
“A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming - kushti
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/smartphone-voting-is-coming-just-in-time-for-midterms-voatz
======
CWuestefeld
If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT
through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like
this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck.

Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility.
Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our
society. And I think that people realize this. So when they know they haven't
invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they
spare us the chance of their error by not voting.

If you want to get more people actively participating in democracy, the right
path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier
for people to understand what they're voting on. Today it's a big investment
in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more
accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed
vote.

~~~
athenot
Moving voting day from a Tuesday to a Sunday would also make a big difference.
There are many people who have have informed opinions but can't afford to take
off work (write-up for being late to work/take off early, lost income,
transport issues). Also that would avoid removing a school day since most
public schools are used for polling.

Another option would be to switch to make mail-in ballots only.

~~~
Shivetya
how do you validate mail in ballots? I am more worried about votes where we
have to verify an absent voter simply because the chance of fraud increases.
Fraud not only in not knowing if it is the actual voter but also because we
cannot insure their vote was not forced.

my state had early voting for weeks so there really isn't a "voting day" issue
here. (Georgia). Now I have not looked but how many other states offer early
voting?

We need multiple issues fixed in US voting. (just a random list)

1) spreading the number of days to vote across a week or more 2) providing an
easy method to confirm a person is eligible to vote and vote on the candidates
they want to vote on.

3) providing a means to vote from outside your district for your own district,
this is mostly solved by expanding the voting period.

4) providing in clear language what non candidate reforms are being voted on

5) randomizing how candidates appear on a ballot

6) removing one party votes. people need to choose, we don't need drones

7) removing the primary system which exists to stymie third party options

~~~
mr_tristan
Oregon's had voting by mail exclusively, and, it _automatically_ registers
voters in a number of places, so unless you are fully off the grid, you're
pretty much gonna get a ballot. Consequently, Oregon has had consistently
higher turnouts in most elections.

Each vote gets the signature reviewed by a person, one at a time. I actually
had my ballot put on hold this year because the signature wasn't quite close
enough - likely, since I probably just flippantly scribbled something on the
package. They quickly mailed out another registration form where I basically
re-signed the ballot for additional information.

Ballots can be dropped off into several boxes, that don't even go through the
postal service.

Additionally, most counties have phone and email notifications for you to
track your vote. That's how I got my notification, 2 days after mailing it in,
that my ballot was under review.

~~~
kiallmacinnes
No two signatures I've ever written actually look the same. I do wonder how
this might affect people like me!

~~~
alistairSH
Gotta agree. My signature is chicken-scratch. Much like my handwriting in
general. Yes, it's a personal failing. But, if it disenfranchises me, I'll be
pretty upset.

------
JumpCrisscross
> _The Boston-based company raised $2.2 million earlier this year, helped
> along by buzzwords such as “biometrics” and “blockchain,” which it claims
> allows it to secure the voting process. Its app reportedly requires voters
> to take and upload a picture of their government-issued I.D., along with a
> selfie-style video of their face, which facial-recognition technology then
> uses to ensure the person pictured in the I.D. and the person entering a
> vote are the same. The ballots are anonymized and recorded on the
> blockchain._

This is horrible on so many levels.

~~~
lb1lf
...and it doesn't address one of the key issues with votes being cast in
places other than a booth in a polling station where you are alone: Coercion.

What's to stop a family member (OK, not much of an issue for overseas military
personnel, one would think) or another person from hovering just outside the
camera's capture area with a blunt object, ready to -ahem- influence your
vote?

Granted, this would only affect individual votes; there are bigger potential
issues with electronically tallying votes, but I'll leave those be...

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _What 's to stop a family member...[from] influenc[ing] your vote?_

This is also a problem with mail-in ballots. (It’s why I believe early votes
should be allowed to be overwritten by in-person votes.)

The issue with smartphone voting with selfie verification is almost everyone’s
phones contain selfies. (Americans overseas are also likely to have a photo ID
on their camera roll.) So controlling the phone means controlling a vote.
That’s a scalable risk.

