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Comment by chr1 | Hacker News Reader

Online voting is hard because people are trying to solve a wrong problem. Now anonymity in voting is needed because a vote has too much value for the politician who is being elected (four years of power), and too little value for the voter (choice between two bundles of promises that almost certainly will not be kept). Because of this asymmetry there is a large risk that with non-anonymous vote people with power will force large number of people to vote for them.

But if we could vote on individual laws and policies instead of people there would not be such difference, and people would be able to use their vote rationally. And if they make mistakes they will not be stuck with the mistake for four years.

Openness of the vote would also allow more flexibility in the way people delegate their vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy or trade support for issues to reach compromise https://voteflux.org/

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> But if we could vote on individual laws and policies instead of people there would not be such difference, and people would be able to use their vote rationally. And if they make mistakes they will not be stuck with the mistake for four years.

That's how you get Brexit.

People got what they voted for. The alternative here is some political cabal subverting the results. Your disagreement is with democracy itself, not a particular style of voting.

This. It’s okay to oppose democracy, btw. I think republics are greatly superior, myself.

I never could understand the argument about republic vs democracy. Some people say republic protects rights of minorities because representatives are voting on laws, and there is a constitution. But if majority wants a law that is unfair to a minority, amending the constitution and electing representatives who dislike the minority is not much harder than voting for a law democratically. The only way this kind of argument works, is if representatives keep lying to get elected and then not keeping their promises. And from history we know this kind of lie never ends well. There can be systems where different people have different amount of votes, but the system of determining this should be known, and accepted by the people, to not cause instability.

> Your disagreement is with democracy itself

Nope. GP is disagreeing with direct democracy, a very specific type of government which is not usually in favor nowadays. Most democracies in the world are representative democracies, where you vote for people who then vote on issues.

For the system to be a democracy the representatives have to represent the desires of the people who have elected them. In ideal case the results should not be different from the results of direct vote.

If there is no way to elect a representative that would support certain idea, then the system is not a democracy but something defined by the method which is used to restrict the pool of available ideas or representatives.

For most democracies in the world such a method was control of mass media, but now they have either to become real democracies or find another method of pretending to be a democracy.

> For the system to be a democracy the representatives have to represent the desires of the people who have elected them.

Not necessarily. It is very well possible for people to vote for representative they hold in high esteem even though they do not agree with them on several matters. It is very possible for representative to go against what is the current majority opinion, and even be reelected afterwards, because in the meanwhile theirs choices have bee proven right. That's why in representative democracies there are elections for a certain role only every several years, to decrease the relevance of immediate issues on the vote, and give more importance to other factors such as broader ideals and the trustworthiness of the candidate.

You can very well prefer direct democracy, but it is not the only, or the one true, kind of democracy.

For that to be democracy people would need to vote explicitly for that "monarch for four years" scheme, but people vote for campaign promises which are not being kept.

If the EU was more democratic brexit probably wouldn't have happened.

By many measures, the EU is more democratic than the UK. The problem is more the perception of it.

The question of whether part of UK's governance should come from Brussels is one that can only be answered by a referendum. To rule otherwise would be a breach of the peoples' right to self-determination.

Yes and no. Brexit encapsulates the problem of too much stuff being bundled into a single decision (and then administered by politicians). If the 10,000 administrative issues involved in Brexit were subject to distributed control then polities would be able to alter their relations in far more pragmatic ways rather than it being a matter of time bombs and clif edges.

not really, because being either "pro-brexit" or "anti-brexit" wasn't the real choice. there was a [3-choice condorcet paradox](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/brexit-condorcet/) and the voters were polled on the falsely binary choice of "in or out".

reducing complex trade-offs to a single vote for Team A or Team B is exactly what could be avoided with an issue-specific, liquid democratic system with a process for participatory, public discourse to achieve compromise

It's all speculative of course, but maybe Brexit would have never happened if the population had felt like they were being listened to. Same for Trump. We have no fine granularity in shaping the country. It is only choose between these two options that both misrepresent you in different but many ways.

While I'm very much in favor of voting on policies instead of people, I don't think that would make online voting more secure.

If voting wasn't anonymous, then wealthy people could pay people to vote in favor of the policies they want. Mobs could threaten people to vote the way they want.

Anonymous voting is important because it prevents people from verifying what you voted for. If people can't verify what you voted for, then it doesn't make sense for them to pay you or force you to vote for what they want.

With liquid democracy voting is not an one off thing, where wealthy person can buy a vote once, and then make up for it by corruption.

If wealthy people can keep paying half the country to keep the laws the way they want, and half of the country keeps accepting that, then maybe the laws are not that bad. It is a much better situation than politicians promising tax cuts or subsidies.

