[mslong]

Absolutely amazing that almost all techies in this thread are against this. Of course there is major security risks, and problems that have to be solved, but it is MASSIVELY outweighed by the fact that mobile voting would mean almost 100% voter turn out overnight if done on a national level. What are we at right now, 60% on average, maybe? Our nation's policies would change immediately with such a massive swing in voter turnout, with adjustments towards forward-thinking, liberal policies.

[phtrivier]

Actually I'm more concerned about online voting meaning 142.3333% turnout.

Not that I'm scared of some malicious foreign hacker getting paid to break the voting system.

I'm just terrified of the human being getting paid to do the programming in the first place. Never trust them. -(Source: I live inside one of them.)

All this reminds me that I have to remember registering to volunteer at the voting booth for the local French elections in a couple weeks.

You know, those local elections where no one will agree on anything, except the results - who will have been (not that painfully) counted and recounted from good old paper ballots by volonteers who could have spent their Sunday night on hacker news like serious techies.

[chimeracoder]

> Of course there is major security risks, and problems that have to be solved, but it is MASSIVELY outweighed by the fact that mobile voting would mean almost 100% voter turn out overnight if done on a national level

Why not just allow everyone to vote online, with no registration? Just type in your full name and select a candidate, no email or password required. It'd guarantee 100% turnout - maybe even >100% turnout, if enough bots join the fun!

The problem with digital voting is that it cannot be made sufficiently secure. It's not a matter of "there are problems we haven't solved yet", but rather "there are problems that we provably cannot solve".

[mslong]

Sorry, but explain to me how I'm able to submit my taxes securely every year online, or pay for my marketplace insurance securely every month, but voting on our own digital devices is somehow beyond reach of what we can technically fathom?

[wool_gather]

No one has an interest in impersonating you to pay your bills.

Someone might have an interest in impersonating you to steal your tax refund -- these scams do happen.

Impersonating a bunch of voters is potentially easier when you're just presenting yourself as a computer with an internet connection rather than a flesh-and-blood human body.

[mslong]

I'm not seeing how the verification process of making sure someone is "flesh and blood" behind their mobile app would be appreciably different than registering for a passport, for instance. A person would presumably have multiple levels of identification (state id, ssn, birth certificate) that they can send in electronically to register an account, that is then tied to a username/password/device. A "vote" would need a checkout of not only an existing account but also a new, untampered photo of your face with a piece of id, just like a real-life vote would work.

[chimeracoder]

> Sorry, but explain to me how I'm able to submit my taxes securely every year online, or pay for my marketplace insurance securely every month, but voting on our own digital devices is somehow beyond reach of what we can technically fathom?

Because the threat models are completely different.

For starters, if you get your taxes wrong, or if someone fraudulently tries to file on your behalf, it's a reversible process. You can fix it after-the-fact.

Ballots have to be anonymous (secret ballot) and also non-verifiable (to prevent vote-selling). There's no redoing an election later on, or asking a person to confirm their previous vote.

[mslong]

Good points, but it just means you have to move the verification process upfront like I lay out in another comment further up this chain.

Bottom line is that we have a literal army of software engineers in this country that are capable of figuring this stuff out if it was a priority to get voting to 100% turnout. We split the atom and landed on the moon, I'm pretty confident we can figure out mobile voting.

[dane-pgp]

I admire your confidence, but I always feel uneasy when I hear someone use the line: "We landed on the moon, so we can surely do <some other thing, which sounds not much harder to a non-expert>".

Next time you try to use it, consider how much credibility you'd give to this argument: "We had men land on the moon and return safely, so we can surely land men on the sun and return them safely".

[mslong]

I am a software engineer. I just have the confidence in our community to believe we can use our skills to tackle hard problems in the world. My point is that other communities of engineers in the past didn't shy away from solving hard problems just because they were hard.

[forgotpwd187272]

Simple, single fraudulent tax benefits one person, with everything in the record, and is easy to trace (bank account owned by someone else)

A single fraudulent vote doesn’t benefit anyone, but thousands of them benefit someone greatly, and it’s difficult to trace, as it looks the same as a regular vote.

[fg6hr]

If you wrote this with a double intent, you would be a great politician, seriously. By the double intent I mean that on the surface level this clever speech looks good and convincing, but between the lines it delivers the opposite evil message.

The techies are against this because they know the technical side and understand how fragile this seemingly secure system is. This is the equivalent of 737 MAX story: the execs shout how solid the plane is, while engineers cry the opposite. They speak up because they are on the losing side: if this system gets implemented, it won't be them who will control the votes.

The "major security risks" are intentionally there. These are backdoors that allow the right people to control the votes.

We don't need 100% voter turn out. We only need voters who care. There are a lot of people who don't care and have no time or desire to learn about what they vote for. These careless voters are often easily manipulated by media and thus someone who controls the media would love all these people to vote.

The nation policies would indeed change immediately: it would be a rapid erosion of those rights we still have; and if "forward thinking" means repealing 2A, then no thanks, I'd rather use my backwards thinking here.