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Ask Slashdot: How Would You Use Computers To Make Elections Better?
shanen writes: Regarding politics, is there anything that Americans agree on? If so, it's probably something negative like "The system is broken," or "The leading candidates are terrible," or even "Your state is a shithole." With all our fancy technology, what's going wrong? Our computers are creating problems, not solutions. For example, gerrymandering relies on fancy computers to rig the maps. Negative campaigning increasingly relies on computers to target the attacks on specific voters. Even international attacks exploit the internet to intrude into elections around the world. Here are three of my suggested solutions, though I can't imagine any of today's politicians would ever support anything along these lines:
(1) Guest voting: If you hate your district, you could vote in a neighboring district. The more they gerrymander, the less predictable the election results.
(2) Results-based weighting: The winning candidates get more voting power in the legislature, reflecting how many people actually voted for them. If you win a boring and uncontested election where few people vote, then part of your vote in the legislature would be transferred to the winners who also had more real votes.
(3) Negative voting: A voter could use an electronic ballot to make it explicit that the vote is negative, not positive. The candidate with the most positive or fewest negative votes still wins, but if the election has too many negative votes, then that "winner" would be penalized, perhaps with a half term rather than a full term.
What wild and crazy ideas do you have for using computers to make elections better, not worse?
(1) Guest voting: If you hate your district, you could vote in a neighboring district. The more they gerrymander, the less predictable the election results.
(2) Results-based weighting: The winning candidates get more voting power in the legislature, reflecting how many people actually voted for them. If you win a boring and uncontested election where few people vote, then part of your vote in the legislature would be transferred to the winners who also had more real votes.
(3) Negative voting: A voter could use an electronic ballot to make it explicit that the vote is negative, not positive. The candidate with the most positive or fewest negative votes still wins, but if the election has too many negative votes, then that "winner" would be penalized, perhaps with a half term rather than a full term.
What wild and crazy ideas do you have for using computers to make elections better, not worse?
I would not use computers! Paper ballot feed in to (Yes computer based) non connected totaling systems. Just my 2 cents ;)
Instead of voting for a candidate, have the electorate vote on a number of issues (combination of recent past issues and issues on the docket). Then take the average, and the candidate of the political party that is closest to the average, wins. Parties can do whatever they want to determine candidates.
Down side is that for those who already feel like voting is like busy homework, this will add to the load.
I'd would allow candidates to compete head to head in a series of video games for the amusement of the audience^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hvoters.
Computers would make this easier but are not required.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting
http://www.fairvote.org/rcv
Shouldn't be Involved" in our Elections AT ALL!
The more you breed the more you vote?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What? You mean the process that has delivered an almost 100% corrupt congress, the utter failure of the drug war, endless military adventurism with zero connection to significant national security issues, abject violation of the constitution by both legislators and the supreme court, Donald Shithole Trump (winner of an election he actually lost by 3m votes)...
Yeah, sure. Let's keep the system that gave us all that. After all, who knows what it'll give us tomorrow!
Seriously. There has yet to be an unhackable computer built, elections are too important to have any electronics involved.
I think that we could somehow leverage Blockchain technology from top to bottom, weâ(TM)d see a more realistic representation of voters. Votes can still be manipulated through gerrymandering and the like, but at least we would have real and transparent numbers on the other side of the equation.
More Republican trolling and deflection. No surprise here.
Trump wants to reduce immigration from 10 countries, which he labeled shitholes. All of these countries are predominantly inhabited by dark-skinned people. He then proceeded to say he wanted more people from places like Norway, which is a country that is predominantly white. He wants fewer dark-skinned people and more white people entering the United States. The sum of those remarks most definitely is racist.
As for the comment about countries being shitholes, it's unbecoming language of a President acting in an official capacity. It's also a foreign relations blunder because it strains foreign relations even more than Trump has already done.
Dude, it's racist to say places are shitholes!
Nah, it's only racist to call shitholes shitholes.
Watson For President
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
I'd like to see it where candidates running for President, for example, all get voted on. The top vote getter is President, the second most vote-getter is the Vice President, etc.
I would program them to recognize and kill humans that try to computerize elections.
I would go even further. If you live off the taxpayers (and this includes government employees and elected politicians), no vote for you. The only exception would be members of the armed forces.
It would be similar to a person recusing themselves because of a vested interest.
The electorate are always going to be emotional, easily fooled and right stupid. Look at the average person and then realize half the people are dumber than him. The best you can hope for is to have a way to remove an incompetent government after 4 or 5 years. The best democracies are ones where people successfully remove a bad party and don't have it return unless it seriously changes it's way. These are countries where new parties can be created and eventually form the government. Poor democracies are ones where the government doesn't change, switches back and forth between two parties with no hope of a third party forming, or countries with endless coalitions where the same people stay in government forever.
Go back to a republic - where only land owners get to vote. Then use computers to adjust the weight of each vote based on how much land you own.
Use an algorithm to create congressional districts with census data so each district has approx. the same amount of possible voters and the smallest circumference. No more rigging to create safe districts for either party with ridiculous borders.
No... no, it's not. If places in Africa are not shitholes, please enlighten us as to why they aren't.
We have been letting things slide in the USA to the point some electronic voting systems have no paper trail at all. Some paper records are deleted or destroyed, even illegally. There is talk of needing fancy ID and who the hell knows how/if your vote counted afterward.
Many think what we need is a permenant voting record for all citizens to view on everyone for all elections using something like pseudo-ids that are re-anonymized for each election. We need a tamper proof way to see that our votes were counted right and to ensure transparency. We need a way to secure voting, but don't want to make an ID law. We would even maybe want it open source for auditing and security purposes
We can already do this with blockchain, perhaps it's time to bring voting into the 21st century without fully giving in to a dystopian future.
How would this account for bailed out bankers or for weapon industry employers?
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Add a short set of very simple, objective questions to the start of the ballot and use it to weight results.
The objective would be to test whether a voter is minimally informed, not to test intelligence.
Questions could range from "who is the current President?" (which would be missed by many even today) to "which year had higher violent crime per capita in the US, 1991 or 2014?" (1991 was over double 2014 so though the magnitude might be arguable the fact of a higher crime rate in 1991 is not).
The results could be used to weight the vote. If you don't even know who the current President is, your vote may not even reflect your own idea of your best interest and is likely to be highly vulnerable to manipulation.
Program them such that only those measures and candidates that received 100% of the vote could be elected.
http://lneilsmith.org/new-cov....
To look up all the excellent work done by mathematicians, economists, political scientists and cryptographers on (a) how to conduct votes and (b) how to use votes to select candidates, before I bang together my own half-baked proportional representation scheme.
The maybe I'd write an R routine to detect gerrymandered states (actually quite easy if you've taken the first step above) and then hack into politicians' social media accounts so I could blackmail them into outlawing partisan gerrymandering.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Register all the citizens who can vote legally using photo ID. No illegal migrants, non citizens get to vote.
