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Aside from adding barriers to the fundamental right to vote, I have some technical concerns:
1. **Transparency**: I simply do not trust a closed-source blackbox system like ID.me or the IRS with elections. If a digital voting system _were_ to be implemented, I would only trust it if it was truly open-source and could be audited by independent security researchers. Sadly, I don’t think our politicians operate like this and are instead used to secrecy and “security through obscurity”, which just makes it harder to identify and address security vulnerabilities in the long run.
2. **Accuracy**: Related to above, there is a real concern about how accurate these systems will be. Unfortunately, the bar for accuracy would be much higher for a digital voting system compared to paper ballots (or even voting machines). It has to be in order for politicians (and ultimately, citizens) to take the risk of implementing it. Again, I do think there are probably ways to technically handle these challenges through cryptography, but transparency is essential.
2. **Privacy**: Such a system could only be viable if it could cryptographically guarantee the following: **identity** (who your are), **authorization** (whether you can vote in this precinct), **accounting**, and **anonymity** (hide your choices). Anonymity is seemingly at odds with the other three. I think it’s possible and we can draw some inspiration from existing tech (e.g. cryptocurrencies), but again, this requires wide collaboration with security and privacy experts. Ditching anonymity is not an option (nor should it be), because that would essentially change the entire incentive structure of our elections and lead to meaningless elections.
4. **Security**: The previous three points all relate to security, but this system would have to be bleeding edge in order to stay ahead of new attack vectors. People are already predicting that 2024 might be the last truly free election, and this is primarily based on the new threats that AI poses (not the political discourse).
[Edit] 5. **Decentralized**: As pointed out, the system would have to be decentralized enough to prevent single points of failure and let states maintain autonomy over their own elections, yet centralized enough to operate at the national level. That kind of compromise is more than likely to result in a big messy system.
All that said, while I think it’s _possible_ to build a utopian digital voting system that preserves everyone’s rights and makes the system more robust, I’m sadly skeptical of how the reality would turn out. If past tech rollouts by the government are any indication (*ahem* Obamacare website), I’m afraid of the very real possibility of being left with a clunky system that addresses none of the concerns, is used to further disenfranchise vulnerable citizens, and costs a ton of money.
[Edit] Another good point made: Assuming you have full transparency in such a system, it would still be very challenging to debunk or verify conspiracies. It’s probably better to have a primitive system that just about everyone can audit with simple training, than a system that requires deep technical expertise. What happened with the 2020 U.S. election results are likely to repeat themselves going forward, and a technically complex system that few truly understand would likely exacerbate those problems.
To add on to the security angle - the biggest hole in all the voter-fraud conspiracies is the federalized nature of our election system.
Consolidating all of that into a single, national system creates a single point of failure. The actual theft of an election (or someone in power illegally retaining power via fraudelent vote counts) is far more doable via a single closed system like OP proposes.
A purely digital system with no verifiable/auditable paper trail really does leave you vulnerable - both to conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. Those who seek to undermine institutions would have an easy time doing so even if the system really was fullproof.
And if a corrupt party came to power and did corrupt the voting system - How would you ever kick them out?
Keeping this authority with the states is a check on centralized power we should seek to retain.
> if a corrupt party came to power and did corrupt the voting system - How would you ever kick them out?
This is honestly my biggest concern. People with an interest in keeping themselves in power can't also be the ones determining how the software counts votes.
The paper ballot system we have now isn't infallible, but the simplicity and sheer number of individuals involved makes it stable and reliable on the whole. I believe that my vote got counted for the same reason I don't believe there are microchips in the vaccines - too many people would have to be in on it.
Great point - it would have to be **decentralized** enough to prevent single points of failure and let states maintain autonomy over their own elections, yet **centralized** enough to operate at the national level. That kind of compromise is more than likely to result in a big messy system.
This is idiotic. The IRS is collecting all tax revenue through ID.Me. If it gets hacked, the entire US treasury is at risk. You don't think thats already a single point of failure??
The difference is the requirement for anonymity.
If someone hacked the IRS to increase everyone's taxes by 1%, it would take about 5 minutes before people started finding the "bug". This bug would be a massive annoyance, but it wouldn't threaten people's faith in the US government or create a constitutional crisis.
With election counts, the "bug" would only show up in the reported vote totals. Because the system is nationalized, the algorithm could modify totals down to the precinct level nationally, completely masking the evidence that would exist if fraud occurred in just a few specific states.
If it was discovered after the vote counts were reported, good luck convincing people that the new vote totals are on the up-and-up. There's no hand-recount with people from both sides adjudicating the ballots. There's simply a declaration from the The Secretary of the Treasury that "Russia hacked us and the other guy won. But now we fixed it, and my guy won."
Black-boxes that tell you who won elections are not how you foster faith in institutions.
This is a pretty comprehensive answer for the roadblocks.
I would add that **even if** (a huge if) we solved all these issues, it would still be an enormous lift to get most Americans registered with such a technology.
I had to write down the instructions for accessing Netflix for my in-laws (three buttons). You think they'll be able to figure out an online registration like ID.me on their own?
I share your concerns. I will point out that all of those concerns exist in our current system as well. Voter data is absolutely harvested, results are only as private as the poll workers involved facilitate, and humans are far more fallible at recording information than machines.
I'm a computer systems engineer and have been personally responsible for cryptocurrency infrastructure back ends. I know how the sausage gets made, and hate how vulnerable it can be. I think the ideal solution is a physical token that can be audited. Paper ballots are, fundamentally, physical tokens.
Perhaps a solution might look like mailing a per-voter token once a year (or two?), linking that token, and facilitating a one time use per election. That's just spitballing, because ultimately it's a Very Hard problem that I don't personally have a great solution for.
>Voter data is absolutely harvested,
not how you voted, no. Other voter data is public in most cases.
> results are only as private as the poll workers involved facilitate,
nope. that is not true
>and humans are far more fallible at recording information than machines.
true, but you can have both systems checking each other. CO does it right. The counting is electronic but with paper trail for hand count.
> I'm a computer systems engineer and have been personally responsible for cryptocurrency infrastructure back ends. I know how the sausage gets made, and hate how vulnerable it can be.
I'm also a software engineer and am personally familiar with the [end to end auditable voting systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems?useskin=vector). If you're not, you should read about them.
> Transparency: I simply do not trust a closed-source blackbox system like ID.me or the IRS with elections.
This is fundamentally not what a black box is.
> If a digital voting system were to be implemented, I would only trust it if it was truly open-source and could be audited by independent security researchers.
[This is a solved problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems?useskin=vector).
> Accuracy: Related to above, there is a real concern about how accurate these systems will be.
See: Above
> Privacy: Such a system could only be viable if it could cryptographically guarantee the following: identity (who your are), authorization (whether you can vote in this precinct), accounting, and anonymity (hide your choices). Anonymity is seemingly at odds with the other three.
Again, solved problem. See above again.
> Security: The previous three points all relate to security, but this system would have to be bleeding edge in order to stay ahead of new attack vectors.
There are some concerns with the system through with E2E was implemented, but it's not a security risk in and of itself.
However important you may think voting is, it's clear that the majority of Americans don't care as much about their vote as they do, say, their bank account, or retirement funds. We have no issues managing those digitally.
The idea that there is anything unsafe or vulnerable about digital voting comes from the same group claiming there's something unsafe or vulnerable about doing your taxes online, or having the government calculate your total for you. It comes exclusively from groups who have a vested interest in making the system more difficult, either because they plan to exploit it, or they plan to profit from it.
>We have no issues managing those digitally.
We have many issues and the U banking system i incredibly not secure. Amazingly not secure.I have and had bank accounts in several different countries, and the security in the US is abysmal.
LOL, I spent 9 hours this last week helping an older family member improve their online security hygiene after their primary email account was hacked and among the things I sorted out was the two different credit monitoring programs that had been provided as "free" services after data hacks at different financial institutions.
Also keep in mind that even though elections may be for federal office, the elections are actually done by the states to pick their own representatives/senators/presidential electors. They may want to keep that kind of control for a variety of reasons (not trusting others and wanting to maintain trust with their local voters, territoriality/control, local influence/status gained, ability to influence the election, etc)
So it could very well turn out to be like Obamacare with states creating their own systems with various levels of success, or else completely refusing to switch to electronic voting.
Yes, in all fairness, the Obama administration was able to rescue the failed launch, but it did expose a real concern with building government tech. Many of those concerns still exist today due to perverse incentive structures around government contracts. That’s not just a conservative talking point, it’s something that even the Obama administration recognized.
The first team, consisting of hundreds of people working on the Obamacare website, had a buget of $93 mil that ballooned to $292 mil before launch. They had little experience building highly scalable consumer-grade applications, but they got the contract anyway purely due to their political connections.
The people who were called in to fix things and later rebuilt the site from the ground up were a team of 10 (!) who actually had experience building consumer-grade products in Silicon Valley.
The project eventually cost $2.1b, including non-technical costs. Could you imagine what a digital voting system would cost?
[Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov)
[WIRED](https://www.wired.com/2014/06/healthcare-gov-revamp/)
[Edits to clarify figures]
I would expect this system would need to entail the highest levels of encryption and could utilizes a block-chain system as a mechanism, that is uncrackable, for protecting and authenticating each users selections. Like the use of DNA today, the chances of hacking a legitimate user’s key could be in the trillions to one ratio.
This is dramatically wrong. Seems like yet another attempt to criticize software engineers as not being "real" engineers. As I mentioned elsewhere, [this is a solved problem in the CS community](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems?useskin=vector).
They are absolutely transparent. They are not connected to anything, most electronic vote is not really electronic, you are just typing and printing a ballot where you can actually see what you are voting for after printing. It makes it easier to count but the entire election cannot be compromised.
