“A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
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Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. And I think that people realize this. So when they know they haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they spare us the chance of their error by not voting.
If you want to get more people actively participating in democracy, the right path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier for people to understand what they're voting on. Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote.
If the cause of someone not voting is politicians saying they are too stupid to vote, maybe they really shouldn't vote.
I think this describes pretty much everyone who votes today. It's nearly impossible to actually understand the issues and I'd wager it's literally impossible to understand the future effect of what you're voting on. The system is just too complex.
Have you ever read a news article about a topic you're actually familiar with? They are rife with inaccuracies. Most of us are not politicians but I'm sure the same can be said about political coverage.
In summation I think the government and society are too complex to reason about with a human brain and what little there is to know is heavily distorted through inaccurate reporting. I don't see smart phone voters being any less informed than the people that currently think they're informed.
You can't ask your average citizen to spend 20+ hours in advance of an election thoroughly researching candidates, and you can't trust a third party to "condense" information on them without an agenda.
A republic is supposed to be a society where people elect representatives to make most of these decisions for them. I should not be directly electing judges, police chiefs, school officials, attorney generals, or cabinet positions of the state government. The only reason TPTB made these elections direct was to incentivize people to vote by party color rather than by person to smuggle in bad actors into government.
I'm a firm believer that instead of having at least 5+ different elections each cycle we should be electing a ranked choice set of 3+ representatives per district who then can, as their job, and by legislature appoint the rest of the offices of government.
That would mean I would ranked choice vote for ~3 representatives that then convene in my state legislature. That legislature sends some number of its own delegates to Washington to act as federal representatives. The 3 representatives in my district would, for my district, select its judges, police chiefs, etc.
That would hugely dissociate the machine that overwhelms people with choice and results in aligning with factions and talking points instead of actual people.
The point is that there is no executive, no dictator, appointed by the people. It all goes to either a council or legislature appointment. And as long as you do such elections locally enough that those representatives aren't just ivory tower detached from those they govern their failures will be reflected throughout the community.
A large part of why it is so easy to mislead voters today with ads and propaganda is that you aren't voting for people you know, you are voting for strangers from a distant land, and to them you are just a statistic.
Who is telling you this? This runs contrary to decades of research findings (however distasteful some might find that).
My experience in the UK was a small 3x5 notecard sized piece of paper with my choices for local member of parliament. I marked the box by the person I wanted to elect, and submitted the vote.
I still joke that the USA has "too much" democracy ;)
But, like other things the USA does differently to the rest of the world, a great many of its people just haven't experienced anything different to compare their experience.
No, the reason reformers made these changes was to break up rampant corruption and back-room dealing in State government and the allocation of appointed positions.
Another option would be to switch to make mail-in ballots only.
how does it make sense to have November 6th as a holiday in a country where more than 50% people don't/can't vote?
The point of making it a holiday is so that people wouldn't have to work that day, to increase the percentage of people who will/can vote. I agree that <50% is too low: let's get that number up, yeah?
Giving a holiday is just an easy way for people to plan an extra long weekend.
my state had early voting for weeks so there really isn't a "voting day" issue here. (Georgia). Now I have not looked but how many other states offer early voting?
We need multiple issues fixed in US voting. (just a random list)
1) spreading the number of days to vote across a week or more 2) providing an easy method to confirm a person is eligible to vote and vote on the candidates they want to vote on.
3) providing a means to vote from outside your district for your own district, this is mostly solved by expanding the voting period.
4) providing in clear language what non candidate reforms are being voted on
5) randomizing how candidates appear on a ballot
6) removing one party votes. people need to choose, we don't need drones
7) removing the primary system which exists to stymie third party options
As for verifying an absent voter, back about 1980 when I voted absentee, I had to have the form notarized.
Saying "rates are low" without any actual metric is never convincing.
It also boosts turnout and saves money, and it's great to sit there and look over your ballot at your leisure.
We used to have voting parties where we'd all sit around and actually talk about the ballot issues and candidates one by one. Nothing's ever felt so much like democracy in action as that.
tl;dr vote-by-mail is great and fraud is virtually non-existent, e.g. Oregon's two decades of vote-by-mail.
The first time I voted, I remember being shocked at the premise that you could tick a box and vote for one party across the board.
Each vote gets the signature reviewed by a person, one at a time. I actually had my ballot put on hold this year because the signature wasn't quite close enough - likely, since I probably just flippantly scribbled something on the package. They quickly mailed out another registration form where I basically re-signed the ballot for additional information.
Ballots can be dropped off into several boxes, that don't even go through the postal service.
Additionally, most counties have phone and email notifications for you to track your vote. That's how I got my notification, 2 days after mailing it in, that my ballot was under review.
I was stopped temporarily last night at the polls after the poll worker scanned my ID and had me sign. She said they're not the same signature, and I'm like, "lmao, yeah, no, no they're not. I gave up on my signature a long time ago."
You could start signing with an "X" and that first X would have legal force. Might confuse or annoy some bureaucrats though.
Except for the massive campaigns to disenfranchise voters.
Which you didn't bother to mention as a problem. You did mention the boogeyman of voter fraud though, good job.
(Other than being an authority, presumably. Notwithstanding authorities on violence, such as Heinlein)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdrjzE1SE58 (depictions of violence, satire)
For those that don't know, Starship troopers is a scathing satire about how "war makes fascist of us all".
To my puzzlement, some people don't notice how ironic it is, throughout.
Try having a political leader jailing people who don’t do what he tells them to do.
That's not the point that was made, however. The post you replied to connected the military to democracies as protectors of their physical integrity.
Greek and Roman citizens had the right to vote linked to their duty of military service at times of war. E.g. Athens had lots of free non-citizens who did not have that privilege and that duty. (Also look up the etymology of the word "idiot".)
Democratic institutions in Europe started to crop up (sometimes as a result of revolutions) when subjects to a particular crown started to be drafted, and thus learned military skills. Nobility, who traditionally had some freedoms and could even be elected to various councils and parliaments under a monarch were also usually bound to military service.
People of the US in particular won their right to vote as free citizens (and not be subjects to British crown) in a literal war in 1775-83 (and then again in 1812).
That "price of freedom is eternal vigilance" idea also links these two ideas pretty tightly.
In a civilized society, this force is normally only exerted by specially designated people, the police force, and, more rarely, by citizens defending themselves against assault.
But any society that wants to preserve itself has to have an army, or some other kind of a self-defense force, else the first invader to come by will overrun and subdue it. Delegating this to someone who are not the citizens possible to an only very limited extent.
Violence is not a great thing, sure, but sometimes it's the lesser evil, when the greater evils are serfdom or extermination. What a civilized society has to curb is aggression, which is the source of violence.
This is sad. I don't like wars. A war is only worth it when all other means fail. I only see the point in defensive wars; the 1991 war in the Middle-Eastern desert was that, protecting Kuwait. Later, not so much, to say the least.
> violence first, democracy later
Rather, "independence first, democracy based on that". I don't see how this Middle-Eastern warfare ever helped US independence, or e.g. Iraqi independence. Except maybe it helped a bit Afghani independence, because Taliban long-term would likely be even worse that the total disarray they're having now.
"major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, when the Armistice with Germany went into effect." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_Day
So any attempt to 'move' Veteran's Day will likely meet resistance due to this connection. This is also why this day is a fixed calendar day (at least in the US) rather than a "first/second/third Monday of the month" type holiday like most of the other official federal holidays. It shares the same connection with specific exact calendar dates as does the 4th of July, Christmas, and New Year's day.
Veterans Day/Armistice Day is also one of the few secular national holidays that we share with most Western countries.
For me the definition of "major war" is were civilians forcibly conscripted.
