Electronic voting conflates authenticity with legitimacy. Same problem in digital identity. To me it seemed actually stupid to believe that the only thing prev

Electronic voting conflates authenticity with legitimacy. Same problem in digital identity. To me it seemed actually stupid to believe that the only thing preventing algorithms from yielding the sympathetic magic required for a peaceful transfer of sovereign power, was their lack of complexity. Arguably, without the ritual element, democracy reduces to a lottery with a biased mechanism, and for it to work, it must necessarily be more than that. It's a larger philosophical question, to be sure, but it's like comparing a Turing test to an Indifference curve. The first is to determine whether something can convince people it is another person, the second is to predict the point at which you will cease to care enough to choose something else. These are analogous in that, like an AI, we can design an e-voting system that can act convincingly as though it facilitates democracy, but mainly it is just an acceptable substitute for people who no longer care whether the democracy they are dealing with is real or not. In the case of voting, it's not just a thought experiment, or a product dev question, as by real, I mean sufficiently legitimate for people not to reject the results and cause civil disturbances. It might sound a bit extreme, but we should really be asking when we institute electronic voting (or counting) whether we are willing to accept a simulation of the ritual we use to grant sovereign powers to people.