Comment by jonathanstrange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonathanstrange | Hacker News Reader

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jonathanstrange

Electronic voting is the classical solution to a nonexistent problem.

Just so the results of voting can be displayed on TV a bit earlier, we are supposed to accept substantial risks to democracy posed by blatantly insecure endpoints, blatantly insecure company infrastructure, insecure network communications and devices (routers, etc.), private companies that often have a track record of insecure and sloppy programming, voting machines that have been shown to be hackable easily (people from CCC and similar groups do that routinely when they get hold of a machine), voting program code that has been improperly audited and/or cannot be verified by the public, flawed patching mechanisms, flawed and insecure operating systems of voting machines, and on and so forth. The list of flaws of electronic voting systems is nearly endless, and, what's worse, there is no mathematical proof that the encryption used in those systems cannot be broken. (There are lots of proofs in cryptography, but almost all of them are based on very strong idealizing assumptions. In the end, only OTPs are provably secure. We do not even have a proof that P!=NP yet.)

Electronic voting may be a harder to implement solution in terms of trust but the problem is not non-existent.

Voting today is a complex and costly process. Hence, it cannot be carried out frequently and hence the accountability/ feedback loop is slower.

Imagine if we could conduct voting in a day (even in large democracies). We would be able to remove bad representatives faster.

> Imagine if we could conduct voting in a day (even in large democracies).

That would be horrible. "direct democracy" does not work (Switzerland is also a representative democracy), practical policy making requires some domain knowledge, patience and the ability to make compromises that the Internet mob could not possibly deliver. People are generally very good at judging the trustworthiness of other people, however, and at being critical about other people (rather themselves). Both traits work well for a representative democracy.

Have you seen who represents the people?

just have a test we can take to illustrate competence in a domain. Passing the test grants us the right to vote on laws in that domain.

Then, those who represent us are those who have illustrated the intellectual capacity to make good decisions.

Who makes the tests, and who decides which domain a given policy proposal falls under?

A bit earlier?

Election recounts were triggered and entire countries and regions were affected because a recount couldn’t be completed in time.

Take for example Al Gore vs George W Bush: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qcz6NSyxrfQ

Because the recount was stopped earlier than it could be completed, Bush became President, stopped watching Bin Laden and we got 9/11, then invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and the entire region was heavily destabilized and overrun with Islamic terrorists. The largest geopolitical disaster of the last 50 years with effects as far reaching as Syrian civil war, Libyan anarchy, and millions of refugees and families broken.

If only a recount could have been done faster...

> Electronic voting is the classical solution to a nonexistent problem.

And some may argue that voting is a pretty bad "solution" by itself.

And some may argue that democracy is a pretty bad "solution" by itself.

https://reason.com/2018/11/10/libertarian-critiques-of-democ...

And some may argue.

"Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…" - Winston Churchil

https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...

> Just so the results of voting can be displayed on TV a bit earlier, we are supposed to accept substantial risks to democracy

You already accept the influence of corporate PACs, which arguably are a much bigger threat to democracy. Not saying you should add another vector, (electronic voting), just that the argument that there's a solid democratic system now is not quite true.

> You already accept the influence of corporate PACs

This is leading astray but just to make this clear for anyone looking up this thread later: I do not accept the influence of corporate PACs at all, and believe (but IANAL) that where I live these would be illegal.

> I do not accept the influence of corporate PACs at all

Good, but I meant "you" as in the broader society concerned about electronic voting, not "you" as the individual.

A corporate PAC is simply a group of people joining together to create political speech, with the added legal protection of incorporation. The Citizens United case was in direct response to the FEC approving nearly all corporate speech from liberal sources, while stopping conservative versions. Explicitly in the Michael Moore v Citizens United FEC complaints. Nothing changed for liberals voices in Citizens United, only for conservatives. Which is why this is such a polarizing issue as one side lost a hugely unfair advantage.

that is a version of the story I never heard before!

