WA Election To Try Online Voting

AuMatar writes "According to the Seattle Times, the King Conservation District is going to allow online voting to combat chronic low turnouts. You can already view the voting portal. As a citizen of WA seriously concerned with politics, anything that completely removes a paper trail like this scares me. Luckily, this is probably the least important election in the state. I wonder if anyone will hack the election so 300% of voters vote for Firefly or Stephen Colbert or something."

Comments

Why the emphasis on turnout?

[Attila Dimedici]

I have never understood the emphasis on voter turnout. It is more important to have voters who understand (and care about) the issues being voted on than it is to have a large number of voters. Making it easier to vote does not improve the responsiveness of government to the voters, it actually does the reverse.
Of course if one examines the other policies supported by the "make it easier to vote" groups, one quickly realizes that they
want a larger number of poorly informed voters.

VoteBook!

[TaoPhoenix]

I'll ignore your sarcasm and raise you total seriousness. The big problem with voting right now is we're pitted against each other in a kind of prisoner's dilemma. But if we really applied social networking (Assuming no fraud for now) we could thrash it among ourselves to organize the nation's voters, where suddenly Democrat, Republican, Tea, Libertarian, & Green ALL find themselves bewildered on the streets as a really honest smart tech president cruises into office.

You know what's even worse?

[YA_Python_dev]

What's even worse is if you actually can determine someone's identity online, even if it's not 100% reliable. Because then someone somewhere can determine how people voted and all kind of shit will hit the fan.

But even a 100% perfect, secure, open source, pure gold, RMS-approved online voting system will have a fundamental flaw: people will be able to vote from a location (e.g. home) where others can see how they vote. This will enable criminal organizations to buy votes with money or threats and check that people actually vote the way they want.

The only way to prevent this is to force people to vote in only one location, the fucking voting booth, where they can and must cast their vote in secret. So even if criminals pay someone to vote for a certain candidate, they will never be certain that he/she actually voted for that candidate.

Any type of remote voting is fundamentally flawed. It's not about the implementation details, it's the basic concept that cannot work.

And, yes, this is an actual and real problem: when Italy tried remote voting by mail for Italians abroad in 2008, criminals literally went home-to-home to bribe and threaten people and collect votes. Everyone knows this, but still the Mafia got their candidate elected (Nicola Di Girolamo, for the record). Yes politics in Italy are shitty for a number of other reasons, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make life harder for criminals, here and elsewhere.

The people that cast 300% of the votes for Colbert with high-tech hacks are the least of anyone's problem. The criminals that move 1% of the votes with low-tech bribes to voters will destroy your democracy.