181–190 of 237 posts
The amount of anti-free-software FUD in this thread is staggering. Did Microsoft buy off all of you?
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Works fine in the UK, voter fraud is tricky (although there have been cases with postal votes) when there's a piece of paper that can be physically counted again. Very hard to defraud if you are in, purely for example, Russia.
Lots of EU nationals living in UK who have no right to vote. But they are physically in UK. I think vast majority of them would never think about fraudulently voting. But think about it logically, if voter ID is not required than it is easier to fraudulently vote. That seems logical to me. Do you have counter argument?
Can you please walk me through a scenario for how someone could commit voting fraud in a way that would be stopped by a voter ID? The only one I can think of is saying you are someone else in your community, like your neighbor... but they are going to find that out right away when your actual neighbor goes to try to vote and finds out someone else has already voted in their name.
How would you commit your fraud?
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Voting still requires registration, which requires eligibility. At this point, you are also checked for uniqueness, so you can't just keep moving house to get more and more votes. You can't just turn up at any polling station and say "give me a ballot paper", you turn up at the right polling station for your address and tell them your name and address. They cross you off the list and if the same person tries to vote…
Different locations do it differently. I know of one are where all you need is someone with an ID to vouch that you are a resident of that area and you can register (under any name you want) and vote. Poll watchers have told me about cases where a bus shows up one person vouches for everybody on the bus and so they vote. They are sure it is fraud, but nothing can be done about it. If it is true or not I don't know, b…
> If it is true or not I don't know, but is a real concern if so.
This is the most important part of your post. The same could be said of sea monsters and getting stuck if the wind changes when you're pulling a funny face.
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Voting still requires registration, which requires eligibility. At this point, you are also checked for uniqueness, so you can't just keep moving house to get more and more votes. You can't just turn up at any polling station and say "give me a ballot paper", you turn up at the right polling station for your address and tell them your name and address. They cross you off the list and if the same person tries to vote…
Different locations do it differently. I know of one are where all you need is someone with an ID to vouch that you are a resident of that area and you can register (under any name you want) and vote. Poll watchers have told me about cases where a bus shows up one person vouches for everybody on the bus and so they vote. They are sure it is fraud, but nothing can be done about it. If it is true or not I don't know, b…
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Came here to say that. Transparent voting boxes, ballots in envelopes, manual redundant counting done by people, usually voter who were nicely asked if they can come help back in the evening. That's what we use in France, you get the official result a few hours after the closing of the voting stations. The whole process is watchable, from the sealing of the box the morning to the count in the end and parties send obs…
Or make voting last multiple days instead of just one.
Seriously, is it harder to make a daily holiday and a transparent process than landing a man on the moon with tech from the 60s?
No. To protect voting, don't use software. Everyone needs to be able to _understand_ as well as be able to verify that they successfully voted. Besides the issues with what software the machine is actually running, most people cannot comprehend or understand that software - even if it is open source. That is not acceptable for an open democratic society, or to sustaining it. In this particular situation it should not…
Voting with paper does not scale. You can't make people vote everyday for example, which is required if you'd like to implement direct democracy. On the other hand, with direct democracy, the stakes are lower for each vote. So there is less incentive to manipulate the vote. So it makes sense to use e-voting for direct democracy. In the end the voting mechanism in democracy is not really about precision, it's more abo…
Yes, it does, it just scales less well than electronic/internet voting. Each voting method (and arguably, voting system) have their + and - but paper voting has the most important benefit. Specifically, the most important one is that whilst counting we have the benefit of many eyes watching over (one of the things NSA improved post-Snowden). I know this first hand as I have participated as vote counter in the 2017 Dutch election on March 15 (can recommend volunteering for the educational experience and ability to observe alone, plus it can be seen as a civil duty). Our team consisted of approx 8 or 9 volunteers. How many people audit the source code? The patches? The build process? The hardware? Are those random people? Are computer experts biased? You don't need to be intelligent or even familiar with computers to count paper votes. You do have to be a computer expert [2] to audit the software or hardware.
> You can't make people vote everyday for example, which is required if you'd like to implement direct democracy.
I'd rather have authentic results for a few elections than have many elections with a higher potential of being bogus.
We should also not neglect that a direct democracy can be dangerously manipulated in times of fake news. The same is true with 2 or 3 elections every 4 years, but the vulnerable choke points are higher in a direct democracy.
Finally, a disadvantage is that you got so many elections that people are tired of elections. I don't know the scientific name for this phenomenon but I know an analogy: visit a supermarket and have a look at all the brands for product X where X can be peanut butter, ice cream, or beer. Result: brand loyalty. So people are gonna vote e.g. 'peanut butter' (I don't wanna name a realistic example to avoid reader assuming I'm partisan) in each of those direct democracy elections w/o looking further. Do not want!
There's an adagium in computerland "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". Paper voting isn't broken, it has a proven track record.
PS: For anyone who is interested in the history of voting security and the risks of electronic & internet voting I can recommend the course "Securing Digital Democracy" by J. Alex Halderman (one of the researchers in the Diebold affair some 15 years ago) on Coursera [1].
[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/digital-democracy
[2] Not sure on a better term here. Computer expert is an inaccurate global term; what is required is a rather specific skillset. Perhaps programmer or hardware hacker is more accurate. But even then programmer doesn't tell us about which programming languages are mastered, and hardware hacker is equally vague. You get the gist.
Electronic voting is a bad idea and I'd be suspicious on anyone trying to promote it. How can you know that even if the source code for the voting machine is open, the voting machine is running the exact same source code? How can you know nobody has tampered the code the instance is running? I'm glad my country is still running on paper ballots and glad we require voter ID.
Came here to say that. Transparent voting boxes, ballots in envelopes, manual redundant counting done by people, usually voter who were nicely asked if they can come help back in the evening. That's what we use in France, you get the official result a few hours after the closing of the voting stations. The whole process is watchable, from the sealing of the box the morning to the count in the end and parties send obs…
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Why do something simple, when we can do something complicated instead?
Well if your country is doing digital elections without citizen signatures and block chain, then chances are you live in a corrupt country. :p
Electronic voting is a bad idea and I'd be suspicious on anyone trying to promote it. How can you know that even if the source code for the voting machine is open, the voting machine is running the exact same source code? How can you know nobody has tampered the code the instance is running? I'm glad my country is still running on paper ballots and glad we require voter ID.
Came here to say that. Transparent voting boxes, ballots in envelopes, manual redundant counting done by people, usually voter who were nicely asked if they can come help back in the evening. That's what we use in France, you get the official result a few hours after the closing of the voting stations. The whole process is watchable, from the sealing of the box the morning to the count in the end and parties send obs…
Historical reasons: http://www.whytuesday.org/answer/
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With electronic banking I can verify that my money are where they should be. With electronic voting, I can't be sure my vote got counted, and even less sure others weren't tampered with.
That's right. And now do both things _publicly_! For money (or others things you own) you will need a Torrens-like title system with a replicated database among your fellow-citizens. For voting - it will be a database replicated on DVDs (or something that can be read, say, by a microscope:) You may be astonished how secure that will be.