Your abusive spouse/boss/dealer could tell you that they want to see you use the app to vote their way, and there's not much to prevent it.
While going to a local precinct is inconvenient, no one knows what you do once you walk in that booth. That's important to avoid coercion.
That said, if the app supported changing your vote later on, it could be preferable to the mail-in solution.
At least a mail-in ballot usually has a "receipt," (that serial number thing that's torn off at the top/bottom) although it does little to show or prove a vote was counted, especially with the subjectiveness of interpreting handwritten marks. The bigger problem is electronic voting has no real records making it far easier to manipulate because there's nothing permanent to recount.
I suggest that to solve the receipt issue, privacy, speed of counting and accuracy to the best degree available, it's best to:
0. Make voting day a national holiday.
1. Mail every voter a durable, physical RFID token (signed by a closely-held private key) that has an unique code that is not recorded who it is given to. If they haven't received one before voting in-person, they can receive a random token.
2. The voter is first checked to make sure they haven't yet voted by keeping a database of "has voted"... completely independent of actual votes.
3. The voter either drops-off the RFID in a container in a booth for their vote preference, or they mail it sealed in two envelopes (outer mailing info, inner vote preference).
4. Votes are counted both by weight and by RFID scanning (whole containers of votes are scanned in batch) for redundancy.
5. Voters can check online in real-time if their vote was counted by searching for the RFID code they used.
6. Recounts are a matter of mass-scanning large containers (with appropriate chain-of-custody) of votes.
7. Tokens are reused to reduce waste.
The only difference here is whether the post office or a TLS connection are more trustworthy to deliver your vote.
Edit ("posting too fast"): For paper votes, no computers need be involved at all - they can be counted and summed by hand.
WA also has vote by mail, but this kind of online voting is very different.
To vote by mail, you have to receive the ballot at your address, physically mark your choices, and then mail it back in. The potential for fraud or abuse of this system is fairly limited.
To vote with this WA online voting system, you need to know the name and the date of birth, that's it. Aside from illegality of voting fraud, the potential for abuse is just humongous, all you need is just a dataset of names and DOB.
The reward provides a sort of ceiling on how much time and money can be spent on trying to break a system. Even if you could get access to a few billion dollars by somehow "hacking" a bank and get away with it, that means that you'd only be spending up to a few billion to do it, and you may spend a few years to plan, but not much more.
But trying to "hack an election"? I would be shocked if there weren't multiple countries spending billions of dollars across literally decades of time trying to find the best way to influence and hack elections in other countries.
Do you really think that ANY software is secure enough to withstand a team of a few thousand of some of the most talented developers money can buy working full time for decades on trying to break it? Because that's the kind of threats that elections face. And if that election happens at all on the internet, the adversaries can be literally anywhere in the world and still attack it.
There are also auxiliary reasons why electronic voting isn't ideal. It removes the ability for the average person to validate the security of their election themselves without a software engineering degree (in a paper election anyone can go watch the locked ballot box all day to ensure there is no tampering, and they can count along with everyone else at the end of the day). It introduces accessibility issues, it adds unnecessary bottlenecks and dependencies (there have been countless stories of there not being enough voting machines or them breaking down causing lines to get multiple hours long and in many cases prevent people from being able to vote before polls close. There's even evidence this has been done on purpose to sway elections by preventing people in some areas from voting as much as people in others), and it's really expensive!
And what are the benefits to electronic voting? slightly faster counting? (you can get results in minutes instead of hours...)
It's possible that a much lower price would even work too, since if you were going to vote my way anyway, you'd do it for free. So I only have to convince the voters on the other side (and hope the electoral college doesn't override my proxy votes).
A bank has no way to know in real time if you are being forced to transfer hundred of thousands of dollars or not.
USA is ruled by laws, not people. The laws can serve as a veil between those who set them and those who follow them. Online voting enables the SkyNet plot: laws are voted for online, but it's AI who casts them.
Oh, really?
> Once voters have completed their ballots, they must verify their submissions and then submit a signature on the touch screen of their device.
Huh?
> Finney says election officials in Washington are adept at signature verification because the state votes entirely by mail. ...
Finney must have never had to sign on a phone screen with a finger while driving before.
