Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election • Hacker News Board

Re: Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

#131

Post by bobthepanda » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 8:31 PM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #116

venantius wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this sounds like the opinion of someone who has spent literally zero time investigating how universal the consensus is among voting security professionals about how paper is still the best, most reliable, most secure technology with which to run elections.

In-person voter fraud isn't that difficult, and especially in Washington people get packets in the mail they can vote with by returning in the mail which would be pretty easy for someone to go swiping from mailboxes. Verifying identity online is not an impossible challenge and we can't just avoid improving anything forever.

It's a lot easier to hijack online voting infrastructure than it is to start digging through everyone's mailboxes at the correct time when they happen to actually be sending a ballot out.

The voting period in Washington is 18 days. So someone would have to either be constantly looking through my mail for the better part of three weeks, or have the best luck when it comes to predicting when I would actually send it out, and that's if they got the correct mailbox and I didn't, say, go to a post office or the ballot dropoff boxes. It would be hard to do even for an individual, and much harder to scale up.

Re: Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

#132

Post by m0zg » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 8:32 PM UTC

This is idiotic beyond belief. Unless you have a verifiable, re-countable paper trail, elections can be made to go whichever way the person running the elections wants them to go. It's as simple as that.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised though. I vote in WA and most people on the ballot seem profoundly unqualified for the positions they're running for. For me it basically boils down to picking the person with the most robust education credentials, unless they're a commie, in which case I pick the next best thing. It's pretty bad. If I were hiring for myself, I wouldn't hire most of these people.

Re: Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

#133

Post by macspoofing » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 8:42 PM UTC

plopz wrote: post #111

macspoofing wrote: post #96

I like the pageantry and ceremony of paper ballots at specific voting locations followed by manual paper ballot counting. I know in principle it's easy to automate this away by introducing online voting and other things ... I think those things will further alienate people from their local communities and society at large. Keep paper ballots because they are inefficient.

The problem is then what do you do with low voter turnout? The article says that this election has in previous years resulted in <1% of eligible voters. That is clearly untenable.

>The problem is then what do you do with low voter turnout?

What's the problem with low voter turnout? If someone doesn't feel like voting, they should have that right. A non-vote is a vote of confidence that you are OK with any choice.

In fact, high voter turnout is usually indicative of major societal divisions or issues (case in point, the upcoming national election will probably have HIGH voter turnout as anti-Trump and pro-Trump people will turn out in droves).

> The article says that this election has in previous years resulted in Why is it untenable? What is the harm? The alternative is you force people to vote, and they'll vote by choosing a name randomly from a list.

Re: Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

#134

Post by Ill_ban_myself » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 8:58 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #129

Ill_ban_myself wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope by the length of my next sentence I'll be worthy of some small part of the praise you're giving the Seattle Times here :-) It seems to me that the only difference between an exit poll and a voluntary disclosure checkbox which, if utilized by a statistically significant portion of the electorate, could be leveraged by official government commissions to audit election results where online voting is offered is th…

Forgive me, I don't know what you're advocating for here. I greatly appreciate that you're chewing on the policy, problem, tech. For the USA, I no longer think polls are useful predictors, nor are exit polls useful audits or verification. For polling to work (be useful), like is done in Germany, requires the whole system to be designed as such. Our gold standard is the Australian Ballot. Private voting, public counti…

From one side of your mouth you're demanding perfect privacy and from the other side I'm sure you'll tell me its necessary because of the laws in the US for voting procedure and policy to be bottom up starting with localities, then states, then federal elections.

I think we both know perfect privacy is cost prohibitive at the local and state levels and largely a talking point that ends with the listener assuming it is impossible to achieve online voting with perfect privacy in our lifetime.

If we can't afford to change the way people vote then why not change the way we measure it so its not so cost prohibitive?

Between exit polls, aggregate voter data held by the national parties, private and public data sources it is already possible to accurately predict the outcome of most elections.

Its already being used by national parties as the foundation for when and where they choose to challenge election results and allocate resources.

There is no such thing as a, "Secret Ballot" with modern analytics. There are just those who can afford to find out how you vote and those who can't.

Those who can't in today's world includes regulators and the government themselves.

Re: Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

#135

Post by usrusr » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:12 PM UTC

jedieaston wrote: post #45

coolspot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because casting votes online makes it easy to start voting market where you get perks for voting in desired direction.

