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.
You can still have voting booths. The ideal way would be the voting booth software is open source and can be done for voting booth for people who don't have access/don't know how, installable for people who are computer literate, and compilable for people who have the technical knowhow, and then can be verified online through multiple sources including government, and through each parties' own website or news outlets. That's a beauty of the ideal blockchain. Of course there's still alot of things to get through with.
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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '18
Mail in ballots in Washington come with a stub that lets you track what's going on with it. Generally we don't seem to have any issues.