4 ms·

(We work with local governments.) This isn't why we don't have online ballots. The issue is specifically that you aren't in a voting booth, which means there i

by tyre 10y ago

(We work with local governments.) This isn't why we don't have online ballots. The issue is specifically that you aren't in a voting booth, which means there is no control over voter influence. Imagine a husband and wife plus a ballot initiative on outlawing flowers. The husband is strongly pro-flowers while the wife is strongly anti-flowers. With online voting, the husband or wife can force the other to vote in front of them. There is no plausible deniability, so individuals are easily pressured into voting one way or another. Groups can say, "you need to vote in front of another group member" to pressure everyone to do what they want. Voting booths prevent this, to a large extent. Another issue is electioneering. By current law, one cannot campaign within 100ft of a polling station. This gives a "safe-space" where people can think about their options and make up their own mind. If I can vote on my phone, a random volunteer can get me all hyped up on the street and I can impulse-vote on the spot. Not a great way to run a nation. (I'm not saying the current system is perfect, or anywhere close to it.)

nixos 10y ago
It does. The article says that you can always cancel your vote later. So vote pro-flowers in front of husband, and then change your vote on your cellphone or in the library
- petertodd 10y ago
  That just shifts the problem, and encourages pretty awful behavior like abduction.
  - ebalit 10y ago
    No need for abduction, they just need to hold on to the ID to prevent revoting.
    - akytt 10y ago
      So basically like buying votes on paper? You force someone either not to vote or vote in a specific way by restricting access to their id. See, as the paper ballot trumps the electronic voting, all the attack vectors end up being about controlling the physical voting. Which is the exact problem with voting right now everywhere. Also, if you are already capable of doing this, why not take everything the person has? The digital signature is equivalent to the physical one so all non-notaried transactions you can execute exactly as voting. To my knowledge there has been exactly zero cases of forceful id extraction in the past 15 years. Basically, if you can significantly influence the voting outcome, you can significantly alter the financial wellbeing of the society. Which is, yes, a risk but would be more desirable for an attacker.
      - ebalit 10y ago
        You can't buy votes on paper because you need to be alone in the voting booth. You could disable people to vote, but not force them to vote as you want. As for the value of digital signature, I don't think it's legally equivalent to the physical signature, at least in my country. I've yet to see any administration accepting a digital signature.
- tyre 10y ago
  Same problem. There has to be some deadline, so if you want to ensure compliance than you wait until the last minute and watch them until expiration.
  - nixos 10y ago
    You can also vote in advance (in person), which overrides the e-vote
- gaur 10y ago
  > It does. I read through your parent comment and could not find any sentence for which the response "it does" makes sense. (Maybe the parent comment was edited?)
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Combined with early voting, and you could have a political event with tens of thousands who all vote a month early online in front of each other, the crowd pressure adding to the emotional fervor. I can't imagine elections being any more screwed up, even including Jim Crow. Jim Crow has nothing on this. But I'm still of the opinion that anything electronic is by nature untrustworthy. Just ask Microsoft, who for more than a decade or more has tried to lock down their O/S. I know how the theory works. But that's just a theory regarding abstract concepts. Real voting doesn't work like that. At all. It's much more than the theory describes. And if we get past all of that? Then we can start talking about how nobody who founded the U.S. wanted a democracy. Democracies are inherently extremely dangerous. It's just a terrible idea masquerading as some cool new thing tech can do.
ksenzee 10y ago
Washington state does all its voting by mail now, which is good in a way because it means all the ballots are on paper and subject to verification, but it's vulnerable to all the voter influence problems you just listed. (It also reduces voting from an in-person civic ritual to just one more form you get in the mail and have to fill out and mail back, like paying a bill. But that's a whole separate problem.)
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Could you clarify why you think not voting in person is a problem?
  - ksenzee 10y ago
    Just what I said: Voting in person is a ritual. You can take your kids with you and show them the foundation of our democracy, right there at your local polling place. Doing things in person has a different psychological effect. Whether or not that's enough of a problem to outweigh all the benefits of voting by mail, I don't know. It certainly lowers the actual barriers to voting: You don't need time off work to drop an envelope in a mailbox. But I do worry about the loss of ritual, and what it will do to voter engagement over a few decades.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
gaur 10y ago
> The issue is specifically that you aren't in a voting booth Too bad. You can claw my mail-in ballot from my cold, dead hands.
RileyJames 10y ago
If votes could be updated until the polls close, wouldn't that resolve the issue? You could simply vote in front of your husband/partner/group and change it later when you're in private. This would rely on having is no method to determine how your vote has been cast, before or after the election. But this should be a feature of any online voting system.
- akytt 10y ago
  Yup, exactly what we do.
TearsInTheRain 10y ago
How is this different from mail in ballots? Why are mail in ballots allowed?
nitrogen 10y ago
Is voter coercion actually a threat today? Or is it just a boogeyman to derail discussion like voter impersonation is used to promote biased voter ID laws?
paganel 10y ago
> With online voting, the husband or wife can force the other to vote in front of them For what it's worth my ex-wife slightly reprimanded me after a general election some time ago because I hadn't told her with whom I was voting for, because she would have cast the same vote as me. On the electioneering thing I have no strong opinion. Just wanting to say that if a person's vote can be so easily influenced by a "volunteer hyping up" someone on the street then maybe, just maybe, that person's vote (and lot of other persons' votes) does (do) not accurately represent la "volonté générale", to quote Rousseau, meaning that universal voting might not result in what's actually best for the people. Related wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_will
akytt 10y ago
The Estonian system pretty much fully prevents that by allowing to vote whowever many times you want. You can sleep on it, re-cast the vote and sleep on it again. And then, if still not happy, go vote on paper. The last vote cast counts.