Use the computers to ensure the citizens can vote once with their registered voter photo ID.
Use paper votes and count them with all party, independent candidate observers looking over the paper court in real time for each vote counted.
Collect each count of the vote by citizens in a town, city, part of the USA.
More party, independent observers to see the final count is correct given their own count from each paper vote counted.
That removes the ability to use illegal migrants presenting as citizens.
Illegal migrants presenting as citizens to vote many times all day.
Citizens getting to vote many times all day.
The use of another citizens "name" to vote.
Gerrymandering would be a problem but the citizen count of actual voters would at least be more correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Easy, have a secure, trusted, i.e. people can identify and authenticate themselves, system for messaging and polling so that voters can ask questions and put forward their views on issues and policies that they care about. It should also keep track of which politician has claimed to support which issues and how well s/he has followed through when elected, i.e. How well did s/he do what s/he said s/he was going to do? It's up to the politicians to listen and respond, or not, and then come election day, the voters can decide on who they'll vote for. It's not a system for voting per se (keep good old fashioned publicly transparent and difficult to cheat paper ballots and human counting), just a way to hear and be heard for everyone involved in the democratic process. Rather than voting for slick ad campaigns and charming, PR-managed political candidates, voters can look at real data and who's a bullshitter and who walks the walk.
Can't be worse than relying on Fox News and MSNBC to find out about parties and candidates, can it?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Those things will rob you of whatever rights you have left, by always giving the highest vote count to the most corrupt and unethical contenders in the election. These criminals will always figure out a way to "rig" the software. Paper ballot counting, however, though vulnerable, requires many a much greater effort and a great many more people involved in the conspiracy, making it much harder to pull off. It's our best defense.
MrSavage's comment is bang on (see below, or link here ->): https://politics.slashdot.org/...
"I would program them to recognize and kill humans that try to computerize elections."
I would do exactly what Putin is doing to western nations, only I would push a somewhat different agenda...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Basically, what you have here is the far right looking to disenfranchise groups who are likely to vote for Democrats.
Did you just assume that parasites overwhelmingly vote democrat?
That's a bit insulting ...
We need to vote for whichever candidate cheated on his wife with the hottest porn star. I have to say, I'm a little bit disappointed that Benedict Donald decided to choose Stormy Daniels, who has done interracial scenes. I didn't think Trump would like following a black guy.
And at $130,000.00, I think he may have overpaid. I thought he was a better negotiator than that.
You are welcome on my lawn.
... as paperweights for the paper ballots.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
So you want to reform democracy?
Https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-want-to-reform-democracy-7f3b1ef10597
Computers are great for predicting where the tight races will be.
Send extra eyes and ears to the tight race locations to help ensure valid procedures are taking place.
Some valid procedures (think gerrymandering) are inherently unfair, but that is not to be dealt with here.
Under no circumstances should a hackable computer (really any computer) be used to register a vote.
There are is a very active field of "voting theory" research about how voting systems can be improved, but little of it has to do with computers per se, though they can make implementation of the post-vote processing more convenient. That is to say, it is not the "computer" that is improving anything. Various forms of preferential voting have a lot to recommend them, along with variations like "instant run-off".
In general it is a good idea to identify actual problems (e.g. widely unpopular candidates winning due multiple candidates splitting the vote; spoilers being run to siphon of votes from specific candidates, etc.) and propose actual fixes that are subjected to formal analyses, large scale simulations and such to validate that they are improvements.
The suggestions of the OP mostly sound like "let's just try something different" rather than carefully considered improvement proposals.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
The only thing that makes computer based ballots exceedingly difficult to implement is politics, not the technology. It's actually quite simple.
A user is assigned a random physical token on registration at the voting place, which "START TRANSACTION"s the process. They take this to the machine, which "unlocks" the voting capability. They make their selections, which the computer stores AND prints out a human AND computer readable receipt ( so no bar codes ), which the user then takes back up to the registration desk for secure storage in case of a recount. They also turn the token back in at this time too, and the agent runs it over the "out" scanner, which effectively issues a "COMMIT" to the vote.
What's the token for? A few different purposes.
1) If the paper ballot is lost before being returned to desk, the user's vote can be eliminated ( ROLLBACK ) and they can vote again. Paper ballots are important.
2) Ensure that only those who should be voting are voting, as verified by the registration desk. Voting machines are not randomly open to anyone who walks up to it. In fact, you can take this a step further and make the secured tokens the only way to unlock the database on disk, cryptographically.
See? Easy. The real question should by; why haven't we done this yet?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
What about this one? If more than 50% of voters abstain,nobody is elected, and we start over the election with new candidates.
Random multiple choice civics test. 10 questions. Get 5 correct, it prints out a paper ballot for you to complete.
That should get rid of half the republican party and three fourths the democrat voters.
Computer voting is a time that will never come. Too insecure, too subject to tampering, and impossible to recount or validate. I want strictly paper ballots.
Want to computerize things? Scan the paper ballots and use OMR software to read them. The paper ballots remain the actual vote, and can be hand-counted or re-counted if required.
AND fingers dipped in ink to reduce double-voting and voter fraud.
Instead of recycling old computers, I would pile them up around places where 'journalists' congregate, rendering it impossible for said 'journalists' to get outside their 'centers of journalism' until after the vote, which would occur on paper, has been counted.
Anybody curious enough to know how the election has gone can sit in seats at large auditoriums where the election officials count the paper ballots in public view.
The ballots are agregated from these counting centers at regional centers, and from there to national centers.
If the journalists who are blocked into the 'centers of journalism' starve to death while the vote count is going on, it's a win-win situation for anybody who matters.
Ending the "winner takes all" system would help too.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Look into 'fluid democracy' whereby all issues are voted on, but you can delegate your vote to someone for any or all issues. You might give your vote to someone because you trust them to think things through, or because they pay you, or perhaps you pay them to act as a representative for you. For issues where you feel strongly, you can make the vote yourself. It looks like an interesting mix between representative and direct democracy.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
What problem with elections can computers address?
- Better candidates?
- Increased voter involvement?
- Voter education?
Right now the effect of computers on elections in America is to attack your opponent, and to a lesser extent communicate your position on policy questions.
Ken
Typical liberal. So busy trying to project some fictional racism onto somebody else (in order to avoid addressing the point he was actually making), that the liberal accidentally displays their own flaming ACTUAL racism. Right on cue! Almost as predictable as liberals displaying the fact that they don't understand the difference between skin pigment and color, or race and country. Of course liberals DO (usually) know the difference, but they play dumb when they act like they don't, since they're talking in their own echo chamber, where they presume that their own liberal audience actually IS dumb. It's quite hilarious, actually.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Go even further: voting power is proportional to the amount you pay in taxes minus how much you taxpayer money you receive... Doesn't sound very democratic... Oh, I forgot the army, give them a vote per kill.
