22 ms·

“A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

249 points by kushti 8y ago

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> The Boston-based company raised $2.2 million earlier this year, helped along by buzzwords such as “biometrics” and “blockchain,” which it claims allows it to secure the voting process. Its app reportedly requires voters to take and upload a picture of their government-issued I.D., along with a selfie-style video of their face, which facial-recognition technology then uses to ensure the person pictured in the I.D. and the person entering a vote are the same. The ballots are anonymized and recorded on the blockchain. This is horrible on so many levels.
- Heag3aec 8y ago
  https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- mbel 8y ago
  Apparently there is an eerily relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- mortenjorck 8y ago
  Honestly, I don’t think voting by app is inherently a “horrifically bad idea” – just that Voatz’ implementation is horrifically bad. Biometrics are going to be almost impossible to do in a non-invasive and secure way for now, so cut that part of the pitch. Blockchain may not be an entirely round peg in this square hole, but there are other cryptographic architectures that probably make more sense (I am not a cryptographer, but maybe go talk to a competent one before just deciding on blockchain). Obviously, without the two big buzzwords of blockchain and biometrics, you’re suddenly at a big disadvantage for VC money, but if mobile voting is ever going to be feasible, it’s going to need a considered, end-to-end approach that isn’t some MVP built from off-the-shelf components and off-the-shelf ideas.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > I don’t think voting by app is inherently a “horrifically bad idea” If a voter can cast their vote from their phone, anyone else can. The strength of paper-based voting is in its cost and complexity: the number of confederates required to tamper with an election is prohibitively large. With app-based voting comes the risk of a large number of compromised phones tampering with elections. The security downsides simply don't make sense next to mailed-in ballots, which capture the security (and accessibility) of paper ballots with the convenience of voting from home. The only upside of app-based voting is cost, which is a ridiculous factor to strongly optimize for when it comes to something as important as elections. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1944 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
  - octorian 8y ago
    > Honestly, I don’t think voting by app is inherently a “horrifically bad idea” Yes, it is. There are many ways such a system can go wrong. If its not this defective implementation, it'll be some other company's defective implementation. If not that, it'll be a targeted attack against the underlying platform. Another big thing you have to think about is... Who will be choosing the system? Its going to be some bureaucrats with a vested interest in supporting one particular vendor, who use their power to silence any critics of said vendor's solution. Whenever electronic voting comes up, we always end up with this situation.
    - therealdrag0 8y ago
      What's better about traditional methods? Numbers are always off, recounts always get different results. It still seems like a black box.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  >and “blockchain,” which it claims allows it to secure the voting process... (I'm rubbing my temples right now) I don't even have the words for how bad this would be for a democracy or republic. I will, however, make a curt but general comment on blockchain: Anytime you see that buzzword, be on your guard.
  - logifail 8y ago
    Question: Are there (m)any people other than those involved in the manufacture and sales of voting machines, or their lobbyists, that support increased automation in the voting process? I'm absolutely, 100% happy with putting a pencil mark onto a paper ballot, which I fold and place into a box (with people watching), which is later taken (with people watching) to a counting place, emptied out on a table (with people watching), and counted by hand by volunteers (with yet more people watching).
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      Finally. REASON! Now this guy has the right idea. Why are people trying to fix something that is not broken?
      - jjgreen 8y ago
        A good question which could also be asked of 30% of HN articles
    - simias 8y ago
      I'm with you on that but I was surprised to find out during the last Brazilian election that they seem to do most of their voting on electronic machines and it seems well accepted over there. At least when I mentioned that to Brazilian colleagues they seemed fine with it. This video (in Portuguese) shows a "tear down" endorsed by the manufacturer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrMLzqgKEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrMLzqgKEI Both the tone of the video (unsurprisingly, given its "officially endorsed" nature) but also the comments seem overall pretty positive. Even though they mention that the software is closed source and you basically have to trust the manufacturer (and any third parties making hardware and software for the device along the way).
- lb1lf 8y ago
  ...and it doesn't address one of the key issues with votes being cast in places other than a booth in a polling station where you are alone: Coercion. What's to stop a family member (OK, not much of an issue for overseas military personnel, one would think) or another person from hovering just outside the camera's capture area with a blunt object, ready to -ahem- influence your vote? Granted, this would only affect individual votes; there are bigger potential issues with electronically tallying votes, but I'll leave those be...
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > What's to stop a family member...[from] influenc[ing] your vote? This is also a problem with mail-in ballots. (It’s why I believe early votes should be allowed to be overwritten by in-person votes.) The issue with smartphone voting with selfie verification is almost everyone’s phones contain selfies. (Americans overseas are also likely to have a photo ID on their camera roll.) So controlling the phone means controlling a vote. That’s a scalable risk. Moreover, if the app is anonymising after verifying, it means the app developers have been deputised by the Board of Elections to verify voters and count their votes. (Whether you voted is public, in America. For whom you voted is not.) That’s a big deal! The blockchain add-on is worthless if done right, dangerous or illegal if done wrong, and increases the cross-section across which the above issues get amplified.
    - tempay 8y ago
      > It’s why I believe early votes should be allowed to be overwritten by in-person votes. It's an interesting idea, though how would you maintain the secret ballot? If you ask them to make a "negative vote" they can suddenly vote three times without any chance of being caught.
      - simias 8y ago
        You could keep the ballot sealed but tied to the voter's ID. Once the polling center closes for every mailed-in ballot they check if they have an in-person vote. If so, they discard it, otherwise they add it in the urn before it's opened for counting.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  So who's betting both the "anonymized" votes and the biometric software are both going to end up having time-stamped logs, which we'll only discover after a major election takes place?
- jobigoud 8y ago
  I wonder how many pairs of ID pic and selfie video can directly be grabbed off Instagram.
CWuestefeld 8y ago
If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck. Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. And I think that people realize this. So when they know they haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they spare us the chance of their error by not voting. If you want to get more people actively participating in democracy, the right path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier for people to understand what they're voting on. Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote.
- sidlls 8y ago
  You've got it backwards: people don't vote for a number of reasons. Many don't because elitists in politics constantly tell them they're too stupid or ignorant to know what's good for them, lecture about civic duty, and ignore the very real problems they have in their lives. Ignoring the real problems that exist in registering or getting to the polls doesn't help.
  - aalleavitch 8y ago
    There are also concerted voter suppression campaigns against certain groups who may be unlikely to vote for a particular candidate.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - IncRnd 8y ago
    > Many don't because elitists in politics constantly tell them they're too stupid or ignorant to know what's good for them If the cause of someone not voting is politicians saying they are too stupid to vote, maybe they really shouldn't vote.
shittyadmin 8y ago
Good idea honestly, the security issues are greatly overblown - especially if we can simply make this a mailer with "if you want to vote for this candidate, enter this code/scan this qr code", where nothing about that code identifies the candidate they voted for. And it'd definitely help to improve voter turnout, just look at studies on how poll lines impact future voting behavior...
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  So, how do you count the votes each candidate gets if nothing about that code identifies the candidate they voted for? Also, you think this system is sufficiently secure to secure access to trillions of dollars? Because that is what elections are about.
  - shittyadmin 8y ago
    On an optically isolated (phyiscally receive only) server which only receives codes sent from the application servers. > Also, you think this system is sufficiently secure to secure access to trillions of dollars? Because that is what elections are about. More secure than Diebold machines to be certain.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      > On an optically isolated (phyiscally receive only) server which only receives codes sent from the application servers and produces results. And how does it count votes per candidate then? > Yes. More secure than Diebold machines to be certain. That seems very questionable.
      - shittyadmin 8y ago