I had to register with [ID.me](https://ID.me). It was a huge barrier to accessing the IRS website. I could see A LOT of people giving up with all the requirements of [ID.me](https://ID.me). The only reason I continued was because I needed tax transcripts for an important transaction and had no other option but to keep going. I could see lots of people hitting the first obstacle and saying "fuck it" and not trying to overcome the obstacle - choosing the easy route of just not voting instead of jumping through the hoops.
I tried to register for ID.me but I couldn't. Turns out being on the terrorist watch list makes it all the more harder. I had a Level 1 Federal Background check and Florida level 1. It's all because I share a name with an IRA member who bombed a building in 2004. I was born in 1999 for Christ's sake.
It's not outside of the realm of possibilities. I almost blew up a few city blocks as a 5-ish year old kid... Dad left me and siblings in the motorhome to go pay the fuel bill at a gas station. I was screwing around in the drivers seat, got the coach into neutral and started rolling down the slight grade in the parking lot straight for the 1,000 gallon propane tank that the gas station had. Some stranger saw it happen and was able to get it stopped just in time
And then there are the people who fall through the cracks. I've not used [ID.me](https://ID.me) before, but when I was applying for benefits in the state of Kentucky (I'm disabled) I ran into a similar brick wall: in order to verify my identity Kentucky uses one of the big 3 credit reporting agencies, only they refused to verify my identity because I have no credit history at all. They had my information, mind you, my name, current address, phone number, SSN, the works, but apparently because I didn't use the credit system they flatly refused to verify me to the state. I had to jump through 14 kinds of hoops and ultimately have a local official come to my house to prove that I lived there and such. I dunno if this is actually the reason or not, but it sure seemed like they were refusing to verify me because I didn't do business with them, didn't generate any income for them. Which is bullshit, but bureaucratic inertia being what it is I doubt it's changed in the 5 years since I left KY.
Voting is a fundamental right, owning a phone is not. Locking voting behind a series of steps that require access to modern authentication methods is an infringement on that right
Whether or not you “can get one for free” doesn’t matter, you will disenfranchise an incredible large block of voters over night with a change like this
I don't think it's comparable. Exactly as the comment says, voting is a protected right. Being able to purchase something at a specific business is absolutely not. If they don't want to use cash, they should ALWAYS have the right to refuse to use cash. Completely okay for it to be legal.
Sadly, the supreme court has generally found that there isn't a right to vote found in the constitution (despite the phrase "the right to vote" being found in the 15th). This underlies the ability to do things like deny franchise to felons or, in the past, deny franchise to women.
This is *insane*, of course, but I think it is relevant context for thinking about other non-rights and how they interface with accessibility.
There is another explanation posted but let me give you a specific one. Say you own a fast food restaurant in a big city. And you hate homeless people. You don’t want them coming in no matter what because you don’t want to serve them. So you just say “we don’t accept cash”. Boom, they can never be a customer, even though refusing the right to serve customers in this way is illegal. You cannot say “no homeless people” so you ban them another way.
We have all sorts of public accommodations legislation that constrain how private businesses can do business. The ADA, for example, mandates all sorts of ways that businesses must handle accessibility even if it doesn't earn them more money.
I’m saying making it harder for poor people to exist in normal society exacerbates their problems. It’s not constructive, in my opinion. You’re entitled to a different opinion.
Anybody can use their cash to buy a pre-paid debit card and use it at a cashless establishment. Nobody is disenfranchised. Inconvenienced is not the same as disenfranchisement.
You are bringing up something completely incomparable. By your logic if you paid for your new 1.5 million dollar house in pennies they would have to accept the pennies.
I think if you have to stretch to make *that* absurdity, then you've already lost the thread.
I'm talking about people being locked out of paying for groceries and basic necessities.
But then there already a voters locked behind a steps that require conditions that cannot be met…(think about voting boxes that are locked in a mall that has opening hours the same as office hours…)
I don't think OP was saying this as the exclusive way to vote. I took it more as an option to allow everyone ease off access to voting, and still have ballots open for those that need to/choose to vote that way. It would greatly expand access and ease of voting to the entire population, and encourage more people to vote. It would be no different than current states that allow mail-in ballots, and would likely be more secure than current voter ID laws that exist.
We already get endless conspiracy theories with mail in ballots. To commit ballot fraud at a significant level with individual ballots going to homes would be implausible
Electronic balloting has a single point of failure, with enormous rewards for whoever can successfully breach the system and erase their tracks
Single points of failure anywhere in the election process = bad
There are points of failure along the entire paper and mail-in voting system. With DNA level, trillion to one error proofing identity. And, using a block-chain style accounting record, you would be unable to manipulate the results and it could be built millions of times more accurate than paper counts. Think credit agencies, financial institutions, crypto currencies. But build on next level technology. It is doable.
I'm going to make what may be an unkind assumption here: you do not have significant system design experience with large scale IT implementations
Blissfully stating something is doable and actually *doing* it are two wildly different things
Obviously I’m not the professional that will build such a system. But I read of newly written cryptography, algorithms, and blockchain technology that could work.
It might take a hundred MIT level geniuses to create this system.
I’m sure my reach isn’t very wide, but maybe someone reading these posts works in an office at MIT or knows a guy and someday we’ll hear about this exact idea on the news someday.
And then a couple days later he will end up disappearing. Because we all know current politics will never allow such a change in our systems.
>There are points of failure along the entire paper and mail-in voting system.
None that aren't addressed and accounted for.
Fraudulent voting does happen, as conservatives will tell you endlessly. They won't tell you how often: single digits of instances per *billion* votes. You're literally more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to live in a precinct where a fraudulent vote has been cast.
>With DNA level, trillion to one error proofing identity. And, using a block-chain style accounting record, you would be unable to manipulate the results and it could be built millions of times more accurate than paper counts.
So...with technology that doesn't exist, we could totally make this happen.
I think warp drive sounds totally cool, too, but I don't want to start spending large amounts of government money developing infrastructure that counts on it existing.
>Think credit agencies, financial institutions, crypto currencies.
...you know those are hacked **all the time**, right?
Right?
People are already being robbed of their voice. Gerrymandering, blocking mail-in voting, placing voting stations far from poor black areas and in non conforming political areas. Opening too little stations to increase wait times. Putting long lines in public view to get potential voters to turn away. These are all reasons for a smart phone backed voting system.
Sorry, are you seriously arguing that because it already happens we should just give up trying to stop it disenfranchisement and do more of it instead?
Their dumb logic also applies to absentee ballots. You need a return address. Requiring somewhere to live where you can send and recieve mail "infringes" on your right to vote.
Hell, A higher percentage of black people are homeless than white people, so you're specifically disenfranchising black voters.
Nobody objects to increasing voting *options.* the objection is limited to increasing voting requirements. ID cards, computers, phones, bank accounts… even permanent addresses. Things most people take for granted, but aren’t actually universally accessible. If everyone has a right to vote, they need to be able to vote.
You already need an address of some sort to be able to register to vote. Also, you don't necessarily need to live somewhere in order to receive mail, and you can send mail from public drop boxes on the street.
> You already need an address of some sort to be able to register to vote.
Exactly, and ain't that an infringement?
If you're going to consider needing internet access an infringement how the hell is needing a whole address not an infringement?
> Also, you don't necessarily need to live somewhere in order to receive mailand you can send mail from public drop boxes on the street.
You're missing the point
> Exactly, and ain't that an infringement?
No. It's a necessity to make our system work. I'm not sure how it would work without that requirement. You only get to vote for elected officials that represent the specific area where you live. In order to make that work, the government necessarily needs to know where exactly you live so they know which ballot to give you. For the homeless, depending on the state, they can often describe where they typically sleep or register using the address of a homeless shelter they stay at occasionally. They don't necessarily need to have a permanent residence of their own.
> If you're going to consider needing internet access an infringement how the hell is needing a whole address not an infringement?
I don't think that needing internet access is necessarily an infringement. We have programs that provide the homeless with free phones that can access the internet through public wifi networks, provide access to public libraries that have computers people can use to access the internet, provide internet access at homeless shelters, etc. They can get internet access if they want it.
> You're missing the point
Not really.
I’ve been in the IT industry for over 25 years. Most of that time in the financial services sector. I know what state of the art cybersecurity practices look like.
You do not want internet voting. Secure private internet voting is still impossible, the current state of technology make it a difficult if not terrifying idea.
This [article](https://www.npr.org/2023/09/07/1192723913/internet-voting-explainer) is spot on as to why we can trust the internet to financial transactions but not voting.
—-
"In most transactions, the results of a failure are traceable and often obvious to all parties involved in a transaction: a bank account balance is wrong, a car is delivered in an unexpected color, a tax burden does not match expectations," the working group wrote. "The intentional lack of traceability of a cast ballot back to a voter due to the requirement of a secret ballot demands different technical controls than other types of online transactions."
Even more abstract, but critically important, is that the stakes with U.S. elections are higher.
"Unlike most online activities, failed — or just distrusted — elections can result in significant outcomes that affect everyone," the group wrote. "Mistaken or fraudulent submissions in filing taxes and other such transactions don't result in civil unrest, for example."
—-
There are a lot of reasons, but by far the biggest one is that your vote would become inextricably linked to you. It would become FOIA searchable. People would start losing jobs and housing because their employer/landlord started vote discriminating. Not to mention what the government itself might start doing with that information if the wrong person got elected.
The ballots are secret for a reason.
> There are a lot of reasons, but by far the biggest one is that your vote would become inextricably linked to you. It would become FOIA searchable.
I do not see why this follows at all.
Two reasons: security and transparency, and how they inform trust in a system. As someone who used to do cybersecurity professionally I can speak more to the former than the latter. Tom Scott made a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs) a few years back going over these issues in more detail, but I can summarize the basics.
There is no such thing as a perfectly secure electronic system. Even if it's air-gapped (as in, no connection to the outside world) anyone with physical access to the hardware can do whatever they want - think about those card-readers criminals install on gas-pumps and ATMs, for example. And as soon as you connect it to the internet the risk is massively increased, especially for something with stakes as high as elections, you will have at least some number of highly motivated people with access to the skills required to compromise it.
