He needs two hundred dollars for some good lecture slides. I found it totally incomprehensible. The only thing that makes it watchable is a kind of exasperation and disbelief in his voice at the large efforts of others which are "wrong". This is a bad sign. He's old, he only needs USD200m to get this thing to work, and it is based on research from the 1920s. Why hasn't it been realised yet? If he's waiting for new technology, then that's a Pandora's box. If it can be done with bamboo leaves and snot then this lone wolf is right and all the tokomak (not just ITER, but also JET) people are wrong. Seems unlikely.
Pigs get stressed more than most animals when they are housed in high density pens. So there is now a move to selectively breed the "stress" out of pigs. There are also much more advanced methods of slaughter now, such as Temple Grandin's Stairway to Heaven.
The larger problem is actually meat consumption. It takes 12,000 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef... and that's the natural way of growing beef! Imagine doing it in a factory... each pound of beef requires six pounds of corn that could be eaten by us instead. When you look at the numbers for meat, its a depressing story.
Economic and environmental issues dictate that the final solution will be processed foods grown
where species can be raised most cheaply. They will probably be adequate as a food source for us, albeit a rather boring one. Not much meat in it. Heavily cooked. Fortified with vitamins and additives to make it worth eating.
If someone else can think up something more interesting and more likely I'm all ears.
I have heard it claimed by my local insane asylum director (no kidding!) that there has never been a false match with iris scanning in its entire commercial history. Seems a bold claim where violent insane people are being let through doors on not on the basis of this technology. Can someone deny/back this up?
I think this ignores that fingerprints can be recorded both in the "raw" (say as a BMP) and so can be stolen, used etc etc or they can be stored as a kind of secure hash, like a shadow password. Unlike a password which may have say 50^8 permutations and is vulnerable to dictionary attacks, the fingerprint "hash" has a much wider (albeit softer) searchspace.
A database of "raw" fingerprints, or any "raw" biometrics would be lunacy, right?
RTWFWS (read the whole f-king website) it only prints "Vacation in Hawaii". That's not all the pictures I have. I also went to Detroit. I can't print that.
Distributed counting would be hard for STV, runoff and similar PR-type ballots. All the ballots for a race need to be together or totals known at once so that eliminations can be executed at each stage. Anyone who weeps over Nader taking votes from Kerry can see that PR-type voting is the future. Nader's lost votes would have been redistributed to Kerry.
Additionally, donkey-voting effects (voting in order down the list, or where the first candidate gets votes for merely being at the top) are eliminated by rotation of candidate order. In some places, this is done by printing several versions of the ballot paper, with different candidate orders. This is expensive and may not cover all orderings.
I hope you can see that fairer voting techniques are also a lot more complex and error prone, difficult to teach to volunteers etc. Computers, on the other hand, eat up this kind of work.
Finally, I do agree with your main assertion; voting should be decentralised as much as possible for the reasons you give. Presently, voting is very centralised and collecting ballots whether by hand or by post places them at greater risk as they accumulate into larger bundles closer to counting centres. Internet voting is also hurt by this model as it is presently centralised. The central web server for Internet voting is too easy to attack.
Having voters vote on PCs in small numbers (such as from work or home) lowers the value of a hack on any one PC as the vote traffic is low. It keeps voters physically distributed so they cannot be coerced en masse or intimidated away from voting. If voters could vote like this and their votes were not centrally collected, Internet voting would be a lot stronger.
Computers do do audit. Blind signatures, forward hashing, digests and any number of well-known techniques allow for voter receipting from a computer. This does not tie a voter to their vote, does not identify the voter and does allow confirmation of vote received intact.
Eventually, electronic voting will be computerised, decentralised, networked, and auditable.
The consumer is an ongoing voter on lots of issues of economy, environment, social policy, foreign policy. You have many choices and likely you'll get what you want. Make sure your money goes to the right places and then perhaps to pay a little more if you have to to get your money going the right way.
Your wife's grandfather's mill may still be open if it had been sustainable. If it had been sustainable and consumers thought about sources of paper and wood products before they bought them, the mill could still be open today.
I'm pleased and glad you have a good education and you got good grades. Everyone should have this experience. Maybe they will vote differently then, maybe not.
You vote every 4 years for Pres but you buy stuff every day. I know you are likely very busy, but try to get this short, almost unknown book:
The secet life of everyday things It is jaw dropping account of the impact of consumer choices.
