It would be great if we could safely vote online. Not only would it be convenient, it would also mean that a whole bunch of longstanding, very important, extremely difficult computer science problems had been solved. which would make all sorts of useful-but-currently-impossible things beyond voting possible, too.
But unfortunately, those problems haven't been solved (and may well never be). So we can't. Sorry.
This would be particularly troublesome amongst religious groups that believe the wife should be subservient to the husband and where as a matter of faith the husband would essentially vote for the wife .
Octavia E. Butler wrote about the hazards of e-voting.
There's a scene in "Parable of the Sower" where the master of the house observes as his domestic servants all vote "correctly" online.
Postmaster DeJoy coerced employees into donating to the GOP.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/06/politics/dejoy-gop-fundraiser-contributions/index.html
In an increasingly inequitous America coerced voting becomes more and more widespread.
Voter intimidation gets easier with e-voting.
https://medium.com/votem/voter-coercion-in-context-5c3df172e593
@Npars01 Indeed, and that's a risk of all forms of remote voting, whether via a computer or mail-in ballot. That risk is ultimately a tradeoff between accessibility and resistance to coercion, and that's ultimately a public policy question independent of the technology itself.
But submission of ballots over the internet also introduces technology problem that we don't know how to solve, even if we wanted to.
Using technology to vote may risk disenfranchisement of the homeless, the poor, seniors, immigrants, illiterate, dyslexic, blind etc.
Technical solutions assumes everyone has access and education to use it.
Not everyone has a phone or computer or internet access.
Not everyone reads English well enough to use technology.
My neighbor has an 80 year old Italian-immigrant grandmother with cataracts who votes regularly but balks at text messaging.
Agreed.
There are technological solutions to election security that are available and worth pursuing.
Protecting election infrastructure becomes even more critical as Republican billionaire donors fund intimidation & attacks on election workers, drop boxes, the USPS, voting machines, voter registration, and ballot handling.
@mattblaze Hello from the Netherlands. Everything government is online here, totally accessible, *except* voting, because the experts recommended against it.
Everyone has free government supplied ID you can get replaced in an instant. The government sends you a certificate weeks in advance. You bring it to one of the polls, with ID, and vote with a pencil.
I didn't even know I was eligible to vote (municipally) because I wasn't yet Dutch until the cert arrived.
@mattblaze Just to be clear to everyone who is replying (not to Matt Blaze, he is very well aware of this): there are a ton of things we do online that people often point to in order to ask "why not voting?".
Amongst others:
- The threat model is different
- The risks are different
- Possible mitigations are different.
E.g.: we can reimburse a financial loss which can mitigate a ton of things. We do not know how to reimburse your vote.
@mattblaze As Matt Blaze often rightly points out, elections are complex and consist of many more processes than just casting a vote.
But even for that one aspect, we're not really sure how to do it online in a way to guarantees the strict requirements we'd like to have, in the (very hostile) environment of the internet.
Matt Blaze
Michael A. Specter
ChuckMcA
Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴♂️📷 🗺️
JP Etcheber
Nicole Parsons
Chris is.
Tom Ritchford
Hugo Jonker
Cykonot