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?
We tried this in the UK, but for some reason the votes were still being counted 3 hours after the results were announced.
liqbase
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
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. ...and in Estonia, this is solved by allowing you to change your vote as many times as you wish until the election day, and on that day you can still drop traditional ballot which overrides the e-vote.
http://www.vvk.ee/elektr/docs/Yldkirjeldus-eng.pdf has description of their system. Considering the confidentiality aspects, read especially pages 9 and 13.
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.
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."
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."
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.
Estonia is a collective noun, so in British English using the plural verb form is completely correct.