E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
Posted Jan 29, 2020 7:08 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: E-vote advocates still don't get it... by chatcannon
Parent article: Cryptography and elections
A $50 used smartphone will be able to run any realistic election software. Including smartphones distributed through the government's "Lifeline" program (that rightwing nutters used to call "Obamaphones", I guess it's "Trumpphone" now).
> adding some bogus facial recognition "for extra security" which fails to recognise black faces
This will not work for more than 1 election cycle. People will complain, lawsuits will follow, software will get fixed.
And unlike real polling places, software will need to be fixed ONCE, not across hundreds of counties.
> under-speccing the servers so that people who try to vote at peak times get network failures
Voting takes about 5 minutes. I guess last minute rush will be problematic, but even a minimum wage cashier can get a 15 minute break.
Electronic voting will help to solve turnout problem.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 8:37 UTC (Wed)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
[Link] (8 responses)
In NZ employers are required to give you at least two hours off work on election day; that might have affected her answer.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 9:02 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (5 responses)
This is compounded by the complicated nature of voting in the US. You not only elect the president but also school board, prosecutors, judges, local councilpersons and vote on various proposals. Simply browsing the options can easily take 20 minutes.
Also, splitting complicated elections into multiple single-issue elections will help a lot. It's way easier to dedicate 10 minutes 5 times a year to voting than 50 minutes 1 time a year.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 10:29 UTC (Wed)
by idrys (subscriber, #4347)
[Link]
I always find it odd when elections are not held on Sunday/whatever-weekday-holds-that-role, so that the majority of people won't need to take time off work to vote...
> This is compounded by the complicated nature of voting in the US. You not only elect the president but also school board, prosecutors, judges, local councilpersons and vote on various proposals. Simply browsing the options can easily take 20 minutes.
Local elections where I live are very complicated as well: While I can simply vote for a list, I can also split 60 votes between candidates from different lists and give them 1 to 3 votes (as long as I don't give out more than 60 votes). The solution here was that they sent everyone the voting sheets beforehand and you had to bring them with you to the voting station, already filled out. Where my parents live, they sent everyone the voting sheets marked as not valid, and you had to fill out the real sheets in the booth.
This has some drawbacks, but they are the same as for voting by mail.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 20:35 UTC (Wed)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (3 responses)
This is a political problem rather than a technical one. We could easily eliminate those long queues just by providing more resources to busy precincts or by splitting them up and having more polling places. That doesn't happen because one of our political parties knows it does badly in those places and deliberately fails to provide them with enough resources in order to make voting as inconvenient as possible for the people there. It's very hard to have a good voting system when one of your political parties doesn't want every eligible voter to vote.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 21:13 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (2 responses)
e-Voting can be done centrally.
There is a good precedent in the recent history - the healthcare exchanges run by the Federal government in disease-loving states.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 2:02 UTC (Fri)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link]
You're just describing how the problem is political rather than technical. We could solve it politically. For example, we could pass a new voting rights act that required a minimum number of voting booths and poll workers per registered voter in a precinct, or which required the local authority to increase resources for any polling place that had long wait times. We haven't done those things because the politicians who benefit from voting being difficult are fighting to keep it that way. Those same politicians would also fight against an attempt to require e-voting.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 11:17 UTC (Fri)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
There's no real election authority in the US anymore that can force these changes.
It turns out that in the US, even federal-level elections are being run by the individual states, by design, and this is something that the states are quite particular about. For example, for presidential elections the US constitution explains how many votes a state has in the electoral college, but it leaves it completely up to the states to decide exactly who they send. (Most states operate a “winner takes all” system where whoever gets the most votes at state level governs all of that state's votes in the electoral college, which is why “swing states” where the race is very tight get so much attention from the campaigns.)
The federal government had to jump through a bunch of flaming hoops to get Obamacare sorted out, because healthcare is technically not something the US Congress is supposed to control. Doing the same thing with elections would be at least as difficult.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 11:42 UTC (Wed)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jan 29, 2020 13:44 UTC (Wed)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link]
Then again, we don't have elections here on weekends either, so you have to do it next to your work.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 15:53 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (1 responses)
Electronic voting will help to solve turnout problem.
That's not a settled question.
I don't think voter turnout is low because of a lack of e-voting. I think it's low because people are cynical about the whole process. That's a much harder problem to fix. When I observe US politics, it's frankly hard for me to see how anyone can have any faith in the system at this point.
Posted Feb 1, 2020 20:11 UTC (Sat)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
From the outside it doesn't look much different to regimes like Russia or Iran. That includes targeting demographics in a very literal sense to deter them from voting.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 19:26 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
The underlying problems are social, not technical.
A $50 used smartphone will not be certified by the election authorities - the hardware you use must be certified, and hey, only high end hardware is certified, so sad, too bad. If anyone cares enough, they can pony up the $10m or so to get a device certified, but it's per-device, and the list of which hardware the authorities have certified does not tell you which ones they did for free, and which ones were paid for.
The facial recognition won't outright fail to recognise black faces; it'll just be bad at it unless the lighting is just so. When people complain, you demonstrate it in good conditions (showing that it copes just fine with black faces), and argue that it doesn't fail, it's just that people aren't co-operating. If that doesn't get rid of the outcry, allow people to use passport-grade ID to bypass the recognition thing; it happens that possession of such ID is biased against blacks, but hey.
The point is that when you're rigging an election, you make sure that all of the things you do sound reasonable, and look reasonable when in test conditions, but break down on the day.
Additionally, you can unlawfully monitor what's going on with an election, and blantantly break the election if one voting route is going "wrong"; if e-voting is mostly voting for the "wrong" candidate, you inject a large number of random votes into the e-voting system, for example, making it impossible to tell which votes were real.
The evidence from Estonia is that e-voting does not solve the turnout problem; the only solution that's been found so far is to combine compulsory voting, paid time off to go and vote, and a way to indicate that you have considered the ballot and chosen to abstain.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 14:27 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
This will not work for more than 1 election cycle. People will complain, lawsuits will follow, software will get fixed.
Ah, such refreshing naiveté! Because politicians who underhandedly win elections never get to pick the judges who would adjudicate these cases, ever.
And unlike real polling places, software will need to be fixed ONCE, not across hundreds of counties.
Ah, such refreshing naiveté! Because we all know software has only one bug, ever. And never has back-doors, ever. And fixes are never wrong, ever.
The thing is, nobody has pointed out a realistic way to hack paper elections as they are conducted in Canada. So no technical fix has been needed.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
And lots of places have long queues for voting.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
But this has to happen among several hundred counties in multiple states, independently of each other. There's no real election authority in the US anymore that can force these changes.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
But this has to happen among several hundred counties in multiple states, independently of each other. There's no real election authority in the US anymore that can force these changes.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...