        > And how does it count votes per candidate then? Codes can be simply be computed as HMAC(secret key, SIN + candidate) or something similar, the user and any attacker without the secret key just has a random string of bits. You do realize votes are tallied by computer currently, right? Most of these just rely on phone-based systems that often expose interfaces to news orgs and such. The sort of interface I'm talking about would actually lead to less exposure in many ways from a security standpoint.
smel 8y ago
Democracy is for losers :)
mattferderer 8y ago
If this were to ever become a reality I would like to see it be open sourced so all countries can use it & all citizens can test for security breaches. Our government is meant to be transparent & this is something that I don't believe becomes better by being closed off.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  1. All citizens aren't experts at auditing software, and won't be. 2. In order to achieve anything close to the same transparency as existing voting systems, you would have to open the operating systems of all chips on the devices, the firmware, and the chip design, and then enable any citizen to verify that the device they have in their hand actually was built from those sources.
- wasdfff 8y ago
  Everything is bugged in some way. If an exploit is found it would be kept secret, and the only way it would be fixed is if a white hat randomly finds it again.
aalleavitch 8y ago
Yeah, this is the opposite of the correct way to solve the problem. What about, instead, you had an app that you could just plug in what time you wanted to vote and it would find the nearest polling place and give you the google maps directions and maybe even allow you to order an Uber ahead of time? It could reminds you how and when to register, it could even help reduce wait times by directing you to polling places with little traffic or at time when most people are not out voting. We could make voting easier in a million ways that are not literally allowing you to vote on your phone.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  > What about, instead, you had an app that you could just plug in what time you wanted to vote and it would find the nearest polling place and give you the google maps directions and maybe even allow you to order an Uber ahead of time? Uber basically does this now. It had a big call to action yesterday to take me directly to my nearest polling place.
zaroth 8y ago
My town has annual “Town Meetings” where everyone pours into a gymnasium (turnout is up to 800 voters in a town with population ~15,000) to vote on all the “articles” of which there can be upwards of 20. The annual meeting often extends multiple evenings as much discussion is permitted on each article, and traditional voting can add several hours to the process when vote counts are close. Instead of shouting aye or nay, raising hands, or standing to be counted, we hand out wireless handsets which have a yes/no buttons and a small display to confirm your vote. Then a screen at the front displays the total. The cost of renting the devices is non-trivial at around $15-20k (having trouble finding our towns specific budget line item for this) so I often pondered why we couldn’t use smartphones that everyone is surely already carrying, and maybe carry a small stock of devices just for people without phones. The idea would be a local WiFi network which was not connected to the internet, where an app on the device would connect to a local server over that WiFi network to place the vote, after someone checks you in at the front desk. I have no reason to trust the devices we use now any more than an open-source public domain phone app and backend container combo that the town could setup. Over thousands of towns and tens of years the TAM is pretty large, but more to the point a non-profit coalition developing and maintaining this solution could provide a lot of value.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  ~$20 per device to RENT a very basic and simple piece of electronics seems like a huge ripoff. That company must have an amazing profit margin.
- Steltek 8y ago
  Yikes, I can see a lot of our TMM's having trouble with phones. It'd be better to just invest in dedicated phones and not allow BYOD. In fact, I can see some TMM's trying to get away with voting remotely (attendance is sometimes challenging). That said, the remotes are amazingly useful for going back and looking over the results.
  - zaroth 8y ago
    To be clear, they are wireless remotes, but you have to be in the room. And even these dedicated devices are not entirely frustration free, sometimes they have to revert to hand counting. I don’t think anything is saved within each device, just the totals. They say there’s no way to know how each individual device (and therefore device-holder) voted. I doubt strongly there is any actual crypto guaranteeing this though.
Novashi 8y ago
Touch screens are a really great idea for voting. No really. https://twitter.com/The_UnSilent_/status/1059962688338583554 https://twitter.com/The_UnSilent_/status/1059962688338583554 </sarcasm>
king07828 8y ago
Could the Monero system be modified to create a voting system that maintains the secret ballot? From an engineering perspective, It seems like the currency and monetization aspects be pulled out/minimized and the untraceable transactions aspect used to record votes.
- monocasa 8y ago
  No. Vote buying and vote cohersion attacks have historically been the largest form of attack on voting systems. We need a voting system where you can be sure your vote was counted without being able to prove how you voted, even to yourself.
Shivetya 8y ago
Smartphone voting is no more bad than absentee voting is for people who are actually in their voting area. We have/had people voting with absentee ballots who just didn't want to do early voting and stand in lines
weegee101 8y ago
Haha, that "sample security test" is hilarious. Basically just a link to SSL Labs saying they meet industry standard. That's great, glad they can meet low hanging fruit. How about proving that they can do better?
mattnewton 8y ago
I think the way the private sector solves problems and the way voting should be done are diametrically opposed- the more inefficient voting is, with the more people involved, the larger a successful conspiracy must be. Trust a lot of people a little over a few people a lot.
dalbasal 8y ago
The problem with "meta" democratic decisions is that we can only discuss them honestly in the abstract. Once it's a live agenda decision, gerrymandering implications are all that will matter. The quality of the proposal becomes irelevant. Lets imagine that security issues are 100% solved. The app can go live. Pollsters will figure out how this (inevitably) changes voting patterns. Young, or rural or some other group will vote more, to the benefit of some party. At this point the only relevant factor determining most politicians' stance on this will be determined by good/bad for my side, in the short term.
matty_makes 8y ago
There needs to be a paper trail. Newer technology is not the answer for voting. What would be a good idea is a team to do UX on voting ballots, nationally. Solve this problem once and take into account all the variations of local things (bonds, amendments, etc.) Then pick a company to make ballot readers, open source the software and use best in class info-sec practices. We don't need instant results, people don't take office at midnight of election day. We need accurate, transparent and verifiable results. Also, make it a national holiday, close schools and just use them all as polling places.
- rsync 8y ago
  "There needs to be a paper trail. Newer technology is not the answer for voting." I agree. Voting systems need to be extremely simple and understandable - and auditing the system, or the votes, needs to be a task that any person pulled randomly off the street could accomplish.
mosselman 8y ago
Voting is a solved problem: fill in some box on paper. What is automating it ever going to solve?
- throwawaylolx 8y ago
  Increasing participation? I won't drive out of my way and queue somewhere to vote. Sure, many people think the solution to this is shaming me for not caring enough about democracy, but it is obviously not working. If it were easy and safe to vote from my phone, I may be more inclined to vote.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - CrlNvl 8y ago
    So this is clearly a funding problem and a date problem. I don't know what the situation is in the US, but in France it never took me (or my parents) more than 15 minutes to cast a vote. Most of the time I'm in and out within 10 minutes. Vote always happen on Sunday.
    - throwawaylolx 8y ago
      >So this is clearly a funding problem and a date problem Clearly not, because I wouldn't go out on Sunday to vote unless it was on my way to do something else. It's an UX problem for me and others--the effort required is not properly compensated by the benefits I'm rewarded with for my vote as far as I'm concerned.
      - foldr 8y ago
        If you care so little about voting that you can't be bothered to go out of your house to do it, why are you even interested in increasing participation? Either voting is important, in which case you should be willing to make a small effort, or it isn't, in which case who cares if people vote or not?
quotemstr 8y ago
I strongly oppose vote-by-mail and vote-by-phone, but for a different and underappreciated reason: the secret ballot is absolutely essential for escaping from preference falsification traps. "Preference falsification" is a social phenomenon in which, between choices A and B, most people prefer thing A but believe that everyone else prefers B, making it socially unacceptable to express support for A. If votes are public, then everyone feels compelled, upon threat of ostracism, to vote for B, leading to enactment of policy that's actually extremely unpopular. Under a secret ballot system, people can profess support for B while secretly voting for A, and if everyone does so, policy A ends up being enacted, concordant with the true preferences of the population. If you can vote by mail, or vote by smartphone, nothing stops people from supervising each other's votes. That there's currently a norm against doing in vote-by-mail jurisdictions is purely a cultural holdover from the days of the true secret ballot, and it's only a matter of time before this norm erodes. We live in an age of moral panic and socially enforcement of beliefs that are both unpopular and, in many cases, scientifically incorrect. Let's not make the problem worse by making it even harder to escape from the preference falsification trap.
VikingCoder 8y ago
> Critics call it “the Theranos of voting.” I'd go so far as to call it the "Thanos of Voting." With just a snap of the fingers, half of all of the votes could be wiped out.
captainbland 8y ago
