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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

#21

Post by zaroth »

My town has annual “Town Meetings” where everyone pours into a gymnasium (turnout is up to 800 voters in a town with population ~15,000) to vote on all the “articles” of which there can be upwards of 20. The annual meeting often extends multiple evenings as much discussion is permitted on each article, and traditional voting can add several hours to the process when vote counts are close.

Instead of shouting aye or nay, raising hands, or standing to be counted, we hand out wireless handsets which have a yes/no buttons and a small display to confirm your vote. Then a screen at the front displays the total.

The cost of renting the devices is non-trivial at around $15-20k (having trouble finding our towns specific budget line item for this) so I often pondered why we couldn’t use smartphones that everyone is surely already carrying, and maybe carry a small stock of devices just for people without phones.

The idea would be a local WiFi network which was not connected to the internet, where an app on the device would connect to a local server over that WiFi network to place the vote, after someone checks you in at the front desk.

I have no reason to trust the devices we use now any more than an open-source public domain phone app and backend container combo that the town could setup.

Over thousands of towns and tens of years the TAM is pretty large, but more to the point a non-profit coalition developing and maintaining this solution could provide a lot of value.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#23

Post by mdorazio »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #3

If 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…

I agree, but it's important to note that many people don't vote in the US because they simply don't have the time to leave work/school and go to a polling place, or won't get paid for it if they do [1]. More mail-in ballots could potentially alleviate this, but a lot of people prefer to vote in person. Also due to our two-party system, gerrymandering, and the way congress works, many people don't vote because they feel it doesn't make a difference, not because they are poorly informed.

A broad approach of better voter education, a national holiday on election day, and replacing FPTP with something else that actually favors more than two parties (I like STAR myself) is needed in the US.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/us/politics/election-day-...

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#24

Post by shittyadmin »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #16
shittyadmin wrote: post #7

Good 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...

So, how do you count the votes each candidate gets if nothing about that code identifies the candidate they voted for? Also, you think this system is sufficiently secure to secure access to trillions of dollars? Because that is what elections are about.

On an optically isolated (phyiscally receive only) server which only receives codes sent from the application servers.

> Also, you think this system is sufficiently secure to secure access to trillions of dollars? Because that is what elections are about.

More secure than Diebold machines to be certain.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#25

Post by king07828 »

Could the Monero system be modified to create a voting system that maintains the secret ballot? From an engineering perspective, It seems like the currency and monetization aspects be pulled out/minimized and the untraceable transactions aspect used to record votes.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#27

Post by lb1lf »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #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. a…

...and it doesn't address one of the key issues with votes being cast in places other than a booth in a polling station where you are alone: Coercion.

What's to stop a family member (OK, not much of an issue for overseas military personnel, one would think) or another person from hovering just outside the camera's capture area with a blunt object, ready to -ahem- influence your vote?

Granted, this would only affect individual votes; there are bigger potential issues with electronically tallying votes, but I'll leave those be...

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#28

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

mattferderer wrote: post #9

If 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.

1. All citizens aren't experts at auditing software, and won't be.

2. In order to achieve anything close to the same transparency as existing voting systems, you would have to open the operating systems of all chips on the devices, the firmware, and the chip design, and then enable any citizen to verify that the device they have in their hand actually was built from those sources.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#29

Post by dvdhnt »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #3

If 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…

While I agree with your overall argument regarding the overflow of issues and ignorance of their particulars, I have to disagree with your view on abstinence from voting being some sort of error prevention. By that measure, there is a right and wrong, then inherently, whether you vote or not, allowing the “wrong” choice to be made is an “error”.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#30

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

shittyadmin wrote: post #24
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, how do you count the votes each candidate gets if nothing about that code identifies the candidate they voted for? Also, you think this system is sufficiently secure to secure access to trillions of dollars? Because that is what elections are about.

On an optically isolated (phyiscally receive only) server which only receives codes sent from the application servers. > Also, you think this system is sufficiently secure to secure access to trillions of dollars? Because that is what elections are about. More secure than Diebold machines to be certain.

> On an optically isolated (phyiscally receive only) server which only receives codes sent from the application servers and produces results.

And how does it count votes per candidate then?

> Yes. More secure than Diebold machines to be certain.

That seems very questionable.

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