If country is in a situation when mobs can threaten people to vote certain way, then the same mobs can simply not accept the result of the secret vote. Moreover in a polarized society the secret vote is more likely to create mobs, because large number of people would think that no one of their acquaintances voted the "horrible way", and no decent human being could vote that way, and there was some fraud, or it is all done by hateful people from other cities and fighting is the only solution.

The situation is exactly same as with money, mobs can threaten you and take your money, fraudsters can scam you, but the solution is not for everyone to hide in bunker, and pretend that he does not have any money. The solution is for everyone to accept that threatening people is not allowed, and markets are good.

I like that idea voting for ideas instead of people.

Not really sure I want to leave the country's future to the few people who can be bothered to pore over a bunch of a la carte laws and vote on each one.

While it sounds good in theory, you're leaving the country to the same sort of crazy on NextDoor who has nothing better to do but peer out their blinds during the day to report the suspicious activity of someone walking their dog.

I believe a core part of the idea is that you can delegate someone to control your vote unless you override them. Most people would choose someone whom they trust to make appropriate judgements and delegate their vote to them. So I think there would be a number of who specialize in evaluating these laws and it wouldn't be just a few crazy people.

I like the idea of having representation but being able to override my representative if I want. I really like that idea. We have the technology to implement it seamlessly now, if we wanted. I would find myself voting on a lot of issues I care about and ignoring the ones I don’t care about.

Some of the issue is that you're almost always still voting for people. People have to implement the ideas and make them happen. There's any number of policies that I'm in favor for if they worked perfectly, but I don't think they're feasible to implement or enforce using humans.

You see this a lot in local elections where often there are specific ideas on the ballot for local people to vote on. I want to vote for "more public transit options" but it's not as if I'm voting for specific train lines or bus routes.

That's before you get into the issue of who is coming up with the ideas to go on the ballot, how they word them, and how carefully they consider them. It's easy to make a lot of things sound good on the snippet you'll read on a ballot, but not prevent bad side effects that you wouldn't think about.

There is a big difference between picking someone to be your boss and decide what needs to be done, and picking someone to work for you and try to implement what you think needs to be done. You are not going to read the idea on the ballot, you read them on internet, or propose them on a site similar to change.org, and then you have lots of opportunity to give feedback during the implementation. There will not be an option to vote for "more public transit options"

Without the limitations of current voting system, there will not be useless votes like "more public transit options". Instead of that when you are stuck in traffic jam you'll create a proposal for a specific line, other people stuck in the same jam would support it, then your city will hold a competition with different companies proposing different solutions, then will be a vote to pick one of them.

Good luck when we have people just vote themselves endless subsidies.

Do you think that would be more likely than voting for socialists in the current system? I think the difference is that with direct voting when the endless subsidies ruin economy it will be easier to vote for something reasonable, instead of being stuck with someone like Maduro.

The issue is the same as letting someone spend his own money, he may end up spending all of it on something stupid (like alcohol), and some people indeed do that, but most people end up spending rationally.

You'd get a poor failed state like Switzerland.

I'd rather vote on implementation...

Year 1: vote on idea

Year 2: vote on ratification of idea as well as the committee members to design the implementation

Year 3: we vote on which of the 3 - 5 design proposals the committee designed to implement as well as the executive team to implement the plan

To a very good approximation, there are no people on Earth who could confirm that an online vote was correctly counted. Perhaps a few dozens of experts in cryptography, computer architecture AND security could truly understand and be convinced that the system was working as prevented. Regular people, like CS professors or Linus Torvalds definitely couldn't.

So, such a system would have to be blindly trusted by essentially everybody. Not a great basis for a democracy, I would say.

But why do we need cryptography if we are not trying to keep it anonymous? If we remove the requirement of anonymity then the task is not much different from counting upvotes on a video. Which is easy to implement, and easy to verify by different parties running the summation algorithm and by people checking their vote status on the site after the result is computed.

Anonymity is crucial to voting, so 'online voting would be easy if we gave up anonymity' would not hold up.

However, cryptography is not necessary just for anonymity, and the extreme difficulty of ensuring the system is neither rigged nor hackable is not just in understanding cryptography.

The way the current voting systems work, each party and many outside observers are going to collaborate on tallying votes in all voting places, and then collaborate in centralizing those votes in progressively larger centers, all the way to the national level. Parties have alternative counts, and they can check their numbers. Since this is a representative democracy, we can trust that the the people we voted for are either convinced the election is fair, or they are collaborating with their political opponents to cheat, which would mean that the election didn't matter anyway.

In an online system, we first need to check that the servers are running the code they claim they are running - not just once, but during the entire electoral process. We need to check that the database of votes contains all of the actual votes that were cast, and no votes that weren't cast, again, not just once, but during the entire process. We need to check that the database used to display results online is the same database used to tabulate the official result. Of course, we also need to make sure the system is highly-available and not prone to DDoS attacks. We need to ensure that someone cutting a few wires doesn't prevent a whole county from voting.