My point is that when you start deviating from the 1 person / 1 vote rule, there is a lot of potential for abuse. What we have now is far from perfect, but it is the least bad we could come up with. A benevolent dictatorship would be ideal, but it practice, it never ends well.
Our computers are creating problems, not solutions. For example, gerrymandering relies on fancy computers to rig the maps.
That's just computers doing what people tell them to do. Blame the people, not the computers.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Really? Which words did I use that triggered you? Was it pointing out that culture and race aren't the same thing? I know, that one really stings. Be proud! Proclaim it! Say what you think: that culture and race ARE the same thing. No? I see.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Keep them as far away from the election process as possible.
Captain Obvious was glad to help.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Or maybe a paperweight.
You MUST NOT use computers for voting purposes. Even if every bit used is open source, even if you open source hardware, software and everything can be audited and everyone can verify that the hash of the binary is the same that a binary you compiled from the source is the same, even if you do EVERYTHING to make sure that anyone is able to audit it, it's a VERY VERY BAD idea.
Not because it can be manipulated. But because you cannot silence the ones claiming it's still fraud and that all the computer savvy people cooperate to overthrow democracy and humanity altogether. Because they can't audit it, because you need to know how computers work and how to audit computers to actually perform one.
Paper and pencil have one key advantage: EVERYONE can audit it. It takes the ability to see and the ability to count. Even reading is entirely optional because all the ballot slips are identical and you can simply go and count the ones with the cross at the same position. Every party can send whoever they want to supervise the election, no special education or skill needed.
It's less about actual election fraud. It's more that nobody can sensibly claim there had been one. We live in a time of fake news and creative reporting. Is it that far fetched that any party who loses an election would start rumors about rigged voting machines that could of course be audited, but only be a select few (aka "the elite")?
With paper and ballot, it's trivial to debunk anything like this. They could have sent literally ANYONE to supervise the election process. They could send ANYONE to recount the ballots. Any claim to fraud would instantly fizzle.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just make voting mandatory so you can't get away with voter surpression, eliminate gerrymandering and have a paper trail. Bang, problem solved. I suppose we could use computers to eliminate the electoral college. That'd be nice.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The bigger your carbon footprint, the more you vote?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Instant run off is reasonable, and has the benefit of being easily doable with people and papers, and so is more auditable. Yes, this is a benefit of the IRO method.
But it does lead to some unreasonable decisions when a poll produces 3 close frontrunners, where the voters who voted for candidate #3 essentially decide the vote by their lower preferences. If you are going to put a computer in charge, then there are better ways, ways that find the Condorcet winner - the winner who, based on everyone's preferences, would have won a one-on-one election against any other candidate. (The methods vary when there is no Condorcet winner, when the preferences are circular - a situation that you might think rare, but there are times where the extreme left and right find they have more in common with each other than with the more boring center.)
These methods, however, are complex, and require a computer to work out - although that computer result can often be confirmed in a hand count.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Stack computers on top of one another until you have a surface tall enough to fill out a paper ballot.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
If we have voting directly on individual issues, as in direct democracy, I would allow people be able to give themselves a weight (from 1 to 10 say) that their vote carries in that voting tally.
People would be encouraged to reflect and only give themselves a high weight when they really care about the issue and also really know about it.
To make voluntary down-weighting more likely, People could save up a bit of unused vote weight to be dispensed within say the next 5 issue votes (or it's lost). So you could give yourself a weight of 19 on the next vote if you only used 1 of your 10 on the first.
But if you don't vote at all on 3 consecutive issues, you start losing voting weight for general non-participation in decision making. and you can only slowly build up your weight to 10 per vote again.
So this method both encourages participation, but also encourages judicious spending of each person's opinion on the matters they know and care most about.
The biggest flaw of course is that many people may be persuaded by demagogues to care the most about the issues they actually know the least about. Perhaps the method could be modified by conducting a qualification comprehension-of-the-issue test before each vote, and without passing it, you're limited to 5 of 10 max weight on that vote. Of course, the huge flaw in that is who sets the issue-test (and, the suspicion goes, biases it)? That would probably have to be done eventually by an impartial AI.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
There are 10 countries from which 10 countries currently receive temporary protected status: El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. These are the 10 countries that Trump labeled as shitholes.
He labeled shitholes as shitholes? That's crazy, man. It's almost as if he doesn't give a shit about your attempts to relabel relativity based on your racist ideology.
Note that we gave this a try when we first wrote the Constitution.
And note that we then went and wrote the 12th Amendment to stop that....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Sorry, did you just suggest that minorities are all parasites?
You are one seriously racist mofo.
Keep computers out of elections. They are far too easy to tamper with in ways most elections officials are incapable of detecting.
Paper ballots and any other form are also imperfect, but at least they physically exist and if properly guarded and supervised by election observers, they are reasonably difficult to rig, assuming you get rid of absentee ballots for everyone who is able bodied and require a signed doctors excuse on a prescription pad for the disabled.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
We can create a system which varies smoothly between direct democracy (issue voting by everyone) and representative democracy.
The general idea is that for a certain time period, you can lend your vote anonymously to another person, who then has a weight of n+1 votes to vote on the issues/legislation that are put up for decision.
Variations of this method are the flexibility of the lending time period, and also whether or not you are allowed to "recall" your representative (withdraw your lent vote) earlier than the originally granted period. If you could, that's better for the lender, but the representatives won't know the voting weight that they have so won't be able to wheel and deal as accurately with other representatives, as US congress people do.
A key technical problem to be resolved is how to prevent forced lending of votes. Imagine a tyrannical "head of the family" husband forcing their wife and a few others for good measure to lend their votes to him. How do you make it impossible for them to know whether such "requested" lending happened or not?
Ideas like a large random noise component in each person's vote weight, and randomization of the timing of lending transaction completion etc come to mind, but this might also be an insurmountable difficulty.
If there were a way of "proving" arms length relationship between lender and lendee, or only allowing pre-qualified (e.g. party-chosen) representatives (i.e. candidates) to receive lent votes, not just "everyone", then that might help with the forced "give me your vote" thing. I don't know. Ideas?
So the basic idea is, lend your vote out when you don't care or want to make the decision yourself. Get your vote back for when you want to decide yourself.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The most obvious change needed in the US is that voting needs to not be optional: Bump individual tax rates by 1-2% and make voting get you it back.
We should also look to make the campaign durations shorter so that they don't have the time to get into mud-slinging and filth and focus on issues.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
My top two:
Condorcet voting, perimeter/area ratio limits for districting.
All votes counted in front of scrutineers, every time. And then independently tallied.
The USA's love of machinery combined with the complete lack of independent oversight looks like it has been deliberately designed so that it can be rigged.
I might add that it is very quick. Takes about an hour to count all votes in a booth completely by hand. No scanning involved.
Us humans can vote for the best AI to rule us. Ya.... no... computers can never be involved in elections :P
[($)]
Computers can only make elections worse, not better.
What's so special about members of the armed forces?
