Slashdot Mirror
Out With E-Voting, In With M-Voting
InternetVoting writes "The ever technology forward nation sometimes known as 'E-stonia' after recently performing the world's first national Internet election are already leaving e-voting behind. Estonia is now considering voting from mobile phones using SIM cards as identification, dubbed 'm-voting.' From the article: 'Mobile ID is more convenient in that one does not have to attach a special ID card reader to one's computer. A cell phone performs the functions of an ID card and card reader at one and the same time.'"
I have 8 sim cards.
Does that mean I get 8 votes?
No vote.
We tried this in the UK, but for some reason the votes were still being counted 3 hours after the results were announced.
liqbase
A major problem with both mVoting and voting over the internet is that the 'secret ballot' is sacrificed. It becomes very easy for this create problems like the US had in the 1800s.
For example, your boss can tell you to vote while he is watching. If you don't vote
the way that he wants he will fire you.
For this reason I am against internet voting and mVoting.
Follow my election reform blog at AllAboutVoting.com
The fact that SIM cards would have to be registered with the government carries with it some degree of invasion of privacy. However, as long as the government allows people to own SIM cards that weren't registered with the government as voting-enabled cards.
In the US, we would also have to have a mechanism for people not owning mobile phones to vote (I know it's hard for a /.'er to envision any reason a person would not have one). The trivial way to do this would be to have people who don't own phones be able to go to a voting place and get a assigned a SIM chip, which could either be used as an insert into any phone (hey, can I borrow your phone to vote?) or else could be taken to a polling place and used in a specially equipped voting booth.
The annoying problem I see with this is that it pretty much removes the last traces of privacy for voting. It's actually really useful to democracy that ballots should be secret. This is, unfortunately, already becoming a thing of the past, with the proliferation of absentee ballots that have no longer become the voting method of last resort, but the voting method of (in some cases) first resort. Voting should be private, not public-- not your boss, not your friends, and not the friendly guy who says "I'll give you ten bucks if you vote the way I ask-- none of these should not be able to say, "hey, let me watch while you vote so I can see who you voted for."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
8 years of post secondary education would be pointless...I've known some extremely well educated people I wouldn't want anywhere near the government, and I've known some people who didn't finish high school who wouldn't bother me a bit.
Likewise "Volunteers" would still be people who really want to exert control over others. This is the big problem already. Anyone who wants to be in charge is going to be suspect. Better to set up a system to pick a random sampling of people from all over and MAKE them serve...That should keep the majority from having any desire to be there at all. Then make all laws have to be renewed every decade, and all new laws need a supermajority to pass, and are subject to ratification in yearly nationwide elections.
Always amuses me to see how many people correlate education with superiority. I'll side with Heinlein on that one...Better to have military service as a prerequisite for citizenship, because then, at least, the citizens would have to have shown themselves willing put themselves at the service of the country, even to the point of losing their lives, before they could exercise their franchise. Education says nothing about the person so educated.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Instead of a representative government, where we periodically vote for representatives and send them to Washington, I suggest a government of the people, by the people, who have cellphones. A government of cell towers situated along superhighways would gather a representative sample of Americans and we can replace our arcane parliamentary procedures with wireless ones, where the power is held by the people, as they drive past particular points on the road.
Think of how convenient that would be. You could vote to condemn a newspaper ad from the comfort of your car as you drive to work. I can't tell you how many times I've needed to do that. Because if I say "zero" it undercuts my argument.
But you ask, how would we ever pay for such a wonderful system? That's easy. Just sell it to a bunch of stupid investors as "web 2.0 style socialization".
This would be a very sophisticated form of government for a large democracy. Smaller ones could use Bluetooth.
Always amuses me to see how many people correlate education with superiority. I'll side with Heinlein on that one...Better to have military service as a prerequisite for citizenship, because then, at least, the citizens would have to have shown themselves willing put themselves at the service of the country, even to the point of losing their lives, before they could exercise their franchise. Education says nothing about the person so educated.
I'm all for the slashdot moderator political system. The only one who can vote are the politically inactive and in good standing with the community (ie never rand for council, no arrests for any felonies). They're picked at random given 5 votes and the freedom to exercise such a vote as they please. Stating a public opinion that can be linked back to you about a particular vote disqualifies you. You can state such a opinion anonymously.
