Protocols, and Standards

Weather analogy for agenda, policy, and long term vs. short term

clarity of data
perceptibility and definition of risk
volatile cargo-cult sport causality-hallucination and proxies
the problem of replacing policy and agenda with short term measurable goals

Policies for software standards

For software that should be reliable for a long time, how to manage the food-fight and cooties-tag fantasy playground that is software engineering?

Standard Fields: Goal Clarification and Disambiguation and/for Alignment

Agenda Process Policy (e.g. Agile-KT-DefStud[software], SixSigma[specific utility repair], Steiner-Jung[brainstorm], Crime Fraud & Corruption, etc.)
User-Features, Subfeatures, and Toolstreasure map
Scope( Scope boundary examples or definitions?)
Schedule[duration in days, started, target end]

Best practice and bad practice

loudest voices are not to be automatically followed
simplistic proxies for decisions such as arbitrary numbers of requests
skipping a decision step and letting scope go directly see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQnz7L6x068

Decision and Automation

balancing and checking where 'automated' work is going?
checking for bad proxies, abdications, and reifications
functional-definition area?

Negative Definitions in Systems-Management, Project-Management, Organization-Management Product management, etc.

There are a lot of tradeoffs with no automatic or easily findable balance, and there are affirmative goals that are not trivial to set, but there is also the low hanging fruit of negative definitions that are easier to identify // 2025.01.23)

What are not goals:

hiding things for the sake of hiding things is not a goal
creating stacks of abstractions for the sake of creating stacks of abstractions is not a goal
disinformation is not a goal
short-term over long-term is not a goal
solution-proxies: meaningless abstraction cargo-cult delusions are not a goal
extreme mis-alignment is not a goal
not learning, not skill improving, not training is not a goal

oositive goals, ish:

data/information hygiene is a goal

Bad Wrong Assumptions about Mind

Stop these assumptions:

everyone is automatically aligned (on scope, goals decisions)
everyone has automatic perfect time-traveling knowledge from and about everyone else
everyone know what is going on and what to do
everyone has impossible tools to solve impossible problems
everyone instantly learns and generalizes everything with time-travel
no one makes schedule mistakes
communication is automatic and effortless and uses time travel

Modeling a persistent failure to learn

cases: 'reappraisals' --TJ

Collapse & Negative Definitions

mirages caused by collapse: 'bad planning' and the illusion of pejorative reifications
'takeover' vs. 'vacuum', 'taken over by a vacuum'?

Errors, Mistakes, Decisions, Skills, Fitness, Perception, Projects

Mapping Bad Equilibria in Mindspace

KT kahneman and tversky areas
agile areas
areas known since greece
survival of mind issues

Sport and Sportsmanship

lexicon in Shakespeare
"hooligan'

Survival of Mind

to what extent can habitability conditions be modeled in a stable-enough way?
the psychology of illusions, the dynamics of getting disconnected from reality
constructing a kind of game-theory space of perception-dynamics, definition-dynamics, and dislocation from reality dynamics.
predictable most-common patterns: e.g. 'panic mode' mid-sprint in agile
predictable most-common bad strategies: overly blocking any management of a basic project area

"Panic" as a definable project-space disfunction

as a standard mode or equilibrium in an agile project time/work unit such as'sprint'/epic etc.

Aspects of general junkfood behavior:

(2025.01.16)

choices made in strongly private situations (maybe not the same an anonymous environments)
peer pressure and trolling bullying hazing disinformation torture against health food and healthy habits.

Both are different, and both are often ignored/denied areas. And both may involve the bazaar cargo-cult of undefined 'rational behavior' which emerged or became dominant in the postwar period.

Workflow Studies

Bureaucracy and Code, Not a reified Antagonist

coding issues and best practice compared with fears of villainous administrations
feedback and cargo cults

externalizing Datastructures and Delineations

swap 'demarcation' system (term to use... 'syntax' swap?)
TOML swap, swap,

Decisions, Coordinated Decisions, Tasks and Project State:

1. case study: "ticket" ownership vs. 'assignment'
1. Daily Project State Alignment: "Standup"
1. Structured-Standup(agile):
- option of owned tasks/task-data-structures

The General Problem Space of Project Decisions:

Decision making skills especially in a context of projects are a critical part of education and fall naturally into general-STEM education.
It is possible that planning STEM-Education is itself a classic example of the presence of significant definable deficits in decision-making skills and abilities, especially including coordinated-decisions and project outcomes. Biases:
aesthetic bias
momentum/tradition bias
disinformation bias
indeterminacy bias
spite & perversity bias
churn bias
panic bias

system hygiene policies

(2025 11 01)

system and definition epidemiology
defense in process and coordinated definitions
identification of bad-actors

Decision Hygiene & Mirage Goals

Pouring effort into an abstraction-proxy is a waste.

Feasibility and infeasibility of plans and proposals

vapor ware
low hanging fruit
shiny distractions vs. practical tools and functionality

Challenging areas and known obstacles

schedule challenges
coordination challenges
externalization challenges
perception challenges
learning challenges
coordination challenges
communication challenges
project challenges
sustainability and liability challenges

Standards and Measures

file types
data types
calculation methods
statistical methods
disclosure of methods

Data Types, Datatypes

defining datatypes
where data must be type specific
where data must NOT be type specific
the adjective-pejorative of 'objects' as "custom data-types"

Advantages of an anonymized public ledgers of votes

Different strategies for immutable data structures

race conditions (term?)

clear definitions in coordination

"explainability" and context

GLM
trees
context and no-context

Analogy: the 'team meeting for dinner' analogy for a project:

1. project planning
1. recreation vs. work
1. impatience and skipping process: the thrill of starting something new
1. 'mid process panic' and confusing process

Coordinating Data and Data Structures in Systems for Decision Coordination:

compatibility across: -- storage formats -- data types
size-management
parallelism
concurrency
mutability
secure by design
graphs
quantizing (of floats)
externalization
graphs (the data structure)

Networks vs. Databases:

Why is data-coordination solved for networks but seen as unsolvable in single databases?
GC garbage collection, database ...

Design Factors and Compromises

...

Equilibria and Tautology: Repeating Invisible Liabilities

...

General Participation & The Health of Systems 2024.01.06 The shift from a simple set of goals into a set of goals much more affirmatively focused on protecting participation, communication, and coordination among diverse participants in a society.

This set goal could be stated as: Use STEM based methods and policies to help defend against disruption and collapse of communication and coordinated decisions in and across diverse groups and perspectives in project-complating societies with general participation of members. ...

STEM and Participation

Participation Areas

fitness
developmental factors
nonlinearity
equilibria in mindspace
Hobbes' deliberate omission

Participation Rules

36 years as required age of person to be able to be elected (issues around this)
alternatives to age for fitness measures

Auditing Election Processes (vs. specific elections):

operationally defining problems with election procedures
processes for finding local consensus or agreement on areas of trade-off compromise, or ambiguity (identification, registration, voting age, duration of vote being open, campaign finance, etc.)
cross regional and international audits
basic election (not-computer) audit
computer-electronics audit of election
security audit
long term data storage and records audit
step by step audit of process? ...

incentives and long term incentives

...

Whole Voting System

cross-platform
secure-by-design
resource-thrifty
scale-able
open and audit-able

Tool areas: whole voting system tools

Election Results Analysis

Election Inspection

tools
measures
tests
automation

Post-Election Audit

Specific Election Plan

scope of included voters
scale of data/geography
hardware needs
software needs
level of security

Open Systems

FOSS
MIT or other licensing for parts of system
the topic of 'security by obscurity'
organizing testing of system

Pre-Election Setup

Election

Post-Election

Overall Discussion:

Defining & Systematizing Elections as 'projects' with Agile and Six Sigma

What are various either easily or not-easily measured goals and problems or errors for coordinated decisions?

Why are specific technologies used for voting?

What is different about 'electronic,' 'network,' and data structure technologies? (making them appropriate or inappropriate for voting systems)

Demand Distortion and General Coordinated-Decision (voting) Spaces

education
learning
collapse
compassion
product development valley of death, demand distortion, want vs. 'should want', education, learning, non-automatic learning, equilibria, bad-equilibria, etc.

Defaults and Equilibria

(2025.01.02)

default easy popular junkfood attractive bad practice: bad equilibrium
health food best practice that is unfashionable unattractive unpopular not automatically learned, not automatically percieved, not a default equilibrium

Francis Fukuyama on default tribal modes and ~ participatory self-identification (two books, part 1 par 2, on political order)

https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Political-Order-Prehuman-Revolution-ebook/dp/B00457X7VI
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MVZH1KP?binding=kindle_edition&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tkin
https://www.amazon.com/Identity-Demand-Dignity-Politics-Resentment-ebook/dp/B0796WDX5G/
computer-science code and law (civil, criminal, etc.)
common code management problems
NASA's Power of 10 process-rules for govern-able code-law
Rust vs. Zig and categories of general-utility code that should lack fragility and not require high or unrealistic skill levels to maintain (e.g. the perpetual-CVE tragedy of ex-vi-vim minimal)

part 2

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy Francis Fukuyama
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IQOFS7M
https://www.amazon.com/Political-Order-Decay-Industrial-Globalization/dp/B00LU3YM8C/

Demand Distortion: Factors and Areas of impact

definition collapse
perception collapse
signal collapse
project collapse
system collapse
toxicity
contagion
hygiene
information epidemiology
learning/education
In the timeline of technologies, which technologies are appropriate and inappropriate and why?
(e.g. complete census vs. statistical sampling)

change state coordination signal STEM

novelty in formal systems
how new ideas enter into systems
how disinformation destroys everything

Equilibria

equilibria as analogy or as literal
heterogeneity of equilibria
bad-equilibria
overall landscape of options in outcomes

Perception and Illusion: ("Monday Morning Quarterbacks")

measuring the resistance of causality reification in random events such as Noisy-Games
rating fitness in system perception

An empirical framework for interactive project elements

Tradeoffs in Voting:

accessibility vs. security
smaller attack space vs. fancy interface
direct-vote vs. representational
ease of vote vs. super-secure-vote
direct participation by voters vs. time consuming processes

History of Voting and Coordinated Decision Making

(book, fall a and rise of democracy)

General Administration General Collapse General STEM

learning-ology

Security & Data / Information Hygiene

Voting and principles of security (ease of use vs. security etc)

hygiene concerns vs. security concerns
analogies

locus of control
treatment of inferiors
seek to turn inferiors into superiors
seek to surround with superiors

General-Information Tools vs. (Production-release) Deployment

the term 'production' There are a large number of Software and Production-Data-Science 'mode' and 'case handling' factors. e.g.

local, batch, at-scale, cloud,
Output structuring and details of deployment

self-hosted,
.gguf,
hidden api-service
specific api-services

Classic NLP, GOFAI, "Deterministic" approach,
Crawling vs. large-chunk
Paralleliszation

also for debugging

Language Choice

third party dependencies

Third Party dependencies

a serious and escalating liability

Full automation vs. semi-automating tool

the fact that this dummy-project generates an unstructured text-field is suspicious, suggesting that this a solution in search of a problem, automatically and verbosely generating possibly useless and illogical documentation-word salad that some human being will manually need to inspect, as opposed to a tool designed to be used by a person for something more specific.

