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Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

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

#171

Post by alpb »

Gaelan wrote: post #157
alistairSH wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm missing something... how does mailing your vote allow somebody to demand that vote be exposed? If my employer asks me how or if I voted in VA (in-person paper), I tell him to fuck off. If my employer asks me how or if I voted in WA (mail-in paper), I tell him to fuck off.

In a state with in-person voting, if someone tells you they'll give you $50 to vote for their candidate, you can take the $50, go to the ballot box, and vote for the other person. They'll be none the wiser. In WA, on the other hand, they can watch you fill out your ballot and stick it in the mail before giving you the $50. As a WA resident, our system is certainly nice. Is that risk worth it? Meh, it probably is.

Pretty sure if someone is forcing you to vote for someone that's a crime in some local or federal code. You can also refuse to take 50$ and go vote in private?

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

#172

Post by humble_engineer »

I like the idea of paid volunteers going around with an iPad and helping homeless people high on meth register/vote in 15 minutes! This sounds great! Of course they will be told to vote for policies that help them live healthier, comfier lives...on the streets.

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

#174

Post by catalogia »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #141

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 week…

Compulsory voting only makes sense if you allow "I don't know" as an answer. There's no value in demanding an answer for me when I know I don't have an informed answer to give.

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

#175

Post by cookie_monsta »

catalogia wrote: post #174
cookie_monsta wrote: post #141

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 week…

Compulsory voting only makes sense if you allow "I don't know" as an answer. There's no value in demanding an answer for me when I know I don't have an informed answer to give.

Compulsory voting tends to mean that you're required to put a ballot into a box. You can fill it out properly, draw a smiley face on it or leave it blank. Nobody's checking your work.

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

#176

Post by joejerryronnie »

iudqnolq wrote: post #167
joejerryronnie wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait till they gamify electronic voting - "Congratulations, you've just earned your Junior Progressive badge! Vote for two more progressive candidates to level up!"

"they"? What makes you certain progressives will control election infrastructure? And the same officials who would set the text of the app currently oversee the descriptions of the issues on the ballot that each voter gets. Can you point to a single case of any progressive politician using their power to manipulate those descriptions? I don't believe any politician has done so in the last 50 years, from either party.…

I wasn’t calling out progressives in particular, just using that as an example. Feel free to swap out progressive with Trumpster or libertarian. This isn’t a critique of political manipulation or abuse. It’s a comment on where we’re going as a society. We’ll gladly accept things like this for just a bit more convenience and dopamine.

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

#177

Post by addicted »

venantius wrote: post #114
jimmaswell wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the WA Sec. of State opposes mobile/online elections due to security concerns, as does her upcoming political opponent" Sounds like nothing but a combination of thinly veiled voter suppression or technophobia, either of which should disqualify someone from public office in the eyes of an educated voter.

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.

This is fair enough, but the issue is that at least in the US, youre not actually replacing paper ballot voting in most cases.

The US currently has digital (often internet connected) polling booths, which bring all the security problems of mobile/net voting, and none of the benefits.

I would much rather have mobile voting, as opposed to the current widespread digital voting booths system. Ideally, of course, we'd want to go the paper ballot route for now.

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

#178

Post by alasdair_ »

catalogia wrote: post #168
alasdair_ wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To corrupt the vote, just offer some money for every empty ballot that gets sent to you to fill in and mail. There are a lot of people who would trade their ballot for a $20 bill.

Good luck scaling that far enough to make a difference, without at the same time broadcasting your intentions to everybody.

Just give a website address that displays a rotating physical address in Russia or China. Rely on the free PR from all the news stories about how terrible it is to scale with minimal "marketing" costs.

If you picked the right districts, it wouldn't even cost that much to tilt the votes in your favor. At $50/ballot you'd almost certainly get 11,000 extra votes in Michigan - enough to swing the state in the last election at a total cost of just over half a million dollars.

This ease of abuse is one of the many, many reasons that I support a single, national vote for president over per-state winner-take-all electoral college voting.

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

#179

Post by fg6hr »

jimmaswell wrote: post #112
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 WA Sec. of State opposes mobile/online elections due to security concerns, as does her upcoming political opponent" Sounds like nothing but a combination of thinly veiled voter suppression or technophobia, either of which should disqualify someone from public office in the eyes of an educated voter.

Here is an educated voter who wrote some tech standards and knows a good deal about all this encryption stuff. WA Sec. of State is absolutely right here. We can't secure online systems even when most parties want to make them secure: all these data leaks prove that. When stakes are high, such as the ability to influence voting, this online system will be broken and backdoored before it sees the light.

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

#180

Post by fg6hr »

alasdair_ wrote: post #155
bobthepanda wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ou…

To corrupt the vote, just offer some money for every empty ballot that gets sent to you to fill in and mail. There are a lot of people who would trade their ballot for a $20 bill.

Some of these $20 bills would get reported to FBI. The probability is tiny, but it grows exponentially with the number of participants.
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