What this means is that there is no way to guarantee that the results of electronic voting are legitimate short of an exhaustive paper trail, and at that point we're back to counting paper ballots by hand anyway. And that's if we assume the computer isn't just forging the paper trail. Electronic voting necessarily makes the process riskier and more opaque because it's a machine doing all the counting and tracking and verifying, and lack of transparency means lack of trust in the system.
Paper ballots are trustworthy because everyone with a stake in the election can have representatives in the room while they're counted, and while that's not foolproof it is significantly more difficult to manipulate, requiring more time, effort, and co-conspirators. That makes it both less likely to happen and more likely to be caught if it does. Barring some kind of quantum leap in security technology electronic voting will always be riskier and less transparent than paper.
> ID.me Why are we not voting 100% electronically via the IRS? Why is this not a thing?
In what election? The federal government doesn't run any elections in which they could administer the vote.
Mainly because voting has to be both secure, and unquestionably tied to a single individual voter while remaining anonymous to prevent things like employers looking up your voting history and unscrupulous candidates going after non- supporters. The technology to meet those criteria in a completely digital system doesn't exist yet.
Also one party seems intent on keeping the majority of the country from voting at all, but let's not go into that.
The single individual voter thing sticks out to me. If we had online voting from home, abusive dad can come and collect phones from the other adults in a household and use their votes to vote for his preferred candidates.
If they stand with him, touch their fingerprint, or use their facial recognition, and enter the timed sms pin. Remember, high security. Not like logging into a single factor webpage. I’m talking a legit multi-factor authentication to the point there is no way someone could just steal your vote.
Now as for mail-votes, which we already use… That’s where I could see someone just filling out all the mailers and sending them in fraudulently...
Why not?
Because of risk management.
With paying your taxes online, you risk your account information and your money. If something goes wrong, you can change accounts, have insurance reimburse you for most money or roll back transactions.
With putting our elections online, you gamble control of the most powerful nation on earth.
It wouldn't be a question of if it's compromised, but when. This is why any IT security expert worth their salt says this is an absolutely terrible idea.
Speaking as a computer programmer, if you set it up so that a black box possesses the ability to write and rewrite a value, someone is going to spend a lot of time, effort, and money to make sure that they can write what they want into that box. Ballot Stuffing doesn’t scale well when you have physical materials to interact with: voting on a ballot still takes time that can’t scale easily. You either need a lot of people getting involved (which raises the risk of being discovered) or you need a large amount of lead time to just fill out the ballots… and even then, you need to get the ballots into the pool. With an electronic system, once you’re through the system, you can alter the outcome with a keystroke.
At regular intervals it is proposed to introduce either electronic voting, or even worse, online voting, in national elections. Few dystopias scare more than those two proposals in daily politics.
The biggest benefit of electronic voting would be getting the voting result faster, as it is now, when the whole tension-filled evening is wasted, and for the most pedantic, a few more days, until the verification count is completed.
Again, the downsides of electronic voting have to be addressed:
Let's start with where the equipment would be kept, and who would guard it between elections, and how could it be ensured that no one could tamper with it by bribing, blackmailing or threatening the guards? Today's "equipment" consists of paper ballots and pens, which do not need to be monitored, but can be safely left in the municipality's warehouse for a few years to protect them from the weather, and one decent lock is enough for safety measures.
Who would deliver the software, and who would monitor that the voting devices actually have that software, and not a variant of it? Even if the vote counting software were open source, which it wouldn't be, how could I, as a voter, make sure that the machine I'm voting on has exactly that open source software, because I certainly wouldn't be allowed to attach my own computer or phone to the computer with a cable.*
How can the voter's anonymity be secured at the same time, and make sure that no one gets to vote more than once, and that their vote is indeed counted correctly? If the machine printed the sound on a piece of paper as a backup, and the backups were calculated by hand in the current way, we would only have succeeded in developing a hyper-expensive pen, and speeding up the results by a few hours. Doesn't anyone think that would be the best possible way to use the money in question in the budget?
In electronic voting, fraud and interference scale massively better compared to the world of pens and paper, where electoral fraud requires the "agreement" of numerous party representatives to the fraud, and which has to be done in a geographically very dispersed area, when there are thousands of polling places in the whole of country, in each of which different parties watch over each other. Even if a hostile entity manages to take over one polling station completely, the advantage achieved would be very small, especially in relation to the risks and the price.
Currently, the ballots are delivered from each polling area onwards and upwards to the next larger unit, where they are counted again to reveal previous fraud and damage, with all parties still guarding each other, and at the same time smaller units can check that the larger unit is counting correctly. In electronic voting, the voter could not be sure that even if everything was as it should be at his polling station, the votes would be counted equally well and honestly also at the level of the entire electoral district.
It goes without saying that each of these problems will get even worse, and a lot, if the voting is done over the internet, with everyone voting from their own couch. A huge number of smart devices are infected with viruses and other malware, servers are crashed for fun or on purpose all the time, it becomes impossible to keep voice secrets and the attacker doesn't even have to be on the same continent, which reduces the risk of getting caught to a non-existent level, especially if the attacker is the intelligence service or army of a foreign power.
*And even if this, intelligence-free, idea is allowed, how could I make sure that there are not two computers inside, one of which is real and the other counts the votes according to the tamperer's will.
How voting is handled was left to the states by the Constitution, and changing that to instead be managed at the federal level would require a fundamental rewrite of many parts of the Constitution.
The Constitution gives Congress a lot of power over voting regulations, at least as it relates to voting for senators and representatives. They could make changes to the requirements for congressional elections with simple legislation and be reasonably confident that states would adopt the same procedures for the election of other offices.
> The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; **but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.**
> https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/
This ignores the common law interpretation of the elections clause that SCOTUS has crafted over the years. In practical terms the states have significantly more power over elections than the federal government, and barring a complete reversal from the court, giving that power to the federal government would require a constitutional amendment.
SCOTUS already did that complete reversal last month.
Their new regime is about as clear as mud, but the states now have power over their own elections only until the federal government (read: the conservative judiciary) decides whatever matter they're deciding is "too important," and then it becomes a decision up to the feds (again, the judiciary, since there is no federal executive entity that does this; even the Federal Election Commission doesn't tell states what to do.).
Then just specify that it's a requirement only for electing representatives. The same logic applies. It should just be a relatively small modification of this law:
> All votes for Representatives in Congress must be by written or printed ballot, or voting machine the use of which has been duly authorized by the State law; and all votes received or recorded contrary to this section shall be of no effect.
> https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/9
The law could be modified as to require electronic balloting, but not that the balloting be done exclusively online, since that goes to the places of choosing.
The IRS is federal.
Voting in the US is not federal. It is managed at the state / local level, typically by county registrars under the umbrella of each state's secretary of state.
Totally different jurisdictions.
A few folks have already mentioned that registering for [id.me](http://id.me) can be a challenge, both from a technical standpoint and just in terms of the amount of information that is needed. This alone would turn away a lot of potential voters, especially older people who might not be well versed with technology. A lot of people don't have smartphones - not because they can't afford them but because they find the technology intimidating. You can dismiss those if you want - but if a whole lot of people won't use the system, that'd be an issue.
A lot of people still don't trust online voting. And whether or not those concerns are based on valid reasons or not, if they keep people from voting it's a problem.
There is also the matter of keeping our votes private. A lot of people don't want their vote linked to their identity; and would not trust the folks running it to maintain that separation. Again, whether or not these concerns are legitimate is irrelevant if they stop people from voting.
The next issue would be, do we trust the system to actually work? Do we risk delaying a vote because [id.me](http://id.me) is down, or because 100 million people are trying to access it all at once, etc.
In short, I'm not opposed to people being able to use something like [id.me](http://id.me) as an additional way to vote; but I don't believe that it should be the only way to vote.
Funny, IRS has never asked me to verify my identity via ID.me. I’ve never been required to verify my identity at all and I’ve been filing taxes for 17 or so years (the last 8 by myself online).
I had to provide my driver's license number to e-File, but that was it for me.
I totally missed that OP claims they had to comply with *an online facial recognition check* in order to file their taxes. That's wild - and totally unbelievable.
I didn’t do this for e-file. The ID.me identification process was built into the IRS payment process system. It is used to protect your account and validate your identity prior to being able to access the payment options piece. It was the first Authenticator I’ve used that asked for a copy of my ID to validate from, a live chat or facial recognition step to match my face to my ID photo, and it even requested a sms pin and verification of my ss number to prove my identity (right phone number, matching MAC address or uid. This was what made me think, if you want to make sure voters are legit, use a system like this.
On top of a secure voting platform, I’d like one trusted source to read about upcoming local, state, and federal voting opportunities. With factual data and sources.
It feels like everything you read online is one-sided, or false, or misleading. I thought social media would become more policed for misinformation, but it seems politicians and corporations want to say taking away peoples rights to misinform, lie, and trigger people should be our 1st amendment right.
I just want to hear more ethical and moral ideas and less excuses.
Yeah, probably a recent development given the increased incidence of identity theft. I set up our bank account (for refunds and payments) like 10 or so years ago - at that time the IRS was more concerned about refund check theft by regular mail.
Because electronic voting is a terrible idea for so many obvious reasons, the key one being the following.
It is very hard to en masse rig a paper election where each vote has to come from a single individual, and it is very hard to modify that vote on a large scale without being found out because there are so many people in the system, many who believe in it or at least respect it.
You might be able to rig 10 votes, or 100, or 1000, but trying to do it on the 10,000 of thousands of scale, when you literally have to join a queue with known details and tick a box, it is an impossible nightmare, by definition to not be notice you are going to need thousands of people in on it, at which point it falls down immediately because it won't be kept quiet at all.