Small-Clear-Task-Doer: Good, Best Big-automated-task-doer: Dubious, but can be good. Task-Helper: Good, flexbile. Automated-Unchecked-Documentation-Genrator: Very Bad.

Definition, Testing, Evaulation, Benchmarking, Auditing: Is something designed so that what it is doing is clearly defined in such as way that it can, effectively, be

unit-tested
workflow-tested
performance benchmarked (as in live month-to-month performance with potential changes to the system or to inputs)
given a meaningful evaluation test (not a mismatched test, or a dubious or overly-indirect test)

Error logging and error/case handling

also gets into language choice

Atomics, Parallelism and Concurrency
scalability
maintainability
deployability

on edge
in a serverless endpoint
consistently fast enough to be an endpoint under 30-sec. (backend-frontend latency, the need for 'step functions' etc.)

Design Maturity Is the whole project/product design mature or is this a theoretical 'solution in search of a problem,' with hopes of a deployment and affordability pathway, and with a dream of maintainability?
A case for a "Small" vs. "Large" Foundation model
Input data type ambiguity: For document processing in real life this can be the most critical issue, yet it can be overlooked all the way until eventual project-collapse.

Note: RC4 used correctly (discarding early output)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC4

mesh?

Fancy Bear goes Phishing, Broadband, People's Computing (sp?): Some kind of study of social-ecology and technology, or culture and technology, or 'upcode' or...how low level and high level have to merge in projects -> as relates to coordinated decision making and voting

DNS policy:

direct DNS with no lookup
dns over https

Modes for server posted material that cannot be altered by any command on that server

Backup signal transmission for areas with disturbances to telecommunications:

the need for emergency ad hoc EM spectrum signal protocols

measurements for disruption distortion and collapse

Micro Signal Coordination

Cellular vs. Macro level for: Conditional Expression and Signal Gaps: General Signal Processing And General Instruction Management

'Artificial' Neural Networks (deep learning) and Neurons vs. Biological Signal Systems 1.1 History 1.2 Future
Chimeric Conditional Expression of Genetic Stored Instruction 2.1 Optional Genome Pathways 2.2 Optional Information-Signal Pathways

Mandate Mixtures

How about a system where a candidate who get's less (or perhaps more too) than a given percentage is required to operate on a mandate system with mandates coming through a proportional consensus system kind of like a parliamentary coalition.

Layers of language and collective symbolism

Whistleblowing

golden circle asymmetry
potemkin villages
shoot the messenger
blame goes down hill
psychology of data

is there a general space of process errors

for systems of coordinated decisions on processes?

discipline specific project-task contexts:

six sigma
systems engineering
medical
education

How much does a decision/Election Cost?

Process Duration / Resource-Cost How long can and should it take for an election to be organized, carried out and reported on, now including any arbitrary window allowed for extra voting (e.g. you could hold a vote open for 5 years, but that doesn't mean it takes 5 years to count the votes and publish).

How minimal and efficient can an election be? How should this be measured? Time window for setup Time window for election Time window for analysis and reporting person-hours to set up electricity cost ...computer cycles to computer per scale?

system health and data pathologies, data ecology and information epidemiology

mapping schedule perception disorders

solution-reification disorders

What problems can be modeled as equilibria?

psychology of schedules (schedule psychology)

Can the answer to this question-set about the past "Is there anything you want me to improve on, do more of, do less of, start doing, or stop doing?" depend upon the future in such a way that the answer can be punted as depending on future events? (2025-05-28)

On the operational definition of voting issues and voting choices:

Applied-Algorithms: Efficient computation of ballot processing

error checking
parallel and concurrent processes
security of process
auditability of process

short term and long term decision making

"dark patterns" and short term vs. long term decisions https://www.economist.com/business/2025/10/16/why-bosses-need-to-wake-up-to-dark-patterns
"to eschew dark patterns is that they can hurt their firms’ long-term interests. Consumers dislike egregious attempts to manipulate them into buying things: the study by Messrs Luguri and Strahilevitz found that aggressive techniques upset the consumers"
"patterns can replicate without much thought. According to Marie Potel, a co-founder of Fair Patterns, a firm that helps to fix dark patterns, problematic designs are often cut and pasted from standard templates."

Nihilism and Short Term Thinking

Is there a pattern whereby nihilism ends up aligning with short term fraud and fanticism, for example in the perhaps measurable sales-fraud, potemkin village, shoot the messenger, relating weak business leadership to 'political' populist extremism?

Detection of short term and long term problems

short cycle bubbles (fewer than 5 years)
indefinite embedded long term problems
Thomas Hobbs and long-term survival via learning, allegories of knowledge based ignorance-based-collapse avoidance.

Value Function and Meaning

detecting disingenuous short term thrill seeking
understanding sport-entertainment-fantasy and anti-reality modes/equilibria

Preempting issues with NLP (Natural Language Processing) and voting software

interpretation and ambiguity
spelling correction

Metrics

definitions
falsifiability

Metrics and Policies for operational and project ambiguity

problema detection
problem resolution/solving

Ballot Fraud Detection

Machine Learning and Fraud Detection

Election Procedures and Best Practice

various kinds of disinformation relating to coordinated decisions:

inability to tell what is computer generated vs. real (may not be a deliberate attack, e.g. misunderstanding of ~art found online)
adversarial attacks on AI

clear-enough definitions and feedback: ways to find out if a plan is practical or if it is overly chaotic and burdened by communication-failures.

System failure and system collapse

non-erronious-external-locus-of-control perspectives
failures that obstruct or impede coordinated decisions
learning and failure repair

measuring areas of fitness

collapse resistance
discipline
'physically etc, mentally etc., morally etc' as from Boy Scouts

Modular Decision / Choice / Vote, etc. Areas:

'multiple choice' systems
write-in systems
questionnaires
poles
elections
juries
quorums
"ticket"-requests

Modular Processes and Applications: Ants and Horses

Uma for planning a decision/vote
Uma for the logistics of a decision/vote
Uma for data analysis of logistics
Uma for data analysis of decision/choices/signals/votes
Uma as an ecosystem of interaction modules, including those operating outside of uma itself: detached distributed platform applications.
Uma's application layer

Formalities of Biology and STEM and Choices in Epiphenomena

Modular vs. non-modular 'objects' and processing

Production Implementation Factors

Production and Productivity:

process-productivity vs. incidental-productivity
long-term productivity vs. incidental-productivity
can-do statement policies and trying to define a difference between production and fraud

long term data storage

sustainability and succession: long term data management
- chain of future control
- future cost structure
- plan for updating an information going stale (e.g. Malissa co.)
- managing archived historical data vs. current
- historical data
reasons for keeping historical data
data about process

Long-Term Data & Software-Maintainability and Efficiency

history of undermined software
timescales: case study of 'dinosaur DNA' search

Evaluation Types:

Daniel Kahneman: Evaluate the process not the outcome.

Efficiency, Maintainability, Sustainability

scalability
'technical debt'

Trajectory of Cost and Maintainability

R&D as value
a trajectory of increased efficiency and maintainability for long running processes

Production Databases

security
scalability
maintainability

Realistic Efficiency:

web applications are usually designed with very strange goals that make the overall process extremely brittle, expensive, and unsustainable, in order to chase fetich-goals with little or no real value (fancy UI, high speed)
election system should be robust with no added features that are not absolutely needed: few dependencies, secure,

Location: on edge, on premise, distributed, server, and cloud

case studies for distributed systems?

Data Hygiene and Voting

Fitness, Behaviors, and Metrics

(2024.07.22)

Basic Utilities

languages
compilers
hardware
storage
operating systems
bare metal
networks
files and directories
slim systems

Minimal Context Specific Design for production deployment, not a general broad scope solution. Reduced attack surface.

Standards for tool usability and liability transparency

public sector usability and liabilities
private sector usability and liabilities

different uses of high and low resolution data and metrics, test, etc.

decisions and disturbance regime Management

general disturbance regimes
out-of-regime disturbances
diversity and disturbance resilience
collapse vs. disturbance

Standardized .csv ballot formats

flat files with no header needed first column: category second column: vote item third column: vote choice voter id as first row voter_id_number, voters_number, MY_NUMBER\n voter_id_name, voters_id, MY_NAME\n judges, judge_1, MY_CHOICE\n (standards on documentation)

Reducing a .csv file to a QR code...

can a standard ballot sized csv file fit into a .csv file?

input and clarity standard: a very long and vague story that needs to be very brief and clear: what are symbols and what gets printed?

