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Validating Voters For Open Source Governance, In Person
An anonymous reader writes "As we (very gradually) move away from feudal, leader-based forms of governance to collaborative and open source governance, some interesting new issues arise. The biggest is usually user authentication: how can we avoid sock-puppets and spammers from overtaking the voting process? Enter the concept of the streetwiki, an ingenious system for having humans validate their physical neighbors. Bleeding-edge social organization meets ancient validation protocol."
At least in California, there's no requirement for ID (nor should there be).. however, you do have to announce your name and address out loud to the election official at the poll before they let you sign in. (some people find this weird.. you're working the polls, and people come in and just show you their sample ballot or ID, and you tell them.. gotta say it out loud)..
The idea is that a poll watcher (a neighbor, for instance) could, at that time, say, "hey, that isn't John Smith who lives on Cherry Lane", triggering a provisional vote for that person. The provisional ballot has a signature on it and gets comared against the signature on file at the county.
Is the biggest problem truly voter identification, rather than voter education?
On another note, once people don't have leaders to blame, will we see increased societal polarization? Right now, hippie liberal wiener in Boston isn't blamed for abortion laws, just as frothing at the mouth nutjob conservative in New Mexico isn't blamed for gun laws. What sort of societal conflict would we see if neighbours, or at least neighbouring states, disagree on divisive issues?
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
I eventually want to write a piece of software which allows for direct democracy. Everyone who has a computer or goes to the library can vote on bills, and tell their figure head officials how to act. You still need people as acting officials because sticking a robot in the UN is kinda silly for example. This isn't to change the US government, but if you have a piece of software that acts as direct democracy with customizable features for a constitution, any time some people overthrow their oppressive government, they could just go,"Hey, lets install direct democracy."
Anyway the problems I've run across is:
You need to authenticate users manually, so maybe the authenticator cards are good for people so stolen passwords can't stop you.
But the bigger problem will be people doing MTM attacks and changing votes, or maybe hacking the system from out of the country, or buying citizen's voting rights.
The main solution for some problems is:
You need your own closed Internet in your country, a secure web, where people from outside the Internet can't log in.
Sure sometimes someone will tap into the line on the telephone pole for MTM, but if you stop it, they get prison time.
You gotta limit what a standard citizen's client can get to also, or people could just route from the internet to client to into the system.
There are a WHOLE HOST of problems though... more than I can even imagine. There is just about no greater honeypot to a hacker than to become a leader of a country. The way I'm going to go about it involves not working on the security issues at first, but just working on the direct democracy system, so when the security issues can be addressed, the system could be altered or rewritten when it happens. Just having something as proof of concept is better than nothing at all.
The street based community wiki seems pretty smart. It was better than my plan to start locally and get people to sign up in person, and for us to hand them a password.
Probs is I have a few projects on my plate before I go back to this system again. If someone wants to start an open source form of government, I'm sure some country down the line will have a revolution and might be interested. So any work done here will be of benefit in the future.
God spoke to me
The way this works (as I understand it, simplified), is people eventually notice sock-puppets, un-trust them, and then the sock-puppets live off in their own un-trusted world that no one trusts.
That might work on a fairly neutral topic, but imagine you notice there are sock-puppets who agree with your opinion on abortion, are you going to un-trust them, or are you going to create more yourself? After all, it's a matter of life-or-death, what are a few bogus accounts when such an important principle (insert any principle you believe strongly) is on the line??
This plan doesn't seem to account that people would be willing to accept sock-puppets that agree with them. Also doesn't seem to realize that I have better things to do with my time than constantly update my 'trusted' list.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Unfortunately it's not so much a matter of the ID itself as the onerous conditions that the Republican party wants to put on getting voter ID. Poor people don't always have a residence they've been at for a year along with three bills and other forms of ID.
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
What is it with this idea that everyone has an obligation to vote and that making voting as easy as possible is automatically a good thing? I think it is immoral to vote when you don't understand the first thing about the candidates or the issues involved, and if you don't have time to get educated about it, then you should sit it out. At least picking a representative has the advantage that any candidate who gets as far as a major election has by then been at least somewhat vetted by the party organization, media etc and should in theory have more of a clue than the 'average' voter. Having EVERYBODY vote on whether the "2011 US bilateral investment treaty with Uruguay" should be signed or not, what percentage of the mortgage insurance premiums should be deductible from the tax return, and every other one of the million issues that come up to the legislators every year, would make great comedy but horrible governance.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.