Can you share some links?

Where I brushed up on my info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

> Electronic voting is the classical solution to a nonexistent problem.

That is incorrect. Voting is a feedback loop for the will of the voters. The slower the process is, the less representative it is. The fidelity of the loop is paramount, but the issue remains.

EDIT: do the downvoters understand that there is setup involved in a paper process and getting results is not the end of the feedback loop (not race)? SMH

"The slower the process is, the less representative it is"

If we are talking about months perhaps, but as long as a result is known within a day or two (at most) I'm not sure it really makes that much difference.

Surely the relevant feedback-loop time is the interval between elections, not how long it takes for votes to be counted.

The uk manages to get a result in general elections in < a day

This is only relevant if you propose to have weekly/monthly elections.

For elections every few years even a week of counting would not be a problem.

Although the longer counting takes, the more difficult it becomes for a substantial number of people to monitor the entire process. In the UK, counting takes place overnight, immediately after the polls close; it's feasible for multiple parties to ensure they have people at every location for the entire time, keeping an eye out for irregularities.

If the process were extended over a week instead of a night, it becomes correspondingly harder to ensure that there was never an opportunity for someone to tamper.

That is true, but if they happen digitally then that becomes completely impossible.

As things are now I see no reason of sort not to use paper ballots as the main proof of vote. Especially for big nation wide elections.

If that happens digitally (and using correctly distributed crypto signatures), then we can provide the public with the necessary tools to check every single vote.

> and using correctly distributed crypto signatures

you sort of lost me here. I will not say it is a bad idea, but it would never work in any country I know. Thee sheer size and cultural innovation required would still need to place an inordinate amount of trust in the system.

Again, it is not that it is evil, as much as there are so many possible problems for so little gain

(IIRC Estonia has a nice program where you have a state-SIM and you can vote via telephone, so there it actually might work)

>> you sort of lost me here. I will not say it is a bad idea, but it would never work in any country I know.

Bitcoin works this way though. It is a set of tools to manipulate a highly abstract data structure. These tools are developed by a minority of the population, but the rest of the population trusts them.

This works because it has value for the folk.

Now you're speaking about elections. Most of the people speaking of e-elections are _mostly_ trying to get to the public that if you could make the elections work electronically - then there's a bunch of other things that could be done digitally too.

One example - company board voting. What if you could be present at any board meeting because everything that is said over there is cryptographically signed by each party thus providing non-repudiation of whatever they said?

What if every newspaper reporter had to sign their articles with their signature which is linked to a news trust network?

Contract signatures. Inheritance.

This is a reply to your:

>> Again, it is not that it is evil, as much as there are so many possible problems for so little gain

Little gain is only for people who have no idea of what you can do with "digital".

I don't think I understand what feedback loop we are talking about?

Everyone who wants to be on the ballot registers a few months in advance, which is usually a short enough time. Since people are usually voted into a job they have to do for 4-6 years you don't want hasty decisions anyways.

Getting poll results while the voting stations are open is usually not a desired feature because of how it influences voters.

The delay for counting the votes measures in days, which is a tiny amount in a feedback loop where one iteration takes 4-6 years. Other steps, like forming a government, routinely take an order of magnitude more time in many nations.

> The delay for counting the votes measures in days, which is a tiny amount in a feedback loop where one iteration takes 4-6 years.

I think their argument is precisely that that's too slow of a time to reflect what the voters want and that a faster turnaround time would allow referendums and more of a direct democracy, even when it comes to minor issues, since 'representatives' often don't quite represent.

Such a system does need informed voters, otherwise it opens up to reactionary activism, but that's a whole another debate.

Canadian elections (federal and provincial) are done with paper ballots, and are always available the same day.

> Voting is a feedback loop for the will of the voters

Why should it go on both direction ? Even if it's true, is it a good thing ? You should change your opinion if you hear good arguments and not because you want to vote like the others.

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