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

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

#141

Post by cookie_monsta » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

Being that the main driver behind this seems to be voter turnout, I have some suggestions:

1) Stop making all these penny ante jobs elected positions. These people are bureaucrats. Let them apply for their jobs like every other bureaucrat. If 99% of voters are saying they de facto don't care, maybe you should take the message.

2) For jobs that do matter, make voting compulsory.

Bonus point: have elections on the weekends when people actually have time to vote. Very few people need two days to drive their buggy in from the farm anymore ffs.

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

#142

Post by specialist » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

Ill_ban_myself wrote: post #134

specialist wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Well then.

I am explicitly not shutting you down. I shared my views and why. I encouraged you to do the same.

For instance, one cheap and obvious way to improve uitilityof exit polling would be to implement compulsory voting.

Also, please work on a campaign. To the best of my knowledge, modern campaigns don't rely much on polling. Most effort is put into GOTV (voter identification and balloting chasing).

Edit: Oops. I'm not familiar with Republican campaigns. In my area, their GOTV is less potent and they rely far more on advertising. So they might still be more reliant on polling. It's a good question for me to follow up.

Opinion polls are still useful in other ways. Depending on who's paying. Sanity checks. Push polling. Message crafting. Talking points, a la Voted San Fran's Favorite Pho Restaurant. Feeding corporate media's horserace narrative. Policy groups trying to gather intel on both opponents and allies. Consultants fleecing noob candidates. Arm waving because old school operators expect it.

YMMV.

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

#143

Post by gnulinux » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

joshuaheard wrote: post #25

I don't understand why a bank's website is secure enough to transfer hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I can't cast a single vote online.

If it's going to make you feel better, your bank's website isn't as secure as you think too; it's not bulletproof.

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

#144

Post by Ill_ban_myself » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #142

Ill_ban_myself wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Well then. I am explicitly not shutting you down. I shared my views and why. I encouraged you to do the same. For instance, one cheap and obvious way to improve uitilityof exit polling would be to implement compulsory voting. Also, please work on a campaign. To the best of my knowledge, modern campaigns don't rely much on polling. Most effort is put into GOTV (voter identification and balloting chasing). Edit: Oops.…

At the danger of DOX'ing myself I'll just say I was a hair's breadth from closing the loop on full online voter registration in 2008 but apparently local offices are not REQUIRED to accept faxed registrations and might FORGET to change the toner or turn them on.

This is not my first brush with radical voting ideas and I'm not afraid to put them into practice when legal signs off :-p

These days I settle for election judging. Isn't that a scary thought?

You should google project Houdini, narwhal, and orca

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

#145

Post by bobthepanda » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 10:15 PM UTC

Ill_ban_myself wrote: post #138

reaperducer wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> No one is going to pay you to tick the organ donor box

> World governments and wealthy private interests are right now paying huge sums of money

You are describing a different problem than the one the parent comment is describing. The latter is lobbying, which can be prevented through legal restrictions and auditing to make sure those restrictions are being adhered to.

The former is outright vote-buying. People who are looking for money can, and will sell their votes for money, goods, or jobs. This happens in less rigorous democracies like India today. This happened in the US as well with the old-time patronage machines in big cities. Even if you don't necessarily need to sell your vote to get any job, you might lose a job offer to someone else who was willing to demonstrate that they voted "correctly".

The existence of one problem does not minimize the other, and we should seek to strike as many impurities from the process as possible, rather than trading one devil for another.

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

#146

Post by lukifer » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 10:23 PM UTC

anon463637 wrote: post #66

lukifer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm in total agreement, and think that this is likely a bad idea, doesn't the same problem exist with mail-in voting? An abusive party can hover over your shoulder while filling it out, and then walk you to the mailbox.

There's no solving infrequent social problems with technology, only socio-politically. I'm sure it does happen to a few people, but it sounds extremely rare. At least a mail-in ballot usually has a "receipt," (that serial number thing that's torn off at the top/bottom) although it does little to show or prove a vote was counted, especially with the subjectiveness of interpreting handwritten marks. The bigger problem…

+1 for election day as a national holiday; I'd even go so far as to make voting mandatory (with support for blank protest ballots, health/circumstance exemptions, etc).

That said, while the RFID system you describe seems achievable (and clearly an improvement over closed-source easily-hackable voting machines), I think it misses an important component of a democratic process: voter trust. Even if the tech is fully auditable, requiring the average voter to trust an elite technological caste does reduce trust, compared to pen and paper, which are auditable by the vast majority of citizens.

Also, the RFID can't be the only mechanism; having a fixed address can be used for authorizing identity (as with mail-in ballots), but is not and should not be a requirement to vote.

At any rate, I agree that technology is no silver bullet; solutions should be sociopolitical first, and technology is merely a tool to that end. I do think there are worthwhile innovations to consider; if anything, I'd like to disrupt polling moreso than voting, which I think has a surprising political influence both during and between election cycles, and yet which we outsource to private media companies with their own biases and incentives. If we could crack the problem of distributed identity that is resistant to Sybil attacks, we could have ongoing/persistent voting, liquid voting, public choice economics, etc, enabling more fluid feedback loops with our representatives (and maybe someday, even "pass-through" representative direct democracy).

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

#147

Post by Ill_ban_myself » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 10:26 PM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #145

Ill_ban_myself wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> No one is going to pay you to tick the organ donor box > World governments and wealthy private interests are right now paying huge sums of money You are describing a different problem than the one the parent comment is describing. The latter is lobbying, which can be prevented through legal restrictions and auditing to make sure those restrictions are being adhered to. The former is outright vote-buying. People who…

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, only the cost and timeline for a grassroots effort to prevent disaster. If we leave this up to local parties to solve our great grandchildren will be having the same argument

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

#148

Post by SamReidHughes » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 10:26 PM UTC

Beldin wrote: post #117

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…

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…

Keep in mind, democracy functioned in America for about a century without secret ballots.

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

#149

Post by usrusr » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

skue wrote: post #9

This is for a voluntary county board position without regulatory power that by statute needs to be elected by March when no one is paying attention. So someone decided to try this out. OTOH, the WA Sec. of State opposes mobile/online elections due to security concerns, as does her upcoming political opponent [1] and FWIW the Seattle Times recently wrote an Editorial also opposing the practice. [2] Bottom line, this h…

The root of the problem this "voter convenience at any cost" approach is trying to solve is that positions that low maybe shouldn't be assigned by vote at all. Vote for presidents, legislators and mayors, but you have to stop doing elections at some point before reaching the office of vice janitor of the public library. Very low voter turnout is an indicator that you are close to that point.

And I'm not just talking election pragmatics here, I'm also convinced that lower offices will on average see less abuse if given to career bureaucrats than if given to people who invest the effort of running in an election for an uncertain chance to get - whatever they were hoping for. It's more likely to be worth the effort for the self-serving type.

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

#150

Post by scarejunba » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 10:52 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…

Try it. They'll defraud you by overriding the vote in person.