I could just as easily start a system right now where I'll send you $15 to get a absentee ballot, vote how I want, and take a picture of it with some kind of unique identifier (post it note with your username on it, for example) before mailing it in. It's possible that a much lower price would even work too, since if you were going to vote my way anyway, you'd do it for free. So I only have to convince the voters on…

Which is exactly the reason why absentee voting should be an exception. Every single person who takes an absentee ballot purely out of convenience is hurting democracy, even if only very slightly. And it's not just plain out vote buying, there are also various forms of soft, even unintended coercion that encroach on a voter who votes outside of the enforced privacy of a booth. If it was possible to run statistics on this I'm quite sure that there would be statistical evidence of spouses voting more alike when voting at home than when voting alone in the booth.

Re: Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

#136

Post by deogeo » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #43

flareback wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a citizen I think this is a REALLY bad idea because of the security implications surrounding it.

As a different citizen, I'm not too enthused about ballot secrecy. 100% of the security issues with online voting come from the ballot secrecy requirement, so it's hard to get worked up about this.

As long as you're not in 1950s US and vote for a socialist, or vote against the communist party in any eastern European country for much of the 20th century, or against Putin or the CCP, or vote conservative and have aspirations in academia [1], then yes, there is an extremely limited range of times, countries, and opinions, for which non-secret voting wouldn't be absolutely catastrophic.

[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/1/liberal-majo... -- "One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.”"

Re: Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

#137

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:19 PM UTC

Ill_ban_myself wrote: post #118

Beldin wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voluntary disclosure sounds as if it undoes the secret ballot. Just a reminder: the secret ballot is secret to protect those, whose genuine vote would otherwise be manipulated (/forced/extorted/...) Not every individual voter might need that level of protection for themselves. But every individual voter requires this level of protection for the whole process. Phrased differently: for some, anonymity in voting is nice…

Again, this assumes a slippery slope. Organ donors abound. Should we be allowed to redact it on our driver's licenses for fear that we might be judged by our bosses and neighbors or compelled to donate or that it reveals our religious beliefs? When someone says, "America isn't ready for online voting." I hear, "The interests who already buy and aggregate enough information to have the results ahead of time want to st…

No one is going to pay you to tick the organ donor box, or threaten you or your family if you don't.

Both of those things have happened with voting in the past, which is why ballots are secret.

Re: Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

#138

Post by Ill_ban_myself » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #137

Ill_ban_myself wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, this assumes a slippery slope. Organ donors abound. Should we be allowed to redact it on our driver's licenses for fear that we might be judged by our bosses and neighbors or compelled to donate or that it reveals our religious beliefs? When someone says, "America isn't ready for online voting." I hear, "The interests who already buy and aggregate enough information to have the results ahead of time want to st…

No one is going to pay you to tick the organ donor box, or threaten you or your family if you don't. Both of those things have happened with voting in the past, which is why ballots are secret.

World governments and wealthy private interests are right now paying huge sums of money to interfere with election results.

That's happening right now. Not in the past. That's why we need enough people who aren't in danger to volunteer their data.

Re: Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

#139

Post by jeffdavis » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #97

legitster wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I have never had this happen nor heard of it happening. Not to say it shouldn't be a concern, but I am reluctant to buy in to the idea based on a complete hypothetical. Needless to say, someone demanding to see my vote counts as a felony still in our state. Maybe it occasionally happens? But it would take thousands of deliberate felonies to meaningfully change an election.

> I have never had this happen nor heard of it happening I've canvassed in New Jersey where one spouse was surprised by the other's party registration, and had two incidences where it broke into an argument in front of me. > someone demanding to see my vote counts as a felony still in our state The line between demanding or requiring and politely, but firmly, requesting is legally blurry and practically meaningless.…

I thought party affiliation was public information?

Re: Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

#140

Post by egypturnash » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

legitster wrote: post #95

egypturnash wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I lived in Seattle my voting process was basically "find the Stranger's recommendations, read through them, and very occasionally look deeper into one issue or office". This is definitely an important function of local news, they spend hours trying to make sense of this stuff and tease out hidden connections so you don't have to.

Don't just look at the Stranger. They are fully capable of making some bad, bad recommendations, often for very petty reasons.

I made my own petty decisions in voting, too.