Privacy and anonymity: "When Hashes Collide"

uses of hashes for statistical usefulness for behavior patterns for statistically anonymous for identifying specific people. Episode #940 | 19 Sep 2023 | 104 min. https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-940.txt https://www.grc.com/sn Episode #940 | 19 Sep 2023 | 104 min.When Hashes Collide

process and step definition across integrated sub-steps with break-down into smaller steps

Cost-Factors & Sustainability

low level costs
database related costs
server related costs
managed-services related costs
dev-time related costs
future-replacement related costs
time-planning costs
high level costs
incentives for participants: do any participants have an incentive to dismantle the entire system and or the providing of user-needed services? (e.g. upgrading the system to better meet the needs is not bad, but dismantling and upgrading can become ambiguous, as with the 1990's bank-mergers the closed down banks of the closing of local newspapers, was that optimal to meet user needs? (on the other hand, keeping an ineffective operation going for the sake of it (Stalin's regime?) is also not a good option)

Definitions of administration and definitions of fraud, crime, corruption, bad actors, disinformation, nihilism, cynicism, and system collapse

It is not sustainable to have ambiguous overlap between definitions of good-governance and bad-governance; it is not viable to have the definition of a responsible administrator being the same as the definition of a criminal bad actor. In the English language this is probably not an easy problem to solve, because of the unfortunate pejorative meaning of the terms "political" and "politics"

clear transparent communication

Civics, STEM, Soft Targets and Bad Actors

There is general universal agreement that good governance, good administration, requires transparency and coherent-clarity, and that this is ultimately a STEM-scope of accuracy and meaningful verification: signal vs. noise. Nevertheless, there is a default tendency for individuals working and seeking to work in administration and in STEM to use miscommunication, non-communication, and obstruction in administration and STEM. Point: Habits and norms and non-transparency and non-clarity must never be accepted or tolerated. No quantity or proportion of bad-actors normalizes destructive and counterproductive behavior such that it should be nihilistically considered the goal.

details of confirming voter choice data-types:

string check float check int check boolean check none check

list check

--string check --float check --int check --boolean check --none check

dict check

--string check --float check --int check --boolean check --none check ?set check? ?tuple check?

Definitions of Criteria in Tests

Empirical Tests for Voting Systems

Empirical Process and Coordinated Decisions: 20203.09.25

applications of quantizing vs. infinite derivation and integration of process modules
von Neumann's bifurcation of roles in self-replicating processes

Participant and Rules based process for maintaining and publishing about voting system and election

Universal Requirements?

Externalize, Show work: show all your steps.
Be clear about your project-context.
check your work / peer checking
revise your work
match results to project-target (must fit)

On Productures, "Trust", Measures, Standards, and Ethics

The importance of open-source for software testing

Coordinated Decisions and externalized project-state in something like-ish game-theory:

https://github.com/stemnetbenchmarks/social_story_and_cookbook_puzzles

Automation and Voting Systems

Checks & Balances & Adam's Creed:

'one MAN one vote' vs. democratic checks and balances
see Adams Jefferson letters: Nov 13th 1815

Automated Testing to Checking Functioning / Status of System

the ease or difficulty in making tests
the ease or difficulty in sharing tests
maybe issues with testing across permission segregated areas
accurate processing tests
security tests
parts of system for testing:
types of tests
role of quality random and pseudo random numbers
clock problems and clock accuracy in voting network
importance of culture and cultural concepts for testing
importance of aspects of testing not being seen as culturally 'rude' such as asking questions, double checking, redundant communication, etc.

Time Databases and Coordinated Decisions

race conditions
syn
decentralized systems and time
large scale systems
affordable time sources
type types: monotonic
delayed source UTC
Astronomical and off-planet time

Franklin's Commonwealth

2024.08.06

Using Technology (including NLP-AI) to search and explain about voting topics, ballot initiatives, and issues connected. etc. e.g. All the issues related to a water-regulation change and what might be affected in the short and long term.

signal interpretation:

reversal
mirage
super-signals
short term

note blindly following excitation and stimulation

monitoring and guarding against illusions: not mis-interpreting signals

Mapping out the various known ways, perhaps in a phylogeny, of how signals, perceptions, communications, can be distorted
ways that datasets can be tricky, distorted, too small, 'leak' influence to other data, etc.
places where perception is an active process and so 'illusion' may be less clear

Impulsiveness (short term, long term):

naive attraction

Ulterior motives:

Proxy Management:

priorities in coordinated decision networks and databases:

atomicity
'linearity'
serializability
fault tolerance or fault reaction
redundancy
scale
speed

Municipal and Academic

software requirements and skill-ability goals

architectural problem spaces

different types of problem-spaces with decentered coordinated decisions vs. centrally handled
how many parties are coordinating
synchronous, asynchronous
state or stateless (as in memory, not gov)

risk and worst case scenarios

standards for describing feasibility and clarity

How are specific coordinated decision tasks and sub-tasks defined, so as to automatically evaluate if that task has been done correctly?

process definitions (2024.06.05
schedule definitions
outcome definitions
mixed?

search sort filter order query find

(The unsolved problem of search)

Algorithms, computation complexity, and sort-search in particular in coordinated decision tool software

What is a balanced architecture between various factors?

centered decentered
private vs. accessible
public vs. ownership
communication vs. encryption

Clarity on divergent project agendas

Taboos and Prohibitions that may interfere with coordinated decisions

anti-STEM
anti-data
there seems to be an extreme
trolling-disinformation nonsense objections

Analysis Section

reification and randomness in patterns, from 'elimination' contest artificiality to Kahneman business and market randomness illusions.
applications to fitness of persons
applications to clear language used
applications to issues and options
applications to best practice operations (for voting and for what is voted on)
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/04/21/our-midterms-forecast-predicts-pain-for-donald-trump

Locus of Control

psychology of external locus of control

Learning from history: How mistakes can be learned from to improve voting

Decision process task size:

for breaking down and building up larger election processes

Ascii vs. Diversity: balancing universal tools with universal users

Voting Statistic Package

frequentist
Bayesian
data analysis
data visualization
statistics and machine learning
decision trees and statistics
continuous functions vs. classification
targets of analysis: participation, time-space, security, results, process efficiency, QC/QA reporting, (see Daniel Kahnemann's book on 'Noise')

Defining "Technology" for coordinated decision making including elections

Measurement and Modeling in Coordinated Decisions

thinking fast and slow
game theory
NLP
blockchain contracts

Disagreement

game theory
Von Neumann vs. Nash

The importance of setting properties of default empty states

empty functions
empty lists
empty values
empty signals

"technical debt"
future proofing
scope and schedule issues
sustainability

case studies and pattern identifying most-common issues with project areas such as schedule issues

System Health, System Coordination, System Voting

measurement and system health measurement
system health and system collapse measurement

Functional categories of signals for decisions:

(see hofstedter-gap)

Standardization:

re-use of functions and modules
read-ability, serialization, encryption,and anonymization of data

Decisions elections and types of questions

Confronting antisocial behaviors, disinformation, and collapse

e.g. when it masquerades as 'culture' 'tradition' etc.

Forms and Formats of Data

size
redundancy
anonymized
statistically identifiable (when hashes collide)

checks and balances vs. mob violence

checks and balances, institutions, wisdom of crowds, and ~prospect-theory

What does it mean to 'vote' input into a decision process?

signal-game spaces

- where speed is needed
- where speed is not needed
- where retries are needed
- inverse of need: prohibited

Process STEM and Boy Scout Values

values and process have always been core to STEM

Process Illusions

solution-reification
functional process vs. declarative-process
functional-law-rules vs. declarative-law-rules
model time-leakage and process time-travel errors: you cannot get a result from a future step, only a past step

Process Fraud

coverup
vaporware
reification, perception illusions

process: 'process' as a STEM innovation contrary to default perception and assumption

(2025.04.22)

making 'next-iteration' decisions based on data-observation

Skills and Abilities required to support Projects and Coordinated-Decisions

What skills and abilities are required to support projects and coordinated decisions?
What known issues prevent, suppress, erode, weather, skills and abilities required to support projects and coordinated decisions?
What supports, enables, the learning transmission and cultivation of skills and abilities required to support projects and coordinated decisions?

Distortions and Illusions

causal mirage illusions
placeholder reification
cargo cults

Records, versioning, documentations, testing standards

Learning, Need & Assistance Areas:

What are the learning and fitness limiting factors in coordinated decisions and projects?
Project Neem
Project Uma

Operationally defining freedom for free elections: see

From Sin-obsessed-authoritarianism to Naive-rebellion-revolution to 1970's denial-ism, to 2020-Information-War from/in The Spirit of The Code From Science to STEM: The State of Nature, Natural Law, Montesquieu, and Edmund Burke: Edmund Burke, Jeffrey Hinton, and the Evolution of STEM in Culture and AI-Computer-Science in Practice 2024.02.20-22

Long term infrastructure costs

Platform and OS safety policies

OS update policies
choice of OS
factors
specific cases
minimal
secure
specific standards and tests

Time, stages, directions, models, perception:

Where do problems occur?
WHere do miscommunications occur?
Where do some models or linear math have no time aspect?
Is there schedule-indeterminacy?

Perception of Causality

common distortions in causality perception
short term long term
alien-paranoia and external locus of control
'magical thinking'
learned helplessness

Fooled By Randomness

perceptions of projects
perception of automaticness
perception of 'errors'
perception of ~statistical distributions
perceptions of linearity
perceptions of nonlinearity
perceptions of ~"randomness" and change

Interconnected decision events

interaction and feedback

Responsibility, STEM & Values

(2024.10.05)

Is responsibility being fraudulently obfuscated?

clarity of definition

short term long term disjunctions / long term short term disjunctions

D.H.Chew Jr. 'The Making of Modern Corporate Finance' (

clear communication

2024.05.16

having clear communication be a priority
having clear communication be valued
having clear communication be seen as not-automatic
having clear communication be invested in
having problems and a lack of clear communication be tested and measured

contraction of systems

cases
measures
models
spread, contagion

STEM and Coordinated Decision Making

decisions and coordinations in: -- networks -- databases -- instruction/data interactions and conflicts -- cryptography -- communication theory ('information theory')

Constructive or collapse-inducing sport and gamification of process

in all parts and discussions of coordinated decisions

simplification, gamification, definition, perception,and coordination
function and fiction in gamification-simplification of vague processes.

quantized or fractional(fractal) dimensional representation

of groups of participants in proportional representation or in category or finite choice selection

Decisions, Logic, and Quantization(number-boundaries)

defining current-time outcomes
defining future targets
defining 'past' known data (states of being unknown etc)

Ballot Item Interpretability:

deterministic (given time as input)
discrete responses
issues with open ended 'write-in'

Alternate Solutions

Equivalence and Non-equivalence in representation of situations and choices.