And of course, we need ways to fix all of these problems if and when they do appear. Say you have an entire county claiming their votes are incorrectly tallied. What happens next? How many people will have enough know-how to check whether there was a bug in the system or the people are lying? How long will it take to audit all of the code that ran (this is important because it is delaying the end of the election)?

Not to mention, you wouldn't really achieve that much. Voting will still have to be done from highly secure machines, so you will still have to go to a polling station (it would be absurdly easy to hack people's PC to have them cast the wrong vote). The same goes for checking the result of your vote.

Overall, an online voting system would be as difficult for people to use. It would take less time to tabulate the votes, but probably much more time to resolve disputes. It would be much, much more complex, and the number of people who could understand and check it would go down by at least 1000x. The attack surface would increase tremendously.

Imagine trying to protect your national voting system from the NSA and CIA. How many countries in the world would have the know-how to combat this very real threat? Especially while probably running US-made chips?

> Anonymity is crucial to voting

Why do you think it is crucial? It did not exist in USA until 1888, it did not exist in Rome until 139 BC, start of the end of Roman republic.

And in Rome the secret ballot actually have caused civil war, by encouraging the people to vote for laws they could not defend.

So voting have worked well without anonymity in the past, and you need better argument why anonymity is crucial, before starting to explore all the unnecessary complexity that it adds to voting.

All of my comment was about the needles complexity that online voting brings to the system even if you disregard anonymity.

Sorry, i have misinterpreted your comment, but reading it again i still do not quite understand it. If voting is open people can simply vote from their phones, everyone can check the status of their own vote, there can be two several independent servers running the software and checking each other, the list of voters will be verified the same way it is verified now. Also at first this will not replace normal voting, but augment it for voting on laws. All of this already works in voteflux which is open on github.

If your tap A on your phone, and your phone shows you that you voted for A, but you later check from your PC and you can see there that you voted for B, what do you do? What do the authorities do?

Imagine how easy it would be for the NSA/CIA/NKVD/etc. to deploy malware to infect hundreds of millions of computers to make all those people think that they've voted for someone else. If even 10% of them never bother to check from an uninfected device, the election is meaningless.

Also, who deploys the servers? Who controls physical access to them? Who is allowed to check the software running on them?

Sure, votsflux may have all their code on GitHub, but the real servers may be running slightly different code, which messes with the data in careful ways. I assume you can export all of the voter data to do the calculations yourself, so at least you can check that when the server says A won, you can check the numbers yourself. But what if they return a slightly altered list, such that if I check my own vote with the vote check API, it shows that I voted for B, but when the data table is exported, I appear to have voted for A, or I appear not to have voted at all? If they change the vote just a bit, odds are few people will ever find out the discrepancies.

And even if they can be found out, how long will it take? After the election is over, but before we can have confidence that the results are meaningful, someone needs to make sure that the votes of the vast majority (depending on the closeness of the vote, even 99%+) of people have been checked against the tables that the server produced. This may take days. Also, an adversary can attack this process - get many people to claim that the server incorrectly tabulated their results, that their phones were hacked etc. The authorities will need to spend weeks investigating just to convince themselves whether the results were true or not. And the investigation will have to be handled by trusted experts, who could be bought themselves...

Electronic voting is not feasible, and any state that attempts neither cares for its citizens right to vote nor does it understand the sophistication of state-level attackers.

> Because of this asymmetry there is a large risk that with non-anonymous vote people with power will force large number of people to vote for them.

Why doesn't this happen today? Any politician can "force" someone to request an absentee ballot, sign it and hand it over to the politician's goons, who will fill it out and send it in with the politician's preferred vote choice. Why doesn't that happen?

This is a very interesting question!

I guess the usefulness of anonymity depends on the situation in the country. For instance in Armenia we do not have absentee ballots just for that reason. And before the 2018 revolution there was large percentage of bought/intimidated vote in all elections. There was a recording how owner of a supermarket chain held a meeting of all employees demanding from them a list of the ids and names of their relatives with promises to vote for him. With this kind of tactic their party ended up taking 68%, as many people were afraid that they could be found if they try to vote not the way they have promised.

Another thing to consider is that filling absentee ballots is a much more complex endeavor, than standing at the booth and making sure people vote the right way.

But in general i think in the situations when secret ballot can actually change the election result, there are much larger problems in the society, which secret ballot won't help to solve.

For instance in Rome secret ballot was introduced only at 139 BC and arguably made the following period of social troubles worse. After all every vote is a dry-run for a civil war, to see who would win without going into war, and it is useful only if it convinces both sides that war is not worth it. But if someone can't even openly say how he have voted, how he can hope to protect the result of his vote? So i think in Rome it ended up causing the civil war.

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