“A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck.<p>Voting may be a duty, but it&#x27;s one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. And I think that people realize this. So when they know they haven&#x27;t invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they spare us the chance of their error by not voting.<p>If you want to get more people actively participating in democracy, the right path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier for people to understand what they&#x27;re voting on. Today it&#x27;s a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote.

&gt; <i>The Boston-based company raised $2.2 million earlier this year, helped along by buzzwords such as “biometrics” and “blockchain,” which it claims allows it to secure the voting process. Its app reportedly requires voters to take and upload a picture of their government-issued I.D., along with a selfie-style video of their face, which facial-recognition technology then uses to ensure the person pictured in the I.D. and the person entering a vote are the same. The ballots are anonymized and recorded on the blockchain.</i><p>This is horrible on so many levels.

There needs to be a paper trail. Newer technology is not the answer for voting.<p>What would be a good idea is a team to do UX on voting ballots, nationally. Solve this problem once and take into account all the variations of local things (bonds, amendments, etc.) Then pick a company to make ballot readers, open source the software and use best in class info-sec practices.<p>We don&#x27;t need instant results, people don&#x27;t take office at midnight of election day. We need accurate, transparent and verifiable results.<p>Also, make it a national holiday, close schools and just use them all as polling places.

Democracy only works with a well informed voting base, and while you may disagree with the current state of politics, it has always been my belief that people that do not know the candidates or issues should abstain from voting. I will often vote in some races but abstain from others, simply because I don&#x27;t know the issue or candidate well enough. I wish more people would do that.<p>Making voting easier for the highly ignorant is not a good path. If someone isn&#x27;t willing to mail in a ballot, drive to the poll, etc I don&#x27;t think they care enough to know the issues.<p>I know there are some circumstances where people can&#x27;t get off of work, but those people generally just don&#x27;t know their own rights. Most states legally obligate employers to give people 2-3 hours off to vote.

My town has annual “Town Meetings” where everyone pours into a gymnasium (turnout is up to 800 voters in a town with population ~15,000) to vote on all the “articles” of which there can be upwards of 20. The annual meeting often extends multiple evenings as much discussion is permitted on each article, and traditional voting can add several hours to the process when vote counts are close.<p>Instead of shouting aye or nay, raising hands, or standing to be counted, we hand out wireless handsets which have a yes&#x2F;no buttons and a small display to confirm your vote. Then a screen at the front displays the total.<p>The cost of renting the devices is non-trivial at around $15-20k (having trouble finding our towns specific budget line item for this) so I often pondered why we couldn’t use smartphones that everyone is surely already carrying, and maybe carry a small stock of devices just for people without phones.<p>The idea would be a local WiFi network which was not connected to the internet, where an app on the device would connect to a local server over that WiFi network to place the vote, after someone checks you in at the front desk.<p>I have no reason to trust the devices we use now any more than an open-source public domain phone app and backend container combo that the town could setup.<p>Over thousands of towns and tens of years the TAM is pretty large, but more to the point a non-profit coalition developing and maintaining this solution could provide a lot of value.

We trust our financial system and it already has decades of fraud detection. Our voting system should be through something similar with all history, fraud detection, voter verification and more.<p>Our current voting system is already rife with fraud with little remedy and recounts are difficult, we need to expect fraud and move to a digital system that does have fraud detection in it similar to our financial system. This system can track all your votes and have a paper trail, you can opt out if you want and deliver it in person.<p>Our current system is such a patchwork of systems it it security by obscurity and broken, recounts are difficult and if we moved to a common system that has records for every vote in every state in a consistent format, then research could detect anomalies and fraud as well.<p>Digital records that are as secure as financial records, and tracked, are easier to find fraud and recount, no security by obscurity. Noone would trust banks that keep paper records and aren&#x27;t verifiable anymore today, voting shouldn&#x27;t be that way either.<p>We all use the financial systems, credit systems, and trust them. Even with their problems people trust that the amount they have and what they use is recorded correctly in terms of financial data. We should expect the system to be hacked and have fraud detection to match it just like in the financial system. Until we do move to digital voting with fraud detection then our elections will be secure only by obscurity, and lots of games being played with no recourse and lack of trust in possible fraudulent counts and recounts.

&gt; Critics call it “the Theranos of voting.”<p>I&#x27;d go so far as to call it the &quot;Thanos of Voting.&quot;<p>With just a snap of the fingers, half of all of the votes could be wiped out.

The problem with &quot;meta&quot; democratic decisions is that we can only discuss them honestly in the abstract. Once it&#x27;s a live agenda decision, gerrymandering implications are all that will matter. The quality of the proposal becomes irelevant.<p>Lets imagine that security issues are 100% solved. The app can go live. Pollsters will figure out how this (inevitably) changes voting patterns. Young, or rural or some other group will vote more, to the benefit of some party.<p>At this point the only relevant factor determining most politicians&#x27; stance on this will be determined by good&#x2F;bad for my side, in the short term.