Moreover, if the app is anonymising after verifying, it means the app
developers have been deputised by the Board of Elections to verify voters and
count their votes. (Whether you voted is public, in America. For whom you
voted is not.) That’s a big deal!

The blockchain add-on is worthless if done right, dangerous or illegal if done
wrong, and increases the cross-section across which the above issues get
amplified.

~~~
tempay
> It’s why I believe early votes should be allowed to be overwritten by in-
> person votes.

It's an interesting idea, though how would you maintain the secret ballot? If
you ask them to make a "negative vote" they can suddenly vote three times
without any chance of being caught.

~~~
simias
You could keep the ballot sealed but tied to the voter's ID. Once the polling
center closes for every mailed-in ballot they check if they have an in-person
vote. If so, they discard it, otherwise they add it in the urn before it's
opened for counting.

~~~
gliptic
This is actually how it works in Sweden. They check the voter list whether the
person already voted during the day and discards the mail-in if so.

------
matty_makes
There needs to be a paper trail. Newer technology is not the answer for
voting.

What would be a good idea is a team to do UX on voting ballots, nationally.
Solve this problem once and take into account all the variations of local
things (bonds, amendments, etc.) Then pick a company to make ballot readers,
open source the software and use best in class info-sec practices.

We don't need instant results, people don't take office at midnight of
election day. We need accurate, transparent and verifiable results.

Also, make it a national holiday, close schools and just use them all as
polling places.

~~~
rsync
"There needs to be a paper trail. Newer technology is not the answer for
voting."

I agree. Voting systems need to be extremely simple and understandable - and
auditing the system, or the votes, needs to be a task that any person pulled
randomly off the street could accomplish.

------
partiallypro
Democracy only works with a well informed voting base, and while you may
disagree with the current state of politics, it has always been my belief that
people that do not know the candidates or issues should abstain from voting. I
will often vote in some races but abstain from others, simply because I don't
know the issue or candidate well enough. I wish more people would do that.

Making voting easier for the highly ignorant is not a good path. If someone
isn't willing to mail in a ballot, drive to the poll, etc I don't think they
care enough to know the issues.

I know there are some circumstances where people can't get off of work, but
those people generally just don't know their own rights. Most states legally
obligate employers to give people 2-3 hours off to vote.

~~~
49531
This sentiment is a part of what drove literacy tests as part of voter law.

Making voting harder tends to benefit one political party over another; it
doesn't across the board lower turnout evenly.

Sometimes it's enough to understand the macro issues of the party. You can't
really know how an elected official will vote on your behalf, so it's all
guesswork. But making voting harder is just going make our government less
democratic.

~~~
masonic

      his sentiment is a part of what drove literacy tests
    

No, _racism_ is what originally drove literacy tests as a result of
manumission. Whites were generally exempt. See the origins of "Grandfather
Clause".

------
zaroth
My town has annual “Town Meetings” where everyone pours into a gymnasium
(turnout is up to 800 voters in a town with population ~15,000) to vote on all
the “articles” of which there can be upwards of 20. The annual meeting often
extends multiple evenings as much discussion is permitted on each article, and
traditional voting can add several hours to the process when vote counts are
close.

Instead of shouting aye or nay, raising hands, or standing to be counted, we
hand out wireless handsets which have a yes/no buttons and a small display to
confirm your vote. Then a screen at the front displays the total.

The cost of renting the devices is non-trivial at around $15-20k (having
trouble finding our towns specific budget line item for this) so I often
pondered why we couldn’t use smartphones that everyone is surely already
carrying, and maybe carry a small stock of devices just for people without
phones.

The idea would be a local WiFi network which was not connected to the
internet, where an app on the device would connect to a local server over that
WiFi network to place the vote, after someone checks you in at the front desk.

I have no reason to trust the devices we use now any more than an open-source
public domain phone app and backend container combo that the town could setup.

