[franciscojgo]

I am strongly against the view of the author.

I see that the majority (or a large portion) of voters are fanatics that vote based on affiliation and fanaticism, not policies nor experience.

Ie. The voting numbers are largely biased towards the political fanatic crowd.

I see online voting as a way to increase the number of ordinary people that vote. Getting the voting population to 80%+ or more is good for democracy. I see this as a positive.

Saying Online voting is a danger to democracy is like saying autonomous cars are a danger to safety.

Yes, if the autonomous system doesn't work and is made with loopholes that allow dangerous stuff, it will pose a danger. But if made to work fail-proof, it will be infinitely better.

There's no point in saying something will not work if your only argument is based on the proposition that it's going to be broken before it's even used.

Sure, an unsafe car is not safe. The only way to make it safe is to make sure it's safe.

The only way "democratic" online voting will work is to make sure it's "democratic".

[curried_haskell]

Your comparisons overlook a major difference between the paradigms of paper and digital ballots. It's the same problem with autonomous cars. An unsafe car can cause a single crash. An unsafe autonomous car program could crash every car everywhere all at once. And with the current state of software development, we KNOW that these softwares are vulnerable.

With paper ballots, it's not easy to tamper with the entire vote. You need a huge, widespread effort. Or your country is so fucked that your government ignores the vote and makes up some numbers. Everybody knows it's fraudulent, but nobody can do anything about it.

With electronic ballots, it's suddenly trivially easy for just a tiny handful rogue elements to stealthily forge every vote without anyone even realizing there was fraud.

[VT_Drew]

>With electronic ballots, it's suddenly trivially easy for just a tiny handful rogue elements to stealthily forge every vote without anyone even realizing there was fraud.

We already have technology that, so far, is pretty much tamper proof that could easily be adapted for online voting. I would be highly skeptical/distrustful of any centralized voting system, but if there was a open ledger voting system that uses a blockchain, well I would be all for that as it would be extremely hard to tamper with, arguable harder to tamper with than with paper ballots.

[ferentchak]

I agree.

And a receipt that shows my vote was counted as part of the final results.

[ethbro]

I think you underestimate the sophistication needed to tamper with paper ballots. There's certainly a "boots on the ground" requirement for tampering, but the knowledge requirements are trivial compared to crypto attacks.

[specialist]

The physical chain of custody can be guaranteed with paper ballots. Yes, you can burn ballots, or stuff the box, but if you're minding the store, someone would notice.

Source: former poll judge, inspector.

[ethbro]

I defer to your expertise but did you ever work in third-world countries? (To use the phrase as a proxy for inadequate political/physical infrastructure)

To use the engineering aphorism, just because it can be done doesn't mean it is done. I'm curious about how physical security/verification works in that environment vs a hypothetical crypto solution.

[specialist]

Observing third world elections is on my bucket list.

Election and voting chicanery happens plenty in the USA. No need to look abroad. Merely lifting the floor here would be transformative.

The silver lining from the oversteer triggered by Gore v Bush 2000 is that HAVA did lead to greater federal involvement in our locally administered elections. eg Election Assistance Commission http://eac.gov is now fairly proactive.

re "vs a hypothetical crypto solution"

Estonia's online voting system hasn't faired well under scrutiny.

[curried_haskell]

If you've worked in third-world countries, you should realize that elections are a human problem determined by societal attitudes. Electoral fraud is not a technical problem.

[notahacker]

Knowledge isn't really going to be an issue for the parties most likely to try to swing elections, many of which are state-level actors.

The thing about the crudeness of methods used to tamper with paper ballots is that it's also similarly trivial for a bunch of volunteers including members of all different parties involved in the election to spot, and in many cases trivial to reverse.

[curried_haskell]

Knowledge is not the problem. In fact, knowledge is a trivial problem because with electronic ballots, you only need a single guy with the right knowledge and he can compromise the entire election.

The old way, you need an entire army of idiots.

[badsock]

People in this thread are assuming we can just solve the security issue if we try hard enough. We can't. It would mean securing every single voter's computer, and that's preposterous.

There is no consensus algorithm or blockchain that will work if the voter's computer or phone is compromised. To name just one avenue of attack: if you have control of the video output then you can swap the name of two candidates. That's all it takes. You figure out which candidate is most likely to win in several key ridings/districts, and then on all of the computers that you've infected with your virus you swap their name with the the candidate you'd like to win. The voting software would never know, the voter would never know. Any confirmation step, like printing out a receipt, can be similarly be trivially defeated.

Whoever is in control of that virus - be it a fanatic, foreign government, or corporation - can now decide an election.

The only way around this is to have a 100% secure device dedicated to noting but voting that you mail out to each voter. Even if you could build such a thing (which is likely impossible considering that the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people across many countries go into making a device - hardware and software), that's far more expensive and awkward than a mail-in ballot.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that online voting would be the end of democracy. For any definition of practical, it cannot be secured. If it cannot be secured, it is not democracy.

[alexandercrohde]

Those statements are too strong for the evidence you provide.

A trivial solution would be when you vote online you get texted a confirmation. If you don't respond to the confirmation you get a call. The confirmation gives you a candidate you voted for and a blockchain signature and an opportunity to report error.

