| > 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. |