Has anyone asked Bennett Haselton? I'll wager he has an idea or three...
Vote for 1st choice, 2nd choice, and 3rd choice candidates.
Candidates with the most votes win.
And term limits given the reality of the power of incumbency.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If I could use computers to make elections better, I would have only 1 option, myself. It's very usable, it's very secure and there would be no doubt that the machine was wrong.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
1. Give each voter a unique receipt. number. They can enter it online to verify their vote was counted and who they voted for.
2. Allow online access to voter registration data and records of who voted when and where to make crowdsourced voter fraud detection possible.
3. Allow / requre recording in voting places (so the ballot can not be seen) to lessen fraud.
4. Publish all challenges to ballots and all evidence aubmitted on a web site.
5. Require photo ID and verify it in a database (like they do at traffic stops) when someone votes.
6. Eliminate the ability of big web sites to bias voters - we need a Fairness Doctrine for Silicon Valley and for ISPs that is stronger than Net Nutrality.
7. Count all minor party votes on election night. Permanently ban from public office any member of any political party that (as a party) has refused to count minor parth votes at the same time they count major party votes. Yes, ban from public office every Democrat and Republican on the plannet. They should feel lucky if we do not return their "favors" and count them as 3/5 of a person while auctioning their children.
...you DON'T.
Hard, primitive, paper ballots is the only way to go. They can be scanned for a fast count and if there's a need for a recount you can do that by hand.....and the parties of the candidates post monies the day before the election so that this can be paid for. If the loser decides not to bother with a recount, the parties get their monies back.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
We don't need computers to make elections better. What we need are term limits for congress (perhaps six years maximum, irrespective of the house of congress), an absolute prohibition of donations to elections by corporations, an extremely small limit of donations to elections (perhaps $200) by any individual in any given year, a serious reduction in lobbying, and a balanced federal budget. That's not all we need, but it's a good start.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Each vote given a weighting in proportion to how much the voter paid in tax. You can vote for lowered taxes for yourself but only by handing more electoral power to other sections of the community.
Use the computer to verify everyone's citizenship and residency and then print up Voter ID cards for everyone. Vote in person and Bob's your uncle...
If we were to go computer based voting, make it so you can keep changing your vote right up to the cut-off period. This would be done to minimise the vote-buying that might occur if you only had one [SUBMIT]. Vote buying would be meaningless if the voter could change their vote at a later date.
Over half of Americans don't know who the vice president is. That's how interested many of us are in policy and the political process. A supermajority can't distinguish the Republican platform from the Democrat platform when it is handed to them with the party name redacted.
I don't have my car fixed by someone who doesn't know what an "engine" is, I don't have dental cavities filled by someone who can't point to my bicuspids, and I don't want national policy decided by people who don't recognize the name "Mike Pence", nor know how many senators there are.
> I think it's clear that if you want representative democracy to work and be considered legitimate, you need fewer barriers to voting, even if people like you think a DMV visit is reasonable.
And that's the reason the founders created a republic, not a democracy. The federal budget isn't American Idol. If you're not interested enough in participating in society to either have a driver's license or swing by and pick up a (free) ID, maybe you're not the person who should be deciding federal law and other national policy, based on "I heard he was born in Africa"or "because she's a woman". Maybe the decisions of national policy SHOULD be made by people who have enough interest to do more than "text your vote to 1-800-bumper-sticker".
If I could log into a website securely, I mean as securely as as a bank's business-to-business website with a PGP encryption angle. Like:
* Username
* strong password
* PIN (i.e. second password)
* RSA key-fob token number supplied by the voting office.
* I'm accessing the site from a static IP registered with the voting office.
* I submit a PGP public key to the voting office, and they send me another PIN via email with an attached encrypted text file that I can decrypt with my private key, that I use as part of the login process.
Then I'm in. I'm authenticated. I select the candidates I wish to vote for and click the "submit" button when I'm done.
* The back-end database is physically secured with a police presence. The DBAs have Top Secret clearances with polygraph.
* My vote is stored electronically, but also printed with my name and PGP public key. That is then scanned into a separate database.
* I can, after the election, log in again with the credentials above and see that what's in the database matches my scanned ballot.
* I can easily submit a complaint if they don't match.
THAT kind of a system I'd be comfortable voting online with. If I couldn't log in prior to the election (online voting would only be available prior to election day), then I'd need to do it the old fashioned way, of waiting in line and going to a physical polling place on election day.
BUT: Recall the debacle the federal government had with Healthcare.gov. And then see the OPM hack, where even fingerprints were taken. This database would be under constant, epic, assault by... everyone. So, I have a dim view that even the federal government, much less a state government could implement such a system. And getting staff for this system would be difficult. It would be a relatively mundane job BUT requiring the best people all the time. And those people would be willing to subject themselves to in-depth security clearances, as this is an issue of national security. That kind of staffing is very hit or miss for all but the top tech companies, for multiple reasons. And you add another layer of complexity due to the clearance requirements that even the top tech companies don't have.
So, it comes back to that Gordian Knot of staffing and project management. One can easily conceive of a secure system. The ability to implement it is quite another, different, problem.
When you register to vote, you go through the process of generating a client certificate that's used as your registration. The client certificate need not carry any information that identifies you other than the fact that you're a registered voter. When you vote online, you use that client certificate to connect to the server and vote.
Each vote is counted and associated with a certificate. You can look up your record by providing your certificate to check how your votes were counted.
#1 is stupid. Why even have districts if you don't have to vote in them? #2 is a fool's description of how Parliamentary elections work. Basically Parliamentary style elections solve the problems #1 & #2 seek to solve but better. Plus we have centuries of practice with Parliamentary elections. #3 is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Negative voting is a surefire way to destroy any possibility of government. Your vote shouldn't get to cancel out someone else's. It's unworkable even in theory.
This is an important point. Billionaires become billionaires in no small part because of their ability to form social networks with political leaders, who also are highly capable social networkers. This has led to the de facto legalization of bribery for politicians ("if money is speech, corporations and the wealthy have a lot more of it than you"), and selective blindness after the Financial Crisis of 2008, to the crimes of the financial sector (no financial sector executive went to jail for any deceptive and unethical behavior related to the crisis).
It's like that XKCD comic of a crypto-nerd's dream of a secure system. The social engineering aspect of the donor class plus politicians cannot be ignored. They would work, as they do now, to boost each other. And it's no small stretch to consider they would work to undermine any secure voting system, in order to preserve the status quo. That the status quo was preserved after something as cataclysmic as the Financial Crisis, a once in a century event, is a testament to their power.
Ask them what operating system said computer is running and if they answer: Internet Explorer, then ban them from political office.
Nothing put on a computer is ever secure. Nothing put on a computer is ever anonymous. Considering democracy requires secret ballots and secret ballots require both anonymity and security, the best place for computers in a voting system is as far away from it as possible. Even air-gapping doesn't work. How many articles are on /. about researchers devising new and exciting ways to hack air-gapped computers? At least one a month, it seems.
