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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

This absolutely rules. I just re-registered (due to having moved) and it's quite straightforward, and you can request a permanent vote-by-mail ballot (most secure way to vote).

For those paranoid about "online voting" - this is nothing of the sort, it simply updates the county voting registry with your details, they do a human effort to match it up with your existing info.

Now if only the swing states had this in-place, it could enfranchise millions of folks who can't/don't have the time to register or don't realize they might have missed the registration deadline.

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> For those paranoid about "online voting"

It wasn't your point, but why would a hypothetical online voting system be a problem? If, as another poster mentioned, this online registration system is good enough to prevent erroneous registrations, why couldn't the creation of an online voting account be included as part of the of the process? Being able to register and vote without leaving your desk (or on your phone, at home, etc) would help to enfranchise the aforementioned nonvoters even more than just making registration more convenient would.

If it's at all in doubt, I'm not trolling here, but genuinely curious as to what the fault(s) in online voting would be. The main problems that come to mind are (theoretically) preventing the privacy of anonymous voting and the possibility of cracking accounts (given a user base close to the entire population of a state and an (imagined) incentive for doing so, brute-force guessing of stupid passwords would likely be very effective if proper password complexity checks were not put in place), but what with the scandals that voting machines have caused in the past, I'm not so sure that offline voting systems are more secure in practice.

> vote-by-mail ballot (most secure way to vote)

[Citation needed].

one that immediately comes to mind is the US Mail system is a best effort delivery protocol.

Best effort? You haven't met my mail carrier, who was busy one day and decided to remedy that by skipping delivery to my neighborhood that day, marking my package "no such residence at address," returning it to its sender, who just happened to send it from another country.

So, yeah. I'm pretty sure it's a least-effort-without-getting-fired delivery protocol.

I would almost certainly trust UDP more to actually deliver my ballot, forgetting things like security, etc.

clarification: get a vote-by-mail form, fill it out and drop it off on election day - you have a guaranteed paper trail.

Good luck getting that kind of assurance with the voting machines. Lack of paper trail is a gaping flaw.

Regarding the last point, Colorado has a decent online voter registration system. I don't think it's a "swing states", but the polls seem extremely close at least.

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