Uber Will Drive You to the Polls for Free on Election Day
thrillist.com
thrillist.com
Assuming that Uber's own words are a more accurate description of what they're doing. It also feels more honest. So I'm hesitant to fault them for how it's being spun in TFA.
In case you haven’t heard it enough though: go vote tomorrow. :)
I wonder if it could be politicized in the future by offering free rides to only some people (i.e. don't announce it, just create a button in the app, and only create the button depending if the users profile suggests they are likely to vote for party X).
Not to suggest I think this is a bad initiative, I think it's a great one.
Smart phones are not secure. Their hardware is not secure. Their operating systems are not secure. The software running on the operating systems is not secure. The network they connect to is not secure. The servers they would need to connect to are not secure. There is no paper trail.
Every argument against voting machines applies 10x more to smartphones.
I say this, while also thinking that if we could securely vote via smartphone we could have a far more functional democracy than we do today.
Election commissions and their data handling, voting machines, and processes they use Are Not Secure.
I walked in and obtained a copy of all voter registrations for Bloomington,In (Monroe Co.) And they loaded it on MY usb drive! I was expecting $5 for a burned CD. Nope. Instead they made themselves vulnerable to evil PowerShell or ironpython exploits, or even badUSB.
To pretend that our votes is secured is horrendously laughable, except we shouldn't be laughing.
Everyone could vote under a username of their choosing, and afterwords could download the "official" spreadsheet of all votes casted and look to make sure your username has the correct vote.
The spreadsheet would be a few megabytes at most and could be duplicated/distributed across different mediums.
The main worry would be someone adding fake usernames and votes to the spreadsheet. I'm not sure how we guard against this under the current system either.
Note that mass buying of votes is a concern under the current system as well. Allow people to pledge that they’ll vote a certain way, and pay them if their county and/or country votes the way they pledged.
Vote buying is not a concern in the US. The privacy of the votes guarantees that the vote buyer can't be certain that the voter voted the way they said they would, so the vote buyer can never know if their "purchase" actually mattered. This inherent uncertainty makes standard means of political persuasion, i.e., political advertising, a more effective spend.
Vote buying is a concern in places like India and South America--coincidentally, jurisdictions which already allow mobile voting...
Vote buying isn't a concern in the US because there is still a mostly functional criminal justice system, and because any politician who bought votes would be shunned by the vast majority of voters in the current culture.
My main concern would be "what happens when something goes wrong". Either a DOS attack (e.g. crashing the cell network), someone(s) finding that their vote was flipped, or someone(s) falsely claiming that their vote was flipped.
I suppose short term DOS can be handled by extending the voting period in response, long term can be handled by switching back to paper ballots (with the representative system the delay caused by this shouldn't be too much of an issue).
Failed audits are harder to deal with. If you make the system onymous instead of pseudonymous (at least with respect to the voting authorities) you could solve the problem by having a period after electronic voting in which people could cast paper ballots in person that overrode their electronic vote. Large number of failed audits would have to cause invalidating all plausibly affected votes and be considered equivalent to a DOS attack.
Fake votes also become more of an issue. Right now they are basically handled by the fact that the effort/reward isn't worth the risk, but electronic systems make the effort lower (for large scale attacks), reward greater, and risk negligible (for state sponsored attacks launched without stepping foot in the country). Since I already think you would have to make this sort of system onymous, it is likely possible to mitigate this with validation against other datasets... it also has the advantage that any such attacks need to target state hardware instead of phones, that could plausibly be secured.
I think you're size estimate is too small, 300M voters * 10 bytes/voter = 3GB not MB. But it's still a completely manageable size.
The remaining problem with all this is having the government actually implement it in a satisfactory way. Advocating for it would come with the large risk that the government would do something similar, but which didn't solve fundamental security issues. In this respect advocating for paper voting is much safer.
The easiest--and still the best--way to vote is by paper. Physical, unchangeable proof. Easily watermarked/holographed for audit purposes. Lasts a long time. Requires no special software or hardware. Best of all--it's easy to trace at every step of the process.
Because that's literally impossible with the current state of smartphone 'security'.