Over thousands of towns and tens of years the TAM is pretty large, but more to
the point a non-profit coalition developing and maintaining this solution
could provide a lot of value.

~~~
Steltek
Yikes, I can see a lot of our TMM's having trouble with phones. It'd be better
to just invest in dedicated phones and not allow BYOD. In fact, I can see some
TMM's trying to get away with voting remotely (attendance is sometimes
challenging).

That said, the remotes are amazingly useful for going back and looking over
the results.

~~~
zaroth
To be clear, they are wireless remotes, but you have to be in the room. And
even these dedicated devices are not entirely frustration free, sometimes they
have to revert to hand counting.

I don’t think anything is saved within each device, just the totals. They say
there’s no way to know how each individual device (and therefore device-
holder) voted.

I doubt strongly there is any actual crypto guaranteeing this though.

------
drawkbox
We trust our financial system and it already has decades of fraud detection.
Our voting system should be through something similar with all history, fraud
detection, voter verification and more.

Our current voting system is already rife with fraud with little remedy and
recounts are difficult, we need to expect fraud and move to a digital system
that does have fraud detection in it similar to our financial system. This
system can track all your votes and have a paper trail, you can opt out if you
want and deliver it in person.

Our current system is such a patchwork of systems it it security by obscurity
and broken, recounts are difficult and if we moved to a common system that has
records for every vote in every state in a consistent format, then research
could detect anomalies and fraud as well.

Digital records that are as secure as financial records, and tracked, are
easier to find fraud and recount, no security by obscurity. Noone would trust
banks that keep paper records and aren't verifiable anymore today, voting
shouldn't be that way either.

We all use the financial systems, credit systems, and trust them. Even with
their problems people trust that the amount they have and what they use is
recorded correctly in terms of financial data. We should expect the system to
be hacked and have fraud detection to match it just like in the financial
system. Until we do move to digital voting with fraud detection then our
elections will be secure only by obscurity, and lots of games being played
with no recourse and lack of trust in possible fraudulent counts and recounts.

~~~
ajb
Banks solve a different problem. The reason why banks can be computerised does
not apply to voting.

Bank functioning is _observable_ by the people concerned: You can see if money
you didn't spend left your account, and if you failed to get paid. Failures
are detected very quickly.

Voting has two key differences:

* Voting is _anonymous_ (to render intimidation and bribery of voters ineffective).

* It's not sufficient that citizens votes are counted correctly, it is necessary that no spurious votes are also counted.

The means by which electronic banking is rendered safe are therefore much
harder to apply.

Voting must also not just be secure, but be demonstrably secure _to the
voters_. With paper voting, you can go and watch the votes being counted. At
every stage of the process, the answer to 'how do you show the public that the
process has integrity' is helped by the fact that the votes are on macroscopic
objects whose movement is obvious. Electronic voting systems lack this
feature.

~~~
drawkbox
> _Banks solve a different problem. The reason why banks can be computerized
> does not apply to voting._

I disagree, fraud detection and security is the best we currently have and
people trust it due to these areas.

> _Bank functioning is observable by the people concerned: You can see if
> money you didn 't spend left your account, and if you failed to get paid.
> Failures are detected very quickly._

I can observe my votes were recorded correctly, others can't see them, data
would be anonymized/fingerprinted/hashed when counting.

> _Voting is anonymous (to render intimidation and bribery of voters
> ineffective)._

Financial systems do not allow other people to see your data/account amounts
and more.

Who people vote for is easily determined by metadata and you really think
security by obscurity on our current system is really that private? Lots of
holes and ways to get voter data in security by obscurity. You don't think the
voting machines and secretary of state offices/recorders have that data? No
need if digital and verifiable.

I think people have a false sense of security how private their votes are.

> _It 's not sufficient that citizens votes are counted correctly, it is
> necessary that no spurious votes are also counted._

You can easily anonymize data when running reports and fingerprint/hash
results. Patterns and anomalies are much easier to find in a data based
system, just as fraud is detected by the digital financial system.

> _The means by which electronic banking is rendered safe are therefore much
> harder to apply._

Agree to disagree.