Oh yeah, three CRT monitors (two no-names and an SGI) had a 6 hour underwater adventure in my garden shed when our neighborhood got flooded. I let them dry and they all worked, eventually.
Actually, there's more. I plugged the 5v speaker pins from my apple 2 into 8ohm domestic speakers (for more of a hi-fi effect) and this fried the motherboard. Repairs : USD300. Still works.
Here's a recent one. I just left a laptop in a hotel in Texas.
As the subject says. Compaq M700 baked at 200 deg c for 20 minutes until I smelt burning plastic. Came out of oven smoking. Cooled off, booted up fine. LCD backlighting was a bit uneven and some of the cast plastic bits (DVD drive cover, infra-red red plastic cover etc were warped and fell out. Cost of repairs, USD1000. Why was it in the oven? Burglars do not look in the oven for stuff. Advice for future : use the microwave instead as cooking does not require pre-heating.
Tidbit of the day : there are 1.5 million union ballots executed each year in the USA.
Yeah, I begrudgingly agree. However, I'm optimistic because Internet voting is nascent. The distributed, governmentless nature of it just seems to be a good fit with democracy, don't you think?
Good grief! Are you a troll from Nedap venting some humiliation on this poor guy from ICTE? C'mon Roy, they won.
And deal with it : the world has moved on from ignoring the electoral process. It can't just be "electrified" now - it needs to be fully re-engineered so it will continue to scale, support PR, be frequent, cheaper.
Paper is not the way, not in its current form. Maybe with scanning, but even then, there's too much room for jiggery pokery and having two channels (e- and paper-) will only lead to the inevitable inequity and loss of faith in both.
It's time Nedap, Diebold, Sequoia and the others realised that the Internet is the way and that one of the many cryptographic communication systems which have served us since WWII will work for e-voting.
We just need to get around DDoS, strong confirmation of remote voter eligibility to vote, vulnerability of the remote voter's PC and vote selling and coercion.
This is why they got to the Moon before we got decent e-voting. However, now its time to turn to these problems and solve them : think of what the world would be like now had Bush not got in.
I think you are right. The issue then is how to manage paper trails. Currently I see the following problems
- if the e-results and the paper results differ, how to resolve this? - paper can be damaged, lost etc - paper management in addition to e-voting duplicates the process, equipment etc over just paper voting
In addition, I think the long term objective should not be for expensive, infrequent elections. Ultimately they should be
- frequent - accessible - for lower-stakes or incremental democratic issues only
Firstly, Trusted Computing could not be proprietary. Voting software has to be auditable. This means the software code has to be open, and it has to be very small and simple.
Secondly, voter disenfranchisement is a real issue; we might be able to protect the vote with crypto and sandbox execution etc, but it has to be hard for a hack to break the voting session for the voter. Voters have to be able to vote no matter what.
Thirdly, remote attestation needs to prove not only what's running, but what version, what changes to that version, what parameters to that software, what supporting software is running. It's a lot to prove. Remote attestation needs to prove the entire system snapshot, remotely. A totally compromised system becomes the host and can make itself look like anything remotely. Also, we need to be sure what we are talking to; I believe everything that identifies a remote box can be spoofed; ARP address, MAC address, IP etc. Even continuous monitoring can be interfered with as another box can theoretically drop in as a monkey-in-middle.
Fourth, DDoS source addresses may be legitimate. IPv6 won't even prevent DDoS from legitimate IP attackers. What is needed is a distributed voting architecture that can't be nuked. This is what the Internet was for, not client-server.
A better solution is an anonymous p2p architecture. Hide the voters, hide the servers.
I'm sure the eVacs system was GPL. It should be out there on a cache somewhere. They are going to use it again this year, so that's ongoing. However, its for polling place voting on isolated LANs, not the web.
In fact, I think this is the issue with the other projects. Free-project.org was a free Internet voting package written in Java, however, the author Jason Kitcat jumped the fence and became an anti-evoting person.
Most other developments are commercial, however, we saw this one for a start. Built with Perl on RH7.2, Apache, MySQL etc, uses an encrypting Java client which is the only bit that can change votes and the source for this was made public, signed etc.