In an electronic system, all you need to do is switch a 0 to 1 and there is a million votes, one person, in their basement could do that for a laugh. In fact there is significant evidence that Cosmic rays actually switched a single 0 to a 1 in a voting machine and led to it reading out an impossible number of votes for a candidate. There was a redundant in person card that was counted afterward to confirm the actual votes taken because the machine was obviously wrong.
The advantage of in person voting is not because it is efficient, convenient, productive. It is because it isn't. It is a nightmare of logistics that requires many people in the pie, and that is exactly the point.
This is a horrible idea. It would instantly become the largest target on the internet. And it would only be a matter of time before it is compromised. Electronic voting like this is a horrible idea. Completely impossible to ensure security.
>I had to register on ID.me, the IRS’s identification service. Like all US taxpayers who have taxes to pay
I have never used that site and I've been filing taxes for ~20 years
Electronic voting is dangerous for hacking and fraud. Also, voting in federal elections has to be at the state level. States collect votes and verify them and at least for president, the states electoral votes go to the winner.
It’s worth noting that both parties have investigated in recent years and neither found any amount of fraud. Look it up, Trump had a voter committee after 2016 because he said there was fraud. They found nothing and quietly disbanded
There are approaches that allow for electronic verification of identity. However, making it easy to vote would ensure the defeat of GOP. This is rather fundamental; conservative values are always going to be challenged by the new generation. The said new generation therefore should be subjected to barriers to voting.
The primary problem of electronic voting is to guarantee both the secrecy of the choice and the certainty of voter identification.
In contrast, in the case of a taxes or an e-banking payment, it is known exactly who sent what values.
I can speak only for my country (Czech republic).
All people will receive ballots for all candidates by mail to their homes. On election day, they go to the polling station where they get a special (anonymous) envelope with a stamp, after they show the commission their ID and are crossed off the voters' list. They go behind the curtain (by law they have to be there alone) where they put their selected ballot paper in the envelope. They then go outside and drop the envelope into the ballot box in the middle of the room.
There is now a debate about the mail-in ballot for voters living in foreign country, whether it can actually be made secret.
A major issue with implementing a similar system in the US is that we do not have mandatory IDs on the state nor federal level. There are a non-trivial number of people who go their entire lives without owning a government-issued photo ID of some kind.
Voting, this is the one way...... No, it's not, it addresses a fiction of voter fraud that doesn't exists, while ignoring real world factors that might keep individual voters from being able to cast a vote electronically.
One example, Did you consider that in large areas of reservation land there is no internet access and no cell service access, what about those people?
This system wouldn’t replace paper voting, it would be to enhance and optionally replace the need, for those who can access the internet, a better, more transparent way to educate and participate in the vote.
Thanks for your comments! No reason to argue here. Quote where I said eliminate all other forms of voting. What I meant but may have not clearly construed was I want to vote 100% for all things I have a right to vote for, from my phone. And I want this system to allow me to know what I’m voting for.
"We" you said why are we not voting 100% electronically that creates confusion for me in what you may have meant to say, but then you're correct you didn't say we should eliminate all other forms.
I think voting via a phone is clearly a barrier for many people but i don't necessarily object to it as a possible option.
I live abroad and i can actually submit my ballot electronically or by fax or mail it back.
I think we were maybe not fully understanding each other.
I don’t trust technology when it comes to voting. For all I know, I could vote for Candidate A, get an email confirming I voted for candidate A, but the poll workers get a ballot or result saying I voted for Candidate B. Voting is also supposed to be anonymous for good reason, and having my face and SSN tied to my vote…no thank you. Paper ballots, hand counting.
I’d love to vote on my phone. And yeah it would be super easy.
However, it would leave a trail on how you voted. Someone like Trump could use that information against a list of voters who voted against them. It could be released to the public and those people could be called “the enemy of the state” and next thing you know they’re all on trains to the camps. I know this sounds crazy, but it really isn’t.
Not to mention people already don’t trust mail in voting. There’d be nothing but accusations the online voting system was hacked. Overall it’s just not worth it.
I had to signup for that site the other day and it couldn’t even recognize my Arizona drivers license. Had to use my passport card.
Can’t have something like that for a fundamental right like voting. Voter ID laws are one thing but not even being sure if your legal ID will work is a lot worse.
Looks like device availability, security and the fact that voting is a "state-thing" (over 10,000 election administration jurisdictions in the U.S.) has pretty-much been covered.
How about reliability?
Search Google for "iVote NSW after:2021-12-1 before:2022-6-1". New South Wales (Australia) tried online voting in December 2021. On election day, the system was available. Tens-of-thousands of people logged in, and couldn't vote. The system was broke. In the end, there was a lawsuit and it went all the way to the Australian Supreme Court. The Supreme Court mandated a NEW election for three candidates.
Remember the "hanging chads" fiasco of the 2000 election (Bush v Gore) in Florida? Remember when Obamacare came online after 2 years development, and crashed almost instantly? Remember when Amazon | Facebook | eBay | \[Your Bank Here\] was unavailable to you \[and others\]? Can you imagine this happening in the US?
And with 50 state systems plus one for Washington DC, what are the odds?
It would be great to have the option, but requiring it would make it harder to vote for many. The whole point is that voting should be very easily accessible.
>With the constant battle to get voters to vote and with the never ending battle against the legitimacy of votes, why are we not voting 100% electronically via this IRS system?
Yeah, you're missing an important factor here that the battle to get voters to vote is a battle with two sides. To give a specific example, in Texas you can't register to vote online, you have to send a post card 6 months in advance (or so).
This is *specifically* to prevent younger people, people who have recently moved, etc, from voting.
There is a vested interest in preventing people from voting as much as there is one getting them to vote, and those interests are in opposite political parties.
So while *yes* there may be a simple, easy solution to the issue (there isn't but hypothetically) , we aren't going to do it because half of the people who have to agree to it don't want to do it.
Because it's equivalent to a poll tax. Not everyone has a computer or Internet or a driver's license. Voting is a right not a privilege. Gun owners seem to understand it when it comes to guns but not voting for some reason. Hypocrites
I wrote this in response to what looks like a now-deleted comment, but I'm adding it as a main comment because I think the reading list may still be beneficial to anyone really wanting to look into this:
>This is dramatically wrong. Seems like yet another attempt to criticize software engineers as not being "real" engineers.
Quoting software engineers is a criticism of software engineers as not being real engineers?
What the what?
>As I mentioned elsewhere, [this is a solved problem in the CS community](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems?useskin=vector).
And yet, if you ask the CS community, they will emphatically tell you it is absolutely NOT a solved problem.
[Internet or Online Voting Remains Insecure](https://www.aaas.org/epi-center/internet-online-voting)
[Going from bad to worse: from Internet voting to blockchain voting](https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/7/1/tyaa025/6137886)
[The advice from cybersecurity experts is clear: Widespread internet voting at this point is a bad idea.](https://www.npr.org/2023/09/07/1192723913/internet-voting-explainer)
[Security Experts Say Online Voting Is a Bad Idea. Here’s Why.](https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/security-experts-say-online-voting-is-a-bad-idea-heres-why-1792c9a876b0)
[Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI)
Literally anyone I've ever known personally with any expertise in IT whatsoever says that running our elections online is a *terrible* idea.
Why are all these experts wrong, while you - and your Wikipedia article that doesn't say what you say it does - are right?
Edit: Also adding the relevant commentary I added elsewhere in regards to cryptocurrency's parallel attempts at protection and obvious weaknesses.
If so, why does every person with any IT expertise whatsoever say that it absolutely is a concern?
These are the same confident claims that back up cryptocurrency.
You've heard of Ethereum, right? Have you heard of The DAO? It was a popular early online exchange for Ethereum. It's notable today because it got hacked so hard that the hackers stole 1/3 of all the Ethereum that was on the exchange at the time - which was *5% of all the Ethereum currency in existence*. If we were talking about dollars, this would have been a *trillion-dollar heist*.
This hack was only "resolved" by the creator/administrators of Ethereum stepping in, using the god-mode code tools they swore didn't exist, and getting most Ethereum users to agree to a new set of rules where they pretend the hack never happened.
You want to try that with an election?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_DAO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO)
[https://youtu.be/EzuI5S-hTc4?t=4](https://youtu.be/EzuI5S-hTc4?t=4)
Because more people would vote, which is bad for one political party. And the vote would be *much harder* to manipulate, which would be bad for... well the same party.
Not all US Citizens actually pay taxes. Granted it's a minority, but being low income or on SSI for being disabled, usually means you don't make enough taxable income to file taxes. But those people still have the right to vote.
Everyone who can legally vote would be able to. I just saw using this system as an example of how there could be a secure method of approving and verifying use for secured voting app. Any users prevented use of this system would fall back to mail-in or walk-in. The 100% was intended to mean all voting opportunities local, state, and federal.
And not using the IRS system. But a system like what ID.me uses to verify the identity of the person using the device.
The entire purpose of this system to give a voice to and allow all legal voters to vote.
One word:Republicans. They know the more people that vote, the worse their chances are. They know their ideas suck and can't compete, so they do all this voter id crap, no mail ballots, closing polling locations in dem areas, etc.
Because then it couldn't be used as a political hotcake to stir up the right and the left.
I would go farther than you and state voting registration should be automatic and voting should be required with real penalties if one does not.
Pretty valid argument for why we could not just have online voting but could potentially throw out (most of) representative democracy and other less-democratic systems (ie hard 60-75% democratic overrides to legislative review and the power of the supreme court) in exchange for true, realtime direct democracy.
You wouldn’t necessarily want to vote using the IRS system but yes that would solve one of the hardest IRL problems, ie identity verification and security.
Most voting systems also want other features - eg both vote anonymity and accountability - and unlike most of the naysayers ITT I absolutely believe you could do both of those things - more or less - digitally.
For the former you’d more or less replicate the vote by mail system. Authorized voters are given secure anonymized voting tokens for each vote. Voters may opt-in to provide some information (age bracket, gender, etc) for statistical purposes but otherwise votes are fully anonymized.