> _Voting must also not just be secure, but be demonstrably secure to the
> voters. With paper voting, you can go and watch the votes being counted._

People trust their financial system but wouldn't if it was all on paper by
some individual counted and just given their word that it was correct...

There can still be a paper trail and reports/vote records can be kept forever.

> _At every stage of the process, the answer to 'how do you show the public
> that the process has integrity' is helped by the fact that the votes are on
> macroscopic objects whose movement is obvious. Electronic voting systems
> lack this feature._

There wouldn't be any blackbox or hackable machines to trust, you trust that
your vote was securely counted online, in an app or if you want down at the
paper ballot and entered into this system. But again, financial transactions
are trusted, I don't trust random ATMs that are like random voting machines, I
trust the app/site where my financial data resides. The middle man is security
by obscurity and more insecure currently than if it was truly online/digital.

Our current elections system are all a patchwork of hackable areas. If we had
a better standard voting system that expected hacking and fraud, like
financials, we'd be better off on security, verifiability and reliability
without election day games and suppression filled with security by obscurity.

Votes currently go into the ether, into various unverifiable counting systems,
counted by people who have biases, entered into black box voting systems that
are hackable, transferred differently from these precincts to the recorder and
there are so many holes along the way it is not trustworthy in any way. Your
vote could go down the memory hole and you'd never know.

------
VikingCoder
> Critics call it “the Theranos of voting.”

I'd go so far as to call it the "Thanos of Voting."

With just a snap of the fingers, half of all of the votes could be wiped out.

------
dalbasal
The problem with "meta" democratic decisions is that we can only discuss them
honestly in the abstract. Once it's a live agenda decision, gerrymandering
implications are all that will matter. The quality of the proposal becomes
irelevant.

Lets imagine that security issues are 100% solved. The app can go live.
Pollsters will figure out how this (inevitably) changes voting patterns.
Young, or rural or some other group will vote more, to the benefit of some
party.

At this point the only relevant factor determining most politicians' stance on
this will be determined by good/bad for my side, in the short term.

------
aalleavitch
Yeah, this is the opposite of the correct way to solve the problem. What
about, instead, you had an app that you could just plug in what time you
wanted to vote and it would find the nearest polling place and give you the
google maps directions and maybe even allow you to order an Uber ahead of
time? It could reminds you how and when to register, it could even help reduce
wait times by directing you to polling places with little traffic or at time
when most people are not out voting.

We could make voting easier in a million ways that are not literally allowing
you to vote on your phone.

~~~
malvosenior
> _What about, instead, you had an app that you could just plug in what time
> you wanted to vote and it would find the nearest polling place and give you
> the google maps directions and maybe even allow you to order an Uber ahead
> of time?_

Uber basically does this now. It had a big call to action yesterday to take me
directly to my nearest polling place.

------
mattnewton
I think the way the private sector solves problems and the way voting should
be done are diametrically opposed- the more inefficient voting is, with the
more people involved, the larger a successful conspiracy must be. Trust a lot
of people a little over a few people a lot.

------
jkaljundi
As an Estonian who has voted online and via mobile ID for years, couldn't
imagine going to vote in a physical location, using pen and paper.

~~~
wasdfff
Pen and paper is hardly done in the US except provisionally. All my votes were
cast on a touchscreen with a printed paper recipes that I could look at and
confirm of my choice. The paper ballot is kept by the board of elections.

Whose to stop bad actors from manipulating electronic votes? Whose to say your
vote was even tallied? It is far easier to manipulate elections
electronically. If Russian operatives are able to penetrate election systems
in the behemoth of the US, do you feel confident that they are leaving your
Estonian system in their immediate sphere of influence alone? It would
potentially take one engineer and one computer to manipulate an electronic
election. It would take a team of people, equipment, trucks, incinerators,
fake ballots, whatever to do the same manipulation to millions of physical
paper ballots stored in secure facilities.

~~~
octorian
> Pen and paper is hardly done in the US except provisionally.

Every state in the US can have a different system in place for the actual
voting process. These systems also change over time. Pen and paper is used in
plenty of the US, just not necessarily in your district.

Of course the pen-and-paper system is designed to be electronically scanned,
at least.

------
nmeofthestate
No offence to Americans reading, but speaking as an outsider, it seems to me
that voting in the US is fucked up in so many ways that need to be fixed first
before starting on "smartphone based voting".

I saw this short twitter thread listing some of problems that are especially
apparent from a foreign perspective:

[https://twitter.com/MackieJonathan/status/105996240724471808...](https://twitter.com/MackieJonathan/status/1059962407244718081)

