Internet voting: Exactly what the 99% needs
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
Whereas filing your taxes online is a one way transaction between you and the government, voting is one big symmetrical transaction between every member of the electorate. This makes it really tricky from a security perspective.
The reason that internet voting is worse than postal voting is the slowness of messing around with paper, the same reason which people tout as a positive. You cant change a million postal votes in a under millisecond from thousands of miles away. Think of the postal service as hash iteration.
For (lots) more info, see the following Google tech talk, "Electronic and Internet Voting (The Threat of Internet Voting in Public Elections)" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GjmRwfkRXY
There are some papers describing systems to do this that seems like they could work. But they're pretty complex.
Further, I don't think Internet voting is automatically a smart way to boost turnout. Same-day registration, early voting, and no-excuse absentee voting are simple and cheap ways to make voting much easier without introducing a bunch of new security problems or dealing with unequal access to computers and the Internet.
How is that a problem when most public libraries provide free access, and traditional early and on-time voting are still available?
If the point is to let people vote from home at their leisure, why not just mail everyone an absentee ballot?
Obviously there are security and coercion concerns that are more detrimental to Internet voting's prospects than the class division aspects. And an absentee ballot sounds reasonable, but is not nearly as convenient as online voting (and has more potential for fraud and coercion than online voting).
My main point is that I believe class disparity is a weak argument against online voting. I don't like using postal mail or waiting in line for an hour or more at the ballot box -- does that mean that it's unfair not to let me vote from home or the library? At least in the US, with libraries, cheap DSL, and cell phones, the vast, vast majority of people not currently voting have easier access to the Internet than they do to polling stations on election day. Don't deny most people a benefit because a few people can't enjoy it.
Even if we can guarantee the votes are submitted and counted accurately, it's impossible to tell if my boss was standing behind me telling me what to vote (or lose my job).
At a polling station they prevent coercion by enforcing secrecy. One person in a voting booth at a time, no cameras in the voting booth, etc. If you can't prove you voted either way, you're free to lie about how you voted.
I don't even see an easy workaround, either... Hrm...
Then you just say you already voted and lie who you voted for. What will they do, confiscate your phone? (assuming phone voting). There are so many "outs" to the coercion scenario that it seems implausible that it would ever occur on any significant scale. What scenario can you think of where coercion would be a real issue?
Forget about intimidation and consider bribery. Instead of a domineering boss threatening termination imagine a man with a laptop and a roll of $20 bills.
Or, much more likely and hard to change, a domineering family member making sure everyone votes the same way.
Nothing would do more damage to the two-party system than for the argument "if you vote for a third party, you throw your vote away" to be demolished.
With Concordet voting, listing someone as your second choice can cause your first choice to lose, which would probably confuse a lot of people.
* 8 people vote: A, C, B * 5 people vote: B, C, A * 4 people vote: C, B, A
IRV eliminates C, despite the majority of voters preferring C over B (12 to 5). The order of elimination means that significant secondary preferences are often ignored.
I had a roommate who worked for a voting reform nonprofit and he said even gathering signatures for "simple" IRV is quite challenging. It's just too hard to explain quickly.
The plural of anecdote isn't evidence, I know, but: I had Condorcet voting briefly explained to me at a young age, and I grasped it immediately. I couldn't do the math, but it was conceptually really easy to grasp. I didn't fully understand the current US system until around age 20.
Unfortunately, HN readers are not representative of the general population. It's not that complicated, no, but I can see people having a lot more trouble with understanding Concordet voting than with understanding IRV.
6 * Republicans, Libertarians, Democrats; 5 * Democrats, Libertarians, Republicans; 2 * Libertarians, Democrats, Republicans.
Liberians are eliminated (despite the majority of voters preferring them over the Democrats), and Democrats win.
Notice how when you use party names, it makes more sense? The Republican and Democrat voters are simply voting "anyone but the other major party". If they are neck-to-neck on primary votes, then the secondary votes of the minor parties start to be counted. This is a feature, not a bug.
