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> If a mobile platform could guarantee secure voting First, that's a mighty big if, and second, it's not enough! Voting is a process where unlike online banki
by henrikschroder 7y ago
> If a mobile platform could guarantee secure voting
First, that's a mighty big if, and second, it's not enough!
Voting is a process where unlike online banking or online shopping there is no way for a human to go in and fix errors, there's no way to audit a vote and go "Oh, Bob meant to vote for A and Cindy meant to vote for B, so the machine did it wrong". It's not enough that an electronic voting system is correct, every single voter has to be able to trust the system, and for that it needs to be simple to understand.
You can't look at the electrons inside a silicon chip to determine they're doing the right thing. But with pen and paper and envelopes and urns and observers and counters, you can determine that the system is doing the right thing. Involving lots and lots of citizens in the voting system is not a bad thing, quite the opposite! You want as many eyes as possible on the entire process to ensure there's nothing shady going on, that there's no mistakes.
But if all the votes go into a black box that spits out the results, all of that goes away, all of that trust, all of that ability to verify that the results are correct.
- baobabKoodaa 7y agoWell, they use a lot of pen & paper in Russia, but somehow Putin can get 107% of votes in some areas. So perhaps your confidence in paper voting is a bit too high.
- cortesoft 7y agoThey never said you can't design a paper ballot system that can be corrupted... they just said that you CAN design one (fairly easily) that can't be corrupted and can be verified by most people (no special technical knowledge required)
- baobabKoodaa 7y agoWell, a completely uncorruptable, perfectly verifiable paper voting system does not currently exist and we haven't come even close to designing one. You're saying that we can design one fairly easily, so why is it that no-one has done so? If it's so easy to do, surely someone at some point would have done it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- henrikschroder 7y agoYes, if election workers are corrupt, your election results will be corrupted as well. No voting system can defend against it. That's what revolutions are for.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- baobabKoodaa 7y agoSo you no longer stand by your original statement where you said "But with pen and paper and envelopes and urns and observers and counters, you can determine that the system is doing the right thing"? Somehow you have gone from one extreme (implying that a traditional paper voting system is always trustworthy) to another extreme (saying that all voting systems can be corrupted), which, by the way, is not true either. For example, the results of a voting system where all votes are public, can not be manipulated. This tiny example shows that clearly some voting systems can defend against corruption.