~~~
specialist
That's a pretty good list. (Copypasta below.) I can only think of a few
omissions (eg poll taxes, destroying all the evidence asap).

No one considers the USA's elections fair, transparent, accountable. Why most
foreign election observers don't even bother.

And yet, American exceptionalism. Point out the emperor has no clothes and the
serfs lose their minds.

\--

If British elections had:

Parties drawing up constituency boundaries

Polls closing at 6pm

Councils recording voters party support

Government-funded selection meetings

Returning officers standing for election

Zero regulation on election spending

Votes counted in secret

Hours-long queues to vote

Barely surmountable criteria to stand for election

No national rulebook for national election admin

Lunatic criteria for voter registration

A minimum of a dozen elections happening at once

Referendums to approve building a school

Voting machines hackable by 10 year olds

Electoral data sold to the highest bidder

Etc etc etc

Folk would go ape. But here we all are watching CNN as if this were a proper
democratic election with a stats guy using a giant iPad and everything.

And that results are declared while some states are still voting

------
mosselman
Voting is a solved problem: fill in some box on paper. What is automating it
ever going to solve?

~~~
throwawaylolx
Increasing participation? I won't drive out of my way and queue somewhere to
vote. Sure, many people think the solution to this is shaming me for not
caring enough about democracy, but it is obviously not working. If it were
easy and safe to vote from my phone, I may be more inclined to vote.

~~~
thrower123
Would you be more inclined to educate yourself on the candidates and the
issues on the ballot? If increasing voter participation is just about having
more ignorant voters, or stuffing the ballot box with people from given
demographics, then quite frankly, I am not in favor of it. I wouldn't qualify
myself to be sufficiently educated to really vote on any of the issues I voted
on yesterday, but hey, I did my civic duty and got my sticker. I don't have
the foggiest idea what the difference between the two candidates for county
clerk is, or what the material results of amending one sentence in the state
constitution with what reads to me as different synonyms will be...

I don't think that is a solvable problem.

And I would be terrified of throwing smartphones into the mix, because they
are just terrible (I think the iPhone has made the world a worse place, on
balance...). Any API endpoint that is setup to handle the traffic is going to
be attacked, and it is going to be broken; people are going to be on shitty
LTE connections, and their votes aren't going to go through. The data is not
going to be properly anonymized. Software is terrible, and it is going to have
bugs and fuckups and gaping holes that would be horribly exposed under the
stress and scale of a real election.

Voting is basically a solved problem, and I don't see that piling complexity
on top of it is a worthwhile endeavor. You go to your polling place, you grab
the sheet of paper, you fill in the bubbles with the sharpie, you drop it in
the slot. There are some simple, low-tech ways to improve things if you want;
make voting day a national holiday, open more polling places, hire more people
to staff them. None of that requires a boondoggle IT project.

~~~
throwawaylolx
>Would you be more inclined to educate yourself on the candidates and the
issues on the ballot?

Yes, definitely.

>Voting is basically a solved problem

Not sure what's your definition of "solved problem," but, as far as I'm
concerned, it's not solved if it fails people who would be inclined to vote
and educate themselves on voting if it were easier to vote.

>open more polling places, hire more people to staff them.

That would be an alternative, especially if they could open polling place at
each workplace and near each home with infinite staff. Alternatively,
technology and automation could be used to scale UX, but, as you mentioned,
current tech does not appear to be fit for this, which makes voting not a
solved problem.

------
gambler
I know how to solve this problem. Upload a speech by each candidate to YouTube
on election day. At the end of the day whomever gets the least downvotes wins.

Google's CAPTCHA and profiling will protect us from election tampering and
make sure only the people who are allowed to vote will vote.

Might need CAPTCHA 4, though. The one where you go through a DNA test to
verify your uniqueness, then get an RFID implant for truly secure 2-factor
authentication. I'm not sure where blockchain and IoT will come in play, by
I'm sure we will will find a place to plug them in.

(If by this point you didn't catch on that this was sarcasm, I'm not sure
there is anything I can do.)

There is a much simpler solution for increasing participation. Don't punish
busy people. Hold voting on a weekend, over the entire 2 days. You will get a
massive surge in participation. Yes, it will be more expensive, but that can
be optimized. Heck, just add a checkbox on tax forms that says "if you support
weekend elections, check here and we will charge you extra X dollars". You
will get tons of money for this initiative.