Yeah, if I lived there, I'd probably want out. If I lived there, I'd certainly call it a shithole.
The whole notion of only letting in the best and brightest into a country? Not only is not the Christian way, it's also not the American way.
You're right, it's the Canadian way. Or the Swiss way. Why shouldn't we be looking for people who bring something TO the country, rather than people who bring the need for massive entitlement spending, more ESOL teachers, and a generation's (at best) lag time in constructive engagement in the economy?
... and would be the very first people to tell you that someone from a rural village in Somalia is not going to show up equipped to do any of those things. Exactly the opposite. If your mission is generosity, why are you not advocating for helping to fix what's wrong in Somalia? Or is it too much of a shithole, and you're thinking it's beyond help?
I'm good friends with African immigrants who showed up here legally, speaking English AND three more languages than I do, who worked three jobs, bought homes, run businesses
Are there shithole countries in Africa? Sure, the Congo comes to mind.
An almost entirely black country. Racist.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I don't see a problem with traveling votes. Create the districts and the polling stations the normal way and let people vote at any station they want. That person still only gets one vote but if they want to drive two hours to vote in a different district them let them. It's a self limiting problem. It would kill gerrymandering and everyone's vote would be worth more. You could drive to a competitive district where your vote would count more but by doing so you take that vote away from your own district and make your own district more competitive.
If anyone thinks this mess can be in anyway improved by changing the very interface on the periphery while the core is utterly rotten (corrupt by design), good luck!
This core - $$-driven up to the wazoo with no other value counting, will always find ways to go by what worked so well and the uncritical mass by a - by design - educational system creating mass-tailored individuals hypnotized by the same cool-aid unable to step aside of their conditioning - who wants to be different and blamed as an outsider or other maroon categorization?
I'd apply a number of filtering criteria (age, criminal conviction, level of education, earned income) to filter out the "best" people according to my elitist standards, and then randomly select them for a draft. If they refused, half of their property would be taken and they'd be imprisoned.
In my community, it is unfortunate that the elected officials tend to be their most successful while in office. It is the best position that many have ever had. I would prefer elected office to be the worst, lowest paying, crappiest job that they have ever had. I do not want to pick someone that desires to be in office. I'd rather draft someone that has many better things to do, and has already proved themselves as a capable, successful, leader.
Before asking what is the best voting system, someone was smart enough to ask if it's even possible to determine what the best voting system is.
The answer is no. If you start by requiring some common sense criteria for what an election should accomplish, it turns out no voting system can meet those requirements. If you rank those criteria in a specific order, it's possible to mathematically calculate which voting system generates "unfair" results more often for that particular ranking of criteria (which is to say, a "worse" system can still sometimes produce a "fairer" result by your predefined standards). But if you change the ranking of the criteria, a different voting system ends up being best and producing a different winner. A clever documentary back in the 1990s even came up with an example where a dozen candidates participated in a mock election whose votes were tallied using a dozen different voting systems, and each voting system produced a different winner (i.e. each candidate won under one voting system).
No, there aren't. Wikipedia has an entire article on the subject. Do note that the five least unprosperous nations are either a thousand miles away from the mainland, or formerly part of the Roman Empire. Sub-Saharan Africa is a hellhole.
None of the above.
I would ask a computer to select the best candidate. Because lately, it is clear that the electorate doesn't know shit.
I feel quite strongly about abolishing political parties. They concentrate power in the hands of a few unelected people. Let each politician run on his own merits, and act on his own concience rather than according to some party line.
This is especially urgent because any district-based system (like the US has) automatically leads to it also being a two-party system. Such a system doesn't allow for new ideas and new parties to appear - there is simply no space for new parties to slowly grow into a real, serious, political party.
Without political parties, there will be a much wider pool of candidates for each state. Each candidate will have to convince the voters of the quality of his policies, instead of riding on some abstract national program (and loon candidates can be avoided fairly easily by making them collect some number of signatures before their candidacy is allowed).
Governing would become a matter of negotiation a lot more than it is today, but you'd be rid of the deadlock where one party blocks the other on principle.
I'd also add a few rules about laws only covering one subject at a time (no riders for completely unrelated subjects), add an upper limit to the length of any law, and I'd mandate that any proposed plan must always be accompanied by a detailed description of how much money will be needed, and where it will be taken from.
And perhaps each law must be explained by the politician who proposed it in three separate schools. If the kids don't understand it, start over.
Or alternatively, keep the system as it is today, but send multiple politicians to Washington for each state, with each wielding a fraction of the state vote that is determined by how many people voted for him.
Or do voting on a permanent basis: each citizen receives a token that he can entrust to a politician of his choice. Allow for the token to be recovered and entrusted to another politician at any time. On the first day of every month, replace all politicians that lost the trust of their voters. Instead of having to look great once every four years, let them represent you every single day of their carreer...
The only way I can think of to make elections better using a computer is to play Call of Duty while the rest of the suckers are out voting.
No thanks, city people are incompetent, the founding fathers knew this and planned accordingly.
Not sure if you're just taking the Luddite perspective, but I'd like to try to persuade you how the computerized voting could be done in a way that would satisfy me.
The voting screen would be interactive to allow for such things as asking for help, even such specific things as "Show me the 50-word summary submitted by each candidate on the second listed issue." After the voter finished, it would print the ballot with two forms (because redundancy helps). The voter would be able to read how he voted in human-readable form, and the ballot would have something like a QR code for more rapid recounting with machines. The voting machine would also collect totals for fast reporting of the results, but with a safe one-way transfer mechanism, NOT a two-way connection to the Internet. In the even the election is challenged, the paper ballots will be easily recounted and also checked to make sure the QR codes match the text versions.
That actually would help with all three of the specific proposals I suggested, but so far I haven't found any improvements in the comments I've read so far. Mostly I searched by the keywords of my proposals.
However, what I was really looking for was better ideas, and so far I haven't found any with my usual searches. Not sure what keywords will help, but there's a lot of stuff to read here... Evidently a topic of substantial interest, and I have seen a number of thoughtful comments and I would like to thank those people for their efforts.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Seems to be the first actual new idea of interest in the discussion. The progress bar indicates I'm about 1/4 of the way through the visible comments. There have been some comments that might be replies or responses to interesting ideas, but they must be from ACs and I can't see them. (My vote against ACs.)
If I understand your idea, it seems to be a form of direct democracy with delegation. The complexity would clearly require computer support, but even then I think it would be tough to implement. However my main concern would be about reactions triggered by panicked mobs. There is a wisdom in crowds, but it depends on keeping the inputs isolated to prevent mass phenomena such as a panic.
Still, it's kind of interesting to think about. Back to reading the comments...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Not computer-related, but I kind of like it. Unfortunately, the politicians votes are too few to matter in elections. Any manipulation of the elections, with or without computers, can safely ignore the politicians own votes.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Actually I favor this one, but not the way you're thinking. I think the Senate should be apportioned based on federal taxes paid. The House would be directly responsible to the voters, but the Senate would be based on the distribution of wealth and respond on that basis. Not sure I'd want to go as far as having a senior senator from Amazon, but the basis of power should be different.