-aa
They did this with the prequel to SERVE, VOI. They sent out CDRs. Problem was the electoral people were not capable of installing the software and also the SOI on the boxes broke/prevented installation of some components. This is why only 80 people ended up voting that time. I recall it cost 100K a vote.
However, your point is a good one. With a 3yr defense budget of what was it, USD 1 trillion dollars(!? Bush asked Congress for 0.9T!) you'd think they'd be able to send out some specially hardened laptops or something for defense people to use.
Aviel Rubin's report was written by him and three of 10 experts asked for comment. Five did not comment as the thing is so politicised. Aviel has already taken the position as strident anti-voting-technology. He is also a security expert, they love hideous what-if scenarios - these pay their wages.
One of the other experts, Ted Selker from MIT criticised Rubin et al.
[snip]
Ms. McLauglin of Accenture said that the company had
contacted the other six members of the outside advisory
group and that five of the six said they would not
recommend shutting down the program.
One of the other outside reviewers, Ted Selker, a professor
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, disagreed
with the report, saying it reflected the professional
paranoia of security researchers. "That's their job," he
said.
Mr. Selker, an expert in the ways people use technology,
said security is a less pressing concern than mistakes in
registration databases, poor ballot design and inadequate
polling place procedures. "Every single election machine
I've seen - including the lever machine, including punch
card machines, including paper ballots - has
vulnerabilities," he said.
Troll. Unis can bid. Anyone can bid. Boos Allen got SERVE last time. Accenture got it this time. UEW might get it next time. Crimminy! It's called democracy. Dude, you should have seen the RFT for SERVE. It was like "solve the halting problem". If Accenture got it, they must have written a good RFT. But so can you.
The problem is the Michigan caucuses Internet ballot went to Accenture as well and were NOT put out to bid. No one else got a look it.
Ya ya sticks and stones you young troll.
You are standing on technology, driving it, eating it and shitting into it. Virtually nothing resembles the lifestyle of the time the Australian Secret Ballot was invented.
Your voting system is 150 years old, it is a creaking, ignored, under-funded, under-trained activity. If people were interested in the voting process it would have been updated decades ago, like everything else.
Get with it; stick with paper and we'll get George Bush again, and itll be No More Mr Nice Guy next time.
The answer my patient friends : open source internet voting. A signed applet uses PKI and the electoral officer decrypts the votes. Voters register and set a password/question pair.
I'm old. I remember many voting problems and I am watching the technology mature.
Steve Mann and others developed a system called gunroll that can align and stitch video frames. When frames overlap, it ups the resolution. Makes me think a basic pan and scan of Bryce canyon taking only, say, one minute would produce an even larger image than this one, without manual blends.
If anyone knows more about Steve Mann's work or got his software to work for the Rest Of Us (tm) please post a reply here! (Steve's C software can be got off the web, google for it.)
Business and first class passengers flying alone would not cover the cost of a 747 flight. Business and first class seating is in the small minority of plane space. Its the cattle class that pay for the flight, and the plane rental and the airline. Obviously the sweet spot between service and value as most people travel this way.
We're witnessing the cost of a poor democratic process. The "president" is going to start wwIII! Elected on paper, too.
My point about election monitors was a theoretical one - sure, there should always be lots of `em - with an Internet system, they can all watch all votes, and all watch each other.
Critics of new voting tech usually say we should stick with paper. It's easy to say "paper will be fine for NNN years when there will be MMM of us". Throw in fairer, more modern counting systems like STV and each paper ballot has to be counted several times. Allow voting for party members, the paper ballot grows into an A3 or A2 (no joke!) size. Usability/turnaround etc get out of hand.
I don't think democracy should be cheaper - let people vote on paper if they want. We just need to offer more channels; few aspects of life at the time of the emergence of ballot voting are the same. We at least need more ways to vote. "To offer choice is to be modern, to not offer a choice is not modern" - MORI (mori.com).
If we can make voting very convenient, then we can make it compulsory. That'll fix a lot of stuff that's bust at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
He needs two hundred dollars for some good lecture slides.
I found it totally incomprehensible. The only thing that makes it watchable is a kind of exasperation and disbelief in his voice at the large efforts of others which are "wrong". This is a bad sign. He's old, he only needs USD200m to get this thing to work, and it is based on research from the 1920s. Why hasn't it been realised yet? If he's waiting for new technology, then that's a Pandora's box.
