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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Correct. The system must be something a bottom 15 percentile person can understand and doesn’t think is magic. https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo?si=RDsgH2uIKb8k7ueG

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My opinion is that IT literacy is increasing fast enough that in the near future a significant percentage would understand enough about electronic ballots as people understand now about the paper ballots. And I think you're over estimating how many people "understand" paper ballots. Yes, they know the basics, but the details on how votes are counted, validated and secured might be a bit too much for a random Joe.

IT literacy is not increasing; if anything it's going down. My wife's Gen Z siblings grew up with iPads and think computers are magic.

OK, fair.

I meant it in the sense of the younger generation has more exposure to concepts like encrypted communication and peer to peer communication and encrypted ledgers, etc. They might not know how exactly they work, but they know they exist and have an inkling of their attributes as they pertain to data secrecy, auditability, etc...

I'm far more familiar with cryptography concepts than the average person but I wouldn't trust myself to audit a crypto system or implementation.

You might trust yourself to read a bunch of blog posts on technical deep dives into the system and make up your mind based on that, though.

(Whether that's a good thing or not I don't know - perhaps you'd end up agreeing with whichever side has the most believable technological shibboleths, which isn't that much different from the current best practice of listening to the side with the better attack ads).

No, I'm aware of my limitations. Reading about how the system 'should' work does nothing to instill confidence that the implementation is correct or that there are no design flaws.

Do you feel the need to audit the ballot process when casting a vote? Do you wait until the station is closed and watch the people count the votes? Do you know what to look for in regards to ballot tampering? Do you know who is allowed to count the votes?

I think that the details of the vote will indeed be opaque to most voters, but I think that's the case right now for most of us. As a voter you must have some trust in the process and in the fact that the correct auditors have vetted it. Hopefully it's going to get there for electronic voting some day.

Not really. I know the voting process is 'fortified'

I believe that when Grandma laments/boasts that "kids these days just know technology", it's often a confusion of confidence with competence.

The elder generation grew up with stuff where you had to be more cautious of damaging it, while the younger generation is far more confident with "randomly mess around until it works", because they grew up with products that were designed to be more forgiving.

"Voter literacy" is obviously a good thing; but blockchain and encryption are not part of that. Very few software developers, for example, are qualified to evaluate a crypto scheme.

Or universal suffrage is fundamentally flawed. If people can't understand mildly complex voting systems then why should they be contributing to making political decisions that are significantly more complex.

Because systems that try to impose qualifications on voter characteristics historically end up being abused.

But we don't vote on complex political decisions; we vote on our representatives, people whose interests allegedly align with ours, which is much simpler to understand, and delegate the complex decisions to them according to their qualifications.

Whether the candidates themselves, all of them, can be trusted is a much more serious problem with democracy, I think, than "dumb" people affecting the vote.

this depends on where you live. there are many places in which people directly vote on complex issues. people in California voted to ban gay marriage. people in the UK voted on the incredibly complex topic of Brexit.

dumb people vote for dumb things, whether issues or candidates.

Well, referendums are kind of direct democracy, so yes, I agree those are at increased risk of dumb voting. But the actual problem there, to me, is such complex decisions being put to referendum in the first place; specially to a simple majority vote.

Also, gay marriage isn't really a complex issue: Even the dumbest person understood the consequences of banning it, they just were that sadistic. Agreed on Brexit though.

Do you think any sitting politician, your physician, or your accountant really understands cryptography? Do you think studying cryptography needs to be a prerequisite to voting? I swear, sometimes nerds are insufferable snobs.

As for the implications of your premise: Do you feel comfortable in not having a say whether you are taxed more, have your hobbies criminalized, or get sent off to die in some awful war somewhere so that some jerk can get rich? Because that's what you ask for when you say some obnoxious technocrat is fine running the country with no input.

And before you mention passing an exam or something to vote, that's just a direct path to corruption and disenfranchisement.

Maybe, but I don't agree with the cure. I think intellectualizing voting is a fool's errand in a representative democracy. I'd much rather filter on having good, democratic instincts. I'd rather have e.g. an Iowan who has a gut-level orientation toward De Tocquevillian democracy than a naturalized foreign elite who has been socialized to think of governance in terms of hierarchy.

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