Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

Voluntary disclosure sounds as if it undoes the secret ballot.

Just a reminder: the secret ballot is secret to protect those, whose genuine vote would otherwise be manipulated (/forced/extorted/...)

Not every individual voter might need that level of protection for themselves.

But every individual voter requires this level of protection for the whole process.

Phrased differently: for some, anonymity in voting is nice. For others, it is necessary to get their genuine vote. For democracy to function, we need everyone's genuine vote.

Thus: we need voter anonimity that cannot be rescinded by the voter - nor by anyone else.

Forgive me, I don't know what you're advocating for here. I greatly appreciate that you're chewing on the policy, problem, tech.

For the USA, I no longer think polls are useful predictors, nor are exit polls useful audits or verification. For polling to work (be useful), like is done in Germany, requires the whole system to be designed as such.

Our gold standard is the Australian Ballot. Private voting, public counting. We weaken this system to extend the franchise, eg absentee ballots.

But the real kicker is our FPTP (winner takes all) election system. It's so brittle. The inevitable error rate intrinsic in any form of voting (casting ballots) coupled with durvergers law virtually ensures drama.

Said another way, my militant defense of the Australian Ballot, this recurring national spaz attack, would be mooted by switching to a more robust form of elections. Ranked choice and proportional representation have the most interest and support, though I prefer Approval Voting for a better balance of fairness and simplicity.

Back to your point about disclosure, if I follow you: I very much would like to see tech, POCs, research into time boxed privacy. Like maybe all election materials, including ballots, are released when an election is certified. Versus hidden and then destroyed a few weeks later. My motivation is to find other balances, equilibria, between people's privacy (and protection) against society's need for confidence in the results.

In-person voter fraud isn't that difficult, and especially in Washington people get packets in the mail they can vote with by returning in the mail which would be pretty easy for someone to go swiping from mailboxes. Verifying identity online is not an impossible challenge and we can't just avoid improving anything forever.

This is fair enough, but the issue is that at least in the US, youre not actually replacing paper ballot voting in most cases.

The US currently has digital (often internet connected) polling booths, which bring all the security problems of mobile/net voting, and none of the benefits.

I would much rather have mobile voting, as opposed to the current widespread digital voting booths system. Ideally, of course, we'd want to go the paper ballot route for now.

I love the way WA votes. I've lived in a half dozen US states, and it is by far the best experience. It makes it extremely easy to vote thoughtfully.

No need for a smartphone. The information packet + drop box / postal vote is fantastic.

What has candidly started to scare me, after a good # of years voting with the packet (and I assure you I _research_ far beyond what the packet contains) is the fact that I'm often Still Clueless at the end.

A toy example is a recent tax levy for some hospital funding. While the packet contained some thousand-foot information on what it was for and amount/etc, there was NO breakdown as far as I could tell, even online, (certainly no objective/in depth/expert sourced) that actually tried to answer "what are the pros and cons? (this sometimes exists in the packet but often not for some of the more technical decisions) Is this a normal tax? Is the argument for or against disingenous? Are there better ways to source this revenue? Is there proper accountability and controls on utilization, and is the underlying legislation solid?

Take the following not as tooting my horn but to give a point of perspective: I have multiple degrees (including advanced) in applied math and CS, and spend an inordinate amount of my time reading about politics, law, and history. I still feel ill-equipped to vote on many of these topics. It sometimes amazes me that the system is as functional as it is now, if even a portion of decisions are made in this fashion.

Yeah, it’s always bothered me—after growing up in CA with information packets—that, now living in TN, there are no such packets mailed to voters. I still don’t understand how anyone feels comfortable voting on anything or anyone at local, county, and state levels here (myself included). Finding impartial information and analysis on measures is extremely difficult (I hesitate to say impossible, but it pretty much is for an average voter). Trying to talk with anyone about ballot measures usually results in blank stares.

I have zero idea what you're talking about. I have never in my life received in informational packet along with my ballot. Like there's a short short summary of ballot issues but nothing about any of the candidates.

Just wait till they gamify electronic voting -

"Congratulations, you've just earned your Junior Progressive badge! Vote for two more progressive candidates to level up!"

I mean am I not allowed to follow the judgement or organizations I trust: namely the ACLU, the League of Women Voters, the local Democratic Party, (and some other local ones but it would give away where I'm from).

It seems presumptuous that I, a software dev who has no serious connection to the statehouse, could do better.

> I have never had this happen nor heard of it happening

I've canvassed in New Jersey where one spouse was surprised by the other's party registration, and had two incidences where it broke into an argument in front of me.