If it can be done with bamboo leaves and snot then this lone wolf is right and all the tokomak (not just ITER, but also JET) people are wrong. Seems unlikely.
No 200M, don't pass Go.
Pigs get stressed more than most animals when they are housed in high density pens. So there is now a move to selectively breed the "stress" out of pigs. There are also much more advanced methods of slaughter now, such as Temple Grandin's Stairway to Heaven.
The larger problem is actually meat consumption. It takes 12,000 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef... and that's the natural way of growing beef! Imagine doing it in a factory... each pound of beef requires six pounds of corn that could be eaten by us instead. When you look at the numbers for meat, its a depressing story.
Economic and environmental issues dictate that the final solution will be processed foods grown where species can be raised most cheaply. They will probably be adequate as a food source for us, albeit a rather boring one. Not much meat in it. Heavily cooked. Fortified with vitamins and additives to make it worth eating.
If someone else can think up something more interesting and more likely I'm all ears.
C'mon Michael was innocent! Sheesh, let it go, already!
I have heard it claimed by my local insane asylum director (no kidding!) that there has never been a false match with iris scanning in its entire commercial history.
Seems a bold claim where violent insane people are being let through doors on not on the basis of this technology. Can someone deny/back this up?
I think this ignores that fingerprints can be recorded both in the "raw" (say as a BMP) and so can be stolen, used etc etc or they can be stored as a kind of secure hash, like a shadow password.
Unlike a password which may have say 50^8 permutations and is vulnerable to dictionary attacks, the fingerprint "hash" has a much wider (albeit softer) searchspace.
A database of "raw" fingerprints, or any "raw" biometrics would be lunacy, right?
RTWFWS (read the whole f-king website) it only prints "Vacation in Hawaii". That's not all the pictures I have. I also went to Detroit. I can't print that.
Distributed counting would be hard for STV, runoff and similar PR-type ballots. All the ballots for a race need to be together or totals known at once so that eliminations can be executed at each stage. Anyone who weeps over Nader taking votes from Kerry can see that PR-type voting is the future. Nader's lost votes would have been redistributed to Kerry.
Additionally, donkey-voting effects (voting in order down the list, or where the first candidate gets votes for merely being at the top) are eliminated by rotation of candidate order. In some places, this is done by printing several versions of the ballot paper, with different candidate orders. This is expensive and may not cover all orderings.
I hope you can see that fairer voting techniques are also a lot more complex and error prone, difficult to teach to volunteers etc. Computers, on the other hand, eat up this kind of work.
Finally, I do agree with your main assertion; voting should be decentralised as much as possible for the reasons you give. Presently, voting is very centralised and collecting ballots whether by hand or by post places them at greater risk as they accumulate into larger bundles closer to counting centres. Internet voting is also hurt by this model as it is presently centralised. The central web server for Internet voting is too easy to attack.
Having voters vote on PCs in small numbers (such as from work or home) lowers the value of a hack on any one PC as the vote traffic is low. It keeps voters physically distributed so they cannot be coerced en masse or intimidated away from voting. If voters could vote like this and their votes were not centrally collected, Internet voting would be a lot stronger.
Computers do do audit. Blind signatures, forward hashing, digests and any number of well-known techniques allow for voter receipting from a computer. This does not tie a voter to their vote, does not identify the voter and does allow confirmation of vote received intact.
Eventually, electronic voting will be computerised, decentralised, networked, and auditable.
The consumer is an ongoing voter on lots of issues of economy, environment, social policy, foreign policy. You have many choices and likely you'll get what you want. Make sure your money goes to the right places and then perhaps to pay a little more if you have to to get your money going the right way.
Your wife's grandfather's mill may still be open if it had been sustainable. If it had been sustainable and consumers thought about sources of paper and wood products before they bought them, the mill could still be open today.
I'm pleased and glad you have a good education and you got good grades. Everyone should have this experience. Maybe they will vote differently then, maybe not.
You vote every 4 years for Pres but you buy stuff every day. I know you are likely very busy, but try to get this short, almost unknown book: The secet life of everyday things
It is jaw dropping account of the impact of consumer choices.
Oh yeah, three CRT monitors (two no-names and an SGI) had a 6 hour underwater adventure in my garden shed when our neighborhood got flooded. I let them dry and they all worked, eventually.
