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Out With E-Voting, In With M-Voting

Posted by Zonk on from the has-to-be-safer-than-diebold dept.

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.'"

5 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. How about this... by Cap'nPedro · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have 8 sim cards.

    Does that mean I get 8 votes?

  2. Tried this in the UK by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Funny

    We tried this in the UK, but for some reason the votes were still being counted 3 hours after the results were announced.

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    liqbase :: faster than paper
  3. Re:This is a terrible idea. by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  4. considering Russian hackers by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

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    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  5. Since when did democracy need to be convenient? by blubadger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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:

    • Security: In a complex system, the potential for undetected fraud multiplies exponentially
    • Transparency: The right of the voter to check how a poll is conducted is somewhat compromised by a need to understand source code (this reached court in Switzerland)
    • Identity: It's obvious and also applies to postal voting, but how do you know who is really voting on that remote device?

    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.