[m12k]

I feel genuinely conflicted: On the one hand I get the "authoritarian overreach heebie-jeebies", that I think a lot of people on HN probably share. On the other hand I'd also really like the West to harden its election processes from election interference by its adversaries (e.g. Russia) - and shoring up dysinfo on e.g. Facebook by requiring users to prove their identity with a government ID is one of the only ways to truly effectively combat this at its source (fact-checking just can't keep up with a firehose of dysinformation). Ideally I'd want "real id requirements" to be limited " partake in public discourse" (mainly Facebook and Twitter). But the slippery slop argument just feels pretty strong here too - once a mechanism like this is in place, its use will only ever expand, and it's much easier for a new government to commit overreach if it's already there and just needs expanding. And of course all this "think of the children" nonsense needs to stop.

[Bender]

Elections are easier to solve technically. No mail in ballots. Require state ID in person at the voting center. But that's a different topic that can get divisive, long and derailed very quickly.

[post-it]

Only if you're fine with disenfranchising voters. In which case, securing elections is the easiest thing in the world: I vote and nobody else does. It's securing elections while not disenfranchising voters that's the hard part.

[bluefirebrand]

> Only if you're fine with disenfranchising voters

I don't love disenfranchising voters but I think it's probably better than allowing elections to be vulnerable to foreign tampering, don't you think?

[0x00C0FFEE]

That’s a false dichotomy. Better practices for election security can be implemented without disenfranchising voters.

[DaSHacka]

Disenfranchising the entire populace by nature of ID verification to use the internet naturally includes voters as well.

[razakel]

The foreign tampering wasn't at the ballot box.

[inigyou]

Social media also lets foreign agents tamper elections.

[Bender]

We should make a new thread for voting challenges.

[Gigachad]

The problem is not fake votes, it’s boomers having their brains cooked by AI videos coming from Russia they can’t identify as fake.

[DaSHacka]

And how exactly is that a bigger problem than fraudulent votes? And how could you possibly solve it outside of segmenting the country's internet to prevent foreign ISP routes?

[Gigachad]

Because fraudulent votes in most developed counties are a complete non issue while people getting psyopped by troll farms and AI is monumental.

And yes, I think we likely will see social media become segmented so hostile nations will be blocked from posting on local social media. Or at least having them flagged as foreign accounts.