Project definition frameworks

metadata
standard formats

Factors in multipoint coordination problems, from signal mcu to project content

distributed mcu
network design
resiliency
security
error correction

Project Decisions

project areas

Data and Illusions:

coordination decision systems need to set up in such a way that data and a tether to reality are able to keep in check and prevail over the tendency towards illusions and coverups and in potemkin villages. Literally or proverbially software since 1970 has been a self-conspiracy among complacent developers who prioritize their won recreation and entertainment experience over reality and the effects of the software they create to result in a space-trash 'polluted' environment of hidden problems where the priority is lipstick-on-a-pig fads and pedantic distractions. Developers spend huge amounts of time entertaining themselves with the 'self-care' of beautifying their keyboard and beautifying their desk and beautifying their background and beautifying editor/IDE and beautifying their 'self commenting' code, and creating the fun-illusion of their own personal entertainment pleasure seeking experience, complete with the fun of being a bullying manager, the fun of randomizing other people's schedules, blaming interns for the problems of senior staff etc, enjoyably, defiantly defying basic Agile project management areas and being a coder cowboy bro rockstar. The result is very predictably ruin and toxification, which is predictably (potemkin village) hidden away and covered up with more lipstick and distraction beautification, blaming down hill, wasting more time on entertainment junkfood and 'self-care.' By analogy, coordinated decisions and elections may be able to work well or fail to work well around similar criteria.

Kahneman & Tversky
Joseph Weizenbaum & Eliza

Eliza Effect & Coordinated Decisions

staying grounded when either the tools or the results or the process may or will inspire participants to diverge from reality or probability and enter into areas of unfounded belief without recourse to verification or accurate assessments of likelihood. (2024.04.20)

The Biology and Evolution of Motivation & Incentives

Learned Helplessness and testing implicit assumptions

aggressively teaching STEM values in perpetuity in a sustainable way 2025.04.09

Tests, Data, and Diagnostics for functions and sets of functions and tasks

testing coordination systems
eligibility tests for human participation
security tests for hardware and software
performance tests and diagnostics
design and process tests
'test' vs. feedback and use-able data

Non-Arbitrary operations

Perhaps as in the more or less deterministic actions of a compiler, what parts of a higher level coordination process such as an election should be done according to protocol (which could involve testing/checking if not pre-set algorithms) and not in arbitrary 'flower arranged' ways subject to constant arbitrary human alteration on whim? (2024.06.07)

Formalities of ownership and tragedy of the commons

Non-Automatic Processes & Equilibria

Implications of non-automatic learning
system literacy for local and regional project administration

Equilibria, Catalysis, Default-Modes, and Non-Automatically Learned Areas:

literacy
numeracy
STEM-literacy
project-area
value-literacy
short-term/long-term
basal-distal
general perception-illusion
sportsmanship
~rolemodel/heros

Psychology and learning in types of signal environments

meaning and multilingual elections

automated translation
merging on slightly differently translated voting options
translation of instructions and procedures (automated options
character-set issues

Dimensionality and Statistical Representations

in various cases what we want from decision data are lower dimensional representations of higher dimensional structures represented by low-dimensional language data from the participants this also may trace a distinction between vote/decisions that can be clearly defined as simple choices, that can elusively be defined, or decisions that cannot be reduced to binary or classification choices

successional sustainability & 'the achilles heel of succession'

generational succession
team to team succession
"0-60" learning curves for onboarding
the default 'anti-teaching' fake-exclusive-expert / caste-system haze-torture-bully-tease pathology of many animal species.
potemkin villages

Distributed Servers and modularization of process

time modules
data size modules

Lagging Indicators

STEM psychology and culture:

scrutiny is good
best practice is good
asking questions is good
responsible data collection is good
error and mistake psychology
process, taboo, and fad psychology
Agile and psychology

poverty and disinformation

(2024.05.07)

disinformation in supposedly educational institutions

Signal Coordination Ecology

https://www.amazon.com/Ecology-Collective-Behavior-Deborah-Gordon/dp/0691232156/ The Ecology of Collective Behavior Paperback – October 24, 2023 by Deborah M. Gordon

alternatives to whole-part contexts

Planning and the Cost of Coordination

Case studies in ideas and literature

direct programming: coordinated decisions and moving parts

Time and Programming
asynchronous systems
parallel systems
concurrent systems

Asynchronous Systems:

databases
concurrency
parallelism
decisions
functions
process derivation
process integration
(data) types (being moved and exchanged)
data structures (being moved and exchanged)

Clearweb infrastructure vs. Deepweb infrastructure

5% of tools and uses
95% tools and uses (see https://medium.com/@GeoffreyGordonAshbrook/forecasting-ces-2024-clear-web-mega-ai-vs-local-ai-gpu-device-specs-may-keep-shaping-ai-software-3abaaa51931c )

Aspects of system diversity or lack of diversity

security
redundancy

Leadership

Project Area Ambivalence
Project Area Panic
Project Area Churn
Project Area Seagull-Management

Leadership Roles and Capacities

Leadership, Decisions, Coordinated-Decisions

initiative taking skills
collapse awareness
navigation skills

Passwords, devices, "fido," etc.

salt

The Stakeholder Perspective:

Would a person who relies upon the voting system as infrastructure for survival go along with decisions being made by people who may be indeterminately incompetent or malicious?

Problems of linguistics and psychology

narrowing manageable scope for project decisions and project state

Forms of Encryption and Trade-offs

character sets
data structure types

Memory Management:

security
privacy (lower level: programming language used)

NASA Power of 10: (enumerated areas? TODO)

2006 embedded systems context
2026 systems programming context

Character sets, flexibility and security, ascii, fonts

Conflict

Automation and Coordination

Is there a way to standardize and automate statistical reporting on data throughout an 'election'?

software, operating system, language, network resources for open, public, charity use:

minimal
secure

2027.07.25 It may be still largely unknown in 2026 how 'social' homo-sapiens are and how to use "social" and other terms. In a context of individuals and populations, there are important differences between types of situations. In some situations we have effectively distinct centralized 'agents' or 'actors' or 'entities' or 'institutions' or 'nouns' (be they 'people' or 'nation-state-republics) negotiating in a context where each is legally and operationally separate. In other situations, perhaps as with "colonies" of organisms such as ant-wasps or bee-wasps, the system is more distributed, where the 'colony' is a different type of single 'genetic entity' that has the ability to detach and re-grow parts of its body. In terms of how decisions and learning and signals work, homo-sapiens may be a mix of these two and more modes of process.

Social problems with best practice not being observed

project skills
social-story skills
object permanence
project object permanence
energy quantizing
sally-anne type point of view
cut-up projects

Coordinated decisions in open, closed, and semi-closed data-ecosystems

Automated testing of question ambiguity

see automated benchmarks
decision coordination and STEM (see Online Voting Using One Time Pads github >= v76)

Specific types of decision coordination skills, fitness, tasks, metrics:

object permanence skills(?)
specific schedule/time related skills(?)
by project area?
negatively defined / testable skills?

modeling, testing, benchmarking

the need to specify what exactly is meant contextually by 'model'
tests for a given system, tool, etc.

meta-data layers: handling and interfacing multiple and changing data storage format: 2024.03.12

when different sets of fields are used
when different names are used for those fields
the eternal length of array, length of string, length of number issue:
e.g.
election:
candidates:
choice:
voted_for_choice_or_choices:
write-in: This overall same information can be expressed and in various specific situations will need to be expressed and externalized in significantly different ways, such that handling and comparing such structure is not automatically simple.

Definitions of emergencies

as in the classic problems on spurious and ongoing claims of emergency-administration

Definition Management

replacing an oversimplified general-linear-model-of-everything with a STEM, categories of types of systems, data-types, and projects paradigm

Open, Closed, and SOS, Coordination:

(From Project Uma)

Open Node, S.O.S. Team-Channel

One of the founding inspirations in the history of the developing of UMA, where many different situations from Prof. Skip Ellis' Project Neem to project management, to education, to secure voting protocols, was that I was living in Japan during the 3.11 Daishinsai Tsunami, Quake, Nuclear-Meltdown, electrical grid failure, cell/mobile phone system failure, etc. Though I was not in a hard hit area at the time, when I traveled to volunteer and work in the North Coastal region I saw and spoke with ordinary people about the tangible need to have some kind of robust signal sending system, some kind of distributed ad-hoc network for large or small emergency situations.

There are a few main things that UMA needs to be or have for an SOS team-channel to work in a way that could have helped in the Daishinsai or in other or lesser situations.

finely constrained and load-managed signals: For better or worse, the history of signal sending from (if proverbial) Byzantine General problems, to early Gutenberg incunabula, to the management of codes and signals during WWI that came from and fed back into computer science: computer science is not based on and does not confirm the naive ideology that 'computer everything in every way and print everything in every way forever' is a feasible way get anything done; disregard for details is completely contrary to computer science. There are a large but manageable number of feasibility constraints that a solution must satisfy in order to be a practical project and product plan: using more resources than exist won't work.

Security and data hygiene are also important factors on many levels: Sending data types or quantities of data that break the system won't work.

Deliberate abuse is (again, look at history) a prominent consideration that cannot be claimed to be a surprise.

The Open-SOS team-channel/mode is not designed to be a vaguely open network where anyone or everyone can send anything or everything in any way or every way to anyone or everyone anywhere or everywhere at any time or at all times.

The Open-SOS team-channel/mode will be as narrowly an strictly and minimally defined so as to be robust and practical within the scope of what is needed. For example: reserved specified listening port: 44444 enum: u8 byte array for latitude enum: u8 byte array for longitude enum: u16 int pre-specified situation code, borrowed from first responders

At a super-minimal SOS signal system, these three size and type constrained byte and int fields may be all that is needed to send and receive a help-signal in a robust way across platforms that minimizes the risk of 'sending a malicious signal'

Another part of this is making sure that the receiving side, however imperfectly, has a minimal scope as well, e.g.

listen at 44444
if you get flooded with signals, e.g. if more than 8 signals in 10 sec, pause listening for 10-min (or some number).
store only a reasonably small number of signals (which depends on how small the signals are), perhaps in the range of 8-512 signals (with 8 being a lite default)
be able to externalize these signals to pass them on to an emergency service.

Even though at some times and places deranged people will spam fake emergency signals just to be destructive (with no benefit to anyone), the overall system can likely be designed so that this is an acceptable amount of noise just in case the system really is needed. e.g. 8 small spam signals every 10 minutes that you can just ignore is not going to over-tax your system.

