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If you make it audit-able, it doesn't need to be 100% secure. Everyone could vote under a username of their choosing, and afterwords could download the "offici

If you make it audit-able, it doesn't need to be 100% secure. Everyone could vote under a username of their choosing, and afterwords could download the "official" spreadsheet of all votes casted and look to make sure your username has the correct vote. The spreadsheet would be a few megabytes at most and could be duplicated/distributed across different mediums. The main worry would be someone adding fake usernames and votes to the spreadsheet. I'm not sure how we guard against this under the current system either.

frostburg 8y ago
Terrible idea, would enable large scale buying of votes.
- randyrand 8y ago
  It's not a terrible idea - but that is a valid concern, yes. Note that mass buying of votes is a concern under the current system as well. Allow people to pledge that they’ll vote a certain way, and pay them if their county and/or country votes the way they pledged.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    It's a horrible idea. Votes are private for a reason. Vote buying is not a concern in the US. The privacy of the votes guarantees that the vote buyer can't be certain that the voter voted the way they said they would, so the vote buyer can never know if their "purchase" actually mattered. This inherent uncertainty makes standard means of political persuasion, i.e., political advertising, a more effective spend. Vote buying is a concern in places like India and South America--coincidentally, jurisdictions which already allow mobile voting...
    - gpm 8y ago
      Mail in ballots have already done away with that layer of security though. Vote buying isn't a concern in the US because there is still a mostly functional criminal justice system, and because any politician who bought votes would be shunned by the vast majority of voters in the current culture.
gpm 8y ago
You might be on to something. My main concern would be "what happens when something goes wrong". Either a DOS attack (e.g. crashing the cell network), someone(s) finding that their vote was flipped, or someone(s) falsely claiming that their vote was flipped. I suppose short term DOS can be handled by extending the voting period in response, long term can be handled by switching back to paper ballots (with the representative system the delay caused by this shouldn't be too much of an issue). Failed audits are harder to deal with. If you make the system onymous instead of pseudonymous (at least with respect to the voting authorities) you could solve the problem by having a period after electronic voting in which people could cast paper ballots in person that overrode their electronic vote. Large number of failed audits would have to cause invalidating all plausibly affected votes and be considered equivalent to a DOS attack. Fake votes also become more of an issue. Right now they are basically handled by the fact that the effort/reward isn't worth the risk, but electronic systems make the effort lower (for large scale attacks), reward greater, and risk negligible (for state sponsored attacks launched without stepping foot in the country). Since I already think you would have to make this sort of system onymous, it is likely possible to mitigate this with validation against other datasets... it also has the advantage that any such attacks need to target state hardware instead of phones, that could plausibly be secured. I think you're size estimate is too small, 300M voters * 10 bytes/voter = 3GB not MB. But it's still a completely manageable size. The remaining problem with all this is having the government actually implement it in a satisfactory way. Advocating for it would come with the large risk that the government would do something similar, but which didn't solve fundamental security issues. In this respect advocating for paper voting is much safer.
gamblor956 8y ago
Your solution is worse than the problem. Votes are confidential for a reason--to prevent voter intimidation, vote swapping, and more. The time to check one's vote is when it is cast, not after the fact. The easiest--and still the best--way to vote is by paper. Physical, unchangeable proof. Easily watermarked/holographed for audit purposes. Lasts a long time. Requires no special software or hardware. Best of all--it's easy to trace at every step of the process.
- randyrand 8y ago
  anonymous usernames...
  - anoncake 8y ago
    Which you can disclose in advance to whoever bought your vote.

frostburg 8y ago

Terrible idea, would enable large scale buying of votes.

randyrand 8y ago
It's not a terrible idea - but that is a valid concern, yes. Note that mass buying of votes is a concern under the current system as well. Allow people to pledge that they’ll vote a certain way, and pay them if their county and/or country votes the way they pledged.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  It's a horrible idea. Votes are private for a reason. Vote buying is not a concern in the US. The privacy of the votes guarantees that the vote buyer can't be certain that the voter voted the way they said they would, so the vote buyer can never know if their "purchase" actually mattered. This inherent uncertainty makes standard means of political persuasion, i.e., political advertising, a more effective spend. Vote buying is a concern in places like India and South America--coincidentally, jurisdictions which already allow mobile voting...
  - gpm 8y ago
    Mail in ballots have already done away with that layer of security though. Vote buying isn't a concern in the US because there is still a mostly functional criminal justice system, and because any politician who bought votes would be shunned by the vast majority of voters in the current culture.

gpm 8y ago

You might be on to something. My main concern would be "what happens when something goes wrong". Either a DOS attack (e.g. crashing the cell network), someone(s) finding that their vote was flipped, or someone(s) falsely claiming that their vote was flipped. I suppose short term DOS can be handled by extending the voting period in response, long term can be handled by switching back to paper ballots (with the representative system the delay caused by this shouldn't be too much of an issue). Failed audits are harder to deal with. If you make the system onymous instead of pseudonymous (at least with respect to the voting authorities) you could solve the problem by having a period after electronic voting in which people could cast paper ballots in person that overrode their electronic vote. Large number of failed audits would have to cause invalidating all plausibly affected votes and be considered equivalent to a DOS attack. Fake votes also become more of an issue. Right now they are basically handled by the fact that the effort/reward isn't worth the risk, but electronic systems make the effort lower (for large scale attacks), reward greater, and risk negligible (for state sponsored attacks launched without stepping foot in the country). Since I already think you would have to make this sort of system onymous, it is likely possible to mitigate this with validation against other datasets... it also has the advantage that any such attacks need to target state hardware instead of phones, that could plausibly be secured. I think you're size estimate is too small, 300M voters * 10 bytes/voter = 3GB not MB. But it's still a completely manageable size. The remaining problem with all this is having the government actually implement it in a satisfactory way. Advocating for it would come with the large risk that the government would do something similar, but which didn't solve fundamental security issues. In this respect advocating for paper voting is much safer.

gamblor956 8y ago

Your solution is worse than the problem. Votes are confidential for a reason--to prevent voter intimidation, vote swapping, and more. The time to check one's vote is when it is cast, not after the fact. The easiest--and still the best--way to vote is by paper. Physical, unchangeable proof. Easily watermarked/holographed for audit purposes. Lasts a long time. Requires no special software or hardware. Best of all--it's easy to trace at every step of the process.

randyrand 8y ago
anonymous usernames...
- anoncake 8y ago
  Which you can disclose in advance to whoever bought your vote.