~~~
AaronM
You can early vote one weekend here in Texas, and that doesn't seem to
radically increase turnout. This year i believe turnout was lower on
Saturday/Sunday than during the week.

~~~
gambler
Do people generally know about this option? Nov 6 date was advertised
everywhere.

------
bigtech
I would be in favor of software that makes it easy to pre-vote. Then, when I
go to my polling place I could quickly print, review and submit my votes.
Where I vote the process is tediously manual. If we could get, say half the
voters in and out quickly, there would be more time for the election
commissioners to assist everyone else.

------
camgunz
VBM and compulsory voting is basically the only way to get turnout > 90%. You
can try to get people fired up about elections, but we're well past
diminishing returns on that front. You can try to lower barriers to voting,
but even in states like Oregon with auto-registration and VBM it's still lower
than 70%.

If you look at any place with > 90% turnout, they have compulsory voting. And
once you have that you have a strong impetus to make voting as easy as
possible, so you get stuff like holidays, VBM, early voting, etc. The fixes
are obvious, simple, and they'll save money; Republicans just want turnout to
stay low so we won't get them. End of story.

~~~
lolsal
Your comment was interesting until the very last two sentences. Please don't
make low-quality generalizations like that, punctuated with dismissal.

~~~
camgunz
I get where you're coming from, but it's a matter of fact that Republicans at
all levels of government are consistently against expanding voting access.
Take some time and look at what happens to those bills. It's 100% a partisan
issue. It shouldn't be, but it is.

------
Shivetya
Smartphone voting is no more bad than absentee voting is for people who are
actually in their voting area. We have/had people voting with absentee ballots
who just didn't want to do early voting and stand in lines

------
fallingfrog
This particular idea seems bad from a security standpoint. But we do need to
make some major changes to level the playing field so that people who have
small children, move often, work odd hours- in other words, everyone except
for propertied old people- are able to vote.

I can see a few ways to make this happen:

1) make voting day a national holiday

2) automate voter registration when you file a tax return and make same-day
registration the law nationwide

3) automatically mail everyone an absentee ballot

~~~
mnx
Just curious, why do Americans always talk about making it a holiday, wouldn't
moving it to a sunday create similar effect, while being much simpler? This is
how we do it here in Poland.

~~~
fallingfrog
That would work too, but most customer serving businesses are open all
weekend, so moving it to the weekend would mostly help people working 9-to-5
jobs, but not the young frequently moving people you are trying to target, who
are also the ones working weekends and late nights. Whereas on federal
holidays like Christmas, only gas stations and hospitals are open.

