
Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app - votes
https://docs.voteism.org/
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kritr
First of all this is very cool and interesting that you guys actually took the
time to build out a system like this, even if it isn't perfect.

I did have one question though, are you reliant upon the integrity of the
platform upon which you're running your voting application on? In the sense,
if I had malware on the phone you were voting from, would that be enough to
compromise a system like this? An addition, did you have any plan to identify
the voters to make sure you couldn't cast an unlimited number of votes?

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votes
Hi Everyone,

The Covid-19 situation forced many things to shift online. We wondered what it
would be like to conduct democratic elections online. While that is the far-
far future, we set about building something that could get us a step closer
towards that future.

VOTEism is a secure political opinion poll app to express your preference for
one electoral candidate or the other. VOTEism currently works for the 2020 USA
Presidential Election only.

Current political opinion polls are riddled with low sample sizes, interviewer
biases, push poll tactics, self voting sock-puppets, and worst of all, the
lack of privacy. VOTEism seeks to change that.

Your vote is encrypted with a public key and is decrypted with the private key
on an air-gapped system. Anonymized and aggregated results are published on
the VOTEism mobile apps.

VOTEism is built, published and funded by a small and independent software
company (AskDesis INC.) based in the United States. We have no political,
governmental, corporate, or media affiliation. Please take time to read our
transparency policy here:
[https://docs.voteism.org/transparency](https://docs.voteism.org/transparency)

We hope you find VOTEism useful.

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codingdave
Interesting idea, but it raises many questions.

\- How do you prevent people from voting multiple times?

\- How do you ensure a representative sample of the population? Google tells
me that only 70% of Americans have smartphones, so what about the other 30%?

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tao_oat
So, a closed-source, non-audited polling app with grand security claims? What
could go wrong?

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dang
This comment breaks more than one of the Show HN guidelines
([https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html))
and also the global HN guidelines, which include: " _Please don 't post
shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment
teaches us something._"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Would you please be more mindful of how you address other people's work, and
not just apply the usual internet snark rules of being a maximal jerk about
everything? I don't mean to pick on you personally; it's a common phenomenon,
of course. But when the first response, indeed the only real response, to
someone's Show HN is a nasty putdown, poisonous fumes fill the thread. Not to
mention it's a sucker punch to the person who did all that work and went to
the trouble to share it.

~~~
tao_oat
You're right; thanks for the fair call-out. I apologize, especially to the
developers of VOTEism!