Oh goodie. If you think the internet of unsecured things revolution was fun to watch, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
knowThySelfx 8y ago
This will happen though. Will seem like a bad idea initially.
ddingus 8y ago
Voting Tek isn't the problem. In fact it's going to make a lot of problems. There is no real way to establish trust without making those votes personally identifiable. Low turnout is because people do not feel compelled to vote. They need something to vote for. Policy better aligned with the needs of ordinary Americans will improve voter turnout.
nmeofthestate 8y ago
No offence to Americans reading, but speaking as an outsider, it seems to me that voting in the US is fucked up in so many ways that need to be fixed first before starting on "smartphone based voting". I saw this short twitter thread listing some of problems that are especially apparent from a foreign perspective: https://twitter.com/MackieJonathan/status/1059962407244718081 https://twitter.com/MackieJonathan/status/105996240724471808...
- specialist 8y ago
  That's a pretty good list. (Copypasta below.) I can only think of a few omissions (eg poll taxes, destroying all the evidence asap). No one considers the USA's elections fair, transparent, accountable. Why most foreign election observers don't even bother. And yet, American exceptionalism. Point out the emperor has no clothes and the serfs lose their minds. -- If British elections had: Parties drawing up constituency boundaries Polls closing at 6pm Councils recording voters party support Government-funded selection meetings Returning officers standing for election Zero regulation on election spending Votes counted in secret Hours-long queues to vote Barely surmountable criteria to stand for election No national rulebook for national election admin Lunatic criteria for voter registration A minimum of a dozen elections happening at once Referendums to approve building a school Voting machines hackable by 10 year olds Electoral data sold to the highest bidder Etc etc etc Folk would go ape. But here we all are watching CNN as if this were a proper democratic election with a stats guy using a giant iPad and everything. And that results are declared while some states are still voting
- jillesvangurp 8y ago
  It worse than that, some of the flaws are actively protected by both parties because they believe they are benefiting from it. There are differences of opinion about discarding votes, how to count votes, who is allowed to vote, etc. E.g. the debacle with the voting machines with the first Bush election had a whole circus around it involving recounts and how to count. This election was so close that every little argument mattered. Technically, it is not that hard to come up with electronic voting systems. The hard part is making them auditable, privacy sensitive, and robust against malicious attacks. It's not impossible but it seems hard enough that this gets messed up consistently.
gambler 8y ago
I know how to solve this problem. Upload a speech by each candidate to YouTube on election day. At the end of the day whomever gets the least downvotes wins. Google's CAPTCHA and profiling will protect us from election tampering and make sure only the people who are allowed to vote will vote. Might need CAPTCHA 4, though. The one where you go through a DNA test to verify your uniqueness, then get an RFID implant for truly secure 2-factor authentication. I'm not sure where blockchain and IoT will come in play, by I'm sure we will will find a place to plug them in. (If by this point you didn't catch on that this was sarcasm, I'm not sure there is anything I can do.) There is a much simpler solution for increasing participation. Don't punish busy people. Hold voting on a weekend, over the entire 2 days. You will get a massive surge in participation. Yes, it will be more expensive, but that can be optimized. Heck, just add a checkbox on tax forms that says "if you support weekend elections, check here and we will charge you extra X dollars". You will get tons of money for this initiative.
- AaronM 8y ago
  You can early vote one weekend here in Texas, and that doesn't seem to radically increase turnout. This year i believe turnout was lower on Saturday/Sunday than during the week.
  - gambler 8y ago
    Do people generally know about this option? Nov 6 date was advertised everywhere.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- fooyc 8y ago
  Who prevents Google from changing the number of votes here ?
jkaljundi 8y ago
As an Estonian who has voted online and via mobile ID for years, couldn't imagine going to vote in a physical location, using pen and paper.
- nabla9 8y ago
  What is your attitude towards significant percentage of population loses their freedom to cast vote independently (often women). Is coercion or vote buying acceptable trade off for mild inconvenience?
- Quarrelsome 8y ago
  As someone who is about to claim Estonian citizenship I am horrified that a nation that borders Russia with a relatively significant ethnic Russian community even has online voting. I like how bold Estonia is on some things but I feel like this has to be scaled back. Given the population, all it takes is some heavy Russian language propaganda combined with some low key attacks to tip the result in the way you want.
- wasdfff 8y ago
  Pen and paper is hardly done in the US except provisionally. All my votes were cast on a touchscreen with a printed paper recipes that I could look at and confirm of my choice. The paper ballot is kept by the board of elections. Whose to stop bad actors from manipulating electronic votes? Whose to say your vote was even tallied? It is far easier to manipulate elections electronically. If Russian operatives are able to penetrate election systems in the behemoth of the US, do you feel confident that they are leaving your Estonian system in their immediate sphere of influence alone? It would potentially take one engineer and one computer to manipulate an electronic election. It would take a team of people, equipment, trucks, incinerators, fake ballots, whatever to do the same manipulation to millions of physical paper ballots stored in secure facilities.
  - octorian 8y ago
    > Pen and paper is hardly done in the US except provisionally. Every state in the US can have a different system in place for the actual voting process. These systems also change over time. Pen and paper is used in plenty of the US, just not necessarily in your district. Of course the pen-and-paper system is designed to be electronically scanned, at least.
viggity 8y ago
IIRC, when parts of Hawaii offered online voting - participation plummeted. People want to be seen voting as they view it as virtue signaling, and nobody sees you vote online. However, this could be contraindicated by Oregon+Washington State who have mail in ballots only and have very high participation.
tim333 8y ago
It seems hard to vote electronically in a way that can't be hacked and is fully private but for those that are not too bothered by privacy it seems ok. I mean I voted Labour in the last thing and aren't bothered if someone finds out. You could still go do the paper ballot thing if worried.
- wasdfff 8y ago
  The worry isn’t how you voted; in the US your party affiliation is already public. It’s ensuring the vote count is correct.
fallingfrog 8y ago
This particular idea seems bad from a security standpoint. But we do need to make some major changes to level the playing field so that people who have small children, move often, work odd hours- in other words, everyone except for propertied old people- are able to vote. I can see a few ways to make this happen: 1) make voting day a national holiday 2) automate voter registration when you file a tax return and make same-day registration the law nationwide 3) automatically mail everyone an absentee ballot
- mnx 8y ago
  Just curious, why do Americans always talk about making it a holiday, wouldn't moving it to a sunday create similar effect, while being much simpler? This is how we do it here in Poland.
  - fallingfrog 8y ago
    That would work too, but most customer serving businesses are open all weekend, so moving it to the weekend would mostly help people working 9-to-5 jobs, but not the young frequently moving people you are trying to target, who are also the ones working weekends and late nights. Whereas on federal holidays like Christmas, only gas stations and hospitals are open.
    - wasdfff 8y ago
      People working minimum wage jobs will still be working Election Day unless it’s very strictly enforced. Plenty of places are open on federal holidays; McDonald’s does not close on christmas.
      - fallingfrog 8y ago
        Yeah, true enough..
fallingfrog 8y ago
One thing to note here is that it's not as if it's just coincidentally difficult for young people to vote, it's not just an unavoidable fact- it's part of an intentional strategy. For certain portions of the American ruling establishment, democracy itself is an enemy to be vanquished by any means necessary. Review the history of racial segregation and you will see obvious parallels to many forms of voter suppression today. This is the next big issue facing the USA, from my point of view.
partiallypro 8y ago
Democracy only works with a well informed voting base, and while you may disagree with the current state of politics, it has always been my belief that people that do not know the candidates or issues should abstain from voting. I will often vote in some races but abstain from others, simply because I don't know the issue or candidate well enough. I wish more people would do that. Making voting easier for the highly ignorant is not a good path. If someone isn't willing to mail in a ballot, drive to the poll, etc I don't think they care enough to know the issues. I know there are some circumstances where people can't get off of work, but those people generally just don't know their own rights. Most states legally obligate employers to give people 2-3 hours off to vote.
- coryfklein 8y ago
  The "highly ignorant" are showing up at the polls just as much as the highly informed. Making voting easier doesn't exacerbate that problem.
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    Can you prove that? Just logically, if you could vote from your smartphone at 7PM on election night from your couch, do you think that would make people who are more informed vote or that it would attract people who are less informed? I know it sounds insane, but sometimes making people have some sort of motivation to physically move, can be a good thing.
- 49531 8y ago