~~~
wasdfff
People working minimum wage jobs will still be working Election Day unless
it’s very strictly enforced. Plenty of places are open on federal holidays;
McDonald’s does not close on christmas.

~~~
fallingfrog
Yeah, true enough..

------
jrs95
Making election day a holiday could help, but let's be honest - a lot of
people are just going to smoke weed and play video games if they get that day
off. It would help but it's not a solution to other issues like voter
suppression & general lack of voter engagement. Although it seems like the
increasing toxicity of our politics is at least getting more people involved.

------
ddingus
Voting Tek isn't the problem. In fact it's going to make a lot of problems.
There is no real way to establish trust without making those votes personally
identifiable.

Low turnout is because people do not feel compelled to vote. They need
something to vote for. Policy better aligned with the needs of ordinary
Americans will improve voter turnout.

------
viggity
IIRC, when parts of Hawaii offered online voting - participation plummeted.
People want to be seen voting as they view it as virtue signaling, and nobody
sees you vote online. However, this could be contraindicated by
Oregon+Washington State who have mail in ballots only and have very high
participation.

------
tim333
It seems hard to vote electronically in a way that can't be hacked and is
fully private but for those that are not too bothered by privacy it seems ok.
I mean I voted Labour in the last thing and aren't bothered if someone finds
out. You could still go do the paper ballot thing if worried.

~~~
wasdfff
The worry isn’t how you voted; in the US your party affiliation is already
public. It’s ensuring the vote count is correct.

------
mattferderer
If this were to ever become a reality I would like to see it be open sourced
so all countries can use it & all citizens can test for security breaches.

Our government is meant to be transparent & this is something that I don't
believe becomes better by being closed off.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
1\. All citizens aren't experts at auditing software, and won't be.

2\. In order to achieve anything close to the same transparency as existing
voting systems, you would have to open the operating systems of all chips on
the devices, the firmware, and the chip design, and then enable any citizen to
verify that the device they have in their hand actually was built from those
sources.

------
weegee101
Haha, that "sample security test" is hilarious. Basically just a link to SSL
Labs saying they meet industry standard. That's great, glad they can meet low
hanging fruit. How about proving that they can do better?

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overthemoon
Why are people not turning out to vote? This is the key question, and I
really, truly do not think it has anything to do with whether you can do it on
your phone. This is a technological solution to a multifaceted problem.

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xte
Oh yeah, so voting it will be no more anonymous and only the company holding
the service know really who vote who...

Corporatocracy is coming, someone watched "Continuum" TV series and think it's
a nice idea...

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AnthonyWnC
It is hilarious and idiotic to see all these modern luddite think that somehow
electronic X (in this case, voting) won't work or can't be secure.

And yes, paper voting has to be the best solution ever. /s

~~~
wasdfff
Every piece of software can be exploited given enough effort and time. Things
are only secure until they are broken. In the year of spectre and meltdown
exploits, you balk at the idea that electronics are insecure?

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Tsubasachan
People who can't be bothered to donate 20 minutes of their time every 2 years
should think about what democracy means for them.

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FredrikMeyer
In Norway we can prevote several weeks before the election. Result is more
people voting and shorter voting lines on voting day.

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captainbland
Oh goodie. If you think the internet of unsecured things revolution was fun to
watch, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

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gibsons77
The only way 'blockchain' would be beneficial is if it was on a public ledger.

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amingilani
I don't like how this article tries to generalize smart-phone voting itself as
the problem. The trouble is this particular app.

I personally think blockchain powered voting solutions with a PKI backed ID
Card like my Estonian e-Residency card could be a fairly strong way of
authentication.

~~~
fooyc
Just like this app, you seem to focus on protecting against the voter (or
someone using the voter's phone).

How do you protect against a compromission of:

* The mobile phone's OS (by a virus, by the manufacturer)

* The app's server code

* The app's hosting providers

We are speaking about governments, or very rich parties trying to change to
outcome of elections here.

~~~
amingilani
All wonderful questions, and maybe some of the tech needs to be refined. But I
can already cryptographically sign transactions on my hardware Bitcoin wallet.

Embedding displays into cards isn't impossible, BofA does it for OTPs already.
A combination could ensure that users know the vote they're casting by
confirming it on a secure hardware token.

With that done, you could upload that vote to a blockchain based system that's
auditable, but anonymized.

But I can't give you a good answer to "what if someone steals the phone and
card". One solution is to have remote election officers that verify your
identity via the camera in real-time as you cast the vote. They could look at
your face, or even read your fingerprint off the camera (I know that's
possible because my country lets banks do that).

You'd only be able to cast the vote through devices with good enough cameras
and under good enough lightening and you may have to wait a little while, but
it'll be secure and you won't have to travel — especially if you're registered
in a distant state or district.

It's better than nothing.

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king07828
Could the Monero system be modified to create a voting system that maintains
the secret ballot? From an engineering perspective, It seems like the currency
and monetization aspects be pulled out/minimized and the untraceable
transactions aspect used to record votes.

