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And this sounds like the opinion of someone who has spent literally zero time investigating how universal the consensus is among voting security professionals a

And this sounds like the opinion of someone who has spent literally zero time investigating how universal the consensus is among voting security professionals about how paper is still the best, most reliable, most secure technology with which to run elections.

jimmaswell 7y ago
In-person voter fraud isn't that difficult, and especially in Washington people get packets in the mail they can vote with by returning in the mail which would be pretty easy for someone to go swiping from mailboxes. Verifying identity online is not an impossible challenge and we can't just avoid improving anything forever.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > In-person voter fraud isn't that difficult It’s difficult to scale without getting caught.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  It's a lot easier to hijack online voting infrastructure than it is to start digging through everyone's mailboxes at the correct time when they happen to actually be sending a ballot out. The voting period in Washington is 18 days. So someone would have to either be constantly looking through my mail for the better part of three weeks, or have the best luck when it comes to predicting when I would actually send it out, and that's if they got the correct mailbox and I didn't, say, go to a post office or the ballot dropoff boxes. It would be hard to do even for an individual, and much harder to scale up.
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
    To corrupt the vote, just offer some money for every empty ballot that gets sent to you to fill in and mail. There are a lot of people who would trade their ballot for a $20 bill.
    - catalogia 7y ago
      Good luck scaling that far enough to make a difference, without at the same time broadcasting your intentions to everybody.
      - alasdair_ 7y ago
        Just give a website address that displays a rotating physical address in Russia or China. Rely on the free PR from all the news stories about how terrible it is to scale with minimal "marketing" costs. If you picked the right districts, it wouldn't even cost that much to tilt the votes in your favor. At $50/ballot you'd almost certainly get 11,000 extra votes in Michigan - enough to swing the state in the last election at a total cost of just over half a million dollars. This ease of abuse is one of the many, many reasons that I support a single, national vote for president over per-state winner-take-all electoral college voting.
    - fg6hr 7y ago
      Some of these $20 bills would get reported to FBI. The probability is tiny, but it grows exponentially with the number of participants.
addicted 7y ago
This is fair enough, but the issue is that at least in the US, youre not actually replacing paper ballot voting in most cases. The US currently has digital (often internet connected) polling booths, which bring all the security problems of mobile/net voting, and none of the benefits. I would much rather have mobile voting, as opposed to the current widespread digital voting booths system. Ideally, of course, we'd want to go the paper ballot route for now.
- modriano 7y ago
  Mobile voting is a nightmare idea. A very large portion of the population is far from tech savvy, but to have mobile voting as an option, the entire voting base has the know how to correctly place a mobile vote, or else a significant percentange of the population could get duped into using a fake voting app/site and not actually voting. Authenticating voters is also a significant technical problem, as the barriers to voting have to be thin, but not so thin that one malicious actor with up to date voter registration information for a precinct could own that precinct. This also seems to suffer the same problems as DRE (direct recording electronic) voting machines with regards to no way to ensure a voters vote is recorded correctly and accurately. I have no confidence in any mobile voting scheme, and for an election, lack of public confidence in a process should be immediately disqualifying for said process.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    One verification avenue that comes to mind is matching fingerprints but that would only work for those who both can afford such a high-end phone and can take time off to go register their fingerprints with their voting office, or however that would be implemented. Maybe a future rollout like this could be done when biometrics like this are standard in cheap smartphones and biometric collection becomes a standard voluntary part of voter registration. Maybe mail-in ballots could come with QR codes but this kind of defeats the idea of a mobile-only option. Maybe we just need to accept that some voter fraud will happen like it already does (the standard for voting in-person is nothing but matching the name you tell them to a list of names, not even any ID required) and settle for something potentially exploitable like SMS's with links sent to phone numbers whose registered names/addresses correspond to a registered voter, where you then have to verify some information like past addresses or whatever. If we'd just force telecom companies to tighten up their security that would be a perfect solution, and as it is it's probably good enough using the existing rate of voter fraud as a bar. Stealing a phone number in the process of identity theft is something that happens and is easier than it should be but it still takes a while on the phone and someone making a full time job of it just to hope to catch that automated text probably wouldn't get that many, if the texts were sent at random times throughout a whole month or so.