All of this digital theater of the absurd in a desperate attempt to engage people in the political process:
> The board of supervisors election in the King Conservation District, for example, in past years has drawn less than 1% of the eligible population to the ballot box.
People don't vote because they don't care. Not because they can't make it to the poling place. They don't care because they don't see anything at stake.
There's no app for that.
So obviously you have to make it as braindead simple to vote as we have made everything else. What I do not see the purpose in, is complaining about or nay-saying these attempts. You're never going to convince someone that one vote is worth more than it is, which is what people really mean when they talk about 'engagement', because your vote on its own really just doesn't matter much and people intuitively get that.
Reducing the cost of voting to match the actual value of a single vote is the best move we have IMO.
If someone has that worldview I'm OK with them not voting.
I'm not sure that X% more participation would improve our collective decision making. In essence we'd be diluting the vote of those who care the most with those who think voting by mail is too hard.
Countries with political leaders willing to stoop to the tactics of dictators will have a field day.
Why the "while driving" bit? Your argument was solid until you added these 2 words. Now you're saying "If it doesn't work while I'm busy operating a motor vehicle, I'm against it!"
> Finney must have never had to sign on a phone screen with a finger while driving before.
How is "while driving" relevant? I think that even the most ardent proponent of reducing barriers to voting would find it acceptable to make it hard for people to vote while driving.
Although this appears to be something local so there’s a chance it’s not entirely useless.
OTOH, the WA Sec. of State opposes mobile/online elections due to security concerns, as does her upcoming political opponent [1] and FWIW the Seattle Times recently wrote an Editorial also opposing the practice. [2]
Bottom line, this hardly constitutes some trend that WA state is moving towards, just something set up by a county office that is otherwise drawing skepticism.
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/secretary...
[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/resist-push-...
And I'm not just talking election pragmatics here, I'm also convinced that lower offices will on average see less abuse if given to career bureaucrats than if given to people who invest the effort of running in an election for an uncertain chance to get - whatever they were hoping for. It's more likely to be worth the effort for the self-serving type.
Thanks for links. I know, and have occasionally crossed swords with, most of the players mentioned.
Our conservation districts fund their own elections. They don't have the budget to pay to be on the normal ballot. The only fix would be for state government to appropriate the money. People like Toby Nixon have floated this reform at various times the last 20 years. Otherwise, there's no push.
Current WA SOS Wyman is ok, for a Republican. While she does nothing to expand the franchise, she does not share Sam Reed's, her predecessor and mentor, technophilia.
KC Exec Constantine absolutely knows better. He played a role in both of my efforts to protect the secret ballot (prohibit voter id from being printed on ballot) and delaying a major risky overhaul of KC Elections in 2008. Constantine is a wicked smart politician. So I wonder what his angle here is.
The automated signature verification has three show stopping flaws. High error rate, both positive and negative. Blackbox. Is another form of rent seeking by vendors; last time I checked, vender gets $0.10 per voter per election (not just per ballot cast).
I'm very proud of Seattle Times' editorial board on this issue. They learned, matured, adapted. I spoke with them 10+ years ago about election integrity. They were wicked smart, painfully polite & earnest, respectfully disagreed. One of my best interactions as an activist. While I disagree with Seattle Times on most everything (else), they are a worthy opponent.
I know nothing about the vendors mentioned, Tuck and Finney. I assume they're typical consulting bozos chasing sales and haven't really thought about the policies involved, and don't know enough to know they're bozos.
Gael Tarleton would make a great SOS.
It seems to me that the only difference between an exit poll and a voluntary disclosure checkbox which, if utilized by a statistically significant portion of the electorate, could be leveraged by official government commissions to audit election results where online voting is offered is that one these options is in the price range of the national parties and not publicly disclosed and the other strikes fear into the heart of everyone I've spoken to involved in election process.
Voluntary disclosure doesn't have to be a slippery slope and I firmly believe can and will lead to more fair and equitable access to the voting process and greater participation if it enabled online voting to be audited.
No one believes that large numbers of people will be blackmailed into disclosing their vote and if this or discrimination happens at scale then make it explicitly illegal. For those who aren't subject to these factors and are willing to participate in a census it would completely change how elections are run for the better.