WWII was 50-90 million and WWI was 40 million. Vietnam and Korea (two conflicts that my father actually fought in) were wars, for sure, but not major wars compared to the World Wars.
There's no reasonable way to conclude these were not "major" wars in the context of US history.
The Korean War transformed the United States from a country that occupied half of Korea with the permission of a local, democratically elected government to a country that occupies half of Korea with the permission of a local, democratically elected government. Vietnam transformed the United States into a slightly less interventionist country for 20-30 years and reduced the scope of Johnson's social welfare reforms.
The World Wars also saw the wide-scale mobilization of the entire nation, including rationing, large-scale transformation of American industry to war production, coastal blackouts at night to protect shipping traffic, ubiquitous propaganda, and other measures. World War II was more disruptive to the life of the typical American at home than any other war that didn't physically take place on American soil. (In fact, parts of World War II did take place on American soil.) Korea and Vietnam--"major" wars maybe in isolation, but not at all compared to WWII.
You also forget about Korea as the start of the communist domino theory that directly led to the Vietnam intervention. And vastly understate the cultural changes that happened as a result of the Vietnam war protests.
The Korean war is more murky. Almost nobody knows it now but South Korea was a military dictatorship, not a paragon of democracy and freedom.
Tuesday is a day that certain people have to be at work, working. And politicians like that.
A lot of polling stations in Europe are schools for that reason.
At least I thought that was the case. Please correct me if I am wrong.
But wealthy New York City, where Democrats run the election commission, was a notable shit show in the recent election.
Dealing with the unequal provision of resources is a big deal, I don't mean to dismiss it, it just isn't the only issue.
It's absolutely about a failure to install proper checks on entrenched power.
That, of course, is another subject for another day.
(Cue someone saying I can't compare TX to CA - it seems like if I can't that demonstrates that there are other factors that matter just as much or more)
In yesterday's election, we had two Democrat candidates vying for a US Senate seat, rather than a bipartisan contest. The candidates from other parties were already squeezed out during our new open-primary election process.
Practically speaking, we don't have direct, proportional representation in most decisions. As a result, people sometimes fall into a trap where they think their personal vote will not really matter. It feels lost in the margin. The same discrete result happens whether they vote or not. This is equally true whether their views align with or against the expected outcome.
It would incentivize people with time and interest to be more involved, and get rid of that pesky agency problem.
At the very least we can marginalize the role of politicians and perhaps be less disappointed in them.
And see the UK support for the Iraq War for an example of the reverse.
What's the death toll of Brexit?
I guess if you're being told by lobbyists what to vote you don't need to take time ...
One group effected negatively could be parents. They may find it more difficult to vote if their kids aren't in school. Particularly single parents. (I vote after the kids go to bed - but have taken a child to the polls a couple of times - but I have a partner to stay home and make that possible).
The reasoning for such extremely strict geographic restrictions, I am unsure of, but surely it would also argue against mail-in ballots (and I would assume smartphone voting).
Side question: How are people temporarily living in distant areas from their registered county (working, attending school, etc) able to vote? I'm sure there's a large handful of people in this situation unable to cast their vote.
One reason is a holdover from the days when the eligible voter roles were physically printed on reams of paper to be lined through in pen as each eligible voter 'checked in' to be given a ballot.
If your system for preventing double voting is by a line drawn in pen across a voters entry in a paper printout, then you have to allocate voters to one, and only one, voting location (because you can't 'line through' in pen multiple geographically disperse paper printouts containing the same name quickly enough to avoid double voting risks).
> Side question: How are people temporarily living in distant areas from their registered county (working, attending school, etc) able to vote?
This is the purpose of the absentee ballot system. If you know you are "away" on election day, you apply for an absentee ballot and vote that way. Most of the recent "early vote" system has simply been an expansion of allowing voters to vote "absentee" by having them show up at the city/county offices before election day, fill out an "absentee" form (with less stringent requirements for proof of being "away"), get a ballot, vote, and drop it in the count box.
Way back when, meaning yesterday? My polling place had two different people with voter lists in front of them. One was a big book I had to sign under my name (once the lady finally paged, one page at a time, through to my name), the other was a huge sheet organized by address where my name was crossed off after I voted.
But, the "splitting" of the lists into one per polling place likely still occurs, because it avoids a need to build a centralized database connected to all polling places to provide the "locking" necessary to allow John Smith III to vote only once. And this central system, were it to be used, also becomes a single point of failure that could halt voting at all polling places at once.
Now, granted, there is still the issue of the fact that a computerized "check off" system can have records be "reset" to allow John Smith III to vote more than once in the same polling place. Paper with an ink pen line (assuming a non-erasable ink) is by far more difficult to "reset" to "not yet voted" status for John Smith III.
In Australia we still use printed rolls, but we can vote at any polling place in our home state.
For some details on how we manage the risk, see 'What is a Declaration Vote at a polling place?' on this page: https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/polling.htm
You can vote by mail even as an expat living overseas. You register via the last address you had in the US and end up getting a more limited overseas ballot that only covers federal elections (and possibly state-wide elections if registered in some states?).
I think it's twofold:
1. There are some hyperlocal elections, such as for school districts. Only your local polling station will have the correct ballots for those elections, and if you vote at the wrong polling location you could vote in an election you shouldn't.
2. Minimization of voter fraud using analog technology: if you're assigned a particular polling station, that station and no other will be given your name on a list to check off. You can't go to two polling locations and vote twice, because no other station will have your name. Human error makes it impractical to give each station a complete list and then cross-check to find people who voted twice: too many false positives.
They don't need to take off work. Every state in the US lets people mail-in votes or vote early in person.
Basically, you should be able to vote quickly before or after work without it cost more than 15 minutes.
Sadly these people are often less ignorant that the ones who haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, and yet still vote. But I agree with the larger point completely, and have been called an anti-democratic fascist to my face for making it before.
At the same time, we elect candidates based on how well we feel they are up for the job. Understanding the issues is very, very hard; even for the candidates & their teams! We're not expected to understand all the issues, especially at a federal level. That's why we have representatives & why they hire staff.
A broad approach of better voter education, a national holiday on election day, and replacing FPTP with something else that actually favors more than two parties (I like STAR myself) is needed in the US.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/us/politics/election-day-...
STAR seems like an interesting method, but one potential issue with it is that it's more complicated than methods like approval voting (more bubbles on the ballot, harder to explain to people). Approval voting seems like the simplest fix to our existing voting system. It would encourage third parties and more diversity of positions, while also reducing the extreme polarization that we see between the Republicans and Democrats.
This is actually the case in many areas. For example, casting a vote for a Republican Presidential candidate in California is a pointless endeavor. This sentiment doesn’t arise from lack of voter education, but rather from voter education - people understand the political makeup of the areas in which they live, and in those that are overwhelmingly partisan, can correctly conclude that their vote won’t make a difference.
That's already solved. People can vote early in-person or mail-in ballots.
What the US needs to be focusing on is changing the voting system. It's absolutely insane and undemocratic for this to keep happening almost every election:
https://preview.redd.it/lyvqks420vw11.jpg?width=949&auto=web...
If this isn't a broken system, I don't know what is. This is not the "voice of the people" being heard. Oh, and what do you think happens when people see how broken this system is? Do you think they'll still "go out and vote"? Many will be turned-off by it and stay home, whether we like it or not.
And if you're looking for an alternative solution, the multi-winner ranked-choice voting system (for Congress/state legislatures) looks pretty good to me, and it would eliminate gerrymandering, too (as a simple side effect of allowing candidates from multiple parties to win in the same district, thus removing district monopolization by a single party):
> https://preview.redd.it/lyvqks420vw11.jpg?width=949&auto=web....
