[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.