“A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
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“A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
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Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#2> The Boston-based company raised $2.2 million earlier this year, helped along by buzzwords such as “biometrics” and “blockchain,” which it claims allows it to secure the voting process. Its app reportedly requires voters to take and upload a picture of their government-issued I.D., along with a selfie-style video of their face, which facial-recognition technology then uses to ensure the person pictured in the I.D. and the person entering a vote are the same. The ballots are anonymized and recorded on the blockchain.
This is horrible on so many levels.
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#3If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck.
Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. And I think that people realize this. So when they know they haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they spare us the chance of their error by not voting.
If you want to get more people actively participating in democracy, the right path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier for people to understand what they're voting on. Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote.
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#4> The Boston-based company raised $2.2 million earlier this year, helped along by buzzwords such as “biometrics” and “blockchain,” which it claims allows it to secure the voting process. Its app reportedly requires voters to take and upload a picture of their government-issued I.D., along with a selfie-style video of their face, which facial-recognition technology then uses to ensure the person pictured in the I.D. a…
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#5> The Boston-based company raised $2.2 million earlier this year, helped along by buzzwords such as “biometrics” and “blockchain,” which it claims allows it to secure the voting process. Its app reportedly requires voters to take and upload a picture of their government-issued I.D., along with a selfie-style video of their face, which facial-recognition technology then uses to ensure the person pictured in the I.D. a…
Apparently there is an eerily relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2030/
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#6If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck. Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. And I think that people realize this. So when…
You've got it backwards: people don't vote for a number of reasons. Many don't because elitists in politics constantly tell them they're too stupid or ignorant to know what's good for them, lecture about civic duty, and ignore the very real problems they have in their lives. Ignoring the real problems that exist in registering or getting to the polls doesn't help.
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#7Good idea honestly, the security issues are greatly overblown - especially if we can simply make this a mailer with "if you want to vote for this candidate, enter this code/scan this qr code", where nothing about that code identifies the candidate they voted for.
And it'd definitely help to improve voter turnout, just look at studies on how poll lines impact future voting behavior...
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#8Democracy is for losers :)
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#9If this were to ever become a reality I would like to see it be open sourced so all countries can use it & all citizens can test for security breaches.
Our government is meant to be transparent & this is something that I don't believe becomes better by being closed off.
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#10If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck. Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. And I think that people realize this. So when…
> Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society.
I think this describes pretty much everyone who votes today. It's nearly impossible to actually understand the issues and I'd wager it's literally impossible to understand the future effect of what you're voting on. The system is just too complex.
Have you ever read a news article about a topic you're actually familiar with? They are rife with inaccuracies. Most of us are not politicians but I'm sure the same can be said about political coverage.
In summation I think the government and society are too complex to reason about with a human brain and what little there is to know is heavily distorted through inaccurate reporting. I don't see smart phone voters being any less informed than the people that currently think they're informed.