This is not without risk but likely has minimal risk. You cannot use this to send an open-ended message, e.g. something a young student should not see. The worst may be if someone is lured to a bandit trap location from a fake signal. This may or may not be a significant risk depending on the details. There is no requirement to have such an S.O.S. channel if it is a liability.

A more useful but also more risky option is to allow a person to share connection information as fields in the signal. There are emergency situations where this would be an asset, but general default-malicious behavior demonstrates that most of the time this would be used by predators to attempt attacks on people who were lured into creating a connection with the attacker. There may be reasonable balances where for example completely vulnerable young children would not be able to set up and configure this feature on their own (or build their own software and hardware from scratch to do the same thing), but emergency-tech-teams would have the option to send and receive connection information as an option.

See the next section for another significant part of the puzzle.

Multi-Band Signal Use: Uma is designed deliberately to only have connection, configuration information exchanged and set up out-of-band manually by the user: connections cannot be added or removed maliciously or deliberately by a remote-collaborator. Only a local user can, out of band (not as part of an online connection) add or remove team-channel and address-book configuration files; these files are not in the shared synced project-graph-nodes data.

Also, in version 1 Uma only uses internet IP signals and addresses: if you do not know someone's IP (and all the other team-channel configuration information) you cannot send them any information.

In this context, where SOS is a (theoretical) 'minimal-open-channel' you would still need to know someone's IP address to send them an S.O.S. signal: this alone likely make the whole idea of an open-channel entirely useless and bazaar: you can listen for S.O.S. signals, but no one can send them to you (unless they are already a team-collaborator and so don't need to).

This is where signal-band comes in: If Uma is able to use a standard, local, CB-radio band spectrum to send and receive signals, then Uma can listen on, e.g. channel 4, sub-channel 4, for anyone near you broadcasting an emergency signal.

White-Knite signal-Relay:

(pending, maybe out of scope)

Portable, solar powered devices

Could mobile-devices/smart-phones be equipped to do something like this but even better? I do not see why not in principle, and will look into exploring this as phone software, but for whatever reasons using phones for distributed signal networks is not what phone hardware OS and software makers are doing or intend to do. People love the single point of failure of centralized signal towers, and people have tunnel vision for what they love.

Notes: The question of whether UMA needs either an ad-hoc connection system, and s.o.s. system, a signal-relay system, etc., is debatable. If you assume that everyone doing a project everywhere in the universe has an reliable ipv6 address, then no UMA does not need anything else, and in 2024 most users of UMA will likely be normal ipv4-ipv6 internet users. But it is not entirely unlikely that researchers in locations without internet (or without reliable internet) or people/towns in locations with reliable internet, or deep-web groups not operating on the clear web internet (which is ~96% of the internet itself) may want to or need to use some local-intranet which does not use ipv4-ipv6 but uses some other signal 'band.'

There is also the past and future question:

Could Uma have been made and used in the 1960's (or even the 1940's perhaps, or if a stretch the 1840's)? Yes, in some form. Was there ipv4-ipv6 back then? No, so Uma would have used (like the Telegraph and AM-Radio) something else.
Will people in the future, for example teams on Mars, be using 2024-style ipv4-ipv6 to communicate? While an earth-internet will eventually be set up on mars, it is either unlikely that all networks and signals on mars will use the earth-internet IP system or that they will use only the earth-ip system.

A related question is: when satellites and cube-sats around mars communicate: do they use ipv6? It is possible that something technically does, but in general, no satellites do not use the internet to communicate with each-other.

Uma can and should be a portable, minimal, platform-agnostic, protocol and system for managing project and collaboration.

Are there use-cases for a robust distributed graph-database that is not reliant on ip-connections: absolutely.

OS Questions

software with no OS
operational definitions of OS
E.g. Uma-type set of features with no other OS

Auditability of Code for Some Projects

community utilities
voting
coordinated decisions
implications for case-handling (such as errors) for modes including production and debugging

Decision-Net, Word-Net, Image-Net:

training sets and testing benchmarks for decisions and coordinated decisions

Training Skill Abilities Learning Measurement

competence levels
pre-requisite / requisite skills

General software sets vs. research and development sets vs. use-production sets, vs. specific use-case sets

optimization
"do one thing well"
standardization

Production-Software (meaning use-able 'deployed' product, not 'still in production' meaning unfinished, ridiculous name)

Standards for production-deployment software
dependencies
files and file paths
readability and maintainability
resource efficiency

Perception

(2024.02.27)

The danger of people worshiping something that they don't understand, for example in an incomprehensibly broken system that makes no sense, because of an internal need to reify something worshipful, be it (the seeking or attempted creation of) an external locus of control or otherwise.

- current and improved research still for people preparing for or carrying out a coordinated decision

how to find out what skill deficits people have
how to teach people to have better research skills

Looking at 'one MAN ONE vote' and 'loyalism':

The English Civil War
The American Revolution
The French Revolution
The American Civil War What is law? Is democracy one man one torch, where the most incendiary mob enforces their will on everyone else by violence? "What is a Loyalist?" & Echos of Classical Dilemmas Geoffrey Gordon Ashbrook 2024.08.10 Sat EDT 'rule of law' vs. ad-hoc fiat authoritarianism
STEM vs. cultural diversity in governance: 2024.08.09 https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief from Japan’s influence in Central Asia Kishida Fumio, Japan’s prime minister, was supposed to travel from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan for a four-day summit this weekend. The trip was canceled at the last minute because of warnings of a giant earthquake striking Japan’s Pacific coast. But Mr Kishida is eager to attend virtually.

Central Asia—home to vast amounts of untapped natural gas and oil, and copper and uranium—has long fallen under the sway of Russia and China. But Japan, a staunch ally of America, wants to strengthen its influence there. Ahead of the summit Japanese officials agreed to put out a statement with five Central Asian countries about the importance of “rule of law”—an indirect criticism of how the region’s two big autocracies are challenging order and stability.

Loosening Russia and China’s grip on the region in any meaningful way would be difficult. But the prospective summit has already upset Russia’s officials. They accused Japan of attempting to “penetrate” the region with “Western ideology”.

Elusive Algorithm Problems

2025.01.13

Search Sort

non-concurrent non-parallel
concurrent and parallel
Fuzzy and Discrete

Tables, Graphs-Nodes and Vectors

Liability and Sustainability Issues

Design and deployment factors

"do one thing well"

connection
roles
databases
'ownership' (as in the Uma signed data system)
single points of failure

Security: Type of attacks that cannot be entirely prevented:

social engineering attacks
physical site destruction
distributed systems vs. centralized systems: e.g. social engineering attacks and the byzantine generals problem, smart contracts, etc.

Auditing and automated auditing, process and step problems in coordinated decision making:

map of process-step-analysis applications

Short term project state, long term project state and object permanence

While some hominids have some object-permanence perception for some overt physical objects, when it comes to long term project state and causality the games of adults are frighteningly similar to games of children. Institutional decisions are made based on crude peek-a-boo brain stimulation either with no evidence of awareness of repeating long term patterns, or with evidence of a deliberate potemkin village to hide the permanent reality in order to cultivate a self-stimulation addiction. Every short term excuse becomes a grotesque generalization of a uniform past-present-future that endlessly changes state (in an amnesiac way where participants apparently have no memory or awareness of this constant change). A 'sport' example of this may be in international high level chess where the match commentary declares that whatever ephemeral prediction is made now is universally true for all past and future time, changing constantly in a disturbingly amnesiac way. (This may also be a kind of disease of hyperbolic-dialectical-journalism.) An institutional example of this borrowed from Daniel Kahneman may be where any short term or no-term abstract success indicator is used to declare an administrator 'always strong and victorious' or 'forever a weak loser' based on completely random noise that changes minute to minute.

Kahneman & Tversky, et al: effects on systems of decisions

decision spaces
behavior economics
decision theory
prospect theory
how options are phrased

principles of coordination in a context of non-automatic perception and non-automatic learning

feedback
habit
equilibria
perceptions/schemas of causality
intertwined learning areas: articulation, perception, modeling/planning, learning

Categories of CS operations involved in coordinated decision making

are there any undefined-behavior or non-analytic components that are unavoidable?

Coordinated Decisions: Who Votes on What?

important set of issues
relatively excellent but still unfocused article: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/07/13/americas-other-elections-problem

- ```No voter can reasonably be expected to make an informed decision about every item on the ballot. The sheer number of elected officials makes it difficult to know who is responsible for what. Even an expert steeped in local governance might struggle to judge whether a county comptroller has succeeded or failed in office, says Mr Schleicher. Yet on many ballots, voters face that challenge dozens of times. When they reach the more obscure races, they are “flying blind”, says Todd Donovan of Western Washington University.

Ballot initiatives can be even harder to understand. The Economist analysed the text of 130 initiatives in California since 2000. Using a metric that scores text based on sentence and word complexity, we found that most required college-level reading comprehension (see chart). One in four demanded the reading comprehension of someone with a graduate degree. Yet only a third of Americans have at least a bachelor’s degree.

- ```politicians tend to be wary of taking power away from voters—or, at least, of being seen to do so. Few elected officials are keen to reduce the number of elected offices, not least because some would be eliminating their own jobs.

Red Herrings

Parasitic and Reified goals: -- discriminatory goals -- arbitrary fetish goals -- goals no one can justify or explain at all
Scope creep
Scope drift
while true: processes stuck in loops

Specialization, Representation, and contextual hierarchies of participants (2024.07.03)

Rules of Evidence in reporting, claims, and advocacy

2024.08.14

Defining time and resource requirements near term to long term

General Participation and fitness (2024.07.03)

perception fitness
articulation fitness (input output measures)
modeling fitness
learning fitness

Partial participation (2024.07.03)

contextual
possible definitions for 'full' participation
institutions and participation (2024.11)

Predictable Temporal Heterogeneity in Perception (2024.07.03)

Schedules, Time, Projects, and Decisions

(2024.11.17)

time window for procedure of making decision: -- e.g. timescale of 'election' in the USA of often 1,2,4 years compared with 1,2,4, weeks in the OECD; 'weeks' is likely closer to optimal. -- e.g. States such as Oregon and Colorado have an entirely paper drop-off voting system in a timescale of weeks which works much more smoothly than, e.g. Pennsylvania's horrendous mix of in-person, and early-voting, and incomprehensible nested-envelope 'in-person-absentee' mail/drop.

schedule problems & disorders

tautologically impossible timelines
sequence direction problems
indeterminate and inconsistent goals
automated detection of schedule problems

Institutional Diversity, Values, Productivity, Sustainability, STEM, Project Scales, Models and Proxies for "Culture"

Data, Logic, Time, and Coordination

time in databases

Testing for system collapse

Skill abilities fitness health and coordinated decision projects

timescales and coordinated decisions

'over-communication' as a goal

American vs. Japanese norms on re-covering discussed topics for agreement.