~~~
monocasa
No. Vote buying and vote cohersion attacks have historically been the largest
form of attack on voting systems. We need a voting system where you can be
sure your vote was counted without being able to prove how you voted, even to
yourself.

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knowThySelfx
This will happen though. Will seem like a bad idea initially.

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slantaclaus
Oh no then everyone would be able to vote, even the renters!

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tapatio
How about we do Smartphone Taxes first?

~~~
wasdfff
The IRS could file your taxes for you automatically tomorrow if they weren’t
legally restricted from doing so. You can thank intuits lobbying.

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fallingfrog
One thing to note here is that it's not as if it's just coincidentally
difficult for young people to vote, it's not just an unavoidable fact- it's
part of an _intentional_ strategy. For certain portions of the American ruling
establishment, democracy itself is an enemy to be vanquished by any means
necessary. Review the history of racial segregation and you will see obvious
parallels to many forms of voter suppression today. This is the next big issue
facing the USA, from my point of view.

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Novashi
Touch screens are a really great idea for voting.

No really.

[https://twitter.com/The_UnSilent_/status/1059962688338583554](https://twitter.com/The_UnSilent_/status/1059962688338583554)

</sarcasm>

------
quotemstr
I strongly oppose vote-by-mail and vote-by-phone, but for a different and
underappreciated reason: the secret ballot is absolutely essential for
escaping from preference falsification traps.

"Preference falsification" is a social phenomenon in which, between choices A
and B, most people prefer thing A but believe that everyone else prefers B,
making it socially unacceptable to express support for A. If votes are public,
then everyone feels compelled, upon threat of ostracism, to vote for B,
leading to enactment of policy that's actually extremely unpopular. Under a
secret ballot system, people can profess support for B while secretly voting
for A, and if everyone does so, policy A ends up being enacted, concordant
with the true preferences of the population.

If you can vote by mail, or vote by smartphone, nothing stops people from
supervising each other's votes. That there's currently a norm against doing in
vote-by-mail jurisdictions is purely a cultural holdover from the days of the
true secret ballot, and it's only a matter of time before this norm erodes.

We live in an age of moral panic and socially enforcement of beliefs that are
both unpopular and, in many cases, scientifically incorrect. Let's not make
the problem worse by making it even harder to escape from the preference
falsification trap.

------
shittyadmin
Good idea honestly, the security issues are greatly overblown - especially if
we can simply make this a mailer with "if you want to vote for this candidate,
enter this code/scan this qr code", where nothing about that code identifies
the candidate they voted for.

And it'd definitely help to improve voter turnout, just look at studies on how
poll lines impact future voting behavior...

~~~
lolc
> simply

That one word you can never use to describe electronic voting with secret
ballot. Sure it may be made easy, but it won't ever be simple.

------
lelelelelele
Why is HN harping on the blockchain aspect of this so hard? Vote counting IS
actually one of the appropriate uses of it, considering it provides non-
repudiation in a manner that can be verified by anyone. The biggest issue here
is the initial assignment of 1 "vote coin" per person during the initial roll-
out. Assuming they can solve that problem (and that's a big if), they can
simply create new block chains for each election in which every potential
voter is again assigned 1 vote.

I realize that this has the side-effect of killing off anonymous voting (at
least to whoever doled out the tokens, you'd still be anonymous to your
neighbors), but I think that is a good thing. While you can argue about what
the side-effects that has on individual voters in extraordinary circumstances,
fact of the matter is, anonymous voting makes it effectively impossible to
verify the percentages each candidate achieved.