> If this isn't a broken system, I don't know what is. This is not the "voice of the people" being heard.
If that graphic were for the House rather than the Senate, it would be more persuasive. The Senate is (by design) not about representation directly in proportion to population.
It may be debatable whether the Senate model of equal representation for each state is appropriate, but that's a different issue than changing the FPTP voting system.
Also, raw vote counts are meaningless because the most populous states are dual-Democrat states, excluding Texas.
You are either willfully ignoring the structure of the system or need to study it more. If a billion people vote for democrats in New York and California, it has zero impact on the election of the representative from Wyoming (or any other not CA or NY). Thinking that it should fundamentally misses the point of a federation.
the right path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier for people to understand what they're voting on
bit of catch 22, because in order to do this we need to vote out people actively obstructing this change
EDIT: "Wow" Retracted and language changes - agree that ignorance is something to be fought, but it's a tough determination when it comes to voting.
How are you determining a voter is ignorant? What if someone is informed but disagrees with you?
Like so many things, we need both, and I don't think it is an either/or.
It should be easier to vote (Maryland just passed same-day registration 67% to 33%.), and people need time to vote which can be hard to come by if you work multiple jobs.
We also need transparency on the issues and good explainers. Civic groups have been doing a good job on the latter, and this works well on the local level depending on your jurisdiction.
Transparency may help you understand incumbents, but will not help with new candidates, or with ballot questions. That also won't scale to local politics. Donate to civic groups that are trying to make it easier to understand what is on the ballot. Push for better explanations on the ballot itself. Fund local newspapers and buy a subscription.
Also, in general, if you think higher participation is better you kinda have to rely on the voter - even the "ignorant, poorly-informed" ones.
OP didn't say anything about agreeing with their positions. I honestly don't see what your "wow" is about - do you believe that it would be helpful to society to have poorly-informed people casting votes?
What I "heard" in the original statement is something implied - something deeper (my hearing may be wrong) To say "we don't need more ignorant uninformed votes" when the only thing you know about a voter is who / what they voted for (not the _why_), while also saying there is a way to vote that will "help our society", then you are implicitly judging the voter as ignorant based on your thought of the "informed" vote. If they vote because they like their hair and that is what matters to the voter, that's the voter's choice.
The comment in my opinion went deeper than "we should better inform voters" and into judgment territory based on my reading. If that was a bad read, then I've wasted my characters and your time and for that I apologize!
TLDR: don't stop anyone from voting, but also don't pressure them into voting.
ig·no·rant /ˈiɡnərənt/
adjective
lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated.
You need to understand the positions, then you can disagree with them.
I'm not belittling the benefits transparency or better information dissemination -- it's just that the average person can't fully appreciate such features. Even on HN, despite the abundance of online info and search tools, people are staggeringly ignorant of ordinary functions of our government -- including the use of public records to do the most basic research. But it's not because people are dumb, it's just they haven't yet had the motivation or need to engage with government and elected officials. OTOH, anyone who's had reason to be irate enough to speak at a city council meeting or read an entire environmental impact review quickly becomes knowledgeable about civic functions.
So I just don't agree with putting forth the idea that you should only vote when you've put in real effort. Voting was intended to be broadly accessible with minimal investment demanded and few requirements imposed upon a citizen's motive or knowledge. No amount of education, passion, or moral inclination changes the fact that your vote has the same worth as even the lowest-information voter.
I'm not necessarily against mandatory voting, but it would be very hard to convince the American public that mandatory voting is a good idea when a huge part of the population would see that as an attack on their freedom to not vote.
This doesn't even begin to discuss the situations where voting only occurs on a Tuesday (aside from mail-ins) and some people can't take that time off work. There would have to be some clause to force employers to let employees go vote, at a loss of money somewhere. Such a clause would lead to more resistance.
Again, I'm not personally against it, but it's not so simple as "make it mandatory."
With a financial penalty if you don't submit a ballot. The simplest method would probably be a per-election tax credit.
> I'm not necessarily against mandatory voting, but it would be very hard to convince the American public that mandatory voting is a good idea when a huge part of the population would see that as an attack on their freedom to not vote.
Most mandatory voting regimes require submitting a ballot, but they tend to accept explicit abstention (usually, just by submitting a blank ballot.)
> This doesn't even begin to discuss the situations where voting only occurs on a Tuesday (aside from mail-ins) and some people can't take that time off work. There would have to be some clause to force employers to let employees go vote, at a loss of money somewhere.
Almost every state already does that, and the exceptions (IIRC) have long early voting periods and/or all mail-in elections which avoid the Tuesday-only problem. So that's not really a problem.
How would you deal with malicious voters, who now surely would be so pissed they would vote for a bad candidate, or put in ballots wrapped in dog shit?
Like filing tax returns. Or jury duty. You may as well ask them how they deal with dog shit filled envelopes.
Tax returns, which are only done at the threat of prison? And mostly in the US because other countries have figured out a way to do it directly as long as you have a job?
I have voted in every election that I was elegible to, but this time I have lost every faith in the system and just want to some way to say to say enough is enough, you have lied to be too many times.
But no, you want me to continue the charade that democracy, without the possibility to hold the politicians responsible for their lies is worth anything at all.
I want them all to burn in hell. Where in your system do I vote in farvour of that?
Submit an empty ballot, or write "burn in hell" on it. It won't make a difference to how your vote is counted, but sitting at home and not voting will make just as little of a difference.
How is that even a problem if the financial penalty for not voting is implemented by way of a per-election tax credit for voting?
> How would you deal with malicious voters, who now surely would be so pissed they would vote for a bad candidate
A large minority of voters do that in the best case now. I'm not really convinced that anger at being offered a financial incentive to turn in a ballot is going to motivate people to be more effective wat voting for bad candidates than those who are ideologically motivated that way now.
Unregistered voters exist obviously, but current statistics estimate that only a very small percentage of the population is actually unregistered (and unregistered voters aren't fined as far as I know).
Empirically, a more proportional election system not only improves satisfaction with government, but also participation in voting.
People not voting should be a signal that there is something wrong with the voting system’s fitness for purpose. Mandatory voting may treat the symptom, but ignores the underlying problem.
So while I agree that apathy and lack of satisfaction are some of the reasons why people are not voting (and are serious problems that need to be addressed), there are other problems that mandatory voting can help resolve. And ultimately the friction to convincing people of your argument is much smaller -- because now it is just a political problem of convincing the public, rather than a practical problem of getting some folks to take time off work to vote.
The second group is those for whom things are going reasonably well - the lights work, the roads get repaired, crime isn't too bad, their economic circumstances aren't terrible, and so why worry? No matter who gets elected, the lights are going to continue to work, and so on - it won't be a radical change either way. (This group may overlap with the first one.)
The third group is those in despair. They see the problems in society, and they see fifty years' worth of politicians who have promised to fix them, and the problems are still here. They've given up on politics as an answer to the problems of society.
As someone who falls under this group, I've often suggested that we should allow more participation for the individual in the democratic process, seeing as how the fundamental assumptions and constraints of society have so drastically changed since the current system was designed:
"In a large society, inhabiting an extensive country, it is impossible that the whole should assemble to make laws. The first necessary step, then, is to depute power from the many to a few of the most wise and good."
-John Adams, Thoughts on Government 1776
Ironically, many of the same people who disparage others for not "participating" enough in democracy (by voting), see a more direct/participatory system to be out of the question, claiming people are too stupid to have more involvement.
They didn't have instanteous global omnipresence that we have today.
We didn't have to travel vast physical distances to do what we are doing right now with eachother.