Further, I don't think real-world voting would match up exactly with the above. There are people that would vote R/D/L and D/R/L, both of which are lacking from this example that would swing things away from the Libertarians.
1. Anecdotes of people thinking it was literally three votes, or people who only voted for the first round, still came up.
2. Voting was too tactical for most people's tastes; in the mayoral race a majority never appeared, thus there were ultimately 11 rounds of runoffs(with 12 candidates), yet you could only pick the top three; voting only for minority candidates left your vote out in the final rounds as they got eliminated.
3. The election still had historic-low turnout.
On the other hand, I still think the result showed a lot of promise.
i don't understand. your vote is basically thrown away regardless of who you vote for. the statistical likelihood that your vote has any impact except in the tightest of races is miniscule.
do people really believe that their vote is "not thrown away" only if they vote for the winning candidate?
To that end, I built https://modernballots.com. It's difficult to get mindshare when it comes to these kinds of things though. Electoral reform activists are fractured between their own preferred methods. Kinda keeps things from going anywhere.
My intuition on this goes as follows: Imagine one single spectrum of policy, that goes from "Left" to "Right" for example. Assume voters exist somewhere on this spectrum, and will vote for the candidate whose policy is nearest to theirs on the spectrum. Then so long as there are exactly two viable candidates then they both have no incentive to deviate from the median voter. Each candidate picks up one whole side of the spectrum, and the only thing that can happen as a candidate makes their policy more extreme is that the median voters begin to see the other candidate as closer.
Of course, the actual US election system is far more complex. Very extreme voters do in fact "throw their vote away" if both candidates appear far from their policy. There are a lot more issues than just one, so a single spectrum of policy is oversimplified. Many voters vote on individual issues, which are often black and white (e.g. pro-life/choice, for/against gay marriage). You could probably argue that candidates actual policies have very little to do with their stated policies, or that voters are significantly more swayed by advertising dollars than policy. All of these are real concerns, but I think the basic point stands: a two-party system encourages both candidates to situate themselves at more or less the median of the American electorate, which I consider a desirable outcome.
The same logic would declare surveys on the internet as representative of the society - and we have seen over and over again that these are often quite different to "reality". The idea would therefore favor those views popular among an internet crowd by lowering the access barrier towards this group as much as possible.
Historically American elections have been putting certain hurdles in place that aim not to generate the biggest turnout possible, but a turnout of those who are really interested in the subject (i.e. the preregistration in some states etc). But this is another discussion.
Introducing online voting should be pursued as an option, just like early voting is. But we should not even think of making it a standard for a long time, because not everyone has internet access. And many people with internet access still wouldn't know how to go to vote.gov and fill in a form.
It is more important to implement unfiltered direct democracy first. I want to vote on some stuff directly and let somebody else vote for me on stuff i dont care about. Thinking hard about changing _how_ to vote without changing _what_ you are allowed to vote on is a waste of time.
As long as I can not vote on stuff directly, I dont care for elections at all. All parties are the same, all representatives sooner or later become corrupt. The game is rigged in favor of people with money & influence, elections are a lie.
My favorite trick which happened in my city is having two bills that look nearly identical, except one looks better (more savings, more jobs, more whatever), but is actually illegal and will inevitably be struck down by the courts. The illegal one has a supersede clause in it so that if both are voted in, it undos the other, but since it'll be struck down for being illegal, nothing will actually change.
As someone whose state, city and county have implemented direct democracy, I can tell you it sucks. I'd rather have no laws passed then them passed directly via an uninformed electorate.
The key for successful direct democracy is encouraging delegation of decision making.
Voting in the United States should be compulsory like it is in Australia.
A central location that would let people vote on bills would serve as a check on politicians votes.
As for the problem with not everyone having access to computers/smart phones, why not replace phone booths with electronic voting booths?