
Ask HN: Why hasn't the USA moved all voting online? - pgrote
After standing in a line for an hour to vote I am trying to wrap my head around why online voting isn&#x27;t an option in the United States.<p>Is it security? Most people consider their money more valuable than their vote and we all support online shopping.<p>Is it identification related? In my state they scan your driver&#x27;s license when you show to vote, which I can do on my phone.<p>The older I get the more I realize that the whole voting process is an enormous amount of time waste that doesn&#x27;t need to occur.
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pwg
> Is it security?

Yes.

Online voting is not secure (at least not secure enough for "voting", which is
a _very_ different security environment than even "banking").

If your online bank account is heisted, your bank can:

1) trace the transfer, and reverse it 2) give you your money back while they
do #1

I.e., the "security environment" is one of "we can easily clean up the mess
after the fact".

Voting is very different. It has to be "annonymous" (in order to function
properly and avoid coercion and/or vote purchasing) and that whole
"annonymous" aspect precludes all of the "clean up the mess after the fact"
abilities we have for non-annonymous situations.

So it (voting) has to be secure up front, and it can't rely on "clean up the
mess later" recovery processes.

Which leads to why online voting is problematic. For voting, the verification
needs to be that you, the human standing in front of the polling place
operator, is indeed who you claim to be. All forms of "online" identification
identify that "the unknown human typing on the keyboard has typed information
we believe to only be known to human X, so the unknown human is likely human
X".

I.e., you could give your online voting password to someone else, and they
could type it in, and the system would not know it was someone else typing it
in. You likely can't give your photo ID to someone else (unless they are your
twin) and have them pass as you while standing in front of the polling place
worker.

Same as for scanning the drivers license bar-code (which, by the way, is not
done to "ID" you, but just to make it easy for the operator to pull up your
record from the DB to mark it "has voted" [i.e., the scanning is simply a
'data-entry' task]). Someone else could obtain your license (theft or you
handing it to them) and they could scan it on their phone and the system would
have no way to know it was not you standing there doing the scanning.

This issue will always be the problem with some form of 'online' voting.
Verifying that the human at the controls (keyboard) is in reality the actual
human to which the credentials do in fact belong.

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nabla9
With online voting significant percentage of population loses their freedom to
cast vote independently (often women). Family member, vote buyer or other
influencer looking over the shoulder or voting for others is real threat.

The most common reaction to what I just said is to laugh it off as not
important or stupid fear mongering. Nothing could be more far from the truth.
Peer pressure has always been significant factor. Vote buying emerges as soon
as the opportunity to verify votes emerges.

There is no reason why the there should be long lines for voting. In many
developed countries they don't have that problem. It seems intentional.

~~~
pwg
A lot of details, including real world historical examples, is listed here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud)

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db48x
If you hate standing in line and talking to your neighbours so much, just vote
by mail.

~~~
cimmanom
Not all states permit absentee/mail voting outside very specific reasons; and
you generally have to sign a form attesting to those reasons under penalty of
voter fraud charges, which are a felony.

~~~
db48x
If you hate your neighbours so much that you can't stand in line with them for
an hour, then you have no ties important enough to keep you from moving to a
state where you can vote by mail.

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mr_overalls
Security is certainly a concern. Voting machines have proven extremely easy to
hack by security pros in recent years.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/defcon-hackers-find-its-very-
easy-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/defcon-hackers-find-its-very-easy-to-
break-voting-machines/)