> someone demanding to see my vote counts as a felony still in our state

The line between demanding or requiring and politely, but firmly, requesting is legally blurry and practically meaningless.

Agree this is an edge case problem. (I support mailed-in ballots.)

Hypotheticals are valuable when forming policy, because they point directionally to incentives and potential counterfactuals. Nobody has yet had to take arms up against a potential tyrant in the US (claims of the southern states during the civil war aside) but one could argue that the reason such tyranny has never been attempted in the first place is due to the deterrent of the 2nd amendment. Just because we can't point to a concrete example which proves the necessity of the 2nd amendment to prevent such tyranny, doesn't mean it would be a good idea to repeal it on the grounds that we do not know if those hypotheticals would actually manifest. Similarly, having policies for voting which prevent coercion seem sound despite the fact that it's currently unknowable if in the absence of those policies we'd see an electoral impact due to such coercion.

An abusive wife can force her husband to vote for X and mail the envelope in front of her. She couldn't do that if the husband was voting alone in a booth.

In a state with in-person voting, if someone tells you they'll give you $50 to vote for their candidate, you can take the $50, go to the ballot box, and vote for the other person. They'll be none the wiser. In WA, on the other hand, they can watch you fill out your ballot and stick it in the mail before giving you the $50.

As a WA resident, our system is certainly nice. Is that risk worth it? Meh, it probably is.

My bad, I guess I misunderstood what you were saying.

I was just trying to make a point that there is no usual "evil hackers trying to break into our systems" kind of situation. It's like stealing someone's car by simply entering the wide open door and turning the keys someone left in the ignition.

You're looking at it backwards. Democracy draws its power from the "consent of the governed", not from the complacency of the subjects. Remember the whole "taxation without representation" thing back when this democracy thing was getting started? Government is a tool of the people, and if the people chose to not engage in the process, the government has no legitimate claim by which it can act on the people's behalf.

The government doesn't ask for your consent, it assumes it, and the only method by which you can directly withhold consent is to refuse to participate in their political process. Low voter turnout is an indicator of an illegitimate government, which no longer has the consent of the people to continue governing them (At least in a democracy).

*Edit: If people chose to not vote (or engage in other political actions) the question should be "do we need this part of the government" not "how do we get more people to vote in this part of the government"

+1 for election day as a national holiday; I'd even go so far as to make voting mandatory (with support for blank protest ballots, health/circumstance exemptions, etc).

That said, while the RFID system you describe seems achievable (and clearly an improvement over closed-source easily-hackable voting machines), I think it misses an important component of a democratic process: voter trust. Even if the tech is fully auditable, requiring the average voter to trust an elite technological caste does reduce trust, compared to pen and paper, which are auditable by the vast majority of citizens.

Also, the RFID can't be the only mechanism; having a fixed address can be used for authorizing identity (as with mail-in ballots), but is not and should not be a requirement to vote.

At any rate, I agree that technology is no silver bullet; solutions should be sociopolitical first, and technology is merely a tool to that end. I do think there are worthwhile innovations to consider; if anything, I'd like to disrupt polling moreso than voting, which I think has a surprising political influence both during and between election cycles, and yet which we outsource to private media companies with their own biases and incentives. If we could crack the problem of distributed identity that is resistant to Sybil attacks, we could have ongoing/persistent voting, liquid voting, public choice economics, etc, enabling more fluid feedback loops with our representatives (and maybe someday, even "pass-through" representative direct democracy).

That is already a factor. Even with paper ballots they eventually get entered into a computer for tallying. Which has a whole stack that must be trusted.

Also your phone's keyboard transmits predictive text data re: write in candidates.

What you describe is considered election fraud and is illegal in the US.

see 18 U.S. Code § 597: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597

That technique leaves quite a lot of evidence around.

Not only do you need every voter you buy the vote from to never speak up about it, but you also need to somehow hide all the mailing of absentee ballots, hide where you mail them back from, and your money needs to be clean and untraceable to yourself. AND all of that needs to happen right around election time.

But hacking an electronic machine can be done by a few people making changes to a warehouse of voting machines by impersonating a janitor 2 years before the election. And that's not hypothetical, 100% of voting machines that have been in the hands of hackers have been exploited to change votes. I myself used to sneak into the room where they kept the voting machines in my high school when I was younger.

"online" voting is even easier to hack. You could attack the users by buying a botnet and have it submit or change the votes on the client machines before they cast them, you could attack the servers via things like evil maid attacks on the server hardware, "normal" exploits on their software to gain access to the systems, even just paying the sysadmin that maintains it a few hundred million dollars to look the other way for a few days.

