The similarity is that:<p>When Amazon gets duplicate orders, or uncast orders, they tell the "customers" to keep the goods.<p>And when an electronic vote is cast, along with the duplicates, the uncast votes, the hacks, the citizen get to keep the bad.<p>The difference is that:<p>Amazon has a financial interest in avoiding uncast orders.<p>Politicians have financial and power interests in having uncast votes for them.
technically feasible. multiple ways of proving your identity on a device and a combination of ways must be used. FB+bank or gplus+DMV or whatever. then you can SSL the connection up to the hilt. some fancy algorithms to copy your choice to independent systems to make sure redundancy or system.<p>but should it be done? i dont think so. with paper, you have many many eyes on whats going on. when something goes wrong, its not even 1% (maybe) of error. but on online, if something goes wrong, its can become a huge issue. it might be hard to convince the bulk of the population (court of public opinion) that the result is true/valid/reliable. because they cant see/touch/feel the raw parts that made up the sum.<p>another issue with high tech solutions, is that you end up targeting the high tech people. its hard for laggards and cavemen to adapt. but its easy for a tech-savvy chap to downgrade to a piece of paper. so it is possible that you dont get a true representative of the population in the results.<p>the last issue, governments suck. voting (almost) never makes things better.
Anyone interested in the security of voting systems would be well-served by watching the lectures from Coursera's course "Securing Digital Democracy":<p><a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/digitaldemocracy" rel="nofollow">https://www.coursera.org/course/digitaldemocracy</a>
The Estonian Internet voting referenced in the article was shown to have several major security issues last May. See <a href="https://estoniaevoting.org/" rel="nofollow">https://estoniaevoting.org/</a>
Seems like a great application for cryptocurrencies, though maybe better with those using proof of stake rather than proof of work.<p>Distribute one coin to every citizen (this is the hard part). Each citizen votes anonymously by giving the coin to the candidate of their choice. The network verifies that no coin (vote) is spent (cast) twice. Done.