Arts culture, communication and decisions

ways of handling categories and topics,

e.g. more and less quantifiable and defined topics.

discipline-specific (medicine, physics) decisions

disambiguating the main problem-spaces of 'voting' coordinated decisions statistical sampling and surveying

[2025.06.12]

Uma-Data/Rows_and_Columns and processing of vote/choice data

Assets and Liabilities

process Assets and liabilities
context specific assets and liabilities

War

Monetesque and the archetype of the Arena: If war is a sport, does an ~international community need to create an 'Arena' space to distance long term habitats from the attractor of sport-thrill?

[2026 05 29]

Projects

(2024.08.09)

project psychology
projects and STEM
projects and state
project failure
projects and Agile-management
projects and system-collapse
projects and definitions
projects and coordinated decisions
projects and scale
projects and long-term
projects and sustainability
projects and diversity
projects and Montesque-Adams: institutional diversity
projects and the tragedy of the commons

Lexical Timeline:

modeling currently used operational definitions over time

Definitions, metrics, and quantifiability

how definition 'types' are handled
how data structures such as meaning-vectors are used
issues with decisions around measurable and non-measurable factors: how does that change the problem space of decisions and projects? 2024.06.23

Measuring feedback: can failures of feedback (a lack of feedback channels) in organizations and institutions be detected

Where are cut-up vs. context and state vs stateless involved in coordinated decisions?

e.g. 2024.06.24 context vs. cutup:

where one prompt cannot contain all roles
it is easier to say 'agent' than it is to either create an illusion of state or create state.
scope creep and bloat issue if too many resources are used for micro-operations 2024.06.24

Data Sources:

questionnaires
metadata
votes
skin in the game
optional and mandatory participation
abstraction and perception (secret, anonymous ballots)

Testability

Assumptions
Statements and assertions
Claims
Code
fault tolerance

Testable Process vs. untestable disinformation attacks

participation, populations, distillation

Perception, Gamification, Sportification, Signal and Signal Loss

super-signals, red herrings, potemkin villages
meaningful models

Sport Perceptions of Process, Administration, Governance, and Political Process

In education

Teaching Civics, Coordinated Project Training

(2026.05.11)

Can-Do statements from definition behavior studies
Feedback based, game-based, training
Specifically monitoring for bad equilibria (sport-gang psychology, gambling psychology, known prospect-theory biases, standard schedule mismanagement areas, each project area, etc.)

anonymity and toxic behavior online

incentives and feedback in behavior
possible ongoing denial about the existence of toxic behavior

Statistics & Analysis Standards for Coordinated Decisions

The buck stops here; what exactly do we mean by 'statistics'?

categories and edges of statistics
statistics math, STEM, computer science
data structures and statistics
key statistics and data science for running tools, not for predicting outcomes.

training and effective education

teaching how to participate in coordinated decision making

agile
elections
direct and indirect education
education learning perception

Nonlinearity in Data Analysis

Choice-spaces and problem spaces:

tautological spaces
procedure vs. outcome
system1, system2
gamification
collapse metrics

Bio-neuro tendencies towards radicalization and extremism with lessons learned from 'the drug war' of the post wwii USA.

addictive behavior
lessons from religious extremism
'the madness of crowds'
John Adams: "The Tyranny of 'The Many'" (vs. the tyranny of the few) "it was all madness" (letters, ~1813)

Revisiting Thomas Hobbes:

Dynamics of Learning
Hobbes and Melville
STEM & Law
Violence and collapse

Revisiting Edmond Burke:

Empiricism and STEM

80-20 Rule in Representation: How modeling society as being entirely of working voters is a rapid way to cover 20% of the work to be done. How 'one person one vote' is a dangerous oversimplification of many issues including montesquieu' checks and balances and Hobbes et al's tradeoff balance agreements. (2024.07.14)

meritocratic hierarchies
biological families
institutions
pre participants
post-participants
checks and balances vs. literal popular vote 'democracy'

Story-relatability & human-understandability of systems & procedures

Databases and Dataframes

encrypted contents
statistically anonymized content (e.g. Security now when hashes collide)
.csv, R, python
spreadsheets vs. dataframes vs. notebooks
production dataframes

Process, Best-Practice, Communication & 'Future-You'

alignment with others and alignment with self over time
sources of feedback:
'Project Areas'

Managing different specific large and small unknown values, variables, and geometries

Adversarial and Stochastic

adversarial and stochastic inputs to automated coordinated decision making (indeterminate incompetence and malice

operationally defining cases for indeterminate-incompetence-and-malice as part of system collapse

reporting (sometimes reified) items that do not exist, and
denying reports of items that do exist)

Analogies of Modularity

types of modularity
brittleness
fix-ability
move-ability

Modeling and tracking 'system state' over a coordinated system process

Historical and future role of Universities

(2024.09.25)

Psychology and Coordinated Decisions

STEM
errors
feedback
awareness of non-automatic learning
project skills
specific: the behavioral psychology of schedules
investment in system-fitness

psychology of repeating the same mistakes indefinately

What is going on? We have to figure this out.
cultures of cryptic silos... that in potemkin-village fashion people then start to believe are cargo-cult-causal

Setting location items and ancestors in local coordinated decisions (2024.04.17)

Mirages and Siren Songs in System Design & Project-Space

Social cohesion and inclusion

Standards and best practice around agenda presentation:

Types of Feedback (2024.01.17)

decision systems
coordination systems
coordination and decisions
code compilation type feedback
agile project participant communication type feedback

Issues of copyright and fair-use on various levels of project, coordinated-decision-making, and the use of STEM processes therein.

Access: Whitelisting and Blacklisting (e.g. network access)

Could some form of white-listing alleviate ddos attack surface?

Art, Sport, Commons, Private, Municipal: The geography of modes of coordination (2024.06.29)

navigating and shaping 'sport' (the arena-dilemmas)

Documentation and Process Standards for Decision Making

using data
a record of how the decision was made

Election Data & Retrieval (databases and generation from vectors):

from 1900's statistical analysis to 2000's Data Science connecting Jan with open frameworks for

deep weight train & make new models
fine tune & transfer-learning with existing models
DPO type training
RAG and databases
- specific epub, pdf, .odf, and .doc(x), sheets, .csv, etc., databases?
- the relational-S.Q.L. stored-data world
- election data formats
project state
externalization
AI-open-office
coordinated decision making

Voting on Disputed Issues & between untrusting parties

real and theoretical: 'not in my backyard' vs. 'boil 49% in oil'
mediation
3rd party arbitration
no-trust contracts

Interfacing Structured, Unstructured, and Semi-structured data and tasks

Data Representation: Stateful Hybrid Structured and Unstructured Document Corpus Processing:

slim topic id phase
vectorization of topics
topic-vector document mapping phase
corpus representation phase (maybe graph)

General Tradeoff between exploring and trimming paths

(2024.09.05)

coordinated decisions
coordinated projects
coordinating planning
coordinated navigation
cut-up projects

more data types

IoT Translation and multi-modal data (2024.08.29), from ecological translation to institutional production

The Language of Bytes u8

2024.11.18

data storage readability
permanence
character sets
computational and storage efficiency and sustainability
physical records

means of objectively determining in a ballot measure is logically sound, e.g. declaring that all triangles have four sides, or some other tautologically false statement.

Project State, System State, and Data State in Coordinated Decisions

the dimensionality of data and state, project-state

Strategies for Managing Sunset-Clauses

where sunsetting is low hanging fruit
where sunsetting is a risk

precedent in modes of ruling vs. sunset limits on specific laws

Measuring Definition Fuzzyness

2024.12.14

scope
effects
terms

Scalable Modular Infrastructure

design, communication, and maintainability 'standards'

Administrative-State Project Statistics (connections and ambiguities of terms)

questions

Stateless and Subsymbolic Systems

(2025 10 29)

expectations of stateful solutions
maintainability of small increases in statefulness
the constant underestimation of the cost of state
the constant lack of awareness of stateless operation
the constant cargo-cult superstitious belief that functionality automatically is caused by state and state expansion
interdisciplinary overlap, parallels, and differences in jargon between municipal state and engineering state.

Topics in Election and Decision Coordination Data Management

transparency
non-potemkin-village
externalization (as in Object Relationship Spaces & Projects)

A STEM approach to defining and defending against nihilism

Projects, Puzzles, Games, Tests

(2024.09.12)

fitness
feedback
learning
skill/ability
process
story
definition
social

Mappability and dynamics of signals perception and learning with presentation and definition of mandates and choices

General Overreach, mis-reach, unsustainable or mirage efforts

2025.01

wrong approach
bad goal
wrong scale or scope

abstraction type
miscalculation type

STEM, Context, and Measurement vs. Nihilism, Disinformation & Collapse

Process & the Hypothetico-Deductive Method

2025.05.28 There is perhaps a strange parallel in negative-definition where future-state in short-term vs. long term is only negatively defined. Dealing with continued-failure-to-disprove quantitatively with the tools of STEM may be similar to modeling non-collapse. 'Process vs. Outcome' seem superficially to differ, as we think of outcomes being measured. But the negatively defined state of a time-series of measurements not-heading in a bad direction is perhaps compatible with a STEM approach to process.

(2024.12.03)

formats of data and documents
tidy data and row-files
granular value files
documents and files
validation of data transfer
validation of ownership
validation of file-document integrity

A Survey of Measurement:

What can be measured?
What measures can be used for what?
What claims of measurement or use are dubious?