jimmaswell 7y ago

In-person voter fraud isn't that difficult, and especially in Washington people get packets in the mail they can vote with by returning in the mail which would be pretty easy for someone to go swiping from mailboxes. Verifying identity online is not an impossible challenge and we can't just avoid improving anything forever.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> In-person voter fraud isn't that difficult It’s difficult to scale without getting caught.
bobthepanda 7y ago
It's a lot easier to hijack online voting infrastructure than it is to start digging through everyone's mailboxes at the correct time when they happen to actually be sending a ballot out. The voting period in Washington is 18 days. So someone would have to either be constantly looking through my mail for the better part of three weeks, or have the best luck when it comes to predicting when I would actually send it out, and that's if they got the correct mailbox and I didn't, say, go to a post office or the ballot dropoff boxes. It would be hard to do even for an individual, and much harder to scale up.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  To corrupt the vote, just offer some money for every empty ballot that gets sent to you to fill in and mail. There are a lot of people who would trade their ballot for a $20 bill.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Good luck scaling that far enough to make a difference, without at the same time broadcasting your intentions to everybody.
    - alasdair_ 7y ago
      Just give a website address that displays a rotating physical address in Russia or China. Rely on the free PR from all the news stories about how terrible it is to scale with minimal "marketing" costs. If you picked the right districts, it wouldn't even cost that much to tilt the votes in your favor. At $50/ballot you'd almost certainly get 11,000 extra votes in Michigan - enough to swing the state in the last election at a total cost of just over half a million dollars. This ease of abuse is one of the many, many reasons that I support a single, national vote for president over per-state winner-take-all electoral college voting.
  - fg6hr 7y ago
    Some of these $20 bills would get reported to FBI. The probability is tiny, but it grows exponentially with the number of participants.

addicted 7y ago

This is fair enough, but the issue is that at least in the US, youre not actually replacing paper ballot voting in most cases. The US currently has digital (often internet connected) polling booths, which bring all the security problems of mobile/net voting, and none of the benefits. I would much rather have mobile voting, as opposed to the current widespread digital voting booths system. Ideally, of course, we'd want to go the paper ballot route for now.

modriano 7y ago
Mobile voting is a nightmare idea. A very large portion of the population is far from tech savvy, but to have mobile voting as an option, the entire voting base has the know how to correctly place a mobile vote, or else a significant percentange of the population could get duped into using a fake voting app/site and not actually voting. Authenticating voters is also a significant technical problem, as the barriers to voting have to be thin, but not so thin that one malicious actor with up to date voter registration information for a precinct could own that precinct. This also seems to suffer the same problems as DRE (direct recording electronic) voting machines with regards to no way to ensure a voters vote is recorded correctly and accurately. I have no confidence in any mobile voting scheme, and for an election, lack of public confidence in a process should be immediately disqualifying for said process.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  One verification avenue that comes to mind is matching fingerprints but that would only work for those who both can afford such a high-end phone and can take time off to go register their fingerprints with their voting office, or however that would be implemented. Maybe a future rollout like this could be done when biometrics like this are standard in cheap smartphones and biometric collection becomes a standard voluntary part of voter registration. Maybe mail-in ballots could come with QR codes but this kind of defeats the idea of a mobile-only option. Maybe we just need to accept that some voter fraud will happen like it already does (the standard for voting in-person is nothing but matching the name you tell them to a list of names, not even any ID required) and settle for something potentially exploitable like SMS's with links sent to phone numbers whose registered names/addresses correspond to a registered voter, where you then have to verify some information like past addresses or whatever. If we'd just force telecom companies to tighten up their security that would be a perfect solution, and as it is it's probably good enough using the existing rate of voter fraud as a bar. Stealing a phone number in the process of identity theft is something that happens and is easier than it should be but it still takes a while on the phone and someone making a full time job of it just to hope to catch that automated text probably wouldn't get that many, if the texts were sent at random times throughout a whole month or so.