I can't recall the last time there was an election in my precinct for any question whatsoever that was actually in play. These days I just give my wife my ballot to vote--it makes us both happier.
Sounds like nothing but a combination of thinly veiled voter suppression or technophobia, either of which should disqualify someone from public office in the eyes of an educated voter.
I don't buy that a smartphone magically hits some convenience threshold that turns out voters.
The disadvantage to this system is the erosion of the secret ballot. Someone (e.g. an employer, spouse or friend) can now ask you for proof of your vote.
(I think absentee ballots should be voidable in person.)
Needless to say, someone demanding to see my vote counts as a felony still in our state. Maybe it occasionally happens? But it would take thousands of deliberate felonies to meaningfully change an election.
While I would agree there are definite issues with security, I really don't like the "print out the digital ballots" idea would rather see something block-chain based which is public and easy to audit.
And I think it's unavoidable that some sort of biometric or other proof of identity will be required (take a selfie in order to vote!) before "voting with your phone" become commonly accepted.
Look at a map of voter turnout in Europe, and ask yourself is that REALLY credible.
It's more likely that US low turnout is because, for many voters in many elections, their vote is kinda meaningless. If you live in California or Texas your vote in a presidential election is meaningless, say, and probably also in a senate election. Depending on your district, your vote in a house election is probably also meaningless; most are not competitive.
As a general rule turnout is higher in countries using some form of proportional representation, as individual votes are far more likely to be impactful there (in a PR-STV system, for instance, it is pretty rare that all of a constituency's representatives are effectively decided before the election, whereas that's the case in the majority of US districts).
Other factors; most US states have rather short ballot opening hours compared to other democratic countries (In Ireland, say, we generally have voting from 7am-10pm or so), and the US population is more dispersed than most developed countries, making traveling to a polling station more difficult.
That said, voting by phone is an obviously unacceptable solution, as it destroys the secret ballot.
It's not like votes in state/municipal elections are higher, and in fact they are lower. (Governors' elections are very significant on meat-and-potatoes issues like transportation, etc., and routinely get 45-50% turnout.)
> Depending on your district, your vote in a house election is probably also meaningless; most are not competitive.
But why aren't they competitive? Because most people agree with the status quo. There is no point showing up to reaffirm the status who that you're happy with.
So, then the folks in Sweden and Denmark are voting because they lack confidence in their government, whereas in Estonia and Latvia, all is fine?
And if you could pre-print your completed ballot to be scanned (once your identity if verified per local requirements) then the process could be very, very fast and efficient.
If they mean that there is a public URL you go to, and then on the site only have to enter you birhdate and name to log in, and then you can vote--that can't be right. There's gotta be more than that.
My guess is that what has been lost in the stories is how you get the URL. I'm guessing that they either email you the URL or they send physical mail which includes a QR code with the URL, and the URL contains some sort of unique per voter identifier (hopefully randomly generated anew for each election). When you go to vote the site knows who you are supposed to be from that identifier in the URL, and the name/birthdate is just for a consistency check.
I mean I agree but this is how in-person voting works right now. The only "secret" information is my polling place but anyone who knows my name can figure that out since the voter records are public and includes my address.
Of course there is. You also need a User-Agent that says you're a phone. And you can't set the evil bit. ;D
I really do hope this goes nowhere, because this is just silly.
Not that I'm scared of some malicious foreign hacker getting paid to break the voting system.
I'm just terrified of the human being getting paid to do the programming in the first place. Never trust them. -(Source: I live inside one of them.)
All this reminds me that I have to remember registering to volunteer at the voting booth for the local French elections in a couple weeks.
You know, those local elections where no one will agree on anything, except the results - who will have been (not that painfully) counted and recounted from good old paper ballots by volonteers who could have spent their Sunday night on hacker news like serious techies.
Why not just allow everyone to vote online, with no registration? Just type in your full name and select a candidate, no email or password required. It'd guarantee 100% turnout - maybe even >100% turnout, if enough bots join the fun!
The problem with digital voting is that it cannot be made sufficiently secure. It's not a matter of "there are problems we haven't solved yet", but rather "there are problems that we provably cannot solve".