Identifying goals that are hybrid-fragment-illusions and not related to:

the project
data
evidence
group agreed upon goals means methods
best practice

No One Size Fits all system

like databases

Data flow in systems: externalization and formats

Avoiding the echo-chamber of infotainment and distracted-shallowness

Security: Types of 'encryption' that cannot be broken:

one time pads
navigation-blind OS

Automated testing of coordinated decision systems

deciding on metrics
non-private information fields
testing
resporting
peer review and audits

Voting Logistics and Ethics: Western Chasm

The odd paradox of people in the west believing that voting is inherently good, yet still with the old dark-age-curse never recovered from that views anything 'worldly' as being an evil monster to be destroyed, with the absurd compromise of being willing to live: "in the world but not of it" or some rubbish. Pay attention to what you are doing and do things properly so no one gets hurt, for heaven's sake that is not an evil plot for destruction; it is a definition of responsibility and at least attempting to do what one ought to do.

Standardized error handling and audits

(2024.10.16)

Problem Identification & Classification

e.g. AI problem vs. general problems & psychology of perception
not ignoring, misdirecting, covering up, problems in ~voting system
no 'blame down hill' (or no "Blame goes down hill.") 2023.11.02

psychological distortions in perceptions of causality in building using and maintaining an architecture for coordinated decision making.

2023.11.02

Naive 'more connection = better' vs. ecology and system and definition studies

Math Anziety-Phobia, AI Anziety-Phobia, and ELIZA human-halucinations

sport-psychology as a disease
mental health epidemiology

Alignment (with reality) vs. Misalignment (with reality) or disconnection

default drift
panic and mid-sprint-panic

Related areas for coordinated decision making:

math
biology
psychology
linguistics

how quickly can an election system be built and used?

Social context in categories of configuration data for data structures and databases (2024.04.07)

standardized or agreed-upon ways of modeling future outcomes in a context of coordinated decisions making

Hamlet's Mill: stories, mythology, and coordinated decisions

2024.08.20

succession
learning procedures
habituation
learned pattern recognition
fitness metrics
valuation

Resource Use

- Scaling and computational efficiency (big o)

energy cost
- human time
- financial cost in areas
- computational time resources
- build-time, setup time
- repair time,
- security and time-use

Managing decentralized (or centralized) projects

efficiency, modularity, svg, and line/curve plots (vs. 'media file' bloat), TUI vs. GUI

Perception Choice and Coordination

Causes of Success Among Broken Clocks 2024.05.26 sun In any given human endeavor where there appears to be some relative success and competition at a given time, it can be non-trivial to identify what the future trajectory is for those who appear 'correct' at one given time, and to ascribe 'success' to what may be either a random outcome or an incomplete act of self-destruction.

Certification

(topics)

Negative Definitions and Right of Refusal

"I must, of force."[henry IV,1]
'nudge' the the tyranny of the default in settings/config

Historical Terms and Timeless Patterns

populism
ideology (e.g. from French revolution)
optimism (From Candid)

Moron-Farming

circle of 'yes-men'
"I choose to surround myself with the least qualified people."
potemkin-villages
Anne Applebalm's introduction to 'Twilight of democracy'

What does it mean to discuss a topic?

Listening
Questions
empirical/STEM grounding
fact-checking
statistical legitimacy

Edge Case or non-edge case definitions

define where database/datastructure time and clock sync issues are edge cases or not edge cases

Proxies and Measures of Fitness in a context of Roles in a context of specific projects including administration:

types/categories:

characteristic of participant: age, birthplace, stakeholder (arguably a form of 'test')
qualification-test: (such as a written exam)
procedural: e.g. checks and balances, [Can connect to STEM]
heuristic: repeat the last pattern (follow precedent/tradition) ['tradition' is interesting flexible and can fit/use any or none of the other categories; can be entirely arbitrary and ineffective or a nuanced recipe of proxies that are effective]
super-signal-test: feed a compulsion, addition, entertainment (e.g. represent a meaningless subjective reification 'has passion' fervor, 'religious' fervor, 'patriotic' fervor, etc., madness of crowd fervor. Super-signal cargo cult. [Not STEM]
nihilistic: deny and attack everything, construct potemkin villages [Anti-STEM]
old people
institutions
first past the post simple plebiscite (51% of people vote to boil 49% of people in oil and take their stuff)
gerontocracy
aristocracy
kakistocracy
kleptocracy
meritocracy
deliberate-Fantasism-ocracy
anti-modern-romanticism-ocracy
nihilism-ocracy
thug-ocracy
disinformation-ocracy
cargo-cult-ocracy
populism-fad-ocracy
revolution-ocracy

Note:

~participants
pre-participants
post-participants
partial/contextual-participants

Ad-Hoc Systems

Participation, representation, and ways to avoid some groups as being defined outside of the ability to participate:

exclusion
discrimination

individuals vs. groups:

balancing group responsibility vs. individual responsibility

rehabilitation and healing, learning

long term data storage problems: paper computers

storage write options
storage read options

Historians and Archives

records
accounts

example from history and educational stories:

The Heike Monogatari

The mechanics of contraction into short-term distortions

Distributed, Bulk and Batch operations:

managing 'voter' databases: -- outreach -- updates

Efficiency and the stories of Modernism

(note: 'measure for measure' previewing later themes)

Implementation & Formalities of Manifestation

"Easy things are hard." ~ (maybe John McCarthy on AI)

Principle and Implementation: frequent problems with databases and administration of projects

2024.07.04

measuring disconnection from reality

measuring institutional disconnection from reality
tests and measures
lexicons
teaching and cultures of awareness

process-participation-psychology

2024.05.31 e.g. if not a great model, the "psychological" and social obstacles that arise in a context of the mechanical logistics of planning and running a chess event or series of chess events (such as Norway Chess).

time series psychology
discontinuity psychology
novelty and habit psychology
why people do or don't participate
stress and strain at points in time
journalism commentary issues, cliches, predictions
conflicts of interest
cheating
how articulation-communication is part of perception-thought-processing

Edge-Cases Around Prohibitions and Taboos

Disambiguating "Bureaucracy" & "Politics" in Project Problem-Spaces

Definition blindspots

How does the social contract of defense not apply to women and children?

Definitions: Derived-Functional Definitions vs. Declarative-Arbitrary Definitions

Examples from coordination tool: -- collaborator-list definition -- collaboration-team definition

objective criteria for voting system feedback and suggestion acceptance:

bug reports
feature requests (lessons learned from past software systems)

measuring the equivalence of processes

Laws Policies, and Voting-Elections about each-other:

a Matrix With Feedback

Design-Guidelines and Standards

enforced rules and "static-analysis" vs. 'style-guides'

Input and Output that are blobs or have distinct sections

'result' (Rust, Zig, Go)

Participation and Motivation

use-ability of system

Simulations and Modeling of behavior:

empirical studies
abstract systems

Queues and Byte Arrays

(2024.11.30)

project-state areas for coordinated decisions

2024.08.31

context and project state
general or non-general/non-unified project-state

Context in measurement in Language & Linguistics (2025.01.30)

Edge Cases, Quantizing & Statistics in Character-Arrays

patterns in measurement.

Communication and Translation between X and y

input output measures
participants
setting location areas
animals
participants
pre-participants, post-participants

DOTW, D.O.T.W., Design Tradeoffs and Optimization,

Do One Thing Well vs.
general flexibility, etc.

overall system and metrics around coordinated decisions

population descriptions
mind-stability
economic-stability
ecosystem-stability

old code can work, new is not always better

databases broadly:

positive user experience with databases (2024.07.10)

LTS-Paradox: Is 'Long Term Support' a paradox for software stability?

Is 'Support after deprecation' a self contradiction or a meaningless reification like hollow OOP-aspirations?

Formal and informal political 'parties':

do there need to be parties
how should party systems be defined?
parties in coalition vs. winner-takes-all systems
proportional representation

Parties, history of representation

Mandates, history of representation

Abstract Negotiation:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22855

Abstract Voting:

Nice reference section in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.22846 An Axiomatic Theory of Tie-Breaking: Impossibility, Characterization, and Decomposition Frank M. V. FeysMay 25, 2026
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-57748-2 Donald G. Saari, Basic Geometry of Voting, Springer, Berlin, 1995 Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd ed., Cowles Foundation Mono- graph 12, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1963.
Laurent Bartholdi, Wade Hann-Caruthers, Maya Josyula, Omer Tamuz, and Leeat Yariv, Equitable voting rules, Econometrica 89 (2021), no. 3, 1463–1483.
Daniela Bubboloni and Michele Gori, Anonymous and neutral majority rules, Social Choice and Welfare 43 (2014), no. 2, 377–401.
Daniela Bubboloni and Michele Gori, Resolute refinements of social choice correspondences, Mathematical Social Sciences 84 (2016), 37–49.
Daniela Bubboloni and Michele Gori, Breaking ties in collective decision-making, Decisions in Economics and Finance 44 (2021), no. 1, 411–457.
László Csató, On the ranking of a Swiss-system chess team tournament, Annals of Operations Research 254 (2017), no. 1–2, 17–36.
Allan Gibbard, Manipulation of schemes that mix voting with chance, Econometrica 45 (1977), no. 3, 665–681.
Felix Brandt, Vincent Conitzer, Ulle Endriss, Jérôme Lang, and Ariel D. Procaccia (eds.), Handbook of Computational Social Choice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016.
Hervé Moulin, The Strategy of Social Choice, Advanced Textbooks in Economics 18, North- Holland, Amsterdam, 1983.
Donald G. Saari, Basic Geometry of Voting, Springer, Berlin, 1995.
Julius Petersen, Die Theorie der regulären graphs, Acta Mathematica 15 (1898), 193–220.
Lloyd S. Shapley, A value for n-person games, in Contributions to the Theory of Games, Volume II (H. W. Kuhn and A. W. Tucker, eds.), Annals of Mathematics Studies 28, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1953, pp. 307–317.
Lirong Xia, Most equitable voting rules, in Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC ’23), 2023, pp. 1133–1162.
Lirong Xia, Computing most equitable voting rules, in Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE ’24), 2024

Modeling the space of definitions for coordinated decision projects

(2024.08.30)

time series
succession
categories of types of definitions
collapse
project-role participant definition-set comparison

Representation and Mandates

Individuals and institutions in voting and infrastructure

from decentered /decentralized elections and networks to centralized political parties, servers, and cloud resources, proportional representation, etc.

