4 ms·

...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 t

by 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.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > Once the polling center closes for every mailed-in ballot they check if they have an in-person vote Agree on keeping votes sealed until live polling closes. But there is no need to check every mailed-in ballot against in-person votes. Instead, when a mailed-in ballot arrives one marks the voter rolls. When a voter checks into a polling place, the rolls are anyway consulted. At that time, if a live voter shows as having already voted: that ballot is found and destroyed, and the voter given a fresh ballot to cast.
    - gliptic 8y ago
      This is actually how it works in Sweden. They check the voter list whether the person already voted during the day and discards the mail-in if so.
- simias 8y ago
  >This is also a problem with mail-in ballots. Just as a datapoint this doesn't exist everywhere. In France for instance it's not possible to vote without physically going to a polling place unless you're living in a foreign country and only for certain elections (not possible for the presidential elections for instance). It is however possible to give a "procuration" for somebody else to vote for you but you still need to go to the police before the vote to make the procuration so it wouldn't be a very convenient way to fraud since you'd have to coerce the person into giving you their vote in front of a police officer. I agree that if your electoral system accepts mail-in ballots then other electronic ways to vote remotely don't seem that much worse overall since they would share pretty much the same potential for abuse. I guess paper ballots would make it a bit harder to automate fraud at least.
- cyphar 8y ago
  Just to point out that "early voting" can take several forms, since I believe in the US many states combine (erroneously) mail-in voting with early voting. In Australia, early voting can be done at polling places for several weeks before the election (though there's less polling places open obviously). Mail voting is also provided, but I agree with you that it really is something that has questionable merit -- when you're overseas you can vote at the Australian embassy. The only real use-case it serves is people who live in the outback or are worried about personal safety (who are "silent electors" -- where your address is not posted on the public voter roll), and I think that mail voting should only be provided to those people.
ghayes 8y ago
If you could re-vote as many times as you’d like, then this would largely destroy coercion since the coercer would have to control you or your device during the rest of the voting period. That alone would significantly reduce this risk. For more complex scenarios, you could allow the user to enter his/her PIN backwards which would mean “silently ignore this vote.”

by lb1lf 8y ago

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.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > Once the polling center closes for every mailed-in ballot they check if they have an in-person vote Agree on keeping votes sealed until live polling closes. But there is no need to check every mailed-in ballot against in-person votes. Instead, when a mailed-in ballot arrives one marks the voter rolls. When a voter checks into a polling place, the rolls are anyway consulted. At that time, if a live voter shows as having already voted: that ballot is found and destroyed, and the voter given a fresh ballot to cast.
  - gliptic 8y ago
    This is actually how it works in Sweden. They check the voter list whether the person already voted during the day and discards the mail-in if so.
simias 8y ago
>This is also a problem with mail-in ballots. Just as a datapoint this doesn't exist everywhere. In France for instance it's not possible to vote without physically going to a polling place unless you're living in a foreign country and only for certain elections (not possible for the presidential elections for instance). It is however possible to give a "procuration" for somebody else to vote for you but you still need to go to the police before the vote to make the procuration so it wouldn't be a very convenient way to fraud since you'd have to coerce the person into giving you their vote in front of a police officer. I agree that if your electoral system accepts mail-in ballots then other electronic ways to vote remotely don't seem that much worse overall since they would share pretty much the same potential for abuse. I guess paper ballots would make it a bit harder to automate fraud at least.
cyphar 8y ago
Just to point out that "early voting" can take several forms, since I believe in the US many states combine (erroneously) mail-in voting with early voting. In Australia, early voting can be done at polling places for several weeks before the election (though there's less polling places open obviously). Mail voting is also provided, but I agree with you that it really is something that has questionable merit -- when you're overseas you can vote at the Australian embassy. The only real use-case it serves is people who live in the outback or are worried about personal safety (who are "silent electors" -- where your address is not posted on the public voter roll), and I think that mail voting should only be provided to those people.

ghayes 8y ago

If you could re-vote as many times as you’d like, then this would largely destroy coercion since the coercer would have to control you or your device during the rest of the voting period. That alone would significantly reduce this risk. For more complex scenarios, you could allow the user to enter his/her PIN backwards which would mean “silently ignore this vote.”