

How feasible would it be to introduce online voting? - lorddoig
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32421086

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informatimago
The similarity is that:

When Amazon gets duplicate orders, or uncast orders, they tell the "customers"
to keep the goods.

And when an electronic vote is cast, along with the duplicates, the uncast
votes, the hacks, the citizen get to keep the bad.

The difference is that:

Amazon has a financial interest in avoiding uncast orders.

Politicians have financial and power interests in having uncast votes for
them.

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toonies555
technically feasible. multiple ways of proving your identity on a device and a
combination of ways must be used. FB+bank or gplus+DMV or whatever. then you
can SSL the connection up to the hilt. some fancy algorithms to copy your
choice to independent systems to make sure redundancy or system.

but should it be done? i dont think so. with paper, you have many many eyes on
whats going on. when something goes wrong, its not even 1% (maybe) of error.
but on online, if something goes wrong, its can become a huge issue. it might
be hard to convince the bulk of the population (court of public opinion) that
the result is true/valid/reliable. because they cant see/touch/feel the raw
parts that made up the sum.

another issue with high tech solutions, is that you end up targeting the high
tech people. its hard for laggards and cavemen to adapt. but its easy for a
tech-savvy chap to downgrade to a piece of paper. so it is possible that you
dont get a true representative of the population in the results.

the last issue, governments suck. voting (almost) never makes things better.

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Ermenwyr
Verifying someone's identity is certainly possible, but how do you deal with
malware flipping votes before they leave the computer? You could design the
most theoretically secure voting system in the world, but how do you truly
secure it when you don't control the hardware and OS that it is running on?

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voteforchange
1) Do away with "voting day". I cast my vote, and I get snail mailed a
receipt. If its wrong, I can call in and cast my vote over the phone. If its
right, do nothing.

2) Begin a publicity campaign to make the default vote a public vote. If you
are worried about being fired, ostracized, or otherwise targeted because of
who you vote for then walk your butt down to the polls and get in line with
grandma and the guy in the tinfoil hat.

Meanwhile I'm going to roll my wheelchair over to the computer room and use my
screen reader to cast my ballot publicly because IDGAF.

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DanAndersen
Anyone interested in the security of voting systems would be well-served by
watching the lectures from Coursera's course "Securing Digital Democracy":

[https://www.coursera.org/course/digitaldemocracy](https://www.coursera.org/course/digitaldemocracy)

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dadrian
The Estonian Internet voting referenced in the article was shown to have
several major security issues last May. See
[https://estoniaevoting.org/](https://estoniaevoting.org/)

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dmvaldman
Seems like a great application for cryptocurrencies, though maybe better with
those using proof of stake rather than proof of work.

Distribute one coin to every citizen (this is the hard part). Each citizen
votes anonymously by giving the coin to the candidate of their choice. The
network verifies that no coin (vote) is spent (cast) twice. Done.

~~~
RankingMember
That actually seems like an interesting idea, but I'd like for the public to
be able to view the list of unique coins for each candidate and verify theirs
went where they wanted it to. Wouldn't the 1-coin-to-1-person connection be
vulnerable to manipulation, since you wouldn't want someone (perhaps on the
inside) to be able to generate coins and spam-vote?

~~~
IanCal
> That actually seems like an interesting idea, but I'd like for the public to
> be able to view the list of unique coins for each candidate and verify
> theirs went where they wanted it to

This now means that if you can be forced to give up (or someone knows through
other means) your coins "id" then they can see how you voted. This is
something there are quite a few laws in place to try and stop with the current
voting system, and it's considered to be a very important property.

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known
Voting in elections is NOT democracy; In democracy it's your vote in elections
that counts; In FEUDALISM it's your count that votes;