I vote in one of the most complicated areas in the country: San Francisco. I had to make 40 different choices for a variety of different local, regional, state, and federal offices, plus 14 ballot propositions. There was an excellent local ballot guide, which voters receive on paper and can view online. [1] The State of California produces a good guide as well, again on paper and online. [2] For areas where I needed more information, there was plenty available. The nonpartisan League of Women Voters has a nice site with general information [3] and both the local and state chapters produce their own good-government recommendations on ballot props. [4] Plenty of organizations have recommendations as well; I looked at several different ballot guides produced by individuals and organizations.
And you know why I did all this work? Because I had to vote. I was not particularly informed on the intricacies of bond funding and government budgeting before this. That's how it has always been. The first time I voted at 18, I surely made some choices I'd now regard as woefully uninformed. Until then I had no skin in the game! But each election I vote, see the outcome, and have more incentive to do better next time. And I do.
So no, the bottleneck is not information. There's a ton of it out there. The bottleneck is also not information access. If well-presented information doesn't land in one's mailbox (and it should!), it's a Google search away. The problem is that voting in America is needlessly hard.
How do I know? The nice people at the Center for Civic Design [4] actually research this. They have done hundreds of interviews with voters. And they write about the problems. [6] We also see, both historically and currently, that people seek partisan advantage by making the registration and voting process needlessly difficult. If those barriers didn't work to discourage voters, self-serving politicians wouldn't be putting them in place.
I have helped register hundreds of people to vote. Not one of them wasn't excited to take part. Not one of them struck me as unserious about exercising their franchise. So I am 100% for voter registration, GOTV, and removing artificial barriers to voting. And I'm 100% for good schools, so that future voters are well prepared. And I think everybody in favor of democracy should be.
[1] https://voterguide.sfelections.org/en
[2] http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/
[4] https://www.lwvsf.org/ and https://lwvc.org/
[6] e.g.: https://medium.com/civic-designing/the-epic-journey-of-ameri...
It's not, and therefore the only 'fair' way of conducting elections is to make sure everyone has the opportunity to vote - even the people who will vote for the candidate you don't like.
A high turnout also has the advantage of inserting noise in to the result, negating the unfair advantages of highly motivated time-rich people (usually older people).
These new products and services justify changing from a per ballot to a per voter revenue model.
Whereas before vendors charged per ballot produced, now they're charging per registered voter. Signature verification, ballot tracking, ballot casting, etc. Every single step, task is being monetized.
The transition to all vote by mail is a bonanza for vendors. Creating a $2.50 ballot packet for every voter every single election, whereas before they'd only print 10 cent ballots for expected turnout (plus 10%).
Undermining the integrity of our elections (private voting, public counting) isn't even a factor in these conversations, much less acknowledged as a regrettable side effect.
What makes you think this is not already happening? Why would phone voting make it worse?
Hence, the only people who vote are irrational or badly informed (driven by the pleasure or duty of casting the vote rather than a commitment to voting optimally), with the well known poor outcomes all democracies suffer from.
(Well, all the systems that have been tried. The systems that have not been tried do not yet suffer from well known poor outcomes.)
An uninformed voter would have nothing else to go off of after all, and with average turn out rates of near 60% currently, it would have a dramatic effect on elections.
Are you saying that voters talking directly to candidates and the volunteers who work on their behalf and know their platforms is NOT a way to educate potential voters and get them to the polls? To me that seems like one of the most effective ways of telling people how to vote, why to vote, when to vote, and where to vote. Well, perhaps second to actually becoming a volunteer oneself.
> Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote.
The generous interpretation here is that you're a software person and are just focusing on what you know, which is the potential for software to improve access to information for voters.
Even so, why are you claiming that your solution is an alternative and not a supplement to the current ways? Especially given that the current ways had an enormous measurable increase in voter turnout yesterday?
I get the urge to code something to help people, but not the urge to wholesale ignore the history of politicking in America.
There are all sorts of weird biases that occur due to the way voting is conducted now. Smartphone voting would be great IMO, assuming it is implemented using a secure cryptographicly verifiable protocol.
Here, the first third interviewing people at UC Berkeley with that idea and the remainder interviewing actual minorities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrBxZGWCdgs
Nobody is saying that (these are direct quotes from the video) "black people don't understand how to use the internet" and "black people don't know how to get to the DMV". The problem is that poor people (outside of a major city in the US) don't have all of the documents they need to get ID, so they need to pay several hundred dollars to get those documents and the ID they need. Several hundred dollars might seem like a small amount of money to you, but the majority of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency -- there are lots of poor people in your country.
Interviewing people in a major city is not really a good example of journalism -- what benefit is gained from asking people who haven't experienced these problems, when we know for a fact that they exist.
(In Australia we don't have voter ID requirements at all, and no study that I know of has shown significant amounts of electoral fraud here. So the entire idea of needing ID is quite foreign to me, and I think you should ask yourself what the threat model voter ID is trying to defend against.)
Government benefits in the USA require ID. This is to keep somebody from getting the assistance that would be meant for more than one person.
It's kind of like voting for more than one person actually.
I guess you could claim that poor people don't get government assistance because of the ID requirements. Being unable to eat seems like a higher priority than being unable to vote.
1. Usually voter ID laws don't allow all forms of ID. For instance, in Texas, you cannot use a school ID to vote but you can use a concealed carry permit -- why? Both are provided by government institutions. Most voter ID laws don't allow the same set of IDs that you need for a job. I'm pretty sure that the same is true for the IDs you need for government benefits.
2. 11% of Americans don't have drivers licenses. This breaks down to 8% white Americans and 25% black Americans (mostly because poor people have fewer drivers licenses and there are more poor black people than poor white people). Getting a drivers license takes several hours (which usually requires you to take time off work), paying a not-insignificant fee, and . Very few jobs require you to drive or have a drivers license, so why would you bother doing it?
3. There are several cases (such as in North Carolina) where their voter ID laws were ruled unconsititutional because they were specifically designed to disenfranchise black people by looking at the statistics of black voters (usually voting earlier, voting in-person more often, usually not having certain forms of ID) and restricting with "surgical precision" (according to the court ruling) their ability to vote.
If new laws are being passed that add requirements for voting which are designed around the fact that statistically more black people don't fulfill, then those laws are discriminatory. There is already evidence that this is the case (as was seen in North Carolina).
You could even require specific items in a manifesto be implemented (at pain of losing office and opening up a new election).
So if it says in a manifesto +£n billion will be spent in 2019 on education and the independent audit officer find that it wasn't then an election is called and the PM + education minister are barred from re-election.
If referenda can be streamlined (eg by sampling) then manifestos would have a list of referenda and they would then legally be required.
Democracy seems flawed; maybe it's still the least flawed system though.
(This is not a great comment: I'm mixing lack of accountability/honour of representatives with poor decision making and poor ability at forward planning by the ignorant.)
No it doesn't, but it does allow the media and establishment to manipulate people in order to obtain a favourable result under the guise of democracy.
I don't think this is true at all, at least not on a macro scale. By having a low sample from your population voting, you're greatly magnifying the impact of uninformed extremists, if anything.
Keeping it harder to vote doesn’t select for informed people, it selects for fanatics and extremists. Making it easier to vote selects for moderates and sane people. That would be a huge win for us.
That said, computerized voting is definitely not the way to do it.
I think this understanding is common, but it's totally incorrect and is part of the larger project to get fewer people to vote.
Voting does represent, in some sense, a decision of import for how society functions. A vote for a tyrant, for example, would be bad for everyone. But is voting more important or influential than the many, many other ways in which people support or oppose bad things in our society?