The original idea was that the Senate would be more responsible to long-term interests if it were more separated from direct elections. Actually seems like a good idea and the move to direct popular vote without changing the basis of apportionment of the Senate seems to me like a mistake.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Interesting approach, but I doubt that it has been tested in the real world. I think it would become a name recognition game, as long as the name wasn't recognized for something horribly negative. In particular, I think #PresidentTweety could have won in such a system because he had YUGE name recognition and almost no relevant track record (as regards politics).
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Sounds like a variation of my suggestion of guest voting. If I understand you correctly, the main anti-gerrymandering feature is that highly irregular districts would create more convenient opportunities for traveling voters.
However I think that guest voting accomplishes the same effect, but while still respecting the principle of one-man-one-vote. An electronic ballot could even show the map and let you pick the district you want to vote in, while a paper ballot could just list all the candidates with your district's candidates at the top and the instruction to pick any one. (Might be a long list if the district is highly gerrymandered.)
I didn't mention a more complicated variation. Allow voting in multiple districts, but divide your vote up. Computers are good with fractions, too.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Adding "None of the above" to every list of candidates would solve so many of the problems with the current system. If "None of the above" wins, all candidates are disqualified from that office and each party has to submit a new candidate to run. We would need a faster (online?) voting methodology, because I suspect that "None of the above" would win a whole lot of elections for a while until the parties realized we weren't voting for s*hole candidates as the "least worst" anymore.
If I listed off all the major reasons I don't like voting, this solves nearly all of them. Voting participation would rise tremendously if people felt like they could vote their actual conscience.
Actually this reminds me of one of the strategies that Putin used to win some of his elections. At certain vulnerable voting places, Putin's goons were positioned between the place where the ballot was given to the voter and the place where it was deposited. They would buy the blank ballot and give the voter a ballot that was marked for Putin. Then they marked the blank ballot for Putin and sold it to the next voter in a kind of daisy chain. I forgot the word for it. Something like caterpillar ballots? (Read Putin's Kleptocracy for details.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I'd take a strategic view, and stop trying to 'computerise' the historic systems we happen to have now. How to 'enable' populous opinion on defined issues, retaining balance and preventing manipulation? What 'political' structures needed to give effect to the results? And notice that 'pricing' assets is equivalent to a weighted vote, with the weights (theoretically, (Ha!), based on purchasers' prior contribution to society. So... that doesn't work properly either, what's better with the systems available tomorrow?
I really meant technology, but for the following:
-put up a big screen at each center that shows the number/percentage of times a candidate lied, told half truths, and truths.
-their tenure
-the top three things they stand for (1000 chars) and they can't change it per state/ballot.
-how many times they stood up for, didn't take part in, or caved on the prior
-public cameras that allow anyone online to see the voting area and counting.
All of the above has a QR code that points back to the official government website that all this is supposed to stream off of. So that anyone can check for tampering.
Also, all results are withheld from media, candidates, etc till they are ALL in. At which point the winner is stated and then the circus can have their way wasting everyone's time on analyzing the states. This way it provides a bit more confidence that all votes are equal. AND we don't make the elections a damn football game.
Just always provide a "none of the above" choice. If it wins, the election must be rerun, with the previous candidates barred from standing.
Use computers to educate the voters, past the average 3rd grade level. Try to teach people how to vote, based on SOME kind of idea of what's best, rather than the usual. Party Lines, It's (Insert Name)'s Turn, They Give Me Money, or (my personal favorite) Because They Will Let Me Change Places With My (perceived) Oppressor.
The number of representatives in the U.S. house is the problem, as is the electoral college. To return to 1:30,000 representation as envisioned (as a minimum) by the founding fathers, we would need about 10,000 representatives. However, if we simply doubled the number of representatives to ~1,000, the effects of Gerrymandering and over representation among States during elections would be halved.
This would minimize both local and national issues, such as one presidential candidate winning by over 3,000,000 votes, yet still losing the electoral college.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> If there's no universal natural right to have an equal voice, there's no point to any of this discussion.
Every citizen has a *right* to vote. They also have the right to sing. I shouldn't sing publicly, because I'm a terrible singer. You would be foolish to encourage me to sing for everyone.
Everyone has a vested interest in the voting results, even not if not a civil servant. The law indeed applies and affects everyone.
While fixing the ballot box is needed, we need to protect ourselves from outside actors such as Russia and China. An important article by Roger McNamee who helped with Facebook wrote an article on the attack of our last election in the latest Washington Montly (https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january-february-march-2018/how-to-fix-facebook-before-it-fixes-us/). by Roger McNamee MAGAZINE. He points out that Facebook and Google use algorithms that can shap our beliefs. This use can allow an inexpensive way to shap public opinion in elections. He also suggests remedies.
I would *did* write open-source software to automatically create fair districts by using a genetic algorithm, thus providing a way to end the practice of gerrymandering once and for all. I would *did* publish it for free on github at https://github.com/happyjack27/autoredistrict and make a small website about it at http://autoredistrict.org .
So, if we are going to use computers in our voting process (I'm against that but I'll go with the idea for a moment) then I think everyone who wants to be President buys a "Lottery" ticket. A winner is picked at random. They hold the office for one term. At the end of that term, the electorate votes on how they did. If the did well they get one more term. Period. If they did OK then they are done and another drawing is held. If they did quite poorly, they are locked up in prison for the rest of their lives. It would cut down on the number of people entering the lottery and we would be voting on results, not broken promises. Also, holding office would have as indelible effect on the office holder as it does on the electorate.
Be More, Be Manly, The Manly Geek Ubergeek Extraordinaire Blogger: www.manlygeek.com/blog Podcaster: podcast.man
Fixed election dates are Evil. The length of an election is much longer with fixed election dates because everyone knows when it's happening, where snap elections you have to wait for the election to be called before you spend money on campaigning (don't want to spend all your money and not have an election). Longer elections favour the rich (cost), and nobody likes year long elections.
Instead of voting for a representative, why not use computers to allow any registered voter to directly vote on bills?
We needed representatives long ago when communications were poor.
Quality communications should make these corrupt representatives obsolete.
You could exercise your right to vote on bills that you had a strong opinion about and ignore others that you didn't care about.
Guns. You want to keep the people with guns, that you pay to protect you, happy.
Use Proportional Representation. If you get 20% of the total vote you receive 20% of the seats in government. This eliminates Gerymandering, prevents vote splitting from disenfranchising political groups, and makes every seat in government of equal political weight. It also lets you have a representative for a specific cause (the NRA rep, the corn farmers rep, etc.)