  This sentiment is a part of what drove literacy tests as part of voter law. Making voting harder tends to benefit one political party over another; it doesn't across the board lower turnout evenly. Sometimes it's enough to understand the macro issues of the party. You can't really know how an elected official will vote on your behalf, so it's all guesswork. But making voting harder is just going make our government less democratic.
  - masonic 8y ago
    his sentiment is a part of what drove literacy tests No, racism is what originally drove literacy tests as a result of manumission. Whites were generally exempt. See the origins of "Grandfather Clause".
camgunz 8y ago
VBM and compulsory voting is basically the only way to get turnout > 90%. You can try to get people fired up about elections, but we're well past diminishing returns on that front. You can try to lower barriers to voting, but even in states like Oregon with auto-registration and VBM it's still lower than 70%. If you look at any place with > 90% turnout, they have compulsory voting. And once you have that you have a strong impetus to make voting as easy as possible, so you get stuff like holidays, VBM, early voting, etc. The fixes are obvious, simple, and they'll save money; Republicans just want turnout to stay low so we won't get them. End of story.
- onychomys 8y ago
  Minnesota had 78% turnout this year (for votes cast in our governor race, anyway). We have VBM but you have to request an absentee ballot specifically, and we have some early voting in person but it's not super widespread yet. Instead, what we have up here is civic pride. We've been the top turnout state for years, and we're darn proud of that.
  - camgunz 8y ago
    Yeah Minnesota is unexplainable (although same day registration goes a long way), and yeah it is something to be proud of. But it's still no Australia, who in their lowest turnout year since adopting compulsory voting still broke 90% (I think it was like 92%?)
- tomjen3 8y ago
  Denmark has 85+ without compulsery voting, because we have more than one party. The US only issue is that you have fpp. Solving that will solve the rest, compulsery voting will just hide it and make sure it is never sold.
  - camgunz 8y ago
    Yeah I do think there is definitely disillusionment in US politics that drives down turnout. If we did something like ranked choice voting that might help a lot, and if you think about compulsory voting without a robust set of political parties, it starts to feel a little corrupt. But Denmark is a lot different than the US. I don't mean to come off like a "USA #1" asshole here but there's maybe 6 million people there. It's a lot harder to set up an election system for some 200 million voters spread across thousands of miles of wildly different environments.
gibsons77 8y ago
The only way 'blockchain' would be beneficial is if it was on a public ledger.
bigtech 8y ago
I would be in favor of software that makes it easy to pre-vote. Then, when I go to my polling place I could quickly print, review and submit my votes. Where I vote the process is tediously manual. If we could get, say half the voters in and out quickly, there would be more time for the election commissioners to assist everyone else.
tapatio 8y ago
How about we do Smartphone Taxes first?
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Also a horrifically bad idea.
- wasdfff 8y ago
  The IRS could file your taxes for you automatically tomorrow if they weren’t legally restricted from doing so. You can thank intuits lobbying.
AnthonyWnC 8y ago
It is hilarious and idiotic to see all these modern luddite think that somehow electronic X (in this case, voting) won't work or can't be secure. And yes, paper voting has to be the best solution ever. /s
- wasdfff 8y ago
  Every piece of software can be exploited given enough effort and time. Things are only secure until they are broken. In the year of spectre and meltdown exploits, you balk at the idea that electronics are insecure?
- simplify 8y ago
  Paper ballots are objectively more secure. If an electronic voting method becomes widespread, one vulnerability can compromise the entire election. Compare that to paper ballots. How many humans do you need to compromise all paper ballot counts?
slantaclaus 8y ago
Oh no then everyone would be able to vote, even the renters!
lelelelelele 8y ago
Why is HN harping on the blockchain aspect of this so hard? Vote counting IS actually one of the appropriate uses of it, considering it provides non-repudiation in a manner that can be verified by anyone. The biggest issue here is the initial assignment of 1 "vote coin" per person during the initial roll-out. Assuming they can solve that problem (and that's a big if), they can simply create new block chains for each election in which every potential voter is again assigned 1 vote. I realize that this has the side-effect of killing off anonymous voting (at least to whoever doled out the tokens, you'd still be anonymous to your neighbors), but I think that is a good thing. While you can argue about what the side-effects that has on individual voters in extraordinary circumstances, fact of the matter is, anonymous voting makes it effectively impossible to verify the percentages each candidate achieved.
jrs95 8y ago
Making election day a holiday could help, but let's be honest - a lot of people are just going to smoke weed and play video games if they get that day off. It would help but it's not a solution to other issues like voter suppression & general lack of voter engagement. Although it seems like the increasing toxicity of our politics is at least getting more people involved.
xte 8y ago
Oh yeah, so voting it will be no more anonymous and only the company holding the service know really who vote who... Corporatocracy is coming, someone watched "Continuum" TV series and think it's a nice idea...
drawkbox 8y ago
We trust our financial system and it already has decades of fraud detection. Our voting system should be through something similar with all history, fraud detection, voter verification and more. Our current voting system is already rife with fraud with little remedy and recounts are difficult, we need to expect fraud and move to a digital system that does have fraud detection in it similar to our financial system. This system can track all your votes and have a paper trail, you can opt out if you want and deliver it in person. Our current system is such a patchwork of systems it it security by obscurity and broken, recounts are difficult and if we moved to a common system that has records for every vote in every state in a consistent format, then research could detect anomalies and fraud as well. Digital records that are as secure as financial records, and tracked, are easier to find fraud and recount, no security by obscurity. Noone would trust banks that keep paper records and aren't verifiable anymore today, voting shouldn't be that way either. We all use the financial systems, credit systems, and trust them. Even with their problems people trust that the amount they have and what they use is recorded correctly in terms of financial data. We should expect the system to be hacked and have fraud detection to match it just like in the financial system. Until we do move to digital voting with fraud detection then our elections will be secure only by obscurity, and lots of games being played with no recourse and lack of trust in possible fraudulent counts and recounts.
- ajb 8y ago
  Banks solve a different problem. The reason why banks can be computerised does not apply to voting. Bank functioning is observable by the people concerned: You can see if money you didn't spend left your account, and if you failed to get paid. Failures are detected very quickly. Voting has two key differences: * Voting is anonymous (to render intimidation and bribery of voters ineffective). * It's not sufficient that citizens votes are counted correctly, it is necessary that no spurious votes are also counted. The means by which electronic banking is rendered safe are therefore much harder to apply. Voting must also not just be secure, but be demonstrably secure to the voters. With paper voting, you can go and watch the votes being counted. At every stage of the process, the answer to 'how do you show the public that the process has integrity' is helped by the fact that the votes are on macroscopic objects whose movement is obvious. Electronic voting systems lack this feature.
Tsubasachan 8y ago
People who can't be bothered to donate 20 minutes of their time every 2 years should think about what democracy means for them.
FredrikMeyer 8y ago
In Norway we can prevote several weeks before the election. Result is more people voting and shorter voting lines on voting day.
overthemoon 8y ago
Why are people not turning out to vote? This is the key question, and I really, truly do not think it has anything to do with whether you can do it on your phone. This is a technological solution to a multifaceted problem.
amingilani 8y ago
I don't like how this article tries to generalize smart-phone voting itself as the problem. The trouble is this particular app. I personally think blockchain powered voting solutions with a PKI backed ID Card like my Estonian e-Residency card could be a fairly strong way of authentication.
- fooyc 8y ago
  Just like this app, you seem to focus on protecting against the voter (or someone using the voter's phone). How do you protect against a compromission of: * The mobile phone's OS (by a virus, by the manufacturer) * The app's server code * The app's hosting providers We are speaking about governments, or very rich parties trying to change to outcome of elections here.
  - amingilani 8y ago
    All wonderful questions, and maybe some of the tech needs to be refined. But I can already cryptographically sign transactions on my hardware Bitcoin wallet. Embedding displays into cards isn't impossible, BofA does it for OTPs already. A combination could ensure that users know the vote they're casting by confirming it on a secure hardware token. With that done, you could upload that vote to a blockchain based system that's auditable, but anonymized. But I can't give you a good answer to "what if someone steals the phone and card". One solution is to have remote election officers that verify your identity via the camera in real-time as you cast the vote. They could look at your face, or even read your fingerprint off the camera (I know that's possible because my country lets banks do that). You'd only be able to cast the vote through devices with good enough cameras and under good enough lightening and you may have to wait a little while, but it'll be secure and you won't have to travel — especially if you're registered in a distant state or district. It's better than nothing.
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
one device, one vote citizenship not required!

