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Comment by humaniania | Hacker News Reader

I have never seen a compelling argument for why this should not be allowed.

There are ~243 years of experience built in to making the government function as intended. Changing the implementation of the key function of one of the critical components must be done with great care.

How does debate work? How is a quorum decided? How long will members have to vote? How are their votes authenticated? etc.

Done wrong, votes in Congress could be perceived as sneaky and illegitimate, and legitimacy is critical. Members take advantage of procedural details all the time. When procedures are new or ill-defined, there are going to be lots of loopholes.

> How does debate work?

Roberts rules with a chairperson (current procedure) seems to translate nicely to a moderated web cast

> How is a quorum decided?

Is there a reason why taking roll by video and voice doesn't work in a video conference any less than it does in person?

> How long will members have to vote?

We don't have to change this with video conference software either

> How are their votes authenticated?

With the exception of deep fakes, video and voice confirmation.

Surely, in a world where each representative could feasible allocate fiber installation to their house, they can whitelist IPs; if not much cheaper options such as VPNs and secure factors.

> Congress could be perceived as sneaky and illegitimate, and legitimacy is critical

Why wouldn't (non classified) meetings be broadcast on CSpan? (Requiring HD Video and HD Voice seems like a no brainer for transparency)

Article 1, Section 5, Clause 2:

  Each House may determine
  the Rules of its Proceedings, ...

It really is up to the Senate how to do this. No one will (should) think less or more of the Senate if they do this.

You would have to decide on a process for senators to formally register their votes remotely, and that process would have to be one that could not be hacked even by a state actor because the stakes are incredibly high. That is a tall order even for a group of technically competent people, and the U.S. Senate is not generally known for its technical competence.

There are only 100 senators, and lots of people track their votes. A senator logging a surprising vote would be asked about it and able to correct the record.

Hacking a senate vote wouldn't be much use in the long run.

Exactly. Remote voting is easier when the votes don't need to be secret.

That is far from clear. Imagine that the famous vote on repealing Obamacare had been done remotely and someone had hacked John McCain's famous thumbs-down vote to be a vote in favor of repeal. Imagine further that before the matter could be clarified with McCain, he had become incapacitated and died. That is a plausible scenario. It only takes one hack at the margins to change the course of history.

> * Imagine that the famous vote on repealing Obamacare had been done remotely and someone had hacked John McCain's famous thumbs-down vote to be a vote in favor of repeal.*

It would've been corrected in minutes. McCain knew he was the deciding vote and the media firesform would've alerted him to an incorrect vote almost immediately.

All of these people have large teams monitoring their coverage and managing their PR. A voting mistake would be caught.

And yet the Senate still often takes votes by voice, where precise counts aren't even logged.

Registry of votes seems easy enough. If there's ever a question or a surprising vote, ask again. As-is, senators regularly vote by means of hand-waving and thumbs up/down gestures, so it's not like things are always super-formal even before this change.

Yes, that's true. But when a senator is on the Senate floor there is no doubt about his or her identity. How are you going to insure that the person registering a vote remotely is in fact the senator and not someone posing as the senator? Yes, there are ways to solve this problem, but they are not trivial.

The main reason is political: It would let senators stay in their home districts and campaign for their entire time in office, making it easier to neglect their duties to write and pass legislation. Politicians may be more motivated to work together on issues affecting the country in DC together. Staying in their home district could be a distraction because of the competing interests of being re-elected.

In general, I think these remote voting proposals should include a time limitation. That there is some "trigger" when they take effect, and they need re-authorization every 30 days until the incident is over.

OTOH staying in their home districts means they may be more attentive to the needs of their home districts, and less likely to be swayed by pressure from the corridors of washington

And all of a sudden further distanced from both lobbyists and the press

Making things more expensive for lobbyists sounds like a good idea to me.

The Senate (really all of congress, but especially the Senate) is supposed to be a deliberative body. There's supposed to be discussion and debate of any measure put forth, convincing others of the right and wrong in a given bill. This is why there's a filibuster, quorum rules, etc.

If you set up a system where Senators can live at home, Zoom in to cast a vote, and otherwise not engage with other Senators, it doesn't really fulfill the "coming together and hashing things out" aspect of congress. It's a bunch of polarized Senators staying polarized, now without even human contact.

(and it's fair to say "we're basically there already", but it's also fair to say "but we're not quite there, and we should preserve and foster whatever bipartisan interaction we have". I just don't think it's a no-brainer.)

Security, fraud, and lack of a physical paper trail.

What physical paper trail currently exists? For a voice vote, there's no counting; for a standing vote, there's no individual identification of senators; for a roll call vote, it's centralized through the clerk anyways.

This was the first comment on the article and I responded before reading that it was about senators voting. Not everyday citizens/residents voting.

In addition to the point raised by wool_gather, why do you need a paper trail with non-anonymous voting? The votes never need to be re-counted, as far as I know. A senator would surely notice if a "yea" appeared next to her "nay" vote.

I said that before realizing the article was about literal senators voting remotely. My bad.

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