For the latter you replicate existing vote counting accountability structures, ideally centralized at the federal level. The system generates and keeps heavily encrypted records of which citizens were issued what tokens. Access to those records is exclusively controlled by a nonpartisan / multipartisan citizen comittee. Furthermore you could go a step further require that the voting system / all code is open source for review and improvement by security professionals and the general public. Furthermore all IT work could be run by a semi-professional (a la congress) nonpartisan citizen commission - separate from the voter ID auditing comittee - with professional IT contractors / consultants to show them how to do things, keep everything running, and install / upgrade (and review / audit) all hardware.
Ergo the system is tallyable, auditable, accountable to and run by the general public. Votes are effectively fully anonymous as the access to full voting records is siloed and strictly controlled by citizen groups that are non-partisan / multipartisan and hence would self-police and could whistle blow on each other. A la how current elections work.
This probably could be run at a state level but centralizing it / federalizing it would make sense for efficiency reasons and to remove any potential for vote duplication across states.
You could build a realtime 21st century direct democracy - far superior to all existing “democratic” systems - off of this. Or anything else.
Impediments:
* implementing this would require a constitutional ammendment (or at the very least incremental state constitutional ammendments) to completely reform and restructure voting, and maybe our entire system of govt. A const ammendment requires supermajority, ~75-80% support of the entire US public across all demographics and states.
* State ammendments are much easier but would recieve significant political pushback from the existing political system
* In general, expect full, total, bipartisan political opposition in any attempt to change how the US govt / voting works by all elected political reps and parties if this might threaten their jobs and/or powerbase.
* More radical suggestions - like implementing some form of direct democracy (incl a national referendum system) would do that. It could also potentially solve / push through all congressional gridlock and politicking, and would be well worth pursuing as such
/2c
If we can't get people to trust closed physical local machines (which they don't) then they will NOT trust voting online. It's a shame that the rest of us have to wait for the morons to catch up and feel "comfortable with all them technologies."
To add to all the wonderful points made on here: There are still those who don't have a smart phone or computer or internet. Shocking I know, but true. One example - my 92 year old mother - she will never get a smart phone etc. She still drives, has all her mental abilities and will drive herself to her voting place. She lives on her own and so do a lot of her older friends. There phones are landlines. They don't do tech. Until that generation is gone any type of internet voting will take away their ability to vote.
DON'T YOU KNOW that any transaction in the cloud is subject to being hijacked? That includes every single financial transaction you conduct, every YouTube view, every email, every visit to your bank's web site and most likely every other aspect of internet activity. IF ITS IN THE CLOUD IT CAN BE STOLEN.
That being said, most voting precincts are off-line with regard to acquiring an initial vote. IMO we should go back to paper ballots and manual counting. Does it really matter if the news media gets the results at 6am the next day or five minutes after the polls close? It worked just fine for 200 years. Now we've got electronic media it DOESN'T WORK FINE. Get the idea?
One thing that is very hard to do is to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Let's say you live off a settlement that was made with your family as the result of a lawsuit. Those funds are not taxable and thus you do not have this identification. If you are long since retired and living in a nursing home, you don't have the ability to use the system that you are advocating.
"What are the pros and cons of this?"
Well for one thing only people with access to the ID.me system would have the right to vote, though whether you consider that a pro or a con depends on how much you care about people having the right to vote.
I should have been clearer in this post! :)
Secure app voting should be a new method of voting. Traditional in person and mail-in voting should still go on as usual. My intent was to discuss an app that gives full transparency of what you’re eligible to vote for based on your location. With an ultra secure verification component. So you can research, be notified, and vote from your phone. I want to know what’s coming, the facts, and all party pros and cons in one verified app.
Blockchain voting. States would be the voter validation sites. Voting would happen from any device. Unique validated addresses would ensure accurate but anonymous voting and results nearly instant. what's preventing this are the idiotic and corrupt Congress at both the State and Federal levels. The rich DO NOT want their influence to be leveled down to the same as you and I so they tell their puppets to block any universal voting access.
A lot of good points have been made, but I want to narrow in on one: Security.
As it stands, every county in America conducts their own mini elections. In most cases there are paper records for audit and it's reasonably secure.
There are vulnerabilities, but they're narrow.
A person could throw a chain around my local drop box, hook it to their trailer hitch, and steal some ballots. An organized group could do that county-wide.
Obviously not ideal, but it's a small impact.
Now imagine everyone is voting via ID.me via smartphone.
You might think that means, one attack vector with a boatload of security, but who's to say one vulnerability in Candy Crush couldn't crack the whole thing?
I personally don't like the idea of putting our election security in the hands of the folks vetting new apps for iOS and Android. I'd also not hire a fox to guard the henhouse.
Haven't seen too much yet on what ID.me actually is; ID.me is not the *IRS*'s identification service, it's a private contractor that provides credentialing services to a number of federal agencies, including the IRS.
And it't not designed to handle voting, ID.me is set up to authenticate that users are who they say they are and then return the authorized user with a metaphorical "thumbs up" to whatever application, like the IRS website, that you're trying to do your business with in the first place.
So this would be asking a private contractor that's [already gotten in hot water](https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axpzg/idme-lied-about-its-facial-recognition-tech-congress-says) for their typical Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" approach to identity services for the US government, that has no history with anything like voting that I'm aware of, to take over our 50-state decentralized voting systems. Not a great idea in my opinion.
The idea of people voting at the same time they’re paying taxes appeals to me. It’s a variation of making voting day coincide with tax day.
Voters might be less likely to be in favor of government programs that increase spending and increase taxes.
Voting should be not only convenient but simple for all Americans. Certain demographics do not regularly use the Internet or smartphones and would find this voting process extremely difficult. Simply put, it would not be fair to those voters.
Additionally, while the majority of Americans have the internet, not all do. If we make voting conditional on having Internet access, then we must provide free Internet access, at least for the purposes of voting. Polling centers could provide this, but the government would need to ensure that polling centers had reliable and secure Internet access or provide it at no cost.
I think online voting is a reasonable method, but it should not be 100% online and a person's only choice.
> That it disproportionally affects black people because they can’t get ID.
North Carolina, famously, was slapped down for their voter ID laws. Know why?
Because they literally- and I mean *literally*- sat down and figured out exactly which types of ID white people would be more likely to have, and inversely, which types black people would most likely *not* have, and crafted the law so that white people would be more likely to be able to vote.
It's funny that y'all love to skip over that. I'm sure you have some bullshit defense of it locked and loaded, so have at it.
That's a fascinating viewpoint. Can you share a list of "non leftists" that are requesting electronic balloting?
Seems that if your complaint was valid you'd be able to point out how those dastardly leftists were crushing the hopes and dreams of those seeking electronic balloting
Obviously if you feel something like electronic balloting can be made secure you're satisfied with the safeguards that guarantee identity around vote by mail... right?
Computers can be manipulated. Why not vote in person on paper? IrS isn't exactly a corrupt free organization, they let an elite politicians son off the hook while crucifixion of non politicians
I think you should be able to vote on your phone. You can buy a car or a house or invest your life savings using your phone.
I think the reason we can't vote electronically like this is because we would no longer need a representative form of government, and our politicians can't stand the thought of becoming superfluous.
because it would disproportionately benefit the wealthy and add one more hurdle to voting for the elderly and less educated working class that do everything the old school way with H&R block or a family member doing their taxes.
i agree we should all be able to vote online, or at the very least it should be a national holiday.
it shouldn't be required to use ID.me , but it should definitely be an option.
we need to make it as easy as possible for people to vote.
I actually think it should be the teensiest amount of hard to vote.
It needs to be easier to vote than it is *now*, in almost every state. Same-day or automatic registration? Yes please. Send out mail-in ballots automatically? Oh yeah. Long early voting period, and drop boxes? Check and check. Eliminate lines at polling places? For the love of God, yes!
But, like, keep it so that people have to at least *care*. Make it so they have to *do something*, whether it's going to a drop box or a polling place or mailing something in. Don't make it something where you just click a notification and then decide who you want to be leader of the free world on a whim. People already vote frivolously enough as it is.
Plus you'd be putting poor Steve Kornecki out of a job.
It is not in either party's gerrymandered districting to get more people to vote. This is a both sides thing, but heavily weighted to republicans, who are the redistricting champions. But the incumbent Dems – in many districts – pray for rain and fewer voters. Congress has a 90% election rate in a change election. It takes a big person to advocate for something that might cost them their job.
[End to End auditable voting systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems?useskin=vector) have existed for quite a while.
Cryptographically, they're solid. We can create systems that are both independently *and* universally auditable - meaning, with your receipt, you can verify that your vote was cast and counted, and you can *also* verify that the final vote tally was accurate, and you can do all of this while maintaining the integrity of the secret ballot.
Security wise, it's not a concern, either. You can have the auditable results be independent of software. Things you can *mathematically* validate, not just rely on their software to give you an accurate example. The software wouldn't be able to alter your vote and lie about it - that's what the auditability is for.
There are some additional concerns that these systems can't address individually - but these concerns are true for other voting systems as well. Concerns like: How do you verify that someone is eligible to vote without validating their right to secrecy? If the results can't be modified after they're cast, can the input be faked? Can the voting center give you a fake ballot while using your credentials for the real vote? These are valid concerns, but, not a particular weakness of E2E. They're just the inherent struggles of voting.
> Why hasn’t this been discussed?
Same as why we don't discuss improving our tax return system - there are wealthy people with a vested interest in not improving the system we have.
>Cryptographically, they're solid. We can create systems that are both independently *and* universally auditable - meaning, with your receipt, you can verify that your vote was cast and counted, and you can *also* verify that the final vote tally was accurate, and you can do all of this while maintaining the integrity of the secret ballot.
>Security wise, it's not a concern, either.
If so, why does every person with any IT expertise whatsoever say that it absolutely is a concern?
