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Ask HN: Why hasn't the USA moved all voting online?

• nabla9 8y ago
  With online voting significant percentage of population loses their freedom to cast vote independently (often women). Family member, vote buyer or other influencer looking over the shoulder or voting for others is real threat. The most common reaction to what I just said is to laugh it off as not important or stupid fear mongering. Nothing could be more far from the truth. Peer pressure has always been significant factor. Vote buying emerges as soon as the opportunity to verify votes emerges. There is no reason why the there should be long lines for voting. In many developed countries they don't have that problem. It seems intentional.
  • pwg 8y ago
    A lot of details, including real world historical examples, is listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud
• pandacrusades 8y ago
  Security and validation are huge reasons for not moving forward with online voting. Mail in ballots would be a decent stop gap until we can get electronic voting dialed in.
• pwg 8y ago
  > Is it security? Yes. Online voting is not secure (at least not secure enough for "voting", which is a very different security environment than even "banking"). If your online bank account is heisted, your bank can: 1) trace the transfer, and reverse it 2) give you your money back while they do #1 I.e., the "security environment" is one of "we can easily clean up the mess after the fact". Voting is very different. It has to be "annonymous" (in order to function properly and avoid coercion and/or vote purchasing) and that whole "annonymous" aspect precludes all of the "clean up the mess after the fact" abilities we have for non-annonymous situations. So it (voting) has to be secure up front, and it can't rely on "clean up the mess later" recovery processes. Which leads to why online voting is problematic. For voting, the verification needs to be that you, the human standing in front of the polling place operator, is indeed who you claim to be. All forms of "online" identification identify that "the unknown human typing on the keyboard has typed information we believe to only be known to human X, so the unknown human is likely human X". I.e., you could give your online voting password to someone else, and they could type it in, and the system would not know it was someone else typing it in. You likely can't give your photo ID to someone else (unless they are your twin) and have them pass as you while standing in front of the polling place worker. Same as for scanning the drivers license bar-code (which, by the way, is not done to "ID" you, but just to make it easy for the operator to pull up your record from the DB to mark it "has voted" [i.e., the scanning is simply a 'data-entry' task]). Someone else could obtain your license (theft or you handing it to them) and they could scan it on their phone and the system would have no way to know it was not you standing there doing the scanning. This issue will always be the problem with some form of 'online' voting. Verifying that the human at the controls (keyboard) is in reality the actual human to which the credentials do in fact belong.
• mr_overalls 8y ago
  Security is certainly a concern. Voting machines have proven extremely easy to hack by security pros in recent years. https://www.cnet.com/news/defcon-hackers-find-its-very-easy-to-break-voting-machines/ https://www.cnet.com/news/defcon-hackers-find-its-very-easy-...
• db48x 8y ago
  If you hate standing in line and talking to your neighbours so much, just vote by mail.
  • cimmanom 8y ago
    Not all states permit absentee/mail voting outside very specific reasons; and you generally have to sign a form attesting to those reasons under penalty of voter fraud charges, which are a felony.
    • db48x 8y ago
      If you hate your neighbours so much that you can't stand in line with them for an hour, then you have no ties important enough to keep you from moving to a state where you can vote by mail.