Yeah, this is the opposite of the correct way to solve the problem. What about, instead, you had an app that you could just plug in what time you wanted to vote and it would find the nearest polling place and give you the google maps directions and maybe even allow you to order an Uber ahead of time? It could reminds you how and when to register, it could even help reduce wait times by directing you to polling places with little traffic or at time when most people are not out voting.<p>We could make voting easier in a million ways that are not literally allowing you to vote on your phone.

I think the way the private sector solves problems and the way voting should be done are diametrically opposed- the more inefficient voting is, with the more people involved, the larger a successful conspiracy must be. Trust a lot of people a little over a few people a lot.

As an Estonian who has voted online and via mobile ID for years, couldn&#x27;t imagine going to vote in a physical location, using pen and paper.

No offence to Americans reading, but speaking as an outsider, it seems to me that voting in the US is fucked up in so many ways that need to be fixed first before starting on &quot;smartphone based voting&quot;.<p>I saw this short twitter thread listing some of problems that are especially apparent from a foreign perspective:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MackieJonathan&#x2F;status&#x2F;1059962407244718081" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MackieJonathan&#x2F;status&#x2F;105996240724471808...</a>

Voting is a solved problem: fill in some box on paper. What is automating it ever going to solve?

I know how to solve this problem. Upload a speech by each candidate to YouTube on election day. At the end of the day whomever gets the least downvotes wins.<p>Google&#x27;s CAPTCHA and profiling will protect us from election tampering and make sure only the people who are allowed to vote will vote.<p>Might need CAPTCHA 4, though. The one where you go through a DNA test to verify your uniqueness, then get an RFID implant for truly secure 2-factor authentication. I&#x27;m not sure where blockchain and IoT will come in play, by I&#x27;m sure we will will find a place to plug them in.<p>(If by this point you didn&#x27;t catch on that this was sarcasm, I&#x27;m not sure there is anything I can do.)<p>There is a much simpler solution for increasing participation. Don&#x27;t punish busy people. Hold voting on a weekend, over the entire 2 days. You will get a massive surge in participation. Yes, it will be more expensive, but that can be optimized. Heck, just add a checkbox on tax forms that says &quot;if you support weekend elections, check here and we will charge you extra X dollars&quot;. You will get tons of money for this initiative.

I would be in favor of software that makes it easy to pre-vote. Then, when I go to my polling place I could quickly print, review and submit my votes. Where I vote the process is tediously manual. If we could get, say half the voters in and out quickly, there would be more time for the election commissioners to assist everyone else.

VBM and compulsory voting is basically the only way to get turnout &gt; 90%. You can try to get people fired up about elections, but we&#x27;re well past diminishing returns on that front. You can try to lower barriers to voting, but even in states like Oregon with auto-registration and VBM it&#x27;s still lower than 70%.<p>If you look at any place with &gt; 90% turnout, they have compulsory voting. And once you have that you have a strong impetus to make voting as easy as possible, so you get stuff like holidays, VBM, early voting, etc. The fixes are obvious, simple, and they&#x27;ll save money; Republicans just want turnout to stay low so we won&#x27;t get them. End of story.

Smartphone voting is no more bad than absentee voting is for people who are actually in their voting area. We have&#x2F;had people voting with absentee ballots who just didn&#x27;t want to do early voting and stand in lines

This particular idea seems bad from a security standpoint. But we do need to make some major changes to level the playing field so that people who have small children, move often, work odd hours- in other words, everyone except for propertied old people- are able to vote.<p>I can see a few ways to make this happen:<p>1) make voting day a national holiday<p>2) automate voter registration when you file a tax return and make same-day registration the law nationwide<p>3) automatically mail everyone an absentee ballot

Making election day a holiday could help, but let&#x27;s be honest - a lot of people are just going to smoke weed and play video games if they get that day off. It would help but it&#x27;s not a solution to other issues like voter suppression &amp; general lack of voter engagement. Although it seems like the increasing toxicity of our politics is at least getting more people involved.

Voting Tek isn&#x27;t the problem. In fact it&#x27;s going to make a lot of problems. There is no real way to establish trust without making those votes personally identifiable.<p>Low turnout is because people do not feel compelled to vote. They need something to vote for. Policy better aligned with the needs of ordinary Americans will improve voter turnout.

IIRC, when parts of Hawaii offered online voting - participation plummeted. People want to be seen voting as they view it as virtue signaling, and nobody sees you vote online. However, this could be contraindicated by Oregon+Washington State who have mail in ballots only and have very high participation.

It seems hard to vote electronically in a way that can&#x27;t be hacked and is fully private but for those that are not too bothered by privacy it seems ok. I mean I voted Labour in the last thing and aren&#x27;t bothered if someone finds out. You could still go do the paper ballot thing if worried.

