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Accounting for errors isn’t the problem. Teaching people to use and trust an insanely complex system is. I’ve yet to hear any proposal for an electronic voting

Accounting for errors isn’t the problem. Teaching people to use and trust an insanely complex system is. I’ve yet to hear any proposal for an electronic voting system that offers any advantages over current systems AND doesn’t require a PhD in mathematics to grasp.

godelski 6y ago
I'm still mixed on electronic voting, but I do think it should be further researched. The simple answer I've seen is giving people a hash or code that can be used to verify their vote in a database. Obviously you have to trust the database, but you also have to trust the people counting. I do think there are enabling technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and locally differential privacy that do help with many of the problems, but my understanding is that neither of these is mature enough for use in voting, yet. But as to general advantages, I think there's two major ones I see. 1) Electronic voting better enables access to voting since people can vote in the comfort of their homes (especially relevant in a situation live covid). 2) Enables better research about candidates. I live in a state with mail in voting and how I vote is with my ballot in front of me while I research all the candidates. In fact, I spend several days voting (sure, not everyone will do this but it makes it easier). Links to official campaign pages or voter guides (we have this in my state with the ballot) would be helpful (and encourage candidates to create them! Because often they don't even have a website, at least on local levels). As a minor advantage I do see having the ability to perform different voting testing and better answer questions to things like ordinal and cardinal voting systems (by participation not forced A/B testing). Just because enabling technologies aren't there yet doesn't mean we should shutdown the conversation about how to solve those technological challenges.

godelski 6y ago

I'm still mixed on electronic voting, but I do think it should be further researched. The simple answer I've seen is giving people a hash or code that can be used to verify their vote in a database. Obviously you have to trust the database, but you also have to trust the people counting. I do think there are enabling technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and locally differential privacy that do help with many of the problems, but my understanding is that neither of these is mature enough for use in voting, yet. But as to general advantages, I think there's two major ones I see. 1) Electronic voting better enables access to voting since people can vote in the comfort of their homes (especially relevant in a situation live covid). 2) Enables better research about candidates. I live in a state with mail in voting and how I vote is with my ballot in front of me while I research all the candidates. In fact, I spend several days voting (sure, not everyone will do this but it makes it easier). Links to official campaign pages or voter guides (we have this in my state with the ballot) would be helpful (and encourage candidates to create them! Because often they don't even have a website, at least on local levels). As a minor advantage I do see having the ability to perform different voting testing and better answer questions to things like ordinal and cardinal voting systems (by participation not forced A/B testing). Just because enabling technologies aren't there yet doesn't mean we should shutdown the conversation about how to solve those technological challenges.