[badsock]

Voting is secret, so your solution as described wouldn't work, but say you used a one-way hash to verify the vote.

It still wouldn't work in the case of someone voting from a compromised phone, because the confirmation can easily be altered.

So now you've got a system where you need to be in front of two separate devices in order to vote, which I find unlikely to be accepted as a solution because of the inconvenience. And even then, it just means that you need two different viruses. Or find an exploitable flaw in the confirmation system. If you've got control over the machinery (including people) that's running the algorithm, the game is over.

My evidence is that there's never been a widely used system that hasn't been compromised: military installations, nuclear power stations, ATMs, gambling machines.

How could you possibly expect voting to be more secure than all of that, considering that in the above examples they had complete control over the network and the devices, and were hugely motivated and well funded in their security efforts.

Voting is too important to be handed over to a group of people who say "trust us, this time we figured it out". And to take that huge risk for what, just to avoid paper ballots?

[csydas]

I'm not sure it's fair to hand-wave the concerns presented in the article with your argument of "just make it fail-proof". How often is software really fail-proof? The more complex software gets, the more difficult it is to ensure that it's bug free enough to be fit for purpose, and that's what the article is effectively arguing; software for voting on a national scale (the size of the US) is going to have an incredibly difficult time finding a level of security and stability that is fit for purpose.

Also, I question the statement that a high percentage of voting is unambiguously good for democracy, especially with how people treat voting like making birthday wishes. I'm paraphrasing from Robert Heinlein here, but too many people think voting is like making a wish, and they want the results without any work or dedication to themselves, their goal, or their country. There are a lot of times when public opinion, in hindsight, was clearly in the wrong, yet a full public vote would have resulted in downright unconstitutional and oppressive results. We saw it with the civil rights movement, we saw it more recently with the right for two consenting individuals in the US to marry, and we'll continue to see how the public is more than willing to weigh in completely on subjects they know nothing about or how certain members of society are willing to throw away the rights of other citizens without a care in the world.

Please understand that I'm not advocating for tests or saying certain people can't vote; but I am saying that just adding more votes doesn't make democracy better, it in fact often works to reserve the power of democracy to an elite few.

And we've already seen how news organizations of all political bents, social networks, and so on have influenced public opinion with their outlets and software.

[alexandercrohde]

1. It's not fair to hand-wave and say "make it fail-proof." It's also not fair to hand-wave and say "It could never be fail-proof." It's also good to ask how secure the current system is.

2. As for the advantages of a minority voting, the fact is that any rational agent would never vote. Your argument that "an elite few" might be better than the masses is irrelevant, the fact is the current turnout isn't the "elite few" it's predominantly old people (i.e. people who are bored).

[csydas]

1. I didn't advocate or posit that it could never be fail proof, I was just responding to the original idea of "just make software fail-proof" as if it addressed all the concerns within the article. The article did bring up a lot of issues that had nothing to do with the actual voting software, which would naturally not be resolved by "fail proof" software. I also do question the very idea of "fail proof", since bugs and errors are an inevitability. For the most part, software works, as I said, fit for purpose. When it does fail, it hopefully fails gracefully (like OSes do quite frequently), but even if the software was 100% bug free, the non-software related issues with a national Internet vote still need to be addressed.

2. I also never suggested that an elite few would be better. I made no particular opinion on standards for voting or who should vote, instead responded to the OP's suggestion that more votes is automatically good. The mention of "elite few" was to address the overwhelming influence that a few wealthy individuals and corporations have when it comes to elections in the United States, and how view points on voting issues are greatly distorted by the imbalance of power/the "loudness" of certain voices in a democratic society.

I made no suggestion as to how to vote so much as a criticism of the current system in which, while all people are able to voice their position, individuals and groups are able to effectively drown out the voices of others by means of wealth, not by the merit of position or through debate and discussion.

[ta_donk_gt]

I don't think the autonomous car analogy is really apt here. For a democracy to be a real thing, the voting process needs to be open, auditable, verifiable. The current trend with any software I've seen around voting has been privatized code that is not inspectable by anyone, surrounded by NDAs, and provides far less in the way of proving results are real than does paper. More people voting and real democracy are probably good things, but without addressing the core auditability of the process _first_, software actually reduces the democracy of the process.

[specialist]

"I see online voting as a way to increase the number of ordinary people that vote."

That is a good goal. However...

All half-measures to increase participation, including registration drives, early voting, absentee voting, postal balloting, same day registration, etc., do not work.

Short of universal voter registration and compulsory voting, the only measure which increases voter participation is competitive races. This means fair redistricting.

Online voting, of any kind, at best, should be considered an opinion survey of questionable provenance.

[aggie]

What is important for representative democracy is that a representative sample of the population votes. Percentage of the total population that votes is really not inherently important beyond achieving an adequate sample to represent all citizens' interests.

Currently, the 'low' voter turnout we see is only a problem because there are groups that are underrepresented, in particular younger people, certain ethnic minorities, and people of lower socioeconomic status. Correcting the proportions of those who vote should be the goal rather than increasing absolute numbers.

[shkkmo]

If you think participation is so key to a functional democracy, the US can make voting mandatory without exposing us to the huge risks associated with online voting.