249 points by kushti 8y ago

> The Boston-based company raised $2.2 million earlier this year, helped along by buzzwords such as “biometrics” and “blockchain,” which it claims allows it to secure the voting process. Its app reportedly requires voters to take and upload a picture of their government-issued I.D., along with a selfie-style video of their face, which facial-recognition technology then uses to ensure the person pictured in the I.D. and the person entering a vote are the same. The ballots are anonymized and recorded on the blockchain. This is horrible on so many levels.

Heag3aec 8y ago
https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
mbel 8y ago
Apparently there is an eerily relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
mortenjorck 8y ago
Honestly, I don’t think voting by app is inherently a “horrifically bad idea” – just that Voatz’ implementation is horrifically bad. Biometrics are going to be almost impossible to do in a non-invasive and secure way for now, so cut that part of the pitch. Blockchain may not be an entirely round peg in this square hole, but there are other cryptographic architectures that probably make more sense (I am not a cryptographer, but maybe go talk to a competent one before just deciding on blockchain). Obviously, without the two big buzzwords of blockchain and biometrics, you’re suddenly at a big disadvantage for VC money, but if mobile voting is ever going to be feasible, it’s going to need a considered, end-to-end approach that isn’t some MVP built from off-the-shelf components and off-the-shelf ideas.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > I don’t think voting by app is inherently a “horrifically bad idea” If a voter can cast their vote from their phone, anyone else can. The strength of paper-based voting is in its cost and complexity: the number of confederates required to tamper with an election is prohibitively large. With app-based voting comes the risk of a large number of compromised phones tampering with elections. The security downsides simply don't make sense next to mailed-in ballots, which capture the security (and accessibility) of paper ballots with the convenience of voting from home. The only upside of app-based voting is cost, which is a ridiculous factor to strongly optimize for when it comes to something as important as elections. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1944 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
- octorian 8y ago
  > Honestly, I don’t think voting by app is inherently a “horrifically bad idea” Yes, it is. There are many ways such a system can go wrong. If its not this defective implementation, it'll be some other company's defective implementation. If not that, it'll be a targeted attack against the underlying platform. Another big thing you have to think about is... Who will be choosing the system? Its going to be some bureaucrats with a vested interest in supporting one particular vendor, who use their power to silence any critics of said vendor's solution. Whenever electronic voting comes up, we always end up with this situation.
  - therealdrag0 8y ago
    What's better about traditional methods? Numbers are always off, recounts always get different results. It still seems like a black box.
bilbo0s 8y ago
>and “blockchain,” which it claims allows it to secure the voting process... (I'm rubbing my temples right now) I don't even have the words for how bad this would be for a democracy or republic. I will, however, make a curt but general comment on blockchain: Anytime you see that buzzword, be on your guard.
- logifail 8y ago
  Question: Are there (m)any people other than those involved in the manufacture and sales of voting machines, or their lobbyists, that support increased automation in the voting process? I'm absolutely, 100% happy with putting a pencil mark onto a paper ballot, which I fold and place into a box (with people watching), which is later taken (with people watching) to a counting place, emptied out on a table (with people watching), and counted by hand by volunteers (with yet more people watching).
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    Finally. REASON! Now this guy has the right idea. Why are people trying to fix something that is not broken?
    - jjgreen 8y ago
      A good question which could also be asked of 30% of HN articles
  - simias 8y ago
    I'm with you on that but I was surprised to find out during the last Brazilian election that they seem to do most of their voting on electronic machines and it seems well accepted over there. At least when I mentioned that to Brazilian colleagues they seemed fine with it. This video (in Portuguese) shows a "tear down" endorsed by the manufacturer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrMLzqgKEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrMLzqgKEI Both the tone of the video (unsurprisingly, given its "officially endorsed" nature) but also the comments seem overall pretty positive. Even though they mention that the software is closed source and you basically have to trust the manufacturer (and any third parties making hardware and software for the device along the way).
lb1lf 8y ago
...and it doesn't address one of the key issues with votes being cast in places other than a booth in a polling station where you are alone: Coercion. What's to stop a family member (OK, not much of an issue for overseas military personnel, one would think) or another person from hovering just outside the camera's capture area with a blunt object, ready to -ahem- influence your vote? Granted, this would only affect individual votes; there are bigger potential issues with electronically tallying votes, but I'll leave those be...
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > What's to stop a family member...[from] influenc[ing] your vote? This is also a problem with mail-in ballots. (It’s why I believe early votes should be allowed to be overwritten by in-person votes.) The issue with smartphone voting with selfie verification is almost everyone’s phones contain selfies. (Americans overseas are also likely to have a photo ID on their camera roll.) So controlling the phone means controlling a vote. That’s a scalable risk. Moreover, if the app is anonymising after verifying, it means the app developers have been deputised by the Board of Elections to verify voters and count their votes. (Whether you voted is public, in America. For whom you voted is not.) That’s a big deal! The blockchain add-on is worthless if done right, dangerous or illegal if done wrong, and increases the cross-section across which the above issues get amplified.
  - tempay 8y ago
    > It’s why I believe early votes should be allowed to be overwritten by in-person votes. It's an interesting idea, though how would you maintain the secret ballot? If you ask them to make a "negative vote" they can suddenly vote three times without any chance of being caught.
    - simias 8y ago
      You could keep the ballot sealed but tied to the voter's ID. Once the polling center closes for every mailed-in ballot they check if they have an in-person vote. If so, they discard it, otherwise they add it in the urn before it's opened for counting.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
So who's betting both the "anonymized" votes and the biometric software are both going to end up having time-stamped logs, which we'll only discover after a major election takes place?
jobigoud 8y ago
I wonder how many pairs of ID pic and selfie video can directly be grabbed off Instagram.

CWuestefeld 8y ago

If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck. Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. And I think that people realize this. So when they know they haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they spare us the chance of their error by not voting. If you want to get more people actively participating in democracy, the right path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier for people to understand what they're voting on. Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote.

sidlls 8y ago
You've got it backwards: people don't vote for a number of reasons. Many don't because elitists in politics constantly tell them they're too stupid or ignorant to know what's good for them, lecture about civic duty, and ignore the very real problems they have in their lives. Ignoring the real problems that exist in registering or getting to the polls doesn't help.
- aalleavitch 8y ago
  There are also concerted voter suppression campaigns against certain groups who may be unlikely to vote for a particular candidate.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- IncRnd 8y ago
  > Many don't because elitists in politics constantly tell them they're too stupid or ignorant to know what's good for them If the cause of someone not voting is politicians saying they are too stupid to vote, maybe they really shouldn't vote.

shittyadmin 8y ago

Good idea honestly, the security issues are greatly overblown - especially if we can simply make this a mailer with "if you want to vote for this candidate, enter this code/scan this qr code", where nothing about that code identifies the candidate they voted for. And it'd definitely help to improve voter turnout, just look at studies on how poll lines impact future voting behavior...

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
So, how do you count the votes each candidate gets if nothing about that code identifies the candidate they voted for? Also, you think this system is sufficiently secure to secure access to trillions of dollars? Because that is what elections are about.
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  On an optically isolated (phyiscally receive only) server which only receives codes sent from the application servers. > Also, you think this system is sufficiently secure to secure access to trillions of dollars? Because that is what elections are about. More secure than Diebold machines to be certain.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    > On an optically isolated (phyiscally receive only) server which only receives codes sent from the application servers and produces results. And how does it count votes per candidate then? > Yes. More secure than Diebold machines to be certain. That seems very questionable.
    - shittyadmin 8y ago
      > And how does it count votes per candidate then? Codes can be simply be computed as HMAC(secret key, SIN + candidate) or something similar, the user and any attacker without the secret key just has a random string of bits. You do realize votes are tallied by computer currently, right? Most of these just rely on phone-based systems that often expose interfaces to news orgs and such. The sort of interface I'm talking about would actually lead to less exposure in many ways from a security standpoint.