In addition to the totally obvious and "duh" ideas (which would already be done if we actually had any ability to improve the election procedure, such as eliminating gerrymandering, ranked voting with instant runoffs, open source software with cryptographic security and a verified paper trail, etc.), I have another thought.
It would be cool if you could arbitrarily proxy your vote to someone else (and/or multiple people). That is, to paraphrase a hypothetical, "I don't want to learn everything about this contest in order to make an informed decision, but I know someone who does, and that person thinks like I do; just count my vote toward his/her choice(s)." I don't think we're ever going to be able to get the average person to vote in an intelligent and informed manner for the best qualified candidate (see: Trump/Oprah), but we _might_ be able to get voters to proxy their vote to people whom they judge to be intelligent, well informed on political topic, and like-minded (eg: Jon Stewart, Bill O'Reilly, etc.). In turn, that just _might_ be able to get the country away from electing the least hated of bad options.
My 2c.
You want Hillary Clinton to be forced to work with Trump? Would either politician be happy with that? Would the country survive it?
If you knew the means to recreate that spark, then perhaps you'd be one to actually fix other countries.
The spark exists everywhere. The chore is in countering the people and cultural inertia that smother it. We've done it before.
It is hubris to think you can fix a whole culture, government, and society.
It took us decades of military occupation and enormous investment to transform a predatory, essentially feudal Japan into a productive, constitutional place run by a proper representative government, with a culture that fully embraces that way of life. No culture that's full of corruption at every level can get past it without a generational shift, and the crushing of those corrupt powers that fight to preserve the corruption. In some places, the culture already has the spark, but has had to live through a generation of attempts to smother it - but when the smothering is forced back, the spark is still there and ready to go: see ... Poland, for example. It took a generation of pushing back against the toxicity of the socialism attacking it from Russia before Poland's spark could operate again, free of that crushing weight.
No, we don't even begin to know why the US was great and plenty of other countries turned out horrible.
What? We know EXACTLY why. See that document that begins with "We The People" and the non-stop fight that's been fought ever since to preserve it. Quit trying to pretend that it wasn't hard work and sacrifice and a dedication to a specific way of life that produced the results we enjoy. Being a classic moral relativist, you're trying to wish away the differences between what allowed colonial America to become something different than present day former-colonial Shitholes that can't get their act together, and which export (via illegal immigration or our witless lottery and chain migration systems) the very culture that has them stagnating or worse, regressing.
And, no, the waves of Irish and German and other immigration earlier in our history are NOT the same. Those groups scrambled to assimilate - culturally, linguistically. We were not then an entitlement nation. If someone who came over couldn't shake off their Irish-ness enough to be an American, it was up to sympathetic fellow Irish or other charities to make up for that deficit on their behalf. This was understood by people getting on that boat in the first place. We still have countless charitable groups willing to help people. But we also have a hugely expensive network of government services that are instantly burdened the moment a non-skilled, non-English-speaking, non-assimilating lottery winner's wife's brother's son and wife arrive with chain migration blessings and no means by which to provide for themselves.
You only know how to belittle others
What? Belittling is your hobby. It's how you make yourself feel important. It's how you begin your participation in almost any conversation. If you DO manage to actually engage on the substance, it's with completely nonsensical, disingenuous, faux-patronizing, factually incorrect crap like your comments above. If you actually talked some sense, your pomposity and snark would be easy enough to shrug off. But when it's simply part of your knowing parade of counter-factual hand waving and projection, it just highlights your hypocrisy.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
All that about voter registration. You know you can register by mail, right?
The topic is showing SOME kind of ID when you vote, so we know how many times you voted. In Texas, any of seven different kinds of evidence of ID are accepted. If a person has some reason that they have nothing with their name on it, they can instead sign an affadavit at the polling place attesting to what their name is. Lying on that affadavit to vote under someone else's name is a crime.
So either bring something with your name on it, or sign a sworn statement of who you are.
But in a two-party system, that would usually give you a president and vice-president from opposite parties, who would be opposed to one another on most or all of the issues that the election was fought over.
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
The USA did OK without a secret ballot for 100 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sure, there may be voter intimidation and vote buying and so on without a secret ballot. But will the consequences really be worse than widespread electronic election fraud?
And the fact is, you can find out who many people probably voted for by looking at campaign donation records anyway.
http://classic.fec.gov/finance...
We expect elected representatives to generally vote in a recorded way and to defend their votes. Why do we think that can work but doing the same for individuals won't?
Otherwise, use paper ballots -- ideally counted by a group of humans from different political affiliations like is done in many other countries.
Some bigger issues than technology for the USA:
We could return to the original constitutional number of Representatives so that each vote for one counts 10X more -- which might reduce the role of money in such elections.
https://economix.blogs.nytimes...
And maybe go back to having Senators appointed by State Legislatures.
https://www.senate.gov/artandh...
And also consider a Parliamentary system where Congress selects a Prime Minister instead of a direct election of the President (given what a money-driven circus such elections have become):
https://www.minnpost.com/eric-...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Idea #1 completely destroys the concept of representing the people of a given area. The WHOLE POINT is that the person elected represents the people of that area - being allowed to vote in a different district means that someone who doesn't live near you is voting for your candidate. Would you want people from, say, Utah, driving over into your district and picking your representative? Are you really that fucking stupid?
Idea #2 completely destroys the concept of The Great Compromise: the concept that gave us a House and a Senate at the federal level. Do you really want the whole country dominated by the big population centers? Everyone else in the country may as well not vote because they will have zero representation. Are you really that fucking ignorant of history?
Idea #3 is also bad. It is going along the lines of the whole "not my president" and "the resistance" crap where you would rather kick and scream and bitch instead of try to work with what you have. Sorry, but you're never going to get a perfect candidate. They all suck on some level. Don't like them? Run yourself, or find someone you do like and convince them. Don't be a baby who just grabs his ball and goes home. Are you really that fucking childish?
None of these ideas need computers, by the way, so they're all also fucking stupid responses for a question about novel uses for a computer.
I wish that Slashdot had some convenient mechanism whereby I could go back and review the newer comments. I'm going to do one more scan for funny and insightful, but the discussion is too large to read all of it in a reasonable amount of time. Right now there are 244 visible comments, and I read the entire visible discussion around 200. Took me a while...
I found many parts of the discussion quite thought provoking and I hope you enjoyed having your thoughts provoked as much as I did. My thanks to the thoughtful contributors (and I wonder why the trolls seem relatively less visible than usual these days (Or perhaps I've merely gotten better at ignoring them?)).
After I digested the comments, my thoughts seem to have branched onto a different track, but since this story is reaching its natural lifespan, I wrote up my newest and craziest idea in a fresh venue. Perhaps you'll be amused?
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
You should read Putin's Kleptocracy to learn about the latest wrinkles (no pun intended) in manipulating paper ballots. I was trying to get the name of the technique that most interested me, but instead found the book Protest in Putin's Russia , where a different version of the same technique is described. Unfortunately, I still couldn't find the amusing name for the technique. Something like caterpillar or daisy chaining.