In the same domain - political donations support or oppose the same politicians (and the relative impact of a donation and a vote is debatable - at the very least people can donate many times!), but the discourse around them has none of the concern around "poorly informed" donators. In a different domain - working for a company can have an enormous good or bad impact on the world, but we don't caution people against "ignorantly" accepting a position (there is lots of discussion around the morality of companies - but people are not called "irresponsible" or "ignorant" simply for working for bad companies).
I would ask you to consider how big an impact a vote has and compare that any other decision we make that impacts the world. The narrative you're advancing holds voting to a much higher standard than other ways in which people affect the world. I personally think this is because the originators of this argument (but not necessarily you) want people to question if they should vote. However, they would never suggest that a person their suitability to select who to buy services from, or work for, or donate money to - because those are all actions taken by higher-income people and voting is (or attempts to be) universal.
Which is what the Founding Fathers intended. The word “democracy” does not exist anywhere in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. As Ben Franklin put it, we have a republic, if we can keep it. We have done a terrible job at that.
But I disagree that this particular discourse is in the tradition of the founding fathers' concerns about popular opinion.
Their project to prevent "the unwashed masses" from expressing themselves came in the form of limiting enfranchisement to white man with property. They would have vehemently disagreed with the idea that those propertied white men should worry a lot about being ignorant and only vote if they were sure they had properly prepared!
Even if that was true (and most generalizations about the Founding Father's aren't because they were a diverse group with often diametrically opposed intentions), “what the Founding Father's intended” (other than some role in the legal interpretation of text of laws written by them, including the Constitution) ought not have any special weight.
Even the one part that was supposed to be actually representative isn't.
Start over. No more senate. Elected president. Representative parliament.
Why would you think that uninformed voters have a lower participation rate than informed voters?
You are not wrong that we need to make changes to get people more engaged with government, but we also need to make it easier for everyone who wants to vote to vote. The forward march of progress in our country has been measured by the number of people who are allowed to vote. If you don't like how "ignorant people" vote, then start pushing for better public education.
One thing Swiss do often is voting on small local issues. Practice makes perfect. Seeing the more immediate local effect is a great teaching experience. Making the training ground small in scale makes a lot of sense.
I think that a path to more informed, conscious voting on big elections lies (partly) through exercise of voting often for local cases.
Approval / Condorcet voting would be another crucial improvement.
The problem is, of course, that I have no idea how the US political system could be adapted to allow this.
Having some sort of TL;DR for each candidate on the ballot or a short abstract of their goals/platform would help inform voters, at least in my personal opinion.
I am in my 20s, and have talked to friends about this, and voting doesn't translate to feeling "involved" in democracy when we have no idea who/what we are voting for. It feels like bringing in a guy from IT to vote for the winner of an NYC fashion show (no offense, since I would be that guy).
I saw the ballot list of candidates, and I knew nothing about even a single person on the list. My hypothesis is that without knowing a candidate's beliefs/morals/objectives, this leads to voters nonchalantly voting for a person based on whether they have a (D) or (R) next to their name, or based on something superficial like how cool their name sounds. This doesn't seem like democracy being put to an effective use.
Unless there is a specific issue groups are vested in compelling people to vote (such as marijuana or rent/housing), there really isn't anything special about purely casting a vote for the sake of it without any motivation behind it. It's not even clear what outcome people are contributing to with their votes in current methods.
Plus, with a lack of people watching TV, listening to the radio, or going out of their way to read election coverage (especially at the local level), there is not a good way for people who are not informed to even become passively informed (other than seeing signs with names plastered everywhere that will end up in some trash pile).
Further, unless practices change, making election day a holiday off work may not even have much effect if people just use it as a free day to vacation or relax.
Without any moorings or context the word ignorance loses all meaning and value. Accusing any group xyz or a nebulous 'other' of ignorance is like accusing HN readers of ignorance of history, because it is logically and physically impossible to prove any such assertion of any group, and you are left with circular logic that points to source assertion as evidence ie uninformed prejudice.
Democracy is about everyone voting, it does not seek to make a judgement or value claims on individuals in any way and if you accept the concept your only job is vote and support the unequivocal right of everyone to vote.
Any arguments about individuals that disqualify them in your personal opinion would need a wider argument against democracy as a concept.
The level of abstraction, indirection, and complexity at a national (and state) level demoralizes and creates antipathy.
You can't blame populism when no one can be informed enough to make an informed decision.
Imagine being asked to make an architectural decision on a 5,000,000 LOC project your first day on the job... then add a bunch of stakeholders telling you that their way is better (and often lying about it, or at least exaggerating the outcomes).
Researching and reading all of the supportive material for a ballot's fill of decisions is a skill and effort
Detailing how to develop that skill and establishing that effort as habit could affect students to continue to keep an interesting in voting
Take your time with each element of the next vote's ballot
let the students discuss multiple viewpoints and coach a civil fact based discourse
And this is why Capitalism is not compatible with Democracy. Especially now that we even call it as 'investment' to be informed to choose who will control our lives. And then there's the fact that it is also an investment to campaign.
However, hopefully, sooner or later, technology will eventually help give the people more information as it did in the past. Pretty sure less centralized medium of information like Twitch or YouTube will eventually replace Fox News or CNN.
I'm not usually one to say this, but this is a very high-and-mighty way of looking at your society. In Australia, voting is mandatory for every citizen. We have just as many misinformed people, but voting is seen as a civic duty in the same way that jury duty is. If you don't show up, you get fined (though skipping jury duty has a much higher fine).
I think the jury duty comparison is quite apt, actually -- in the case of voting (depending on your voting system), most individuals have very little individual power over which way an election will go. But as a member of a jury, you have a very large amount of power over how someone else's life will go. My point is that if you believe in mandatory jury duty (which I do) then you should also view mandatory voting as being no more insane than mandatory jury duty.
I agree with the rest of what you said, but I disagree that only well-informed people should be pushed to go and vote. It should be the duty of everyone to vote, because if you don't uniformly push even misinformed or disinterested people to vote then you are providing a gap for particular parties to push their supporters to out-vote you -- which is a ridiculous problem to have in my view.
> These are not the bottleneck.
As an outsider, it seems to me that the bottleneck in the US is laws being passed to explicitly make it more onerous to vote and other various organisational aspects (difficult to do early or postal voting, election day is on a Tuesday, bosses are allowed to fire employees for going to vote, really long lines at polling places, etc).
I'll never understand why so many politicians and citizens in the US view making voting more difficult as being anything other than a move away from a democratically elected representative government.
(As an aside, in Australia we don't have any form of voter ID. You just say your name and address and whether you've voted before and then you get a ballot.)
voting is mandatory for every citizen
If the former, are you required to vote on every issue and office?
In Australian elections there are no votes on issues, it's purely deciding your representative in the Senate or House of Representatives (which are voted on separate pieces of paper so you can spoil one and not the other if you wish). Votes on issues aren't really a thing we do outside of referendums (and there hasn't been one of those for a while).
[+] Interestingly the American secret ballot system is called the "Australian ballot".
I agree the first step is to make the system more transparent, maybe it will surface the almost insane complexity to more people.
Also, more transparency, but not at the expense of sacrificing fairness and privacy
This is horrible on so many levels.
(I'm rubbing my temples right now)
I don't even have the words for how bad this would be for a democracy or republic.
I will, however, make a curt but general comment on blockchain:
Anytime you see that buzzword, be on your guard.
I'm absolutely, 100% happy with putting a pencil mark onto a paper ballot, which I fold and place into a box (with people watching), which is later taken (with people watching) to a counting place, emptied out on a table (with people watching), and counted by hand by volunteers (with yet more people watching).
REASON!
Now this guy has the right idea.
Why are people trying to fix something that is not broken?
