You should always use paper ballots and people from different parties should be on the table.
Like with Kanban quality control, you want simplicity and robustness, and paper is great for that.
We create and programs machines for a living and nobody can warrantee that they have not been tampered.
That said, NZ has a similar system without compulsory voting, and I've never heard of any significant voter fraud. We have decent voter turnout.
I was also mistaken somewhat when I said "paper ballots". There is certainly electronic voting in Australia, but the "authentication" aspect of just saying a name is still the same. It's essentially "trust but verify"
It is easy to tamper paper ballots the way the US uses them, i.e. by having to manually tick the candidate box.
I think that, for some elections, using different ballots for each party and/or candidate, should be the way. This is done in many other countries and it works consistently better.
You also want an electronic trail, just because there are certain places where you cannot trust that the manual count would be accurate.
I think most people do not trust voting machines because they do not understand the security preconditions they have to comply with. In many ways, they are way more reliable than paper and manual counting.
I do find myself agreeing on voting machines though.The Last Week Tonight on voting machines was quite something to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svEuG_ekNT0
https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi...
I'm not trying to start a flame war, but with all due respect, there are ways to discuss the politics and their relevant merits (or lack thereof) without immediately devolving into partisanship.
So you see in the end, this is not about partisanship, I am just defending my self-enforced sovereign right to call out a rich childish prick who's never had to work a day in his pampered life when he is behaving like one. It's a crazy world where you can't call someone crazy because he's got the crazies' support. That being said, I am against millonnaires even where they are not sociopaths.
I think that even if electronic voting devices are not guaranteed to be failsafe today it does not mean that they can't get there.
Paper ballots are not an optimal democratic way of conducting voting. The whole process is time and resource consuming and disenfranchises the less privileged.
If there would be a cheap and safe way to cast electronic ballots from one's own phone I bet engagement with democracy would be a lot higher, not only on big issues like presidential elections, but on smaller stuff that one would vote at a local level.
The the worry is coercion, those actors could force you to vote on paper in their presence. The phone isn't a variable.
If there is no coercion, the voter can go wherever they feel safe (even a polling place) to do their voting (whether on paper, on phone or whatever other method).
O.....kay.
The way I think about this electronic voting is not limited to just mobile applications or through the web, voting booths/stations can still be employed (which theoretically will have also less friction, due to lower usage). The purpose is to decrease friction of voting in the demographics where participation is not great currently. Young people usually don't vote, maybe having the option at their finger tips would improve that, what do you think?
I have no issue with the notion of expanding voting options to include a well thought out smart phone option but I have real concerns that limiting voting to only that would disenfranchise people outside your ken.
Recall that a number of indigenous americans have had their right to vote restricted simply by living on a tribal reservations with no conventional fixed address.
Sure, they might have a phone .. but I offer that as an example of the "oops, didn't think of that" consequence of assuming everyone has an address.
The assumption that everyone has internet access is no different.
As far as I remember some parts of the US were against requiring ID for voting, so make of that what you will.
That really depends on how it's implemented. Living in Switzerland I get to vote a lot.
About a month before an election or referendum I get the voting slips in an envelope that can be reused to send them back, postage paid.
The slips are placed in a sealed envelope and a signature has to be provided on a slip. The same slip I need to provide at the polling station should I chose to vote in person.
Results are in in a couple of hours after polling closes, except for more complex elections (usually election of parliament, which has a few idiosyncrasies). But even there, results are in the same evening.
The actual procedure may slightly differ by Canton.
It may be resource intensive, but election integrity and speed has a price, which I think is worth it.
And nobody is disenfranchised since you pop your vote into the next letterbox for free.
This solution is often rejected because it could theoretically lead to vote buying but in practice vote buying is ridiculously susceptible even to very halfhearted sting operations.
Historically it has been a problem because it was tolerated, but literally as soon as it was cracked down upon it dried up completely. It only worked when it was de facto decriminalized.
Paper is still better but IMHO I'd be happy with electronic voting with cryptographic after-election vote validation.
But what would you do after you detect it? Go back to paper elections?
If it's impossible to achieve on a meaningful scale without wearing an orange jumpsuit people won't try.
That something is theorerically plausible and possible on a small scale doesnt make it practical on a large scale.
In an unrelated note I can't understand why anonymous crypto hasnt been banned yet. Illegal money transfers are pretty much the only practical use case. Owning bitcoin is like owning shares in the underground economy.