The way it works is that Putin's henchman goes to vote early. He gets his blank ballot, but he does NOT cast it. He stops in the hallway leading to the ballot boxes, where he marks his ballot for Putin, and waits for the next voter. He asks the next voter if he'd like to make some money (I think the book said about 50 rubles) for his blank ballot. In exchange, he also gets the completed ballot, which he takes down the hall and puts in the box. Lather, rinse, repeat for as many votes as Putin can buy.
Of course there is no secrecy in this, and all of the voters who sold their votes know the election was rigged. Several reasons they don't do anything about it, but I think the main ones are that they know Putin is going to win anyway, so they might as well take the money, too, and if they do make a fuss they know Putin's police are NOT going to do anything about it beyond arresting them for taking the money for their ballot. Actually, it could be worse than that if they make too big a fuss. Making a big fuss about Putin is one way to get whacked in today's Russia.
Hate to remind you, but #PresidentTweety admires Vladimir and wishes he could have so much direct control over the FBI.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Use them to make sure the person voting is registered and the one using that vote. There is nothing like going to vote and finding out you already voted. Someone used your registered vote to vote. The officials don't know what to do, they often accuse you of trying to vote twice, it's a mess. All because some asshole stole your vote.
Go back to paper. Electronic is just too easy to hack.
make a new cryptocoin, call it votecoin. make a website (extremely secure) that gives out 1 coin per election cycle per SSN. SSN has to be from a non deceased person, obviously, with more checks in place to ensure this happens.
voting is just transferring your coin (split in however many ways you wish) to the politicians in the race, whoever has the most coins wins. have specific coins for each election cycle and race, so you could be giving out say 20 types of coins if you're voting in 20 different races, but all managed from same wallet.dat file.
bam. you have a decentralized encrypted voting scheme with a viewable blockchain, so people can verify themself where their vote went. perhaps might have a voting VPN that people transfer from, so peoples IPs aren't revealed to voting preference. no gerrymandering.
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
Automate elections better. Right now, voters face a limited number of pre-selected candidates from a limited number of pre-selected political parties. Allow a broader range of candidate: all who meet the constitutional qualifications. All. Let the voter choose.
There was a time when government didn't decide which political parties were "real" and which ones weren't. The electorate did. There was a time when government didn't decide which candidates were "real" and which ones weren't. The voters did.
And voter turnout was a lot higher.
And the usual plug for _Why America Stopped Voting_, by Mark L. Kornbluh. http://www.worldcat.org/search...
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
People escape shitholes for a reason
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
tamperproof
Too hard to find the problem if you don't keep track and allow a means to compare ballot by ballot. See http://openballotinitiative.or... The problem is that you WILL have differences between the interpretations.
Just like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa we should elect some Law makers via lottery
https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Do-you-support-MLAs-MPs-being-selected-via-lottery-like-in-Belgium
Casteism
I would use chits with a specific weight, that you write the number of the candidate on the chit, which is then fed through a computerized counter that reads the number on the chit, into a weighed container clearly labelled for the candidate's number. You obtain a chit by verifying your identity using your state-issued ID or other recognized form of identifying information to affirm you are a legal voter in that election. You now have 3 specific ways of security. If the weight is off, you recount the chits by weight and autofeed through a counter like sorting coins. The feeder would sort out the ones that are mis-marked as well, and also can validate against the number of voters who recieved chits. The individuals vote is never recorded to a specific person
Use computers the ones connected to fMRI machine and scan the brains of politicians to make sure they aren't Sociopaths with narcissistic tendencies, because as it so happens popularity contests are almost always won by Sociopaths with narcissistic tendencies. They tell you whatever you want to hear and they stab their competitor in the back. Sound like anyone you know????? It's the reason why government is the most hostile work environment on the planet. Alarm bells should be ringing when the people whose job is to take responsibility stop wanting to do their job for fear of being stabbed in the back. Now the only way to fix it is to scan all their brains and kick out all the sociopaths with narcissistic tendencies. Return the work environment to something more sane.
1. Gerrymandering.
I'd not use a computer for this. I'd double the number of people elected and divide the seat between the first and second place person in each election in accordance with their percentage of the vote. So someone with 80% of the vote gets 80% of the seat and represents 80% of the people. Since the first two places generally represent 96-99% of the voters, virtually all voters get represented. Fairly. Unlike the present system, when it's quite possible that 45% get represented.
I'd probably also switch to a system where you have ten points and divide those between the candidates, no more than 7 points on any one candidate.
2. Location of voting.
You vote in the election in the State you are registered in, no matter what voting station you are at. That increases accessibility. I'd also allow for mobile voting stations, so people out in the middle of nowhere can vote.
The price for that is that I'd make voting mandatory for anyone in the continental US, optional for any eligible voter elsewhere. Overseas voters would not be using forms, they'd use the same voting system as everyone else and their votes would be counted at the same time. That way, there are no "accidents".
3. Eligibility.
Anyone who is alive and was born in, was naturalized in, or is living in, the US should have the right to vote. The incompetence of State authorities, the destruction of records, etc, are not my concern. If States cannot be trusted to know who is eligible, then make everyone eligible. It is better that ten guilty go free than to have one innocent person suffer.
This makes computer voting essential because the only way to get secure voting stations everywhere is to not rely on heavy physical security.
4. Proof that one person got one vote
Use voting registration cards to hold a 4096-bit "public" key. A central voting computer carries the corresponding private key. A SHA-3 hash is used to identify which vote goes with which decryption key. A second SHA-3 hash of the vote, with a digital signature for the combined whole, will prove the vote has not been tampered with.
Votes would be transmitted in encrypted form from the voting station to a proxy server at the polling station. It cannot be decrypted there, as there's no decryption key present. It is then reliably multicast to the central computer and to independent observers. The reason for the proxy is to break any timing attack that could be used to identify who cast which encrypted vote. Reliable multicast, such as NORM, guarantees all observers and the central machine received the vote.
The voting computers, proxy and central computer would need to be open source software and open source hardware, with the software proven correct in both source and binary form. All would need to be Trusted Computers (A1+) and tamper-proof. The central computer should also be physically inaccessible.
The central computer would generate the cards, retaining the private keys and issuing only the public keys with hash. These would be fed directly into a second computer with the voter details. This would simply print the details onto the card and seal it. This way, the central computer doesn't know who the private key is associated with and the secondary computer doesn't know the private key.
(The decryption key should be printed onto parchment paper using indelible ink, together with the hash. Printouts should be fed directly into a storage bin capable of holding around 500 million pages. This should be in a distinct room that cleared individuals can enter in pairs, for maintenance. Ideally, the server room should not be entered at all, ever, once the machine is running.)
The second computer would have the name and address of every person over the age of 16 (which I'd make the new voting age) either resident in the US or born in the US regardless of where they were resident.
This sealed card would be handed off to the voting officials to mail off. They would need to certify whose card had been s
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)