[slim]

Voting with paper does not scale. You can't make people vote everyday for example, which is required if you'd like to implement direct democracy.

On the other hand, with direct democracy, the stakes are lower for each vote. So there is less incentive to manipulate the vote. So it makes sense to use e-voting for direct democracy.

In the end the voting mechanism in democracy is not really about precision, it's more about getting an acceptable outcome for all the parties

[matt_wulfeck]

The fact that it doesn't scale is exactly why we should stick with it. We want voting to be hard, distributed, and diverse. That prevents a single county or state from destabilizing the rest of the country. It should prioritize accuracy over speed and all else.

It's like an ecosystem. The more homogeneous the system then the more vulnerable we are to a single virus (or hacker) we become.

[cortesoft]

Wait, why do we want voting to be hard? If voting is hard, that means it takes more time to vote, and not everyone is equally able to take extra time to vote. A disproportionate percentage of the voters will end up being people with more time and/or more flexible schedules.

[vertex-four]

They mean vote counting should be hard.

[blibble]

neither do the attacks, which is the point

[EugeneAZ]

Public - i.e. everyone knows how others have voted - voting can be both precise and secure. Public voting can be done electronically, say, via encrypted SMS.

So why to bother with secrecy in the first place?

[yellowapple]

Secret ballots protect voters from intimidation and blackmail. That particular bit of secrecy is absolutely essential in a democracy.

[makeee]

So you can't pay people to vote for a particular candidate.

[EugeneAZ]

Do you know how people take photos of themselves voting at "secret-keeping" poll-stations? How about politicians, which publicly give lucrative promises to their particular electorate?

If they want to sell their vote - it is their choice. I'd only say that the right of citizens to secede from such a society must be respected too.

[SilasX]

>Do you know how people take photos of themselves voting at "secret-keeping" poll-stations?

That's illegal, and (somewhat contradictorily) not non-repudiable. You can take a picture of yourself with "ballot marked for candidate I'm paid/coerced to vote for" and then step right out and say "oops, I messed up my ballot, give me another one" and then submit that.

[0xffff2]

Didn't SCOTUS recently uphold peoples right to take selfies in the ballot box? Seems that ship has already sailed in the US.

Also, California allows for absentee voting with no particular reason. I've voted in every election I've ever been eligible to vote in and I have never once set foot in a physical polling place.

[Fnoord]

> Voting with paper does not scale.

Yes, it does, it just scales less well than electronic/internet voting. Each voting method (and arguably, voting system) have their + and - but paper voting has the most important benefit. Specifically, the most important one is that whilst counting we have the benefit of many eyes watching over (one of the things NSA improved post-Snowden). I know this first hand as I have participated as vote counter in the 2017 Dutch election on March 15 (can recommend volunteering for the educational experience and ability to observe alone, plus it can be seen as a civil duty). Our team consisted of approx 8 or 9 volunteers. How many people audit the source code? The patches? The build process? The hardware? Are those random people? Are computer experts biased? You don't need to be intelligent or even familiar with computers to count paper votes. You do have to be a computer expert [2] to audit the software or hardware.

> You can't make people vote everyday for example, which is required if you'd like to implement direct democracy.

I'd rather have authentic results for a few elections than have many elections with a higher potential of being bogus.

We should also not neglect that a direct democracy can be dangerously manipulated in times of fake news. The same is true with 2 or 3 elections every 4 years, but the vulnerable choke points are higher in a direct democracy.

Finally, a disadvantage is that you got so many elections that people are tired of elections. I don't know the scientific name for this phenomenon but I know an analogy: visit a supermarket and have a look at all the brands for product X where X can be peanut butter, ice cream, or beer. Result: brand loyalty. So people are gonna vote e.g. 'peanut butter' (I don't wanna name a realistic example to avoid reader assuming I'm partisan) in each of those direct democracy elections w/o looking further. Do not want!

There's an adagium in computerland "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". Paper voting isn't broken, it has a proven track record.

PS: For anyone who is interested in the history of voting security and the risks of electronic & internet voting I can recommend the course "Securing Digital Democracy" by J. Alex Halderman (one of the researchers in the Diebold affair some 15 years ago) on Coursera [1].

[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/digital-democracy

[2] Not sure on a better term here. Computer expert is an inaccurate global term; what is required is a rather specific skillset. Perhaps programmer or hardware hacker is more accurate. But even then programmer doesn't tell us about which programming languages are mastered, and hardware hacker is equally vague. You get the gist.