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Elon Musk’s Starlink could be used to transmit Australian election voting results
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
29 points (96.8% liked)
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I’m not at all a fan of the ketamine clown, but it’s literally just a dumb pipe.
If you’re truly concerned about the integrity of data passed over it, treat it as one of many multiplexed channels, and use out-of-band cryptographic validation, which any serious voting system design should include regardless.
Sure. But I do wonder why he’s so keen to get involved here. Don’t trust it for one bit.
We should 100%, unironically go back solely to paper ballots. Even if they take months to tally up.
These are Australian elections -- it is 100% paper ballots.
https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/
The starlink thing is just a backup link for communicating election-night preliminary count data counted by election staff at the booths. Then the ballots are transported to counting centres for the official count. Full legal results aren't known for a couple of weeks.
Still not a good enough reasons to use Starlink.
We should be investing in making sure all Voting Locations have proper telecommunication infrastructure.
Most voting locations are schools and most schools are connected to the NBN.
In the article, the AEC says Starlink is only a backup.
Also, there's a lot of remote polling locations where the only options are satellite-based - so if they're planning to use the NBN satellites (Sky Muster), but a backup is required, Starlink makes sense for that.