If this were to ever become a reality I would like to see it be open sourced so all countries can use it &amp; all citizens can test for security breaches.<p>Our government is meant to be transparent &amp; this is something that I don&#x27;t believe becomes better by being closed off.

Haha, that &quot;sample security test&quot; is hilarious. Basically just a link to SSL Labs saying they meet industry standard. That&#x27;s great, glad they can meet low hanging fruit. How about proving that they can do better?

Why are people not turning out to vote? This is the key question, and I really, truly do not think it has anything to do with whether you can do it on your phone. This is a technological solution to a multifaceted problem.

Oh yeah, so voting it will be no more anonymous and only the company holding the service know really who vote who...<p>Corporatocracy is coming, someone watched &quot;Continuum&quot; TV series and think it&#x27;s a nice idea...

It is hilarious and idiotic to see all these modern luddite think that somehow electronic X (in this case, voting) won&#x27;t work or can&#x27;t be secure.<p>And yes, paper voting has to be the best solution ever. &#x2F;s

People who can&#x27;t be bothered to donate 20 minutes of their time every 2 years should think about what democracy means for them.

In Norway we can prevote several weeks before the election. Result is more people voting and shorter voting lines on voting day.

Oh goodie. If you think the internet of unsecured things revolution was fun to watch, you ain&#x27;t seen nothin&#x27; yet.

The only way &#x27;blockchain&#x27; would be beneficial is if it was on a public ledger.

I don&#x27;t like how this article tries to generalize smart-phone voting itself as the problem. The trouble is this particular app.<p>I personally think blockchain powered voting solutions with a PKI backed ID Card like my Estonian e-Residency card could be a fairly strong way of authentication.

Could the Monero system be modified to create a voting system that maintains the secret ballot? From an engineering perspective, It seems like the currency and monetization aspects be pulled out&#x2F;minimized and the untraceable transactions aspect used to record votes.

This will happen though. Will seem like a bad idea initially.

Oh no then everyone would be able to vote, even the renters!

How about we do Smartphone Taxes first?

One thing to note here is that it&#x27;s not as if it&#x27;s just coincidentally difficult for young people to vote, it&#x27;s not just an unavoidable fact- it&#x27;s part of an <i>intentional</i> strategy. For certain portions of the American ruling establishment, democracy itself is an enemy to be vanquished by any means necessary. Review the history of racial segregation and you will see obvious parallels to many forms of voter suppression today. This is the next big issue facing the USA, from my point of view.

Touch screens are a really great idea for voting.<p>No really.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;The_UnSilent_&#x2F;status&#x2F;1059962688338583554" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;The_UnSilent_&#x2F;status&#x2F;1059962688338583554</a><p>&lt;&#x2F;sarcasm&gt;

I strongly oppose vote-by-mail and vote-by-phone, but for a different and underappreciated reason: the secret ballot is absolutely essential for escaping from preference falsification traps.<p>&quot;Preference falsification&quot; is a social phenomenon in which, between choices A and B, most people prefer thing A but believe that everyone else prefers B, making it socially unacceptable to express support for A. If votes are public, then everyone feels compelled, upon threat of ostracism, to vote for B, leading to enactment of policy that&#x27;s actually extremely unpopular. Under a secret ballot system, people can profess support for B while secretly voting for A, and if everyone does so, policy A ends up being enacted, concordant with the true preferences of the population.<p>If you can vote by mail, or vote by smartphone, nothing stops people from supervising each other&#x27;s votes. That there&#x27;s currently a norm against doing in vote-by-mail jurisdictions is purely a cultural holdover from the days of the true secret ballot, and it&#x27;s only a matter of time before this norm erodes.<p>We live in an age of moral panic and socially enforcement of beliefs that are both unpopular and, in many cases, scientifically incorrect. Let&#x27;s not make the problem worse by making it even harder to escape from the preference falsification trap.

Good idea honestly, the security issues are greatly overblown - especially if we can simply make this a mailer with &quot;if you want to vote for this candidate, enter this code&#x2F;scan this qr code&quot;, where nothing about that code identifies the candidate they voted for.<p>And it&#x27;d definitely help to improve voter turnout, just look at studies on how poll lines impact future voting behavior...

Why is HN harping on the blockchain aspect of this so hard? Vote counting IS actually one of the appropriate uses of it, considering it provides non-repudiation in a manner that can be verified by anyone. The biggest issue here is the initial assignment of 1 &quot;vote coin&quot; per person during the initial roll-out. Assuming they can solve that problem (and that&#x27;s a big if), they can simply create new block chains for each election in which every potential voter is again assigned 1 vote.<p>I realize that this has the side-effect of killing off anonymous voting (at least to whoever doled out the tokens, you&#x27;d still be anonymous to your neighbors), but I think that is a good thing. While you can argue about what the side-effects that has on individual voters in extraordinary circumstances, fact of the matter is, anonymous voting makes it effectively impossible to verify the percentages each candidate achieved.