smel 8y ago

Democracy is for losers :)

mattferderer 8y ago

If this were to ever become a reality I would like to see it be open sourced so all countries can use it & all citizens can test for security breaches. Our government is meant to be transparent & this is something that I don't believe becomes better by being closed off.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
1. All citizens aren't experts at auditing software, and won't be. 2. In order to achieve anything close to the same transparency as existing voting systems, you would have to open the operating systems of all chips on the devices, the firmware, and the chip design, and then enable any citizen to verify that the device they have in their hand actually was built from those sources.
wasdfff 8y ago
Everything is bugged in some way. If an exploit is found it would be kept secret, and the only way it would be fixed is if a white hat randomly finds it again.

aalleavitch 8y ago

Yeah, this is the opposite of the correct way to solve the problem. What about, instead, you had an app that you could just plug in what time you wanted to vote and it would find the nearest polling place and give you the google maps directions and maybe even allow you to order an Uber ahead of time? It could reminds you how and when to register, it could even help reduce wait times by directing you to polling places with little traffic or at time when most people are not out voting. We could make voting easier in a million ways that are not literally allowing you to vote on your phone.

malvosenior 8y ago
> What about, instead, you had an app that you could just plug in what time you wanted to vote and it would find the nearest polling place and give you the google maps directions and maybe even allow you to order an Uber ahead of time? Uber basically does this now. It had a big call to action yesterday to take me directly to my nearest polling place.

zaroth 8y ago

My town has annual “Town Meetings” where everyone pours into a gymnasium (turnout is up to 800 voters in a town with population ~15,000) to vote on all the “articles” of which there can be upwards of 20. The annual meeting often extends multiple evenings as much discussion is permitted on each article, and traditional voting can add several hours to the process when vote counts are close. Instead of shouting aye or nay, raising hands, or standing to be counted, we hand out wireless handsets which have a yes/no buttons and a small display to confirm your vote. Then a screen at the front displays the total. The cost of renting the devices is non-trivial at around $15-20k (having trouble finding our towns specific budget line item for this) so I often pondered why we couldn’t use smartphones that everyone is surely already carrying, and maybe carry a small stock of devices just for people without phones. The idea would be a local WiFi network which was not connected to the internet, where an app on the device would connect to a local server over that WiFi network to place the vote, after someone checks you in at the front desk. I have no reason to trust the devices we use now any more than an open-source public domain phone app and backend container combo that the town could setup. Over thousands of towns and tens of years the TAM is pretty large, but more to the point a non-profit coalition developing and maintaining this solution could provide a lot of value.

umanwizard 8y ago
~$20 per device to RENT a very basic and simple piece of electronics seems like a huge ripoff. That company must have an amazing profit margin.
Steltek 8y ago
Yikes, I can see a lot of our TMM's having trouble with phones. It'd be better to just invest in dedicated phones and not allow BYOD. In fact, I can see some TMM's trying to get away with voting remotely (attendance is sometimes challenging). That said, the remotes are amazingly useful for going back and looking over the results.
- zaroth 8y ago
  To be clear, they are wireless remotes, but you have to be in the room. And even these dedicated devices are not entirely frustration free, sometimes they have to revert to hand counting. I don’t think anything is saved within each device, just the totals. They say there’s no way to know how each individual device (and therefore device-holder) voted. I doubt strongly there is any actual crypto guaranteeing this though.

Novashi 8y ago

Touch screens are a really great idea for voting. No really. https://twitter.com/The_UnSilent_/status/1059962688338583554 https://twitter.com/The_UnSilent_/status/1059962688338583554 </sarcasm>

king07828 8y ago

Could the Monero system be modified to create a voting system that maintains the secret ballot? From an engineering perspective, It seems like the currency and monetization aspects be pulled out/minimized and the untraceable transactions aspect used to record votes.

monocasa 8y ago
No. Vote buying and vote cohersion attacks have historically been the largest form of attack on voting systems. We need a voting system where you can be sure your vote was counted without being able to prove how you voted, even to yourself.

Shivetya 8y ago

Smartphone voting is no more bad than absentee voting is for people who are actually in their voting area. We have/had people voting with absentee ballots who just didn't want to do early voting and stand in lines

weegee101 8y ago

Haha, that "sample security test" is hilarious. Basically just a link to SSL Labs saying they meet industry standard. That's great, glad they can meet low hanging fruit. How about proving that they can do better?

mattnewton 8y ago

I think the way the private sector solves problems and the way voting should be done are diametrically opposed- the more inefficient voting is, with the more people involved, the larger a successful conspiracy must be. Trust a lot of people a little over a few people a lot.

dalbasal 8y ago

The problem with "meta" democratic decisions is that we can only discuss them honestly in the abstract. Once it's a live agenda decision, gerrymandering implications are all that will matter. The quality of the proposal becomes irelevant. Lets imagine that security issues are 100% solved. The app can go live. Pollsters will figure out how this (inevitably) changes voting patterns. Young, or rural or some other group will vote more, to the benefit of some party. At this point the only relevant factor determining most politicians' stance on this will be determined by good/bad for my side, in the short term.

matty_makes 8y ago

There needs to be a paper trail. Newer technology is not the answer for voting. What would be a good idea is a team to do UX on voting ballots, nationally. Solve this problem once and take into account all the variations of local things (bonds, amendments, etc.) Then pick a company to make ballot readers, open source the software and use best in class info-sec practices. We don't need instant results, people don't take office at midnight of election day. We need accurate, transparent and verifiable results. Also, make it a national holiday, close schools and just use them all as polling places.

rsync 8y ago
"There needs to be a paper trail. Newer technology is not the answer for voting." I agree. Voting systems need to be extremely simple and understandable - and auditing the system, or the votes, needs to be a task that any person pulled randomly off the street could accomplish.

mosselman 8y ago

Voting is a solved problem: fill in some box on paper. What is automating it ever going to solve?

throwawaylolx 8y ago
Increasing participation? I won't drive out of my way and queue somewhere to vote. Sure, many people think the solution to this is shaming me for not caring enough about democracy, but it is obviously not working. If it were easy and safe to vote from my phone, I may be more inclined to vote.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- CrlNvl 8y ago
  So this is clearly a funding problem and a date problem. I don't know what the situation is in the US, but in France it never took me (or my parents) more than 15 minutes to cast a vote. Most of the time I'm in and out within 10 minutes. Vote always happen on Sunday.
  - throwawaylolx 8y ago
    >So this is clearly a funding problem and a date problem Clearly not, because I wouldn't go out on Sunday to vote unless it was on my way to do something else. It's an UX problem for me and others--the effort required is not properly compensated by the benefits I'm rewarded with for my vote as far as I'm concerned.
    - foldr 8y ago
      If you care so little about voting that you can't be bothered to go out of your house to do it, why are you even interested in increasing participation? Either voting is important, in which case you should be willing to make a small effort, or it isn't, in which case who cares if people vote or not?

quotemstr 8y ago

I strongly oppose vote-by-mail and vote-by-phone, but for a different and underappreciated reason: the secret ballot is absolutely essential for escaping from preference falsification traps. "Preference falsification" is a social phenomenon in which, between choices A and B, most people prefer thing A but believe that everyone else prefers B, making it socially unacceptable to express support for A. If votes are public, then everyone feels compelled, upon threat of ostracism, to vote for B, leading to enactment of policy that's actually extremely unpopular. Under a secret ballot system, people can profess support for B while secretly voting for A, and if everyone does so, policy A ends up being enacted, concordant with the true preferences of the population. If you can vote by mail, or vote by smartphone, nothing stops people from supervising each other's votes. That there's currently a norm against doing in vote-by-mail jurisdictions is purely a cultural holdover from the days of the true secret ballot, and it's only a matter of time before this norm erodes. We live in an age of moral panic and socially enforcement of beliefs that are both unpopular and, in many cases, scientifically incorrect. Let's not make the problem worse by making it even harder to escape from the preference falsification trap.