Absentee ballot or any other real-world interaction dramatically increases price per vote and risks.

With electronic vote, both reward and verification can be done in untraceable way. Basically you could sell your credentials for Monero on some Onion site and vote will be done on your behalf. Low risk for both parties and plausable deniability for seller (OMG, I was hacked!!!).

I have been playing with that idea, as some kind of activist political stunt but I am pretty sure my country has limitations in place to prevent/forbid the selling of vote.

Which is exactly the reason why absentee voting should be an exception. Every single person who takes an absentee ballot purely out of convenience is hurting democracy, even if only very slightly. And it's not just plain out vote buying, there are also various forms of soft, even unintended coercion that encroach on a voter who votes outside of the enforced privacy of a booth. If it was possible to run statistics on this I'm quite sure that there would be statistical evidence of spouses voting more alike when voting at home than when voting alone in the booth.

Try it. They'll defraud you by overriding the vote in person.

I think this is a REALLY bad idea because of the security implications surrounding it.

As a different citizen, I'm not too enthused about ballot secrecy. 100% of the security issues with online voting come from the ballot secrecy requirement, so it's hard to get worked up about this.

As a Russian hacker I think this is a REALLY great idea because of the security implications surrounding it.

Speed

This. The thing about "get out the vote" campaigns is, they're intended to draw out the least-involved, least-informed members of the electorate. Which in my book is a bad thing.

Voting is not the only civic duty - educating yourself on the issues at hand is also part of that civic duty. If someone doesn't want to vote because taking the legally-mandated time off to go to the polls or fill out their mail-in ballot is "too much work," I'm not sure they're living up to their end of the bargain as a citizen.

Exercising your right to vote doesn't mean you value it. Shouldn't we be asking how we can get people to value their vote enough to be engaged?

Irrespective of that, haven't we already witnessed the mass security issues that come with making voting machines digital? Do we really want to subject that flawed scenario to even more flaws by putting it out on the web? Do we never learn?

Some people believe, if a politician has $X to spend, they're more likely to spend it on things demographics with high turnout rates want than things demographics with low turnout rates want.

So for example, these people see the interests of people of retirement age represented much better than the interests of under-30s. They see this as part of the cause of rising college costs, and rising house prices transferring wealth from the young to the old.

By this model, every non-voter that starts voting is a step towards more even -and hence more just- representation. And if you're in a demographic with a below-average voting rate, the state better serving your needs.

Of course, that's a largely academic argument in the election of the board of supervisors for a conservation district, who probably don't have much influence on matters like house prices.

>In essence we'd be diluting the vote of those who care the most with those who think voting by mail is too hard.

I travel a lot. So much so that I am actually flying back to Iowa from the West Coast for 2 days in order to participate in the caucus, and flying out again for work the following day. While I am ok with purchasing a plane ticket to participate, it's understandable that others in my situation, particularly in less important states, would not be ok with incurring that cost. Being able to vote by phone would enable absentee voters who are not always around to participate in their home state's elections.

With that being said I understand I am a fringe case - but those who don't vote because "voting by mail is too hard" are likely a fringe case as well. I'd venture to guess those same people wouldn't vote because "they don't want another app on their phone".

> If someone has that worldview I'm OK with them not voting.

Then advocate for making it illegal for some people to vote.

No one has an interest in impersonating you to pay your bills.

Someone might have an interest in impersonating you to steal your tax refund -- these scams do happen.

Impersonating a bunch of voters is potentially easier when you're just presenting yourself as a computer with an internet connection rather than a flesh-and-blood human body.

Simple, single fraudulent tax benefits one person, with everything in the record, and is easy to trace (bank account owned by someone else)

A single fraudulent vote doesn’t benefit anyone, but thousands of them benefit someone greatly, and it’s difficult to trace, as it looks the same as a regular vote.

> Sorry, but explain to me how I'm able to submit my taxes securely every year online, or pay for my marketplace insurance securely every month, but voting on our own digital devices is somehow beyond reach of what we can technically fathom?

Because the threat models are completely different.

For starters, if you get your taxes wrong, or if someone fraudulently tries to file on your behalf, it's a reversible process. You can fix it after-the-fact.

Ballots have to be anonymous (secret ballot) and also non-verifiable (to prevent vote-selling). There's no redoing an election later on, or asking a person to confirm their previous vote.

> And if you could pre-print your completed ballot

Your printer will betray you by printing invisible identifying dots on your ballot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

Virginia just made it a state holiday, yay for progress. Too bad half the people that should vote will still be working on that day or don't even think about voting because they're too stressed to care.