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Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

engineering.stanford.edu

261–270 of 316 posts

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#261

I am strongly against the view of the author. I see that the majority (or a large portion) of voters are fanatics that vote based on affiliation and fanaticism, not policies nor experience. Ie. The voting numbers are largely biased towards the political fanatic crowd. I see online voting as a way to increase the number of ordinary people that vote. Getting the voting population to 80%+ or more is good for democracy.…

"I see online voting as a way to increase the number of ordinary people that vote."

That is a good goal. However...

All half-measures to increase participation, including registration drives, early voting, absentee voting, postal balloting, same day registration, etc., do not work.

Short of universal voter registration and compulsory voting, the only measure which increases voter participation is competitive races. This means fair redistricting.

Online voting, of any kind, at best, should be considered an opinion survey of questionable provenance.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#262
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comparisons overlook a major difference between the paradigms of paper and digital ballots. It's the same problem with autonomous cars. An unsafe car can cause a single crash. An unsafe autonomous car program could crash every car everywhere all at once. And with the current state of software development, we KNOW that these softwares are vulnerable. With paper ballots, it's not easy to tamper with the entire vot…

I think you underestimate the sophistication needed to tamper with paper ballots. There's certainly a "boots on the ground" requirement for tampering, but the knowledge requirements are trivial compared to crypto attacks.

The physical chain of custody can be guaranteed with paper ballots. Yes, you can burn ballots, or stuff the box, but if you're minding the store, someone would notice.

Source: former poll judge, inspector.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#263

I am strongly against the view of the author. I see that the majority (or a large portion) of voters are fanatics that vote based on affiliation and fanaticism, not policies nor experience. Ie. The voting numbers are largely biased towards the political fanatic crowd. I see online voting as a way to increase the number of ordinary people that vote. Getting the voting population to 80%+ or more is good for democracy.…

I don't think the autonomous car analogy is really apt here. For a democracy to be a real thing, the voting process needs to be open, auditable, verifiable. The current trend with any software I've seen around voting has been privatized code that is not inspectable by anyone, surrounded by NDAs, and provides far less in the way of proving results are real than does paper. More people voting and real democracy are probably good things, but without addressing the core auditability of the process _first_, software actually reduces the democracy of the process.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper based system guards against vote buying through the guarantee of secrecy. I go into a booth on my own, make my mark(s) fold my paper, and put it in a locked box. No one but me knows how I voted. If I go in with someone else, the officials will take action. You can try to buy my vote, but I can just take your money and vote however I want. If I can vote from wherever I like, then someone can stand over my sh…

> If I can vote from wherever I like, then someone can stand over my shoulder and watch me vote, then only pay for it if I do as I'm told. and this scales?

Sending a vote buyer knocking on doors and watching people vote when they happen to be voting is not very scalable. However, party activists and pollsters already do the first part. Adding the second isn't a massive leap.

However, there are situations that might scale better.

A business owner or manager might strongly persuade their workforce into voting the "right" way, by getting them to vote at work. This would scale quite well in a non-office environment, where you might suggest to your workers to come and use one of the few computers you have (for their own convenience, of course).

Another option might be some kind of party, where you invite people to come and vote for your candidate in exchange for payment. This could work quite well to gain the votes of the poorest in society, who may otherwise find it difficult to vote (no internet at home, can't easily get to the polling station).

Remember, those who care enough and are decisive enough to vote early in the day, are not the target of vote buyers. The people whose votes you can buy are those who wee possibly thinking of not voting at all, or those yet to decide as the polls are closing.

Think about the scalability of the other side. At the moment, you have a few people per few thousand voters sitting in the designated room for those voters, watching out for violations.

Both of these intimidation/buying activities would be illegal, and would certainly not be endorsed by the actual party in question, but by rogue individual supporters of the party. However, detection and prosecution of offenders will be far more difficult and time consuming.

Having to detect and prosecute these irregularities after-the-fact would also mean that elections may have to be invalidated and redone (possibly ad-infinitum) when a violation has happened, if you just remove all the illegal votes and recount, then what about all those voters who did vote with their conscience, but just happened to do so in the wrong place. Then what do you do about the actions of the illegally elected in the interim?