VikingCoder 8y ago

> Critics call it “the Theranos of voting.” I'd go so far as to call it the "Thanos of Voting." With just a snap of the fingers, half of all of the votes could be wiped out.

captainbland 8y ago

Oh goodie. If you think the internet of unsecured things revolution was fun to watch, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

knowThySelfx 8y ago

This will happen though. Will seem like a bad idea initially.

ddingus 8y ago

Voting Tek isn't the problem. In fact it's going to make a lot of problems. There is no real way to establish trust without making those votes personally identifiable. Low turnout is because people do not feel compelled to vote. They need something to vote for. Policy better aligned with the needs of ordinary Americans will improve voter turnout.

nmeofthestate 8y ago

No offence to Americans reading, but speaking as an outsider, it seems to me that voting in the US is fucked up in so many ways that need to be fixed first before starting on "smartphone based voting". I saw this short twitter thread listing some of problems that are especially apparent from a foreign perspective: https://twitter.com/MackieJonathan/status/1059962407244718081 https://twitter.com/MackieJonathan/status/105996240724471808...

specialist 8y ago
That's a pretty good list. (Copypasta below.) I can only think of a few omissions (eg poll taxes, destroying all the evidence asap). No one considers the USA's elections fair, transparent, accountable. Why most foreign election observers don't even bother. And yet, American exceptionalism. Point out the emperor has no clothes and the serfs lose their minds. -- If British elections had: Parties drawing up constituency boundaries Polls closing at 6pm Councils recording voters party support Government-funded selection meetings Returning officers standing for election Zero regulation on election spending Votes counted in secret Hours-long queues to vote Barely surmountable criteria to stand for election No national rulebook for national election admin Lunatic criteria for voter registration A minimum of a dozen elections happening at once Referendums to approve building a school Voting machines hackable by 10 year olds Electoral data sold to the highest bidder Etc etc etc Folk would go ape. But here we all are watching CNN as if this were a proper democratic election with a stats guy using a giant iPad and everything. And that results are declared while some states are still voting
jillesvangurp 8y ago
It worse than that, some of the flaws are actively protected by both parties because they believe they are benefiting from it. There are differences of opinion about discarding votes, how to count votes, who is allowed to vote, etc. E.g. the debacle with the voting machines with the first Bush election had a whole circus around it involving recounts and how to count. This election was so close that every little argument mattered. Technically, it is not that hard to come up with electronic voting systems. The hard part is making them auditable, privacy sensitive, and robust against malicious attacks. It's not impossible but it seems hard enough that this gets messed up consistently.

gambler 8y ago

I know how to solve this problem. Upload a speech by each candidate to YouTube on election day. At the end of the day whomever gets the least downvotes wins. Google's CAPTCHA and profiling will protect us from election tampering and make sure only the people who are allowed to vote will vote. Might need CAPTCHA 4, though. The one where you go through a DNA test to verify your uniqueness, then get an RFID implant for truly secure 2-factor authentication. I'm not sure where blockchain and IoT will come in play, by I'm sure we will will find a place to plug them in. (If by this point you didn't catch on that this was sarcasm, I'm not sure there is anything I can do.) There is a much simpler solution for increasing participation. Don't punish busy people. Hold voting on a weekend, over the entire 2 days. You will get a massive surge in participation. Yes, it will be more expensive, but that can be optimized. Heck, just add a checkbox on tax forms that says "if you support weekend elections, check here and we will charge you extra X dollars". You will get tons of money for this initiative.

AaronM 8y ago
You can early vote one weekend here in Texas, and that doesn't seem to radically increase turnout. This year i believe turnout was lower on Saturday/Sunday than during the week.
- gambler 8y ago
  Do people generally know about this option? Nov 6 date was advertised everywhere.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
fooyc 8y ago
Who prevents Google from changing the number of votes here ?

jkaljundi 8y ago

As an Estonian who has voted online and via mobile ID for years, couldn't imagine going to vote in a physical location, using pen and paper.

nabla9 8y ago
What is your attitude towards significant percentage of population loses their freedom to cast vote independently (often women). Is coercion or vote buying acceptable trade off for mild inconvenience?
Quarrelsome 8y ago
As someone who is about to claim Estonian citizenship I am horrified that a nation that borders Russia with a relatively significant ethnic Russian community even has online voting. I like how bold Estonia is on some things but I feel like this has to be scaled back. Given the population, all it takes is some heavy Russian language propaganda combined with some low key attacks to tip the result in the way you want.
wasdfff 8y ago
Pen and paper is hardly done in the US except provisionally. All my votes were cast on a touchscreen with a printed paper recipes that I could look at and confirm of my choice. The paper ballot is kept by the board of elections. Whose to stop bad actors from manipulating electronic votes? Whose to say your vote was even tallied? It is far easier to manipulate elections electronically. If Russian operatives are able to penetrate election systems in the behemoth of the US, do you feel confident that they are leaving your Estonian system in their immediate sphere of influence alone? It would potentially take one engineer and one computer to manipulate an electronic election. It would take a team of people, equipment, trucks, incinerators, fake ballots, whatever to do the same manipulation to millions of physical paper ballots stored in secure facilities.
- octorian 8y ago
  > Pen and paper is hardly done in the US except provisionally. Every state in the US can have a different system in place for the actual voting process. These systems also change over time. Pen and paper is used in plenty of the US, just not necessarily in your district. Of course the pen-and-paper system is designed to be electronically scanned, at least.

viggity 8y ago

IIRC, when parts of Hawaii offered online voting - participation plummeted. People want to be seen voting as they view it as virtue signaling, and nobody sees you vote online. However, this could be contraindicated by Oregon+Washington State who have mail in ballots only and have very high participation.

tim333 8y ago

It seems hard to vote electronically in a way that can't be hacked and is fully private but for those that are not too bothered by privacy it seems ok. I mean I voted Labour in the last thing and aren't bothered if someone finds out. You could still go do the paper ballot thing if worried.

wasdfff 8y ago
The worry isn’t how you voted; in the US your party affiliation is already public. It’s ensuring the vote count is correct.

fallingfrog 8y ago

This particular idea seems bad from a security standpoint. But we do need to make some major changes to level the playing field so that people who have small children, move often, work odd hours- in other words, everyone except for propertied old people- are able to vote. I can see a few ways to make this happen: 1) make voting day a national holiday 2) automate voter registration when you file a tax return and make same-day registration the law nationwide 3) automatically mail everyone an absentee ballot

mnx 8y ago
Just curious, why do Americans always talk about making it a holiday, wouldn't moving it to a sunday create similar effect, while being much simpler? This is how we do it here in Poland.
- fallingfrog 8y ago
  That would work too, but most customer serving businesses are open all weekend, so moving it to the weekend would mostly help people working 9-to-5 jobs, but not the young frequently moving people you are trying to target, who are also the ones working weekends and late nights. Whereas on federal holidays like Christmas, only gas stations and hospitals are open.
  - wasdfff 8y ago
    People working minimum wage jobs will still be working Election Day unless it’s very strictly enforced. Plenty of places are open on federal holidays; McDonald’s does not close on christmas.
    - fallingfrog 8y ago
      Yeah, true enough..

fallingfrog 8y ago

One thing to note here is that it's not as if it's just coincidentally difficult for young people to vote, it's not just an unavoidable fact- it's part of an intentional strategy. For certain portions of the American ruling establishment, democracy itself is an enemy to be vanquished by any means necessary. Review the history of racial segregation and you will see obvious parallels to many forms of voter suppression today. This is the next big issue facing the USA, from my point of view.

partiallypro 8y ago

Democracy only works with a well informed voting base, and while you may disagree with the current state of politics, it has always been my belief that people that do not know the candidates or issues should abstain from voting. I will often vote in some races but abstain from others, simply because I don't know the issue or candidate well enough. I wish more people would do that. Making voting easier for the highly ignorant is not a good path. If someone isn't willing to mail in a ballot, drive to the poll, etc I don't think they care enough to know the issues. I know there are some circumstances where people can't get off of work, but those people generally just don't know their own rights. Most states legally obligate employers to give people 2-3 hours off to vote.

coryfklein 8y ago
The "highly ignorant" are showing up at the polls just as much as the highly informed. Making voting easier doesn't exacerbate that problem.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Can you prove that? Just logically, if you could vote from your smartphone at 7PM on election night from your couch, do you think that would make people who are more informed vote or that it would attract people who are less informed? I know it sounds insane, but sometimes making people have some sort of motivation to physically move, can be a good thing.
49531 8y ago
This sentiment is a part of what drove literacy tests as part of voter law. Making voting harder tends to benefit one political party over another; it doesn't across the board lower turnout evenly. Sometimes it's enough to understand the macro issues of the party. You can't really know how an elected official will vote on your behalf, so it's all guesswork. But making voting harder is just going make our government less democratic.
- masonic 8y ago
  his sentiment is a part of what drove literacy tests No, racism is what originally drove literacy tests as a result of manumission. Whites were generally exempt. See the origins of "Grandfather Clause".