This video (in Portuguese) shows a "tear down" endorsed by the manufacturer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrMLzqgKEI
Both the tone of the video (unsurprisingly, given its "officially endorsed" nature) but also the comments seem overall pretty positive. Even though they mention that the software is closed source and you basically have to trust the manufacturer (and any third parties making hardware and software for the device along the way).
For some reason the lure of instant results is so great that every year there is some place in the world where electronic voting is once again strongly pushed for, even though none of the arguments against it are suitably addressed.
Is it a mindset thing? A disdain for an analogue process that they deem outmoded? A lack of understanding of the inherent problems with automatization for this particular task? All I know is that it takes a lot of effort to keep elections free from voting machines.
This is a global phenomenon by the way.
What's to stop a family member (OK, not much of an issue for overseas military personnel, one would think) or another person from hovering just outside the camera's capture area with a blunt object, ready to -ahem- influence your vote?
Granted, this would only affect individual votes; there are bigger potential issues with electronically tallying votes, but I'll leave those be...
This is also a problem with mail-in ballots. (It’s why I believe early votes should be allowed to be overwritten by in-person votes.)
The issue with smartphone voting with selfie verification is almost everyone’s phones contain selfies. (Americans overseas are also likely to have a photo ID on their camera roll.) So controlling the phone means controlling a vote. That’s a scalable risk.
Moreover, if the app is anonymising after verifying, it means the app developers have been deputised by the Board of Elections to verify voters and count their votes. (Whether you voted is public, in America. For whom you voted is not.) That’s a big deal!
The blockchain add-on is worthless if done right, dangerous or illegal if done wrong, and increases the cross-section across which the above issues get amplified.
It's an interesting idea, though how would you maintain the secret ballot? If you ask them to make a "negative vote" they can suddenly vote three times without any chance of being caught.
Agree on keeping votes sealed until live polling closes. But there is no need to check every mailed-in ballot against in-person votes.
Instead, when a mailed-in ballot arrives one marks the voter rolls. When a voter checks into a polling place, the rolls are anyway consulted. At that time, if a live voter shows as having already voted: that ballot is found and destroyed, and the voter given a fresh ballot to cast.
Just as a datapoint this doesn't exist everywhere. In France for instance it's not possible to vote without physically going to a polling place unless you're living in a foreign country and only for certain elections (not possible for the presidential elections for instance). It is however possible to give a "procuration" for somebody else to vote for you but you still need to go to the police before the vote to make the procuration so it wouldn't be a very convenient way to fraud since you'd have to coerce the person into giving you their vote in front of a police officer.
I agree that if your electoral system accepts mail-in ballots then other electronic ways to vote remotely don't seem that much worse overall since they would share pretty much the same potential for abuse. I guess paper ballots would make it a bit harder to automate fraud at least.
In Australia, early voting can be done at polling places for several weeks before the election (though there's less polling places open obviously). Mail voting is also provided, but I agree with you that it really is something that has questionable merit -- when you're overseas you can vote at the Australian embassy. The only real use-case it serves is people who live in the outback or are worried about personal safety (who are "silent electors" -- where your address is not posted on the public voter roll), and I think that mail voting should only be provided to those people.
Biometrics are going to be almost impossible to do in a non-invasive and secure way for now, so cut that part of the pitch. Blockchain may not be an entirely round peg in this square hole, but there are other cryptographic architectures that probably make more sense (I am not a cryptographer, but maybe go talk to a competent one before just deciding on blockchain).
Obviously, without the two big buzzwords of blockchain and biometrics, you’re suddenly at a big disadvantage for VC money, but if mobile voting is ever going to be feasible, it’s going to need a considered, end-to-end approach that isn’t some MVP built from off-the-shelf components and off-the-shelf ideas.
If a voter can cast their vote from their phone, anyone else can.
The strength of paper-based voting is in its cost and complexity: the number of confederates required to tamper with an election is prohibitively large. With app-based voting comes the risk of a large number of compromised phones tampering with elections.
The security downsides simply don't make sense next to mailed-in ballots, which capture the security (and accessibility) of paper ballots with the convenience of voting from home. The only upside of app-based voting is cost, which is a ridiculous factor to strongly optimize for when it comes to something as important as elections.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
Yes, it is. There are many ways such a system can go wrong. If its not this defective implementation, it'll be some other company's defective implementation. If not that, it'll be a targeted attack against the underlying platform.
Another big thing you have to think about is... Who will be choosing the system? Its going to be some bureaucrats with a vested interest in supporting one particular vendor, who use their power to silence any critics of said vendor's solution. Whenever electronic voting comes up, we always end up with this situation.
What would be a good idea is a team to do UX on voting ballots, nationally. Solve this problem once and take into account all the variations of local things (bonds, amendments, etc.) Then pick a company to make ballot readers, open source the software and use best in class info-sec practices.
We don't need instant results, people don't take office at midnight of election day. We need accurate, transparent and verifiable results.
Also, make it a national holiday, close schools and just use them all as polling places.
I agree. Voting systems need to be extremely simple and understandable - and auditing the system, or the votes, needs to be a task that any person pulled randomly off the street could accomplish.
Making voting easier for the highly ignorant is not a good path. If someone isn't willing to mail in a ballot, drive to the poll, etc I don't think they care enough to know the issues.
I know there are some circumstances where people can't get off of work, but those people generally just don't know their own rights. Most states legally obligate employers to give people 2-3 hours off to vote.
Making voting harder tends to benefit one political party over another; it doesn't across the board lower turnout evenly.
Sometimes it's enough to understand the macro issues of the party. You can't really know how an elected official will vote on your behalf, so it's all guesswork. But making voting harder is just going make our government less democratic.
his sentiment is a part of what drove literacy tests
Also, that sentiment was driven by racism, not by actual intelligence. If you look up those old tests, there were some questions with no right answer, etc.
Instead of shouting aye or nay, raising hands, or standing to be counted, we hand out wireless handsets which have a yes/no buttons and a small display to confirm your vote. Then a screen at the front displays the total.
The cost of renting the devices is non-trivial at around $15-20k (having trouble finding our towns specific budget line item for this) so I often pondered why we couldn’t use smartphones that everyone is surely already carrying, and maybe carry a small stock of devices just for people without phones.
The idea would be a local WiFi network which was not connected to the internet, where an app on the device would connect to a local server over that WiFi network to place the vote, after someone checks you in at the front desk.
I have no reason to trust the devices we use now any more than an open-source public domain phone app and backend container combo that the town could setup.
Over thousands of towns and tens of years the TAM is pretty large, but more to the point a non-profit coalition developing and maintaining this solution could provide a lot of value.
That said, the remotes are amazingly useful for going back and looking over the results.
I don’t think anything is saved within each device, just the totals. They say there’s no way to know how each individual device (and therefore device-holder) voted.
I doubt strongly there is any actual crypto guaranteeing this though.
On the other hand I'm not sure I'm too worried about hacking of in person town meetings. It seems high risk/reward and relatively likely to be caught.
Our current voting system is already rife with fraud with little remedy and recounts are difficult, we need to expect fraud and move to a digital system that does have fraud detection in it similar to our financial system. This system can track all your votes and have a paper trail, you can opt out if you want and deliver it in person.
Our current system is such a patchwork of systems it it security by obscurity and broken, recounts are difficult and if we moved to a common system that has records for every vote in every state in a consistent format, then research could detect anomalies and fraud as well.
Digital records that are as secure as financial records, and tracked, are easier to find fraud and recount, no security by obscurity. Noone would trust banks that keep paper records and aren't verifiable anymore today, voting shouldn't be that way either.