It can't be any worse then the current system.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
hEY, CAN i BORROW YOUR vOTE,.. ER UM i MEaN PHONE.. I need to call my mom.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
DDoSed the entire country of Estonia because they moved a stupid World War II era statue (ehem, i mean dearly important statue, dear any Russian hackers reading this comment), what Estonia is going to get from this scheme is Lenin being elected their next president, coming in second place will be Ivan Drago from Rocky IV, and coming in third place will be Boris Badenov from Rocky and Bullwinkle
voting should be on paper. even mechanical voting is too susceptible to tampering. electronic voting? cell phone voting? are you kidding? yes, simple paper ballots can be messed with too, but anything more technological than simple paper ballots merely introduces more attack vectors... orders of magnitude more attack vectors the more unnecessarily technofetishized you get, such as with electronic voting
democracy is too important and voting is really striaghtforward. there is no need to make it more complicated than scribble a mark on a piece of paper and dropping it in a box, especially when you risk the generla public losing confidence in their own government. all countries, no matter how technophilic and rich, should vote with paper ballots
stupid, bad idea Estonia
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"We're going to give all our votes to some guy you've never met, who will count them with nobody else watching, and whose answers we will trust completely. You'll never see the original votes again, but if you want a recount he'll be happy to tell you the same numbers twice."
"What! That's outrageous! Why the possibilities for corruption are so..."
"The guy will use a computer."
"Oh, well, that's okay then."
Better to have military service as a prerequisite for citizenship, because then, at least, the citizens would have to have shown themselves willing put themselves at the service of the country
Wow, what a good idea. You've got to prove that you're willing to be killed for the government of the land you live on. I mean, you can't prove your citizenship by any other means, right?
The problem with evoting is that computer systems are, as any /.r knows, an easy lay. Anyone here going to say that he or she can design a completely secure voting system, post it on here, and not find it cracked by next login?
The privacy concerns are trivial compared to concerns about the manipulation of data.
Yeah ok, I voted through my cellphone for deregulation of the cellphone markets - let's make them put their money where their mouth is. And I lost. I must be in the minority!
God bless Democracy. May it rest in peace.
I'm serious. We know from experiments in Estonia and Switzerland and elsewhere that e-voting is convenient. M-voting will probably be even more so.
We also know that there are fundamental, perhaps irremediable problems with voting electronically and remotely. In particular:
Is democracy like shopping on Amazon, to be judged by its convenience and efficiency? Or is it something more important, and precious, than that?
I think that if people take democracy seriously, they should slow down and ask these questions a bit more. If it means a few more years of voting the boring manual way, perhaps that will be for good reasons.
Internet and mobile phone voting in the EU, where the data retention directive will soon be implemented in every member state allowing unprecedented charting and tracing of everyone's internet and phone communications? No thank you. I'll step behind the curtain in the ballot office, put my vote in the anonymous envelope and watch the people behind the desk drop it in the box, just like in all previous elections.
Any election method where the vote can't be guaranteed to be secret (because you are allowed to vote somewhere where someone can force you to let him watch you do it) or anonymous (because mobile phones and internet connections can not be trusted) is open to abuse.
Estonia is a collective noun, so in British English using the plural verb form is completely correct.
These systems concentrate on the ability to conduct a ballot.
But the secrecy of the ballot is equally important. It is not just a side-issue. Even postal voting defies the right to secret ballot. How do you ensure the right to secrecy from your family or peer group, or undue pressure therefrom, if the place of voting is not controlled?
I may be a Luddite but such fundamentals are best left un-technoligised. Go back to paper ballots.
DISCLAIMER: I am as pro-american as one can be. I am also a citizen from the European Union.
The poor are never counted when one politician makes a decision. That is why they promise and lie.
The politicians ASK the poor for the votes, so they can get into power. I think the film that Eddie Murphy made about getting into congress is pretty much accurate. The problem is not GETTING into power, is being strong enough to lobby the elected into doing one's will. And let's face it, either is Europe or US, the system is quite favourable to those that own land, being the new land access to the media and the opinion makers. Which is clearly something an indigent or a poor has not.
Don't even try to get me started about Africa. I have lived in RDC (old Zaire) and Cameroon. Those two countries do have elections, which they call democratic elections too.
Francisco