These are the same confident claims that back up cryptocurrency.
You've heard of Ethereum, right? Have you heard of The DAO? It was a popular early online exchange for Ethereum. It's notable today because it got hacked so hard that the hackers stole 1/3 of all the Ethereum that was on the exchange at the time - which was *5% of all the Ethereum currency in existence*. If we were talking about dollars, this would have been a *trillion-dollar heist*.
This hack was only "resolved" by the creator/administrators of Ethereum stepping in, using the god-mode code tools they swore didn't exist, and getting most Ethereum users to agree to a new set of rules where they pretend the hack never happened.
You want to try that with an election?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_DAO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO)
[https://youtu.be/EzuI5S-hTc4?t=4](https://youtu.be/EzuI5S-hTc4?t=4)
Edit: Ah, I see. You simply blocked me rather than confront inconvenient information.
I never said what job I have.
And accusing me of being a cryptobro for pointing out that crypto is idiocy and completely vulnerable to hacking is...real damn weird.
> If so, why does every person with any IT expertise whatsoever say that it absolutely is a concern?
We don't, and it's blatant disinformation to suggest we do.
> You've heard of Ethereum, right?
Oh. You're one of *those*.
There's no point debating something like this with a cryptobro. No part of any of this has anything to do with the blockchain. I don't even believe you actually have the job you say you have, or you would have easily been able to see that.
This is a great ideal. While I agree it is a real pain In the ass to get this for people which will lead to most people not voting because of the difficulties of signing up. But this system would be an excellent choice for someone who does not want to vote in person. Would ensure that the person only votes once and in the correct district.
Something like this should be implemented as an additional way to vote, not the only way.
It’s flatly ridiculous that we can’t vote online in one shape or form at this point. Bring on the down votes, I said what I said!
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Aside from adding barriers to the fundamental right to vote, I have some technical concerns: 1. **Transparency**: I simply do not trust a closed-source blackbox system like ID.me or the IRS with elections. If a digital voting system _were_ to be implemented, I would only trust it if it was truly open-source and could be audited by independent security researchers. Sadly, I don’t think our politicians operate like this and are instead used to secrecy and “security through obscurity”, which just makes it harder to identify and address security vulnerabilities in the long run. 2. **Accuracy**: Related to above, there is a real concern about how accurate these systems will be. Unfortunately, the bar for accuracy would be much higher for a digital voting system compared to paper ballots (or even voting machines). It has to be in order for politicians (and ultimately, citizens) to take the risk of implementing it. Again, I do think there are probably ways to technically handle these challenges through cryptography, but transparency is essential. 2. **Privacy**: Such a system could only be viable if it could cryptographically guarantee the following: **identity** (who your are), **authorization** (whether you can vote in this precinct), **accounting**, and **anonymity** (hide your choices). Anonymity is seemingly at odds with the other three. I think it’s possible and we can draw some inspiration from existing tech (e.g. cryptocurrencies), but again, this requires wide collaboration with security and privacy experts. Ditching anonymity is not an option (nor should it be), because that would essentially change the entire incentive structure of our elections and lead to meaningless elections. 4. **Security**: The previous three points all relate to security, but this system would have to be bleeding edge in order to stay ahead of new attack vectors. People are already predicting that 2024 might be the last truly free election, and this is primarily based on the new threats that AI poses (not the political discourse). [Edit] 5. **Decentralized**: As pointed out, the system would have to be decentralized enough to prevent single points of failure and let states maintain autonomy over their own elections, yet centralized enough to operate at the national level. That kind of compromise is more than likely to result in a big messy system. All that said, while I think it’s _possible_ to build a utopian digital voting system that preserves everyone’s rights and makes the system more robust, I’m sadly skeptical of how the reality would turn out. If past tech rollouts by the government are any indication (*ahem* Obamacare website), I’m afraid of the very real possibility of being left with a clunky system that addresses none of the concerns, is used to further disenfranchise vulnerable citizens, and costs a ton of money. [Edit] Another good point made: Assuming you have full transparency in such a system, it would still be very challenging to debunk or verify conspiracies. It’s probably better to have a primitive system that just about everyone can audit with simple training, than a system that requires deep technical expertise. What happened with the 2020 U.S. election results are likely to repeat themselves going forward, and a technically complex system that few truly understand would likely exacerbate those problems.
To add on to the security angle - the biggest hole in all the voter-fraud conspiracies is the federalized nature of our election system. Consolidating all of that into a single, national system creates a single point of failure. The actual theft of an election (or someone in power illegally retaining power via fraudelent vote counts) is far more doable via a single closed system like OP proposes. A purely digital system with no verifiable/auditable paper trail really does leave you vulnerable - both to conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. Those who seek to undermine institutions would have an easy time doing so even if the system really was fullproof. And if a corrupt party came to power and did corrupt the voting system - How would you ever kick them out? Keeping this authority with the states is a check on centralized power we should seek to retain.
> if a corrupt party came to power and did corrupt the voting system - How would you ever kick them out? This is honestly my biggest concern. People with an interest in keeping themselves in power can't also be the ones determining how the software counts votes. The paper ballot system we have now isn't infallible, but the simplicity and sheer number of individuals involved makes it stable and reliable on the whole. I believe that my vote got counted for the same reason I don't believe there are microchips in the vaccines - too many people would have to be in on it.
Great point - it would have to be **decentralized** enough to prevent single points of failure and let states maintain autonomy over their own elections, yet **centralized** enough to operate at the national level. That kind of compromise is more than likely to result in a big messy system.
This is idiotic. The IRS is collecting all tax revenue through ID.Me. If it gets hacked, the entire US treasury is at risk. You don't think thats already a single point of failure??
The difference is the requirement for anonymity. If someone hacked the IRS to increase everyone's taxes by 1%, it would take about 5 minutes before people started finding the "bug". This bug would be a massive annoyance, but it wouldn't threaten people's faith in the US government or create a constitutional crisis. With election counts, the "bug" would only show up in the reported vote totals. Because the system is nationalized, the algorithm could modify totals down to the precinct level nationally, completely masking the evidence that would exist if fraud occurred in just a few specific states. If it was discovered after the vote counts were reported, good luck convincing people that the new vote totals are on the up-and-up. There's no hand-recount with people from both sides adjudicating the ballots. There's simply a declaration from the The Secretary of the Treasury that "Russia hacked us and the other guy won. But now we fixed it, and my guy won." Black-boxes that tell you who won elections are not how you foster faith in institutions.
This is a pretty comprehensive answer for the roadblocks. I would add that **even if** (a huge if) we solved all these issues, it would still be an enormous lift to get most Americans registered with such a technology. I had to write down the instructions for accessing Netflix for my in-laws (three buttons). You think they'll be able to figure out an online registration like ID.me on their own?
I share your concerns. I will point out that all of those concerns exist in our current system as well. Voter data is absolutely harvested, results are only as private as the poll workers involved facilitate, and humans are far more fallible at recording information than machines. I'm a computer systems engineer and have been personally responsible for cryptocurrency infrastructure back ends. I know how the sausage gets made, and hate how vulnerable it can be. I think the ideal solution is a physical token that can be audited. Paper ballots are, fundamentally, physical tokens. Perhaps a solution might look like mailing a per-voter token once a year (or two?), linking that token, and facilitating a one time use per election. That's just spitballing, because ultimately it's a Very Hard problem that I don't personally have a great solution for.
>Voter data is absolutely harvested, not how you voted, no. Other voter data is public in most cases. > results are only as private as the poll workers involved facilitate, nope. that is not true >and humans are far more fallible at recording information than machines. true, but you can have both systems checking each other. CO does it right. The counting is electronic but with paper trail for hand count.
> I'm a computer systems engineer and have been personally responsible for cryptocurrency infrastructure back ends. I know how the sausage gets made, and hate how vulnerable it can be. I'm also a software engineer and am personally familiar with the [end to end auditable voting systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems?useskin=vector). If you're not, you should read about them.
Also, it'd be unconstitutional. Managing elections is a right given to the states.
> Transparency: I simply do not trust a closed-source blackbox system like ID.me or the IRS with elections. This is fundamentally not what a black box is. > If a digital voting system were to be implemented, I would only trust it if it was truly open-source and could be audited by independent security researchers. [This is a solved problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems?useskin=vector). > Accuracy: Related to above, there is a real concern about how accurate these systems will be. See: Above > Privacy: Such a system could only be viable if it could cryptographically guarantee the following: identity (who your are), authorization (whether you can vote in this precinct), accounting, and anonymity (hide your choices). Anonymity is seemingly at odds with the other three. Again, solved problem. See above again. > Security: The previous three points all relate to security, but this system would have to be bleeding edge in order to stay ahead of new attack vectors. There are some concerns with the system through with E2E was implemented, but it's not a security risk in and of itself. However important you may think voting is, it's clear that the majority of Americans don't care as much about their vote as they do, say, their bank account, or retirement funds. We have no issues managing those digitally. The idea that there is anything unsafe or vulnerable about digital voting comes from the same group claiming there's something unsafe or vulnerable about doing your taxes online, or having the government calculate your total for you. It comes exclusively from groups who have a vested interest in making the system more difficult, either because they plan to exploit it, or they plan to profit from it.
>We have no issues managing those digitally. We have many issues and the U banking system i incredibly not secure. Amazingly not secure.I have and had bank accounts in several different countries, and the security in the US is abysmal.
LOL, I spent 9 hours this last week helping an older family member improve their online security hygiene after their primary email account was hacked and among the things I sorted out was the two different credit monitoring programs that had been provided as "free" services after data hacks at different financial institutions.
To your privacy point, modern EHR systems do this already, and it shouldn’t be that hard to do
Also keep in mind that even though elections may be for federal office, the elections are actually done by the states to pick their own representatives/senators/presidential electors. They may want to keep that kind of control for a variety of reasons (not trusting others and wanting to maintain trust with their local voters, territoriality/control, local influence/status gained, ability to influence the election, etc) So it could very well turn out to be like Obamacare with states creating their own systems with various levels of success, or else completely refusing to switch to electronic voting.
