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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

If we can get an app for banking, I wonder if we can ever get an app for voting. A vote would seem to be less valuable than access to an enormous sum of money, yet one is available to be instantly and the other requires standing in line.

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Nope. If you control the votes, you control the money, the laws that make it, the military (including intel services, alliances & secret police), plus the rest. You don't even need to buy a presidency then. Once you control votes, you can privilege escalate to do almost anything. There's probably nothing else we should be as truly concerned about securing properly. It's already been rigged and EXTREMELY probable it was exploited for George W. Bush's election too. Electoral security is an absolute joke and a travesty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions#Con...

The difficulty is not secure voting, the difficulty is a secure, secret vote. So that the person that cast the vote, can't prove which way they voted ("Hey, see, I voted for you, now pay me the 10.000 USD you promised me"), that other's cant prove which way any given person voted (or indeed, prove that the vote wasn't blank) ("Put him on a black-list, he voted for $wrong candidate!").

As far as I know, secure on-line voting is still an open research question (and that's just the theoretical bit, never mind building a real, concrete system).

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