by tyre 10y ago

nixos 10y ago

It does. The article says that you can always cancel your vote later. So vote pro-flowers in front of husband, and then change your vote on your cellphone or in the library

petertodd 10y ago
That just shifts the problem, and encourages pretty awful behavior like abduction.
- ebalit 10y ago
  No need for abduction, they just need to hold on to the ID to prevent revoting.
  - akytt 10y ago
    So basically like buying votes on paper? You force someone either not to vote or vote in a specific way by restricting access to their id. See, as the paper ballot trumps the electronic voting, all the attack vectors end up being about controlling the physical voting. Which is the exact problem with voting right now everywhere. Also, if you are already capable of doing this, why not take everything the person has? The digital signature is equivalent to the physical one so all non-notaried transactions you can execute exactly as voting. To my knowledge there has been exactly zero cases of forceful id extraction in the past 15 years. Basically, if you can significantly influence the voting outcome, you can significantly alter the financial wellbeing of the society. Which is, yes, a risk but would be more desirable for an attacker.
    - ebalit 10y ago
      You can't buy votes on paper because you need to be alone in the voting booth. You could disable people to vote, but not force them to vote as you want. As for the value of digital signature, I don't think it's legally equivalent to the physical signature, at least in my country. I've yet to see any administration accepting a digital signature.
tyre 10y ago
Same problem. There has to be some deadline, so if you want to ensure compliance than you wait until the last minute and watch them until expiration.
- nixos 10y ago
  You can also vote in advance (in person), which overrides the e-vote
gaur 10y ago
> It does. I read through your parent comment and could not find any sentence for which the response "it does" makes sense. (Maybe the parent comment was edited?)

DanielBMarkham 10y ago

Combined with early voting, and you could have a political event with tens of thousands who all vote a month early online in front of each other, the crowd pressure adding to the emotional fervor. I can't imagine elections being any more screwed up, even including Jim Crow. Jim Crow has nothing on this. But I'm still of the opinion that anything electronic is by nature untrustworthy. Just ask Microsoft, who for more than a decade or more has tried to lock down their O/S. I know how the theory works. But that's just a theory regarding abstract concepts. Real voting doesn't work like that. At all. It's much more than the theory describes. And if we get past all of that? Then we can start talking about how nobody who founded the U.S. wanted a democracy. Democracies are inherently extremely dangerous. It's just a terrible idea masquerading as some cool new thing tech can do.

ksenzee 10y ago

Washington state does all its voting by mail now, which is good in a way because it means all the ballots are on paper and subject to verification, but it's vulnerable to all the voter influence problems you just listed. (It also reduces voting from an in-person civic ritual to just one more form you get in the mail and have to fill out and mail back, like paying a bill. But that's a whole separate problem.)

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Could you clarify why you think not voting in person is a problem?
- ksenzee 10y ago
  Just what I said: Voting in person is a ritual. You can take your kids with you and show them the foundation of our democracy, right there at your local polling place. Doing things in person has a different psychological effect. Whether or not that's enough of a problem to outweigh all the benefits of voting by mail, I don't know. It certainly lowers the actual barriers to voting: You don't need time off work to drop an envelope in a mailbox. But I do worry about the loss of ritual, and what it will do to voter engagement over a few decades.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

gaur 10y ago

> The issue is specifically that you aren't in a voting booth Too bad. You can claw my mail-in ballot from my cold, dead hands.

RileyJames 10y ago

If votes could be updated until the polls close, wouldn't that resolve the issue? You could simply vote in front of your husband/partner/group and change it later when you're in private. This would rely on having is no method to determine how your vote has been cast, before or after the election. But this should be a feature of any online voting system.

akytt 10y ago
Yup, exactly what we do.

TearsInTheRain 10y ago

How is this different from mail in ballots? Why are mail in ballots allowed?

nitrogen 10y ago

Is voter coercion actually a threat today? Or is it just a boogeyman to derail discussion like voter impersonation is used to promote biased voter ID laws?

paganel 10y ago

> With online voting, the husband or wife can force the other to vote in front of them For what it's worth my ex-wife slightly reprimanded me after a general election some time ago because I hadn't told her with whom I was voting for, because she would have cast the same vote as me. On the electioneering thing I have no strong opinion. Just wanting to say that if a person's vote can be so easily influenced by a "volunteer hyping up" someone on the street then maybe, just maybe, that person's vote (and lot of other persons' votes) does (do) not accurately represent la "volonté générale", to quote Rousseau, meaning that universal voting might not result in what's actually best for the people. Related wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_will

akytt 10y ago

The Estonian system pretty much fully prevents that by allowing to vote whowever many times you want. You can sleep on it, re-cast the vote and sleep on it again. And then, if still not happy, go vote on paper. The last vote cast counts.