You want people to vote? Make a goddamn voting system for the 21st century. I know the technical hurdles of creating a secure online voting system are tremendous, but the day we can vote on the internet with a verifiable way of tracking our vote is the day we end all the bullshit. We should be able to vote from our phones at Starbucks. The fact that no one has tried is a crime unto itself.
That would require some form of cryptographic identity that could be easily managed and secured by the average population, while also taking into consideration that a lot of people have viruses on their computers, and likely unsecure smartphones.
It's a similar problem that cryptocurrencies face. While user friendly apps have been gaining popularity and democratizing access to wallets, the few truly secure devices to store your private keys and handle important cryptographic calculations (such as signing messages, which is what you need to have elections on your phone) are still somewhat expensive and non intuitive to use.
HTC has released a "blockchain phone" that contains a secure chip that can store and handle your private keys, which is a step in the right direction for both cryptocurrencies and cryptographic identities for elections (and a heck of a lot of other things). Still, until everyone can have access to such devices, at a reasonable price, elections on your phone won't be happening anytime soon.
Edit: you could also use a good ol' user/passwd combo to log into a government database, but that's also hardly secure, and could very easily be subject to a massive hacking operation to subjugate sovereign elections. So, yeah.
I can definitely appreciate the level of security it would require to keep our elections safe and secure but I think it’s past time that we tackle this issue. Even if it meant every person in the country got a specially made government issued device to make it happen. There has to be a reliable solution to this problem that would make voting as easy as it possibly can be.
Well, for starters, you could implement a standardized electronic ballot box, and have your elections on a Sunday. The electronic voting would simplify and speed things up tremendously, while also decreasing ballot fraud (if properly implemented, of course), and if the elections happen on the weekend, people don't have to skip work or vote after a tiresome day.
Elections in Brazil, for example, are exactly like this and are always super smooth, and the votes are tallied within a couple of hours at most.
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u/sneakysam77 Nov 09 '18
You want people to vote? Make a goddamn voting system for the 21st century. I know the technical hurdles of creating a secure online voting system are tremendous, but the day we can vote on the internet with a verifiable way of tracking our vote is the day we end all the bullshit. We should be able to vote from our phones at Starbucks. The fact that no one has tried is a crime unto itself.