The techies are against this because they know the technical side and understand how fragile this seemingly secure system is. This is the equivalent of 737 MAX story: the execs shout how solid the plane is, while engineers cry the opposite. They speak up because they are on the losing side: if this system gets implemented, it won't be them who will control the votes.
The "major security risks" are intentionally there. These are backdoors that allow the right people to control the votes.
We don't need 100% voter turn out. We only need voters who care. There are a lot of people who don't care and have no time or desire to learn about what they vote for. These careless voters are often easily manipulated by media and thus someone who controls the media would love all these people to vote.
The nation policies would indeed change immediately: it would be a rapid erosion of those rights we still have; and if "forward thinking" means repealing 2A, then no thanks, I'd rather use my backwards thinking here.
Phone voting is a cybersecurity nightmare.
Not advocating for anyone to do so, as this is extremely illegal, but imo whoever signed off on this kind of online voting system is an even bigger criminal in my eyes.
EDIT: upon reading further comments, I discovered that voter registration records in WA are officially public, and they include names and DOB (among other things). I am speechless.
Vote automates your votes by choosing the best candidates for you using SocialAI technology.
Of course, that might end up putting a lot of power into the hands of the people making the algorithms, but if the training data and source code were transparent, and the output of the algorithm included a human-readable explanation for its recommendation, then it might actually be a better system than people voting the way they are told to by the only newspaper or TV station that they read/watch. (People should still then go to a ballot box and cast their vote on paper, though).
Here is a TED talk which introduces this idea:
I'll agree that voting should be on paper. I'm not ready to boil it all down to something like a dating app.
Could a similar hack be done on a larger scale, and used to alter votes before they are sent, without changing the electronic signature?
Lets assume no until proven otherwise. And if proven otherwise, lets assume it was an isolated incident, and it won't happen again after a "commitment to do better".
Lets also assume Mr. Tusk's firm can be trusted - after all, why not put a private middle-man between voters and elections? As Mr. Tusk correctly points out, the only plausible explanation to resistance is wanting to suppress voters.
[0]: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/vrdb/extract-requests.aspx
1) Stop making all these penny ante jobs elected positions. These people are bureaucrats. Let them apply for their jobs like every other bureaucrat. If 99% of voters are saying they de facto don't care, maybe you should take the message.
2) For jobs that do matter, make voting compulsory.
Bonus point: have elections on the weekends when people actually have time to vote. Very few people need two days to drive their buggy in from the farm anymore ffs.
Keep paper ballots because they are inefficient.
What's the problem with low voter turnout? If someone doesn't feel like voting, they should have that right. A non-vote is a vote of confidence that you are OK with any choice.
In fact, high voter turnout is usually indicative of major societal divisions or issues (case in point, the upcoming national election will probably have HIGH voter turnout as anti-Trump and pro-Trump people will turn out in droves).
> The article says that this election has in previous years resulted in <1% of eligible voters. That is clearly untenable.
Why is it untenable? What is the harm? The alternative is you force people to vote, and they'll vote by choosing a name randomly from a list.
Perhaps the voters should get a set of one-time codes along with a PIN from the voting office, and use that to validate their vote.
1. No paper record.
2. No privacy.
A better way would be to use anonymous physical RFID pebbles that are placed in a container to indicate voting preference. Votes can be both weighed and scanned for counting redundancy very quickly.
Mail-in voting would consist of mailing back the pebble chit in an outside return envelope with an inner vote envelope designating the preference; the outer envelope is removed and mixed with many others before sorting.
Then later, no matter how a vote was cast, it's possible to find how a vote was counted (by the voter searching for the RFID code(s) they used) in real-time because all votes were mass-scanned in RFID containers... that is, there will be a number of large containers that contain all votes for a particular preference in a particular election. Subsequent elections reuse the RFIDs to eliminate waste. No hanging chads, no provisional ballots, no hacked voting machines and no voting by mobile.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised though. I vote in WA and most people on the ballot seem profoundly unqualified for the positions they're running for. For me it basically boils down to picking the person with the most robust education credentials, unless they're a commie, in which case I pick the next best thing. It's pretty bad. If I were hiring for myself, I wouldn't hire most of these people.
There is minimal risk that Russia cares about who serves on your local school board.