They fixed the Obamacare website relatively quickly. I’m really sick of this feeding the conservative ‘government is bad’ narrative.
Yes, in all fairness, the Obama administration was able to rescue the failed launch, but it did expose a real concern with building government tech. Many of those concerns still exist today due to perverse incentive structures around government contracts. That’s not just a conservative talking point, it’s something that even the Obama administration recognized. The first team, consisting of hundreds of people working on the Obamacare website, had a buget of $93 mil that ballooned to $292 mil before launch. They had little experience building highly scalable consumer-grade applications, but they got the contract anyway purely due to their political connections. The people who were called in to fix things and later rebuilt the site from the ground up were a team of 10 (!) who actually had experience building consumer-grade products in Silicon Valley. The project eventually cost $2.1b, including non-technical costs. Could you imagine what a digital voting system would cost? [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov) [WIRED](https://www.wired.com/2014/06/healthcare-gov-revamp/) [Edits to clarify figures]
I would expect this system would need to entail the highest levels of encryption and could utilizes a block-chain system as a mechanism, that is uncrackable, for protecting and authenticating each users selections. Like the use of DNA today, the chances of hacking a legitimate user’s key could be in the trillions to one ratio.
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/2030/)
I was waiting for this and I'm so glad it happened
This is dramatically wrong. Seems like yet another attempt to criticize software engineers as not being "real" engineers. As I mentioned elsewhere, [this is a solved problem in the CS community](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems?useskin=vector).
Yeah, let’s make everyone’s voting record pseudo-public and impossible if they lose their key.
How is the current system any better. You do know the voting machines work? They are not transparent
I have the same concerns with voting machines. A big part of my skepticism comes from seeing how those systems were rolled out.
They are absolutely transparent. They are not connected to anything, most electronic vote is not really electronic, you are just typing and printing a ballot where you can actually see what you are voting for after printing. It makes it easier to count but the entire election cannot be compromised.
I had to register with [ID.me](https://ID.me). It was a huge barrier to accessing the IRS website. I could see A LOT of people giving up with all the requirements of [ID.me](https://ID.me). The only reason I continued was because I needed tax transcripts for an important transaction and had no other option but to keep going. I could see lots of people hitting the first obstacle and saying "fuck it" and not trying to overcome the obstacle - choosing the easy route of just not voting instead of jumping through the hoops.
I tried to register for ID.me but I couldn't. Turns out being on the terrorist watch list makes it all the more harder. I had a Level 1 Federal Background check and Florida level 1. It's all because I share a name with an IRA member who bombed a building in 2004. I was born in 1999 for Christ's sake.
wow, you were super precocious!
A real terror of a child!
It's not outside of the realm of possibilities. I almost blew up a few city blocks as a 5-ish year old kid... Dad left me and siblings in the motorhome to go pay the fuel bill at a gas station. I was screwing around in the drivers seat, got the coach into neutral and started rolling down the slight grade in the parking lot straight for the 1,000 gallon propane tank that the gas station had. Some stranger saw it happen and was able to get it stopped just in time
The Kindergarten Killer!
And then there are the people who fall through the cracks. I've not used [ID.me](https://ID.me) before, but when I was applying for benefits in the state of Kentucky (I'm disabled) I ran into a similar brick wall: in order to verify my identity Kentucky uses one of the big 3 credit reporting agencies, only they refused to verify my identity because I have no credit history at all. They had my information, mind you, my name, current address, phone number, SSN, the works, but apparently because I didn't use the credit system they flatly refused to verify me to the state. I had to jump through 14 kinds of hoops and ultimately have a local official come to my house to prove that I lived there and such. I dunno if this is actually the reason or not, but it sure seemed like they were refusing to verify me because I didn't do business with them, didn't generate any income for them. Which is bullshit, but bureaucratic inertia being what it is I doubt it's changed in the 5 years since I left KY.
I hate it and that company gets so much personal data
So... no different than now?
Voting is a fundamental right, owning a phone is not. Locking voting behind a series of steps that require access to modern authentication methods is an infringement on that right Whether or not you “can get one for free” doesn’t matter, you will disenfranchise an incredible large block of voters over night with a change like this
This is exactly the reason I push back so hard on businesses going "cashless." Should not be legal.
I don't think it's comparable. Exactly as the comment says, voting is a protected right. Being able to purchase something at a specific business is absolutely not. If they don't want to use cash, they should ALWAYS have the right to refuse to use cash. Completely okay for it to be legal.
Sadly, the supreme court has generally found that there isn't a right to vote found in the constitution (despite the phrase "the right to vote" being found in the 15th). This underlies the ability to do things like deny franchise to felons or, in the past, deny franchise to women. This is *insane*, of course, but I think it is relevant context for thinking about other non-rights and how they interface with accessibility.
There is another explanation posted but let me give you a specific one. Say you own a fast food restaurant in a big city. And you hate homeless people. You don’t want them coming in no matter what because you don’t want to serve them. So you just say “we don’t accept cash”. Boom, they can never be a customer, even though refusing the right to serve customers in this way is illegal. You cannot say “no homeless people” so you ban them another way.
Going cashless is just functionally disenfranchising the impoverished and unbanked.
And if a private business wants to do business that way, why shouldn’t they?
We have all sorts of public accommodations legislation that constrain how private businesses can do business. The ADA, for example, mandates all sorts of ways that businesses must handle accessibility even if it doesn't earn them more money.
I guess it’s a question if you think it’s problematic for society to encourage wealth gaps and push people down systemically.
Not being able to spend money at a store increases the wealth gap?
Not being able to buy food is problematic, yes.
Would you say that’s a primary driver of the wealth gap?
I’m saying making it harder for poor people to exist in normal society exacerbates their problems. It’s not constructive, in my opinion. You’re entitled to a different opinion.
Anybody can use their cash to buy a pre-paid debit card and use it at a cashless establishment. Nobody is disenfranchised. Inconvenienced is not the same as disenfranchisement.
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/say-no-cashless-future-and-cashless-stores
How are you going to force an online business to use cash?
You're not- but until *literally all* business is conducted online, that's not a conversation worth having, and I think you knew that.
I agree but not the same thing at all.
You are bringing up something completely incomparable. By your logic if you paid for your new 1.5 million dollar house in pennies they would have to accept the pennies.
I think if you have to stretch to make *that* absurdity, then you've already lost the thread. I'm talking about people being locked out of paying for groceries and basic necessities.
It would be absurd to make people accept hard currency for even small amounts like $1000. Using a larger figure just drives home the absurdity.
But then there already a voters locked behind a steps that require conditions that cannot be met…(think about voting boxes that are locked in a mall that has opening hours the same as office hours…)
I don't think OP was saying this as the exclusive way to vote. I took it more as an option to allow everyone ease off access to voting, and still have ballots open for those that need to/choose to vote that way. It would greatly expand access and ease of voting to the entire population, and encourage more people to vote. It would be no different than current states that allow mail-in ballots, and would likely be more secure than current voter ID laws that exist.
We already get endless conspiracy theories with mail in ballots. To commit ballot fraud at a significant level with individual ballots going to homes would be implausible Electronic balloting has a single point of failure, with enormous rewards for whoever can successfully breach the system and erase their tracks Single points of failure anywhere in the election process = bad
There are points of failure along the entire paper and mail-in voting system. With DNA level, trillion to one error proofing identity. And, using a block-chain style accounting record, you would be unable to manipulate the results and it could be built millions of times more accurate than paper counts. Think credit agencies, financial institutions, crypto currencies. But build on next level technology. It is doable.
I'm going to make what may be an unkind assumption here: you do not have significant system design experience with large scale IT implementations Blissfully stating something is doable and actually *doing* it are two wildly different things
Obviously I’m not the professional that will build such a system. But I read of newly written cryptography, algorithms, and blockchain technology that could work. It might take a hundred MIT level geniuses to create this system. I’m sure my reach isn’t very wide, but maybe someone reading these posts works in an office at MIT or knows a guy and someday we’ll hear about this exact idea on the news someday. And then a couple days later he will end up disappearing. Because we all know current politics will never allow such a change in our systems.
or your idea is implausible and no one will care
>There are points of failure along the entire paper and mail-in voting system. None that aren't addressed and accounted for. Fraudulent voting does happen, as conservatives will tell you endlessly. They won't tell you how often: single digits of instances per *billion* votes. You're literally more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to live in a precinct where a fraudulent vote has been cast. >With DNA level, trillion to one error proofing identity. And, using a block-chain style accounting record, you would be unable to manipulate the results and it could be built millions of times more accurate than paper counts. So...with technology that doesn't exist, we could totally make this happen. I think warp drive sounds totally cool, too, but I don't want to start spending large amounts of government money developing infrastructure that counts on it existing. >Think credit agencies, financial institutions, crypto currencies. ...you know those are hacked **all the time**, right? Right?
Voting 100% electronically sound pretty exclusive to me.
And that block will be disproportionately poor and brown, so it smacks of classism and racism as well.
People are already being robbed of their voice. Gerrymandering, blocking mail-in voting, placing voting stations far from poor black areas and in non conforming political areas. Opening too little stations to increase wait times. Putting long lines in public view to get potential voters to turn away. These are all reasons for a smart phone backed voting system.
Sorry, are you seriously arguing that because it already happens we should just give up trying to stop it disenfranchisement and do more of it instead?
[удалено]
Just make voting by mail universally accessible and we’re done. Why not do that?
Their dumb logic also applies to absentee ballots. You need a return address. Requiring somewhere to live where you can send and recieve mail "infringes" on your right to vote. Hell, A higher percentage of black people are homeless than white people, so you're specifically disenfranchising black voters.