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#265
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a system where your vote can be verified, you can be coerced into voting a certain way.

As a special case of this, one might see the mild "coercion" in simply being uncomfortable with going against the grain by voting for something that others strongly dislike.

The votes do not need to be public. It should only be verifiable to people that know your key.

That does not solve actual coercion, but honest peer pressure isn't a problem.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#266

I am strongly against the view of the author. I see that the majority (or a large portion) of voters are fanatics that vote based on affiliation and fanaticism, not policies nor experience. Ie. The voting numbers are largely biased towards the political fanatic crowd. I see online voting as a way to increase the number of ordinary people that vote. Getting the voting population to 80%+ or more is good for democracy.…

If you think participation is so key to a functional democracy, the US can make voting mandatory without exposing us to the huge risks associated with online voting.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#267

For a 2016 article about online voting, i'm really surprised to find no mention of block-chain related solutions... It seems most of the concern addressed here can be solve with this kind of "open-computing / open-data" technologies. If you are interested in this topic, I strongly advise you the reading of: https://medium.com/@DomSchiener/publicvotes-ethereum-based-v... And more generally what can be done with contra…

The article indirectly addresses that in the last paragraph: paper is something everyone understands. I'm all for improving processes with technology but I'll have to admit that even though I've been neck deep in Software development for 2 decades, the block-chain solutions require a fair amount of mental work for me. They may be good but I don't readily understand them. And I can guarantee you that my parents don't.…

While that's a decent premise and I agree that less than 5% of the US population understands blockchains, I would also reckon they don't understand HTTP (or HTTPS) protocols, B-trees, networks, cryptographic hashes, or even the compilers that underpin much of technology. But they're more than willing to trust these things with the entirety of their liquid assets if it spares them a 20 minute trip to the bank.

I think there would still be a group of people who don't trust blockchains (or, let's be real, technology whatsoever - like the interviewee). And they're the people that drive to booths and do their business on paper. And I'm okay with that.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#268
post #220

For a 2016 article about online voting, i'm really surprised to find no mention of block-chain related solutions... It seems most of the concern addressed here can be solve with this kind of "open-computing / open-data" technologies. If you are interested in this topic, I strongly advise you the reading of: https://medium.com/@DomSchiener/publicvotes-ethereum-based-v... And more generally what can be done with contra…

This is the answer. You should never trust any one given voting machine. But it is much, much harder to corrupt large consensus networks, and blockchain based voting lets you maintain pseudonymity and it lets you verify the results with whatever computer you want. Some neat features you can bake into a blockchain based voting protocol: * You can have temporary identifiers in the confirmation stage. IE, you cast your…

Please explain to my mother how this system would work.

And should this system fail, or simply be faked, how would I know?

PublicVotes' first claim is to be "fair". Fairness is a property of the form of election (eg approval voting vs first-past-the-post), not the voting system. I'll scan the docs, see if there's any merit, but right out of the gate the starting assumptions are way off base, so don't have much hope for the rest.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#269
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want citizens participating though? I have no clue about what it takes to run a state and I'm not a lawyer and can't really read new laws. Also, I have a job and very limited free time that I don't want to spent on keeping up with new developments in politics. So my opinions are likely very biased and quite useless for the political process. Even elected officials seem to have a hard time reading all th…

> Do you really want citizens participating though? What is the alternative? Some aristocracy deciding matters without any consent from the citizens? If you get any alternative that's actually better than the citizens participating, I'd love to hear it.

That is almost exactly what we have now. I'd hope citizen participation would be an improvement but I'm not certain. Populist positions can be good, but they can also be disastrous -- look at Trump, his brand of populism preys on the most base and vile aspects of human nature: hate, bigotry and racism and he intends on enacting policies which will inarguably be horribly destructive to the very fabric of the country and arguably the world. If we had direct democracy, what makes you think we wouldn't just get more of that? A lot of the principled stands that keep the country in one piece are not widely popular.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decoy votes. https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...

In the end of the day, my vote is signed, and any of the bailout checkers can discover who I voted for. Also, I can not total the votes and verify their result.

With multiparty computation, nobody has the access they would need to decrypt any votes.
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