Someone, please remind me again, why do we need digital voting systems? For the convenience of getting the results a couple of hours earlier? To save the climate? To eliminate recounts? Because using paper ballots feels too archaic for our high-tech modern society?
People tend to speak about electronic voting as a settled matter. I must have missed the debate.
We don't. Mail-In ballots are pretty good in my opinion. Plus it doesn't have the risk of a single hacker corrupting the outcome. You can always just recount them.
It's easy to imagine how a society that trusts a computer voting system they don't understand can go bad, even if that voting system is initially good.
(1) The problem of booth capturing. In a massive population, law and order is a unique challenge that most of the western countries do not face. Local goons used easily get hold of a lot of ballots and mass vote in 5 minutes and then run away before the law arrived. EVMs are made in such a way that every button press needs about 45 seconds to a minute after which you can vote again.
(2) The problem of illegal votes. Button based voting is precise. No chance of illegal votes.
(3) The problem of counting votes correctly from such a massive population. The chance of making mistakes is a lot higher and this is a unique problem that the west have never handled.
> The convenience of getting results a couple of hours earlier
Its actually a matter of many days here. The window for corruption is too high. And there are too many human vectors who can be compromised by bribes. EVMs just throw all of that out of the window.
(4) I will just mention environmental factors, although its not my main point. More population = more paper. We have 1 National Election, about 29 State Elections (28 states, 1 NCT), 1000s of municipal elections, and 10s of thousands Village headman elections!
This means some kind of elections all year round are always ongoing!
Conventional efforts to strengthen voter enfranchisement address many of the points without the added stakes.
I don't see how the threats of underlying issues of crime and corruption are mitigated by making voting electronic. If thugs prey on voting stations and voters, it seems there are more apparent options available sans the added inherent risks to the voting system itself.
About 1,00,00,00,000 people voting together between thousands of political parties and candidates! I am not wrong when I say that the west has never faced this.
Why not have a machine then, which could make this task scalable and easier to manage?
Those bribable humans will be just as bribable when they're working in an electronic voting system. Just that instead of tampering with ballots, now all they have to do is change a number in a database table.
Same argument for online crime. Some election manager will demand the machines be put online, and someone perhaps half-way across the world will find a vunlerability.
Electronic voting is not a secure system without -- at the absolute minimum -- an auditable paper record. The computer expands the attack surface dramatically.
Without knowing anything about your country I think that by going digital you've just made the goon's job easier. They just need to bribe whomever is in charge of the electronic machine.
(Can we sort of prove there is no cryptographic solution to a good list of problems with online voting?)
I'm against digital voting systems for security reasons too, but hypothetically if that problem were solved, the increased turnout would be a good thing.
The groups that have trouble turning out - because they're poor, working two jobs, got no car, got poor public transport because they live in the bad side of town, they speak a minority language - those are the same groups that are likely to find digital stuff inaccessible.
Define minority language people? Spanish (primary) speakers in the US are more tech savvy than maybe we're giving them credit for.
Also, there's another group that seems to have trouble turning out, and finds digital stuff perfectly accessible: young people.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/states-make-harder...
If polling stations are closed, strategically, and people cannot afford the time/money to vote, or wait to vote, are they truly accessible?
Mail-in is a different situation, so I am not considering this.
Otherwise, I agree with much of your thought.
I'm not for disenfranchisement, but I don't automatically buy into this premise.
If anything, increased turnout has corresponded to increased partisan rhetoric and fear based motivations to vote.
The so-called swing-voters (or swing-participants) are (imho with no proof to back this up) generally the groups that are most likely to be influenced by misleading attack ads, Russian bots, or any other form of social engineering/manipulation.
Participation in elections is good, but only if it's for the right reasons... otherwise it becomes like any other targeted meaningless metric.
Artificial barriers/inconveniences to voting should be removed, but that doesn't mean it should be completely effortless to vote.
Some level of proof-of-effort is not a bad thing, imo.
As an extra method on top of existing options it would probably help, but then you lose a lot of the other suggested benefits around faster counting and etc. which require it to be the only form of voting.
I don't think the two should be equated or conflated.
I think a lot of people assume that digital voting will obviously lead to re-enfranchisement of certain groups and better turn out from other groups of potential voters. It's a noble goal, but dangerous to assume that outcome is likely.
I'm all for easier access to the polls. I've heard great things about Oregon and a few other states that make broad use of vote-by-mail (with a paper ballot). Yes, that has it's own issues, but my understanding is those issues pale in comparison to the upside of easy access. Failing that, I'd love to see voting day made a holiday or moved to a weekend.
And I loathe efforts from certain groups within the US to make voting more difficult. Removing polling places, reduced hours, voter ID laws (lacking substantial proof that fraud is a problem).
General elections see much higher turnout [1], often hitting into 80% or more, but generally staying in the 70s.
[0] https://sos.oregon.gov/elections/Documents/Voter-Turnout-His...
[1] https://sos.oregon.gov/elections/Documents/Voter_Turnout_His...