camgunz 8y ago

VBM and compulsory voting is basically the only way to get turnout > 90%. You can try to get people fired up about elections, but we're well past diminishing returns on that front. You can try to lower barriers to voting, but even in states like Oregon with auto-registration and VBM it's still lower than 70%. If you look at any place with > 90% turnout, they have compulsory voting. And once you have that you have a strong impetus to make voting as easy as possible, so you get stuff like holidays, VBM, early voting, etc. The fixes are obvious, simple, and they'll save money; Republicans just want turnout to stay low so we won't get them. End of story.

onychomys 8y ago
Minnesota had 78% turnout this year (for votes cast in our governor race, anyway). We have VBM but you have to request an absentee ballot specifically, and we have some early voting in person but it's not super widespread yet. Instead, what we have up here is civic pride. We've been the top turnout state for years, and we're darn proud of that.
- camgunz 8y ago
  Yeah Minnesota is unexplainable (although same day registration goes a long way), and yeah it is something to be proud of. But it's still no Australia, who in their lowest turnout year since adopting compulsory voting still broke 90% (I think it was like 92%?)
tomjen3 8y ago
Denmark has 85+ without compulsery voting, because we have more than one party. The US only issue is that you have fpp. Solving that will solve the rest, compulsery voting will just hide it and make sure it is never sold.
- camgunz 8y ago
  Yeah I do think there is definitely disillusionment in US politics that drives down turnout. If we did something like ranked choice voting that might help a lot, and if you think about compulsory voting without a robust set of political parties, it starts to feel a little corrupt. But Denmark is a lot different than the US. I don't mean to come off like a "USA #1" asshole here but there's maybe 6 million people there. It's a lot harder to set up an election system for some 200 million voters spread across thousands of miles of wildly different environments.

gibsons77 8y ago

The only way 'blockchain' would be beneficial is if it was on a public ledger.

bigtech 8y ago

I would be in favor of software that makes it easy to pre-vote. Then, when I go to my polling place I could quickly print, review and submit my votes. Where I vote the process is tediously manual. If we could get, say half the voters in and out quickly, there would be more time for the election commissioners to assist everyone else.

tapatio 8y ago

How about we do Smartphone Taxes first?

craftyguy 8y ago
Also a horrifically bad idea.
wasdfff 8y ago
The IRS could file your taxes for you automatically tomorrow if they weren’t legally restricted from doing so. You can thank intuits lobbying.

AnthonyWnC 8y ago

It is hilarious and idiotic to see all these modern luddite think that somehow electronic X (in this case, voting) won't work or can't be secure. And yes, paper voting has to be the best solution ever. /s

wasdfff 8y ago
Every piece of software can be exploited given enough effort and time. Things are only secure until they are broken. In the year of spectre and meltdown exploits, you balk at the idea that electronics are insecure?
simplify 8y ago
Paper ballots are objectively more secure. If an electronic voting method becomes widespread, one vulnerability can compromise the entire election. Compare that to paper ballots. How many humans do you need to compromise all paper ballot counts?

slantaclaus 8y ago

Oh no then everyone would be able to vote, even the renters!

lelelelelele 8y ago

Why is HN harping on the blockchain aspect of this so hard? Vote counting IS actually one of the appropriate uses of it, considering it provides non-repudiation in a manner that can be verified by anyone. The biggest issue here is the initial assignment of 1 "vote coin" per person during the initial roll-out. Assuming they can solve that problem (and that's a big if), they can simply create new block chains for each election in which every potential voter is again assigned 1 vote. I realize that this has the side-effect of killing off anonymous voting (at least to whoever doled out the tokens, you'd still be anonymous to your neighbors), but I think that is a good thing. While you can argue about what the side-effects that has on individual voters in extraordinary circumstances, fact of the matter is, anonymous voting makes it effectively impossible to verify the percentages each candidate achieved.

jrs95 8y ago

Making election day a holiday could help, but let's be honest - a lot of people are just going to smoke weed and play video games if they get that day off. It would help but it's not a solution to other issues like voter suppression & general lack of voter engagement. Although it seems like the increasing toxicity of our politics is at least getting more people involved.

xte 8y ago

Oh yeah, so voting it will be no more anonymous and only the company holding the service know really who vote who... Corporatocracy is coming, someone watched "Continuum" TV series and think it's a nice idea...

drawkbox 8y ago

We trust our financial system and it already has decades of fraud detection. Our voting system should be through something similar with all history, fraud detection, voter verification and more. Our current voting system is already rife with fraud with little remedy and recounts are difficult, we need to expect fraud and move to a digital system that does have fraud detection in it similar to our financial system. This system can track all your votes and have a paper trail, you can opt out if you want and deliver it in person. Our current system is such a patchwork of systems it it security by obscurity and broken, recounts are difficult and if we moved to a common system that has records for every vote in every state in a consistent format, then research could detect anomalies and fraud as well. Digital records that are as secure as financial records, and tracked, are easier to find fraud and recount, no security by obscurity. Noone would trust banks that keep paper records and aren't verifiable anymore today, voting shouldn't be that way either. We all use the financial systems, credit systems, and trust them. Even with their problems people trust that the amount they have and what they use is recorded correctly in terms of financial data. We should expect the system to be hacked and have fraud detection to match it just like in the financial system. Until we do move to digital voting with fraud detection then our elections will be secure only by obscurity, and lots of games being played with no recourse and lack of trust in possible fraudulent counts and recounts.

ajb 8y ago
Banks solve a different problem. The reason why banks can be computerised does not apply to voting. Bank functioning is observable by the people concerned: You can see if money you didn't spend left your account, and if you failed to get paid. Failures are detected very quickly. Voting has two key differences: * Voting is anonymous (to render intimidation and bribery of voters ineffective). * It's not sufficient that citizens votes are counted correctly, it is necessary that no spurious votes are also counted. The means by which electronic banking is rendered safe are therefore much harder to apply. Voting must also not just be secure, but be demonstrably secure to the voters. With paper voting, you can go and watch the votes being counted. At every stage of the process, the answer to 'how do you show the public that the process has integrity' is helped by the fact that the votes are on macroscopic objects whose movement is obvious. Electronic voting systems lack this feature.

Tsubasachan 8y ago

People who can't be bothered to donate 20 minutes of their time every 2 years should think about what democracy means for them.

FredrikMeyer 8y ago

In Norway we can prevote several weeks before the election. Result is more people voting and shorter voting lines on voting day.

overthemoon 8y ago

Why are people not turning out to vote? This is the key question, and I really, truly do not think it has anything to do with whether you can do it on your phone. This is a technological solution to a multifaceted problem.

amingilani 8y ago

I don't like how this article tries to generalize smart-phone voting itself as the problem. The trouble is this particular app. I personally think blockchain powered voting solutions with a PKI backed ID Card like my Estonian e-Residency card could be a fairly strong way of authentication.

fooyc 8y ago
Just like this app, you seem to focus on protecting against the voter (or someone using the voter's phone). How do you protect against a compromission of: * The mobile phone's OS (by a virus, by the manufacturer) * The app's server code * The app's hosting providers We are speaking about governments, or very rich parties trying to change to outcome of elections here.
- amingilani 8y ago
  All wonderful questions, and maybe some of the tech needs to be refined. But I can already cryptographically sign transactions on my hardware Bitcoin wallet. Embedding displays into cards isn't impossible, BofA does it for OTPs already. A combination could ensure that users know the vote they're casting by confirming it on a secure hardware token. With that done, you could upload that vote to a blockchain based system that's auditable, but anonymized. But I can't give you a good answer to "what if someone steals the phone and card". One solution is to have remote election officers that verify your identity via the camera in real-time as you cast the vote. They could look at your face, or even read your fingerprint off the camera (I know that's possible because my country lets banks do that). You'd only be able to cast the vote through devices with good enough cameras and under good enough lightening and you may have to wait a little while, but it'll be secure and you won't have to travel — especially if you're registered in a distant state or district. It's better than nothing.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

one device, one vote citizenship not required!