Actually, there's more. I plugged the 5v speaker pins from my apple 2 into 8ohm domestic speakers (for more of a hi-fi effect) and this fried the motherboard. Repairs : USD300. Still works.
Here's a recent one. I just left a laptop in a hotel in Texas.
As the subject says. Compaq M700 baked at 200 deg c for 20 minutes until I smelt burning plastic. Came out of oven smoking. Cooled off, booted up fine. LCD backlighting was a bit uneven and some of the cast plastic bits (DVD drive cover, infra-red red plastic cover etc were warped and fell out. Cost of repairs, USD1000. Why was it in the oven? Burglars do not look in the oven for stuff. Advice for future : use the microwave instead as cooking does not require pre-heating.
Tidbit of the day : there are 1.5 million union ballots executed each year in the USA.
Yeah, I begrudgingly agree. However, I'm optimistic because Internet voting is nascent. The distributed, governmentless nature of it just seems to be a good fit with democracy, don't you think?
Good grief! Are you a troll from Nedap venting some humiliation on this poor guy from ICTE? C'mon Roy, they won.
And deal with it : the world has moved on from ignoring the electoral process. It can't just be "electrified" now - it needs to be fully re-engineered so it will continue to scale, support PR, be frequent, cheaper.
Paper is not the way, not in its current form. Maybe with scanning, but even then, there's too much room for jiggery pokery and having two channels (e- and paper-) will only lead to the inevitable inequity and loss of faith in both.
It's time Nedap, Diebold, Sequoia and the others realised that the Internet is the way and that one of the many cryptographic communication systems which have served us since WWII will work for e-voting.
We just need to get around DDoS, strong confirmation of remote voter eligibility to vote, vulnerability of the remote voter's PC and vote selling and coercion.
This is why they got to the Moon before we got decent e-voting. However, now its time to turn to these problems and solve them : think of what the world would be like now had Bush not got in.
I think you are right. The issue then is how to manage paper trails. Currently I see the following problems
- if the e-results and the paper results differ, how to resolve this?
- paper can be damaged, lost etc
- paper management in addition to e-voting duplicates the process, equipment etc over just paper voting
In addition, I think the long term objective should not be for expensive, infrequent elections. Ultimately they should be
- frequent
- accessible
- for lower-stakes or incremental democratic issues only
Camera bag. Big camera flash. Jack hammer.
The silo has been used for construction porn.
Firstly, Trusted Computing could not be proprietary. Voting software has to be auditable. This means the software code has to be open, and it has to be very small and simple.
Secondly, voter disenfranchisement is a real issue; we might be able to protect the vote with crypto and sandbox execution etc, but it has to be hard for a hack to break the voting session for the voter. Voters have to be able to vote no matter what.
Thirdly, remote attestation needs to prove not only what's running, but what version, what changes to that version, what parameters to that software, what supporting software is running. It's a lot to prove. Remote attestation needs to prove the entire system snapshot, remotely. A totally compromised system becomes the host and can make itself look like anything remotely. Also, we need to be sure what we are talking to; I believe everything that identifies a remote box can be spoofed; ARP address, MAC address, IP etc. Even continuous monitoring can be interfered with as another box can theoretically drop in as a monkey-in-middle.
Fourth, DDoS source addresses may be legitimate. IPv6 won't even prevent DDoS from legitimate IP attackers. What is needed is a distributed voting architecture that can't be nuked. This is what the Internet was for, not client-server.
A better solution is an anonymous p2p architecture. Hide the voters, hide the servers.
Should be (Deficit == increasing) or are you trying to introduce some sort of Linux kernel root exploit?
Internet voting suffers by trying to be like paper voting : single submission, weak authentication and centralised vote collection.
Only for people in Canada and the US. Hrrmmmfff. Also, all Haiku has to mention or allude to one of the 4 seasons. Ask Damien Conway.
I'm sure the eVacs system was GPL. It should be out there on a cache somewhere. They are going to use it again this year, so that's ongoing. However, its for polling place voting on isolated LANs, not the web.
In fact, I think this is the issue with the other projects. Free-project.org was a free Internet voting package written in Java, however, the author Jason Kitcat jumped the fence and became an anti-evoting person.