We all use the financial systems, credit systems, and trust them. Even with their problems people trust that the amount they have and what they use is recorded correctly in terms of financial data. We should expect the system to be hacked and have fraud detection to match it just like in the financial system. Until we do move to digital voting with fraud detection then our elections will be secure only by obscurity, and lots of games being played with no recourse and lack of trust in possible fraudulent counts and recounts.
Bank functioning is observable by the people concerned: You can see if money you didn't spend left your account, and if you failed to get paid. Failures are detected very quickly.
Voting has two key differences:
* Voting is anonymous (to render intimidation and bribery of voters ineffective).
* It's not sufficient that citizens votes are counted correctly, it is necessary that no spurious votes are also counted.
The means by which electronic banking is rendered safe are therefore much harder to apply.
Voting must also not just be secure, but be demonstrably secure to the voters. With paper voting, you can go and watch the votes being counted. At every stage of the process, the answer to 'how do you show the public that the process has integrity' is helped by the fact that the votes are on macroscopic objects whose movement is obvious. Electronic voting systems lack this feature.
I disagree, fraud detection and security is the best we currently have and people trust it due to these areas.
> Bank functioning is observable by the people concerned: You can see if money you didn't spend left your account, and if you failed to get paid. Failures are detected very quickly.
I can observe my votes were recorded correctly, others can't see them, data would be anonymized/fingerprinted/hashed when counting.
> Voting is anonymous (to render intimidation and bribery of voters ineffective).
Financial systems do not allow other people to see your data/account amounts and more.
Who people vote for is easily determined by metadata and you really think security by obscurity on our current system is really that private? Lots of holes and ways to get voter data in security by obscurity. You don't think the voting machines and secretary of state offices/recorders have that data? No need if digital and verifiable.
I think people have a false sense of security how private their votes are.
> It's not sufficient that citizens votes are counted correctly, it is necessary that no spurious votes are also counted.
You can easily anonymize data when running reports and fingerprint/hash results. Patterns and anomalies are much easier to find in a data based system, just as fraud is detected by the digital financial system.
> The means by which electronic banking is rendered safe are therefore much harder to apply.
Agree to disagree.
> Voting must also not just be secure, but be demonstrably secure to the voters. With paper voting, you can go and watch the votes being counted.
People trust their financial system but wouldn't if it was all on paper by some individual counted and just given their word that it was correct...
There can still be a paper trail and reports/vote records can be kept forever.
> At every stage of the process, the answer to 'how do you show the public that the process has integrity' is helped by the fact that the votes are on macroscopic objects whose movement is obvious. Electronic voting systems lack this feature.
There wouldn't be any blackbox or hackable machines to trust, you trust that your vote was securely counted online, in an app or if you want down at the paper ballot and entered into this system. But again, financial transactions are trusted, I don't trust random ATMs that are like random voting machines, I trust the app/site where my financial data resides. The middle man is security by obscurity and more insecure currently than if it was truly online/digital.
Our current elections system are all a patchwork of hackable areas. If we had a better standard voting system that expected hacking and fraud, like financials, we'd be better off on security, verifiability and reliability without election day games and suppression filled with security by obscurity.
Votes currently go into the ether, into various unverifiable counting systems, counted by people who have biases, entered into black box voting systems that are hackable, transferred differently from these precincts to the recorder and there are so many holes along the way it is not trustworthy in any way. Your vote could go down the memory hole and you'd never know.
I'd go so far as to call it the "Thanos of Voting."
With just a snap of the fingers, half of all of the votes could be wiped out.
Lets imagine that security issues are 100% solved. The app can go live. Pollsters will figure out how this (inevitably) changes voting patterns. Young, or rural or some other group will vote more, to the benefit of some party.
At this point the only relevant factor determining most politicians' stance on this will be determined by good/bad for my side, in the short term.
We could make voting easier in a million ways that are not literally allowing you to vote on your phone.
Uber basically does this now. It had a big call to action yesterday to take me directly to my nearest polling place.
Is coercion or vote buying acceptable trade off for mild inconvenience?
Whose to stop bad actors from manipulating electronic votes? Whose to say your vote was even tallied? It is far easier to manipulate elections electronically. If Russian operatives are able to penetrate election systems in the behemoth of the US, do you feel confident that they are leaving your Estonian system in their immediate sphere of influence alone? It would potentially take one engineer and one computer to manipulate an electronic election. It would take a team of people, equipment, trucks, incinerators, fake ballots, whatever to do the same manipulation to millions of physical paper ballots stored in secure facilities.
Every state in the US can have a different system in place for the actual voting process. These systems also change over time. Pen and paper is used in plenty of the US, just not necessarily in your district.
Of course the pen-and-paper system is designed to be electronically scanned, at least.
I saw this short twitter thread listing some of problems that are especially apparent from a foreign perspective:
https://twitter.com/MackieJonathan/status/105996240724471808...
No one considers the USA's elections fair, transparent, accountable. Why most foreign election observers don't even bother.
And yet, American exceptionalism. Point out the emperor has no clothes and the serfs lose their minds.
--
If British elections had:
Parties drawing up constituency boundaries
Polls closing at 6pm
Councils recording voters party support
Government-funded selection meetings
Returning officers standing for election
Zero regulation on election spending
Votes counted in secret
Hours-long queues to vote
Barely surmountable criteria to stand for election
No national rulebook for national election admin
Lunatic criteria for voter registration
A minimum of a dozen elections happening at once
Referendums to approve building a school
Voting machines hackable by 10 year olds
Electoral data sold to the highest bidder
Etc etc etc
Folk would go ape. But here we all are watching CNN as if this were a proper democratic election with a stats guy using a giant iPad and everything.
And that results are declared while some states are still voting
There are differences of opinion about discarding votes, how to count votes, who is allowed to vote, etc. E.g. the debacle with the voting machines with the first Bush election had a whole circus around it involving recounts and how to count. This election was so close that every little argument mattered.
Technically, it is not that hard to come up with electronic voting systems. The hard part is making them auditable, privacy sensitive, and robust against malicious attacks. It's not impossible but it seems hard enough that this gets messed up consistently.
Clearly not, because I wouldn't go out on Sunday to vote unless it was on my way to do something else. It's an UX problem for me and others--the effort required is not properly compensated by the benefits I'm rewarded with for my vote as far as I'm concerned.
Which is why it's not a solved problem.
I don't think that is a solvable problem.
And I would be terrified of throwing smartphones into the mix, because they are just terrible (I think the iPhone has made the world a worse place, on balance...). Any API endpoint that is setup to handle the traffic is going to be attacked, and it is going to be broken; people are going to be on shitty LTE connections, and their votes aren't going to go through. The data is not going to be properly anonymized. Software is terrible, and it is going to have bugs and fuckups and gaping holes that would be horribly exposed under the stress and scale of a real election.
Voting is basically a solved problem, and I don't see that piling complexity on top of it is a worthwhile endeavor. You go to your polling place, you grab the sheet of paper, you fill in the bubbles with the sharpie, you drop it in the slot. There are some simple, low-tech ways to improve things if you want; make voting day a national holiday, open more polling places, hire more people to staff them. None of that requires a boondoggle IT project.
Yes, definitely.
>Voting is basically a solved problem
Not sure what's your definition of "solved problem," but, as far as I'm concerned, it's not solved if it fails people who would be inclined to vote and educate themselves on voting if it were easier to vote.
>open more polling places, hire more people to staff them.
That would be an alternative, especially if they could open polling place at each workplace and near each home with infinite staff. Alternatively, technology and automation could be used to scale UX, but, as you mentioned, current tech does not appear to be fit for this, which makes voting not a solved problem.
Google's CAPTCHA and profiling will protect us from election tampering and make sure only the people who are allowed to vote will vote.