Meritocracy & Meritocratic

Anne Applebaum on anti-fittness social-selection

Coordination and Fitness

meritocratic participation
"tradition" "religion" fitness and participation
is 'pageant-show' theocracy a form of populism?
is 'testosterone-show' a form of populism?

STEM Perception and Psychology of Metrics

Measures
Scores

Applications of Mandate-Based Systems

2024.06.21 temporal measures of legibility

measuring how long it takes to read information from a device diagram or language, with lack of clarity requiring more time to 'read'

psychology of data:

2024.08.07

sports psychology and coordinated decisions
psychology of testing-metrics and data procedures

Patterns in Misperception

2025.02.17

history of bad technology use and planning

System Design

secure by design
trust vs. trust-less
permissions vs. no-permissions

Potemkin Villages

cases
identification
avoiding disasters

STEM-Natural-Law

(2024.10.13)

STEM-structure-hygiene systems
no-membrane systems (rapidly weathering)
coercive-declarative systems (violence, fraud)
non-systems (delusion)
collapse-as-system (unclear)
too vague to proceed with

Protocol, Process, Signal, Information: Health and Toxicity:

Toxic Information Environments
Health, long-term and sustainability
information-resources and data-ecology

Tradeoffs and Contexts for Optimization

Data ~Handling(?) Policy:

function-equation data vs.
values vs.
instructions? (separate from functions?) Types of 'state'? (as in values being odd in lambda-calc?)

Votes from past generations who are no longer alive vs. sun-set clauses

Communication Infrastructure Costs

institutional roles

Security Needs vs. Command-line Aversion and super-signal attraction

information epidemiology and demand distortion

(2025 11 08)

everything has a default of system collapse within context
everything is susceptible to contagious/spreading system-definition patterns and disturbance regime dynamics
information asymmetry can refer either to demand distortion exploited by demand (for mutual long term loss) or exploited by supply (for mutual long term loss)
non-automatic-skills, literacy, patience, and best practice including learning are (non-automatic) infrastructure needed for survival and non-collapse
radicalization, extremism, demand-distortion, and 'rip-off economy' 'bad actors'(terminology from The Economist)
bubble echo-chambers can exacerbate

Balancing Types:

"symbolic" (horrible misnomer) computation and structured data
stateful systems
stateless "sub-symbolic" processes
coordination protocols

Best Practice

Definition Behavior & System Collapse

Tools for Project Management (non-collapsing projects)

Alignments
Scope
Tasks
Needs & Goals Definitions (not process reification illusion or goal reification-illusion)

Metrics for Definition Behaviors & Collapse

(2024.12.10th)

undefined spaces
underlying process or process definition issues
red flag definition changes
case study collapse event (modeling targets)
looking at maybe-similar modeling cases: forest fires, epidemiology
possible simple or subsymbolic-rule cell-contagion maps

Where best practice is active cost reduction as maintenance and liability reduction and prevention

Behavior Language Signals & Psychology around Project Alignment Decisions and Planning

history
books on subject
case study areas: -- from Ashby's history to Bletchley Park and post-war computer building ('mathematicians(logicians) not allowed') -- from the 'cult of the dead cow' to bug bounties -- "The Power of 10 Rules": 1970-1990, 1990-2005, 2005-2025

standard definition problems

pseudo-dialectical definitions (The Stalin Method) -- say multiple self contradictory things, then case by case claim you are always right and to be rewarded and everyone else is to be punished (sometimes with maximum cruelty for recreation).

Converting and Interfacing Structured and Unstructured Data

The world is not made of structured information.
Interfacing in both directions from raw unstructured information to structured and semi-structured information, is a set of processes.
Sometimes structured information is very useful and functional (STEM).
Sometimes structured information abstractions are a recreational luxury for whim.

Empty placeholders in process reification illusions and goal reification illusions

empty placeholder abstractions are not project goals or project processes for achieving goals
adding more empty placeholder abstractions does not fill existing empty placeholder abstractions

From Debate Moderation to Dispute Mediation (2024.07.08)

Forms of democracy and types and structures of elections:

forms of decision making in history: -- from 'the decline and rise of democracy' book

Static questions vs. diversified questions with a data-root

e.g. language translation versions
simplification level versions
ways of asking question to test which are obscure of misunderstood
the classic 'identification' step, where if what the question is asking can not be identified with a high percentage of the time, then the phrasing of the question is liability, effectively asking the wrong question, communicating the wrong thing, and causing confusion and miscommunication

Coordinated Decisions, Externalization, Agile, and the language-psychology of reactive-generation

(2024.08.25)

metrics roles organizations wholes and parts

John Adams, Democracy and Checks & Balances

the epidemiology of bad idea
the madness of crowds
STEM vs. 'votes'
debate vs. 'votes'
mediation vs. 'judgements'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke

speed of voting, protest votes, and reactions to violent takeovers

mediation education and long term issues

2024.06.17

'peace' historically being a 'useful idiot' disinformation campaign
'safety' in shakespeare
post-war reconstructions: -- Heike -- US civil war and "reconstruction" (how not to do things) -- 'There is nothing for you here' and time period fiction

Dysfunctional Areas

2024.06.17

Navigating and Failing to Navigate the space of mind

2024.12.27

visibility
learnability
repeating failures
case studies
Attraction to and avoidance of cargo-cults misinterpreting 'luck' and chance events.

How to deal with simplistic ethno-purity-nationalist ideas from the 1800's

2024.06.17

Adam's Monsters, Hobbes & Survival

2024.06.17 -- Extremist Ideology -- The Tyranny of the Many

Decision Skills:

What can be learned from comparing 'social story puzzles' and task-schedule ('pointless puzzles')?

Decision and Representation on small and large scales, public private sector, open source projects, etc.

2024.06.17

John Von Neuman on Technology

specific factors in goals and values-

The Eliza Effect vs. The Kramnik Effec https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gwlIfaH0xWn1hbz0E0pkrGcgAadRjD0foQM51lerjcw

Networked_Voting_and_Decisions_Including_One_Time_Pads

Decision Coordination: General and Specific

Voting, Decision, & Consensus Systems in Networks and in General

Project-Context Decision-Making Involving Participants and Components:

Contents:

Part 1: Secure Online-Voting in-Principle

Part 2: Practical-&-Secure Online-Voting

Part 3: Whole-Election and Vote-Analysis Platforms

Part 4: Generalized Decision Coordination

Bibliography & Resources

Clarifying Goals and Questions:

1. Is secure-auditable online-voting possible in principle?

2. Is reliable online-vote-result-publishing possible in principle?

3. Can election-processes and election-results-publishing be feasibly, sustainably, pragmatically, realistically, implemented given real world limitations on resources? How is security measured? What specific measures are required for security to be sufficient?

Goals, Health, Fitness, Junkfood, Fads

Questions For Clarification

Questions to answer and focus on include the following:

Questions that we are NOT attempting to answer and that we are NOT focusing on in this project include the following:

Peripherally Related Questions:

Concept: Universality, Voting-Procedures and Voting-Processes

Conceptual Note on Identification & Verification

Voter Identification, Voting-Office Identification, And One-Time-Pads

Social Engineering

Proposed Steps for Secure Online Voting

Rules & Assumptions (For Conceptual-Ideal Election)

Steps (For Conceptual-Ideal Election)

Step 1: (During in-person Voter Registration: start registration [not-over-a-network/not-online]:)

A. ballots that have been (or can have been) designed at the time of registration, and

B. Standardized or truncated ballots containing just choices and not all the text of the ballot (possibly a choice (e.g. choice number) and the initials of the person's name as a second factor) and

C. whether whatever form of ballot is customized for each voter (e.g. with a custom-id, verifiable as going to and coming from that one voter) or whether the ballot is standardized (and verifiable as the standard ballot for that election or more standardized) )

Step 2: (During in-person Registration: Make one-time-pads.)

Step 3: (During in-person Registration: Create Encrypted Ballot)

Step 4: (Voter Gets Not-Yet-Completed Ballot over-a-network)

Step 5: (Voter Receives the not-yet-completed ballot [over-a-network])

Step 6: (Decrypt and print ballot [not-over-a-network/not-online])

Step 7:(Print Ballot [not-over-a-network/not-online])

Step 8: (Validate the not-yet-completed Ballot [not-over-a-network/not-online])

Step 9: (Complete/Mark/Fill-in the Ballot with Vote-Choices [not-over-a-network/not-online])

Step 10: (Digitize the Completed Ballot not-over-a-network/not-online] )

Step 11: (Check Completed-Ballot for Errors [not-over-a-network/not-online])

Reference:

Step 12: (Encrypt the Ballot [not-over-a-network/not-online])

Step 13: (Voter Submits Encrypted-ballot Over-a-Network)

Step 14: (Initial Handling of Voter's Encrypted Ballot [Over-a-Network])

Note: This step will most likely be done on a "computer" that is connected to a "network."

Step 15: (Processing the Voter-Submitted Ballot [not-over-a-network / not-online])

Step 16: (Process Election Data / Count The Votes)

Step 17: (Publish Election-Results Data)

Information-Entropy, One time pads, old pads, and random number generation.

Risks, Attacks & Security

Identifying Risks

Bad-agents

Description & Overview of Process-in-Principle

Implementation & Secure Voting

Security Section

Additional steps can be taken to increase security.

For example:

Unique Ballots

Challenges:

(note: .csv files may have a standardizing role here)

(note: writing characters in a grid may have a standardizing role here)

About One Time Pads

Low-Tech Security & Limited-Resources

Entropy randomness and pseudorandomness

Fingerprinting

Part 2: Practical Secure Online Voting

Goal: Practical version of 'online voting' for realistic implementation

Some voting locations (or regions) may not have:

Most locations can be assumed to have and required to have:

An alternative Thrifty-Protocol for Resource-Limited Situations/Geographies

Practical Voting

General Revisions for Thrifty-Secure-Voting:

Topic/idea: use of one time pads plus signing signatures

use and issues with signing certificates

feasibility of one time pads: attack surface of initial sharing

Notes:

Ballot format standardization?

Proposed Steps for Practical Secure Online Voting (section under construction)

This thrifty-and-pragmatic (if not perfect) system does NOT assume:

Step 1: (Election-Setup: [over-a-network / online])