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0 pointsanon4636376y ago0 comments

There's no solving infrequent social problems with technology, only socio-politically. I'm sure it does happen to a few people, but it sounds extremely rare.

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.

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lukifer6y ago

+1 for election day as a national holiday; I'd even go so far as to make voting mandatory (with support for blank protest ballots, health/circumstance exemptions, etc).

That said, while the RFID system you describe seems achievable (and clearly an improvement over closed-source easily-hackable voting machines), I think it misses an important component of a democratic process: voter trust. Even if the tech is fully auditable, requiring the average voter to trust an elite technological caste does reduce trust, compared to pen and paper, which are auditable by the vast majority of citizens.

Also, the RFID can't be the only mechanism; having a fixed address can be used for authorizing identity (as with mail-in ballots), but is not and should not be a requirement to vote.

At any rate, I agree that technology is no silver bullet; solutions should be sociopolitical first, and technology is merely a tool to that end. I do think there are worthwhile innovations to consider; if anything, I'd like to disrupt polling moreso than voting, which I think has a surprising political influence both during and between election cycles, and yet which we outsource to private media companies with their own biases and incentives. If we could crack the problem of distributed identity that is resistant to Sybil attacks, we could have ongoing/persistent voting, liquid voting, public choice economics, etc, enabling more fluid feedback loops with our representatives (and maybe someday, even "pass-through" representative direct democracy).