That is worrying. How do you know that the voter could vote freely and didn't sell their vote? Corruption around vote-selling is a concern in certain ethnic enclaves in Britain, and there were even elections annulled over that. The foremost concern shouldn't be convenience, it should be that the vote is safe and secret.
In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online
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Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online
#12I like this trend towards e-voting since it seems to be influenced by trends in cutting edge blockchain technology like decentralised autonomous organisations. It means that novel types of national governance may follow from blockchain governance models, such as liquid democracy. This would be a vast improvement over our current representative democracy model since we'd be able to hold politicians accountable more ea…
A lot of these proposed solutions in first sight look like solutions, but I've yet to find a "blockchain" (or any other buzzword) system that offers clear advantages. In practice most of the times it's plain old ploutocracy or founderocracy disguised under the veil of a new tech (with the help of an "innocent non-profit foundation")
Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online
#13That is worrying. How do you know that the voter could vote freely and didn't sell their vote? Corruption around vote-selling is a concern in certain ethnic enclaves in Britain, and there were even elections annulled over that. The foremost concern shouldn't be convenience, it should be that the vote is safe and secret.
You don't. Which is why this should definitely not be used for important votes like these. It may work fine at first but the attack surface on your election (and thus on your democracy) has just increased massively.
Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online
#14That is worrying. How do you know that the voter could vote freely and didn't sell their vote? Corruption around vote-selling is a concern in certain ethnic enclaves in Britain, and there were even elections annulled over that. The foremost concern shouldn't be convenience, it should be that the vote is safe and secret.
How do you know they don't change your physical ballots?
Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
> such as liquid democracy The German Pirate Party tried liquid democracy, and the result was similar to what's going in Wikipedia: There's a small set of people with more time on their hands than it good for them or others, and it doesn't take long for them to take over.
I'm confused, why would a small set of people with time on their hands be able to compromise a liquid democracy? Are there not workarounds to the problems encountered? Interesting how we iterate so often, yet are so concrete in our conclusions about improvements to our own governance.
I think because we can't afford to 'break things' with governance so we prefer not to 'move fast'.
Seems like good thinking...
Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online
#16That is worrying. How do you know that the voter could vote freely and didn't sell their vote? Corruption around vote-selling is a concern in certain ethnic enclaves in Britain, and there were even elections annulled over that. The foremost concern shouldn't be convenience, it should be that the vote is safe and secret.
>That is worrying. How do you know that the voter could vote freely and didn't sell their vote?
Historically, vote buying in the UK and the US used to be rife until it was cracked down upon (which came after it was made illegal). Once that happened it completely disappeared.
For voters to sell their votes, somebody needs to advertise that they are willing to buy their votes. That advertisement makes them easy to detect, track down and prosecute.
Vote buying doesn't worry me in this system but hacks certainly do. It gives the impression of being a very insecure system.
Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online
#17Any more in-depth treatment on the properties of the system and how it resists various attacks?
"Security Analysis of Estonia's Internet Voting System" @31C3 (December 2014) https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6344_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412281... (starts at 20:26) They failed on quite some points, I cannot believe they fixed all issues.
Any analysis written not this year is out-of-date.
Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online
#18That is worrying. How do you know that the voter could vote freely and didn't sell their vote? Corruption around vote-selling is a concern in certain ethnic enclaves in Britain, and there were even elections annulled over that. The foremost concern shouldn't be convenience, it should be that the vote is safe and secret.
How exactly do you propose vote buying would work? Somebody has to advertise it, somehow validate results, and then engage in widescale monetary transactions in a method that would appeal to a significant number of voters. All while also somehow avoiding all legal issues in the process. And this all needs to somehow be more effective than the typical pattern of just dumping millions/billions into half truths, mudslinging, and the other noble arts of modern politicking.
By contrast, I do think high level integrity of a vote is something we should be constantly vigilant towards. Was your vote counted? Was it for whom you wanted it to be? Integrity and validation are areas where e-voting could pull far ahead of traditional paper voting. As a nice thing you'd also have instantaneous and 100% accurate results instead of this silly 'Let's have the supreme court decide who won.' type affair.
Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online
#19Any more in-depth treatment on the properties of the system and how it resists various attacks?
https://estoniaevoting.org/findings/paper/ TL;DR: It's not that good.
As I replied to the another guy under this parent, any analysis done on previous years it absolutely out-of-date by now. We'd need new reviews to make a proper assessment how (in)secure it is.
Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online
#20Wasn't it compromised a few years ago? [1] https://edri.org/estonian-eid-cryptography-mess-750000-cards...
Those certificates were replaced and/or revoked.