Most other developments are commercial, however, we saw this one for a start. Built with Perl on RH7.2, Apache, MySQL etc, uses an encrypting Java client which is the only bit that can change votes and the source for this was made public, signed etc. -aa
They did this with the prequel to SERVE, VOI. They sent out CDRs. Problem was the electoral people were not capable of installing the software and also the SOI on the boxes broke/prevented installation of some components. This is why only 80 people ended up voting that time. I recall it cost 100K a vote.
However, your point is a good one. With a 3yr defense budget of what was it, USD 1 trillion dollars(!? Bush asked Congress for 0.9T!) you'd think they'd be able to send out some specially hardened laptops or something for defense people to use.
Aviel Rubin's report was written by him and three of 10 experts asked for comment. Five did not comment as the thing is so politicised. Aviel has already taken the position as strident anti-voting-technology. He is also a security expert, they love hideous what-if scenarios - these pay their wages.
One of the other experts, Ted Selker from MIT criticised Rubin et al.
"Report Says Internet Voting System Is Too Insecure to Use"
January 21, 2004
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
[snip] Ms. McLauglin of Accenture said that the company had contacted the other six members of the outside advisory group and that five of the six said they would not recommend shutting down the program.
One of the other outside reviewers, Ted Selker, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, disagreed with the report, saying it reflected the professional paranoia of security researchers. "That's their job," he said.
Mr. Selker, an expert in the ways people use technology, said security is a less pressing concern than mistakes in registration databases, poor ballot design and inadequate polling place procedures. "Every single election machine I've seen - including the lever machine, including punch card machines, including paper ballots - has vulnerabilities," he said.
Troll. Unis can bid. Anyone can bid. Boos Allen got SERVE last time. Accenture got it this time. UEW might get it next time. Crimminy! It's called democracy. Dude, you should have seen the RFT for SERVE. It was like "solve the halting problem". If Accenture got it, they must have written a good RFT. But so can you.
The problem is the Michigan caucuses Internet ballot went to Accenture as well and were NOT put out to bid. No one else got a look it.
Ya ya sticks and stones you young troll.
You are standing on technology, driving it, eating it and shitting into it. Virtually nothing resembles the lifestyle of the time the Australian Secret Ballot was invented. Your voting system is 150 years old, it is a creaking, ignored, under-funded, under-trained activity. If people were interested in the voting process it would have been updated decades ago, like everything else.
Get with it; stick with paper and we'll get George Bush again, and itll be No More Mr Nice Guy next time.
The answer my patient friends : open source internet voting. A signed applet uses PKI and the electoral officer decrypts the votes. Voters register and set a password/question pair.
I'm old. I remember many voting problems and I am watching the technology mature.
You don't think so? Go read what happened to your paper votes last time.
Steve Mann and others developed a system called gunroll that can align and stitch video frames. When frames overlap, it ups the resolution. Makes me think a basic pan and scan of Bryce canyon taking only, say, one minute would produce an even larger image than this one, without manual blends.
see : their paper and see this image which adds resolution as they have discovered : scroll down to the swimming pool
If anyone knows more about Steve Mann's work or got his software to work for the Rest Of Us (tm) please post a reply here! (Steve's C software can be got off the web, google for it.)
Adam.
Arenchagunnarooda? Nahdinwanna.
Business and first class passengers flying alone would not cover the cost of a 747 flight. Business and first class seating is in the small minority of plane space.
Its the cattle class that pay for the flight, and the plane rental and the airline. Obviously the sweet spot between service and value as most people travel this way.
We're witnessing the cost of a poor democratic process. The "president" is going to start wwIII! Elected on paper, too.
My point about election monitors was a theoretical one - sure, there should always be lots of `em - with an Internet system, they can all watch all votes, and all watch each other.
Critics of new voting tech usually say we should stick with paper. It's easy to say "paper will be fine for NNN years when there will be MMM of us". Throw in fairer, more modern counting systems like STV and each paper ballot has to be counted several times. Allow voting for party members, the paper ballot grows into an A3 or A2 (no joke!) size. Usability/turnaround etc get out of hand.
I don't think democracy should be cheaper - let people vote on paper if they want. We just need to offer more channels; few aspects of life at the time of the emergence of ballot voting are the same. We at least need more ways to vote. "To offer choice is to be modern, to not offer a choice is not modern" - MORI (mori.com).
If we can make voting very convenient, then we can make it compulsory. That'll fix a lot of stuff that's bust at the moment.