Might need CAPTCHA 4, though. The one where you go through a DNA test to verify your uniqueness, then get an RFID implant for truly secure 2-factor authentication. I'm not sure where blockchain and IoT will come in play, by I'm sure we will will find a place to plug them in.
(If by this point you didn't catch on that this was sarcasm, I'm not sure there is anything I can do.)
There is a much simpler solution for increasing participation. Don't punish busy people. Hold voting on a weekend, over the entire 2 days. You will get a massive surge in participation. Yes, it will be more expensive, but that can be optimized. Heck, just add a checkbox on tax forms that says "if you support weekend elections, check here and we will charge you extra X dollars". You will get tons of money for this initiative.
If you look at any place with > 90% turnout, they have compulsory voting. And once you have that you have a strong impetus to make voting as easy as possible, so you get stuff like holidays, VBM, early voting, etc. The fixes are obvious, simple, and they'll save money; Republicans just want turnout to stay low so we won't get them. End of story.
The US only issue is that you have fpp. Solving that will solve the rest, compulsery voting will just hide it and make sure it is never sold.
But Denmark is a lot different than the US. I don't mean to come off like a "USA #1" asshole here but there's maybe 6 million people there. It's a lot harder to set up an election system for some 200 million voters spread across thousands of miles of wildly different environments.
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-would-it-look-like-if-e...
I can see a few ways to make this happen:
1) make voting day a national holiday
2) automate voter registration when you file a tax return and make same-day registration the law nationwide
3) automatically mail everyone an absentee ballot
Low turnout is because people do not feel compelled to vote. They need something to vote for. Policy better aligned with the needs of ordinary Americans will improve voter turnout.
Our government is meant to be transparent & this is something that I don't believe becomes better by being closed off.
2. In order to achieve anything close to the same transparency as existing voting systems, you would have to open the operating systems of all chips on the devices, the firmware, and the chip design, and then enable any citizen to verify that the device they have in their hand actually was built from those sources.
Corporatocracy is coming, someone watched "Continuum" TV series and think it's a nice idea...
And yes, paper voting has to be the best solution ever. /s
Compare that to paper ballots. How many humans do you need to compromise all paper ballot counts?
I personally think blockchain powered voting solutions with a PKI backed ID Card like my Estonian e-Residency card could be a fairly strong way of authentication.
How do you protect against a compromission of:
* The mobile phone's OS (by a virus, by the manufacturer)
* The app's server code
* The app's hosting providers
We are speaking about governments, or very rich parties trying to change to outcome of elections here.
Embedding displays into cards isn't impossible, BofA does it for OTPs already. A combination could ensure that users know the vote they're casting by confirming it on a secure hardware token.
With that done, you could upload that vote to a blockchain based system that's auditable, but anonymized.
But I can't give you a good answer to "what if someone steals the phone and card". One solution is to have remote election officers that verify your identity via the camera in real-time as you cast the vote. They could look at your face, or even read your fingerprint off the camera (I know that's possible because my country lets banks do that).
You'd only be able to cast the vote through devices with good enough cameras and under good enough lightening and you may have to wait a little while, but it'll be secure and you won't have to travel — especially if you're registered in a distant state or district.
It's better than nothing.
No really.
https://twitter.com/The_UnSilent_/status/1059962688338583554
</sarcasm>
"Preference falsification" is a social phenomenon in which, between choices A and B, most people prefer thing A but believe that everyone else prefers B, making it socially unacceptable to express support for A. If votes are public, then everyone feels compelled, upon threat of ostracism, to vote for B, leading to enactment of policy that's actually extremely unpopular. Under a secret ballot system, people can profess support for B while secretly voting for A, and if everyone does so, policy A ends up being enacted, concordant with the true preferences of the population.
If you can vote by mail, or vote by smartphone, nothing stops people from supervising each other's votes. That there's currently a norm against doing in vote-by-mail jurisdictions is purely a cultural holdover from the days of the true secret ballot, and it's only a matter of time before this norm erodes.
We live in an age of moral panic and socially enforcement of beliefs that are both unpopular and, in many cases, scientifically incorrect. Let's not make the problem worse by making it even harder to escape from the preference falsification trap.
And it'd definitely help to improve voter turnout, just look at studies on how poll lines impact future voting behavior...
Also, you think this system is sufficiently secure to secure access to trillions of dollars? Because that is what elections are about.
> Also, you think this system is sufficiently secure to secure access to trillions of dollars? Because that is what elections are about.
More secure than Diebold machines to be certain.
And how does it count votes per candidate then?
> Yes. More secure than Diebold machines to be certain.
That seems very questionable.
Codes can be simply be computed as HMAC(secret key, SIN + candidate) or something similar, the user and any attacker without the secret key just has a random string of bits.
You do realize votes are tallied by computer currently, right? Most of these just rely on phone-based systems that often expose interfaces to news orgs and such. The sort of interface I'm talking about would actually lead to less exposure in many ways from a security standpoint.
Changing a vote to be for another candidate is not the only way to influence an election; you could have votes for the 'wrong' candidate be thrown out as invalid, too.
I could say the same thing currently - how do you know that vote you placed on a voting machine actually counted?
> you could have votes for the 'wrong' candidate be thrown out as invalid, too.
That's why you have codes that have no public mapping to candidates as I already suggested - I even suggested a primitive way to do so.
Which is a reason for introducing an even less secure system how? Yes, voting computers are a huge security problem. Which is why they should be banned.
> That's why you have codes that have no public mapping to candidates as I already suggested - I even suggested a primitive way to do so.
As I mentioned above: Thinking of securing an election like securing a bank is doing things completely wrong. "The public" is not the primary attack vector you have to defend against. "The public" is who is supposed to have the power in an election. Entrenched powers is what you have to defend against.
I'd be happy with voting machines if all they did was keep a running tally - have them print a ballot, have the voter deposit this ballot in an urn - if the result (gotten from the voting machine as the polls close) is disputed, recount the paper ballots, end of discussion.
As for the second part, I misread your initial post -apologies.
Not in countries that take elections seriously, for example almost anywhere in Europe.
Sadly it’s true of the US, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
In Switzerland, were you vote on referendums up to three times a year [which can be pretty complex issues] votes are cast on paper and counted manually.
Vote counting is semi volountary, but rather well paid, at about 32$ an hour in Zurich.
First results, with the exception of parliamentary votes, which are more complex, are in two hours after the polling places close. Final results usually don't take longer than four or five hours.
Please don't come with the argument that it's a small country, which can not be compared to a huge country like the US. Its' a matter of scaling appropriately on a communcal level and being willing to spend money on it.
Of course this has a price, but the question to ask is: Is it not worth the price to guarantee the integrity of your democratic system?
In other words: The codes do identify who voted for what, which is contrary to your original claim.
The attacker not having the secret key is an inacceptable requirement for voting systems, as the election is run by those in power, but has to be able to remove them from power.
> You do realize votes are tallied by computer currently, right?
No, where I live they don't. The consitutional court of Germany ruled that voting computers are illegal to use here for reasons of election transparency and integrity.
> The sort of interface I'm talking about would actually lead to less exposure in many ways from a security standpoint.
No, not as far as the relevant attack vectors are concerned. If you think of securing an election like securing a bank, you are completely off the track.
That one word you can never use to describe electronic voting with secret ballot. Sure it may be made easy, but it won't ever be simple.
I realize that this has the side-effect of killing off anonymous voting (at least to whoever doled out the tokens, you'd still be anonymous to your neighbors), but I think that is a good thing. While you can argue about what the side-effects that has on individual voters in extraordinary circumstances, fact of the matter is, anonymous voting makes it effectively impossible to verify the percentages each candidate achieved.