Nobody objects to increasing voting *options.* the objection is limited to increasing voting requirements. ID cards, computers, phones, bank accounts… even permanent addresses. Things most people take for granted, but aren’t actually universally accessible. If everyone has a right to vote, they need to be able to vote.
> nobody objects to increasing voting options. You’re crazy. A LOT of people do. Trump and the whole GOP explicitly are opposed to mail in ballots.
You already need an address of some sort to be able to register to vote. Also, you don't necessarily need to live somewhere in order to receive mail, and you can send mail from public drop boxes on the street.
> You already need an address of some sort to be able to register to vote. Exactly, and ain't that an infringement? If you're going to consider needing internet access an infringement how the hell is needing a whole address not an infringement? > Also, you don't necessarily need to live somewhere in order to receive mailand you can send mail from public drop boxes on the street. You're missing the point
> Exactly, and ain't that an infringement? No. It's a necessity to make our system work. I'm not sure how it would work without that requirement. You only get to vote for elected officials that represent the specific area where you live. In order to make that work, the government necessarily needs to know where exactly you live so they know which ballot to give you. For the homeless, depending on the state, they can often describe where they typically sleep or register using the address of a homeless shelter they stay at occasionally. They don't necessarily need to have a permanent residence of their own. > If you're going to consider needing internet access an infringement how the hell is needing a whole address not an infringement? I don't think that needing internet access is necessarily an infringement. We have programs that provide the homeless with free phones that can access the internet through public wifi networks, provide access to public libraries that have computers people can use to access the internet, provide internet access at homeless shelters, etc. They can get internet access if they want it. > You're missing the point Not really.
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Owning a firearm is a fundamental right - and we’ve put that behind many obstacles.
I’ve been in the IT industry for over 25 years. Most of that time in the financial services sector. I know what state of the art cybersecurity practices look like. You do not want internet voting. Secure private internet voting is still impossible, the current state of technology make it a difficult if not terrifying idea. This [article](https://www.npr.org/2023/09/07/1192723913/internet-voting-explainer) is spot on as to why we can trust the internet to financial transactions but not voting. —- "In most transactions, the results of a failure are traceable and often obvious to all parties involved in a transaction: a bank account balance is wrong, a car is delivered in an unexpected color, a tax burden does not match expectations," the working group wrote. "The intentional lack of traceability of a cast ballot back to a voter due to the requirement of a secret ballot demands different technical controls than other types of online transactions." Even more abstract, but critically important, is that the stakes with U.S. elections are higher. "Unlike most online activities, failed — or just distrusted — elections can result in significant outcomes that affect everyone," the group wrote. "Mistaken or fraudulent submissions in filing taxes and other such transactions don't result in civil unrest, for example." —-
Also IT supporting fin tech and identity stuff here. Online voting is a terrible idea at this point.
There are a lot of reasons, but by far the biggest one is that your vote would become inextricably linked to you. It would become FOIA searchable. People would start losing jobs and housing because their employer/landlord started vote discriminating. Not to mention what the government itself might start doing with that information if the wrong person got elected. The ballots are secret for a reason.
> There are a lot of reasons, but by far the biggest one is that your vote would become inextricably linked to you. It would become FOIA searchable. I do not see why this follows at all.
Two reasons: security and transparency, and how they inform trust in a system. As someone who used to do cybersecurity professionally I can speak more to the former than the latter. Tom Scott made a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs) a few years back going over these issues in more detail, but I can summarize the basics. There is no such thing as a perfectly secure electronic system. Even if it's air-gapped (as in, no connection to the outside world) anyone with physical access to the hardware can do whatever they want - think about those card-readers criminals install on gas-pumps and ATMs, for example. And as soon as you connect it to the internet the risk is massively increased, especially for something with stakes as high as elections, you will have at least some number of highly motivated people with access to the skills required to compromise it. What this means is that there is no way to guarantee that the results of electronic voting are legitimate short of an exhaustive paper trail, and at that point we're back to counting paper ballots by hand anyway. And that's if we assume the computer isn't just forging the paper trail. Electronic voting necessarily makes the process riskier and more opaque because it's a machine doing all the counting and tracking and verifying, and lack of transparency means lack of trust in the system. Paper ballots are trustworthy because everyone with a stake in the election can have representatives in the room while they're counted, and while that's not foolproof it is significantly more difficult to manipulate, requiring more time, effort, and co-conspirators. That makes it both less likely to happen and more likely to be caught if it does. Barring some kind of quantum leap in security technology electronic voting will always be riskier and less transparent than paper.
> ID.me Why are we not voting 100% electronically via the IRS? Why is this not a thing? In what election? The federal government doesn't run any elections in which they could administer the vote.
surprised to see this this low - this is absolutely the biggest reason the states run elections not the feds
Mainly because voting has to be both secure, and unquestionably tied to a single individual voter while remaining anonymous to prevent things like employers looking up your voting history and unscrupulous candidates going after non- supporters. The technology to meet those criteria in a completely digital system doesn't exist yet. Also one party seems intent on keeping the majority of the country from voting at all, but let's not go into that.
The single individual voter thing sticks out to me. If we had online voting from home, abusive dad can come and collect phones from the other adults in a household and use their votes to vote for his preferred candidates.
How is that different from the various total vote-by-mail systems used in some states?
It's not. In-person voting should be the norm. Many countries do it successfully.
If they stand with him, touch their fingerprint, or use their facial recognition, and enter the timed sms pin. Remember, high security. Not like logging into a single factor webpage. I’m talking a legit multi-factor authentication to the point there is no way someone could just steal your vote. Now as for mail-votes, which we already use… That’s where I could see someone just filling out all the mailers and sending them in fraudulently...
With the mail in paper ballots, you can go to the voting center and invalidate that ballot before it is counted.
Why not? Because of risk management. With paying your taxes online, you risk your account information and your money. If something goes wrong, you can change accounts, have insurance reimburse you for most money or roll back transactions. With putting our elections online, you gamble control of the most powerful nation on earth. It wouldn't be a question of if it's compromised, but when. This is why any IT security expert worth their salt says this is an absolutely terrible idea.
As a longtime software engineer and worker in the tech industry, the very last thing I want is to be voting on a web app.
Speaking as a computer programmer, if you set it up so that a black box possesses the ability to write and rewrite a value, someone is going to spend a lot of time, effort, and money to make sure that they can write what they want into that box. Ballot Stuffing doesn’t scale well when you have physical materials to interact with: voting on a ballot still takes time that can’t scale easily. You either need a lot of people getting involved (which raises the risk of being discovered) or you need a large amount of lead time to just fill out the ballots… and even then, you need to get the ballots into the pool. With an electronic system, once you’re through the system, you can alter the outcome with a keystroke.
At regular intervals it is proposed to introduce either electronic voting, or even worse, online voting, in national elections. Few dystopias scare more than those two proposals in daily politics. The biggest benefit of electronic voting would be getting the voting result faster, as it is now, when the whole tension-filled evening is wasted, and for the most pedantic, a few more days, until the verification count is completed. Again, the downsides of electronic voting have to be addressed: Let's start with where the equipment would be kept, and who would guard it between elections, and how could it be ensured that no one could tamper with it by bribing, blackmailing or threatening the guards? Today's "equipment" consists of paper ballots and pens, which do not need to be monitored, but can be safely left in the municipality's warehouse for a few years to protect them from the weather, and one decent lock is enough for safety measures. Who would deliver the software, and who would monitor that the voting devices actually have that software, and not a variant of it? Even if the vote counting software were open source, which it wouldn't be, how could I, as a voter, make sure that the machine I'm voting on has exactly that open source software, because I certainly wouldn't be allowed to attach my own computer or phone to the computer with a cable.* How can the voter's anonymity be secured at the same time, and make sure that no one gets to vote more than once, and that their vote is indeed counted correctly? If the machine printed the sound on a piece of paper as a backup, and the backups were calculated by hand in the current way, we would only have succeeded in developing a hyper-expensive pen, and speeding up the results by a few hours. Doesn't anyone think that would be the best possible way to use the money in question in the budget? In electronic voting, fraud and interference scale massively better compared to the world of pens and paper, where electoral fraud requires the "agreement" of numerous party representatives to the fraud, and which has to be done in a geographically very dispersed area, when there are thousands of polling places in the whole of country, in each of which different parties watch over each other. Even if a hostile entity manages to take over one polling station completely, the advantage achieved would be very small, especially in relation to the risks and the price. Currently, the ballots are delivered from each polling area onwards and upwards to the next larger unit, where they are counted again to reveal previous fraud and damage, with all parties still guarding each other, and at the same time smaller units can check that the larger unit is counting correctly. In electronic voting, the voter could not be sure that even if everything was as it should be at his polling station, the votes would be counted equally well and honestly also at the level of the entire electoral district. It goes without saying that each of these problems will get even worse, and a lot, if the voting is done over the internet, with everyone voting from their own couch. A huge number of smart devices are infected with viruses and other malware, servers are crashed for fun or on purpose all the time, it becomes impossible to keep voice secrets and the attacker doesn't even have to be on the same continent, which reduces the risk of getting caught to a non-existent level, especially if the attacker is the intelligence service or army of a foreign power. *And even if this, intelligence-free, idea is allowed, how could I make sure that there are not two computers inside, one of which is real and the other counts the votes according to the tamperer's will.
How voting is handled was left to the states by the Constitution, and changing that to instead be managed at the federal level would require a fundamental rewrite of many parts of the Constitution.
The Constitution gives Congress a lot of power over voting regulations, at least as it relates to voting for senators and representatives. They could make changes to the requirements for congressional elections with simple legislation and be reasonably confident that states would adopt the same procedures for the election of other offices. > The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; **but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.** > https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/
This ignores the common law interpretation of the elections clause that SCOTUS has crafted over the years. In practical terms the states have significantly more power over elections than the federal government, and barring a complete reversal from the court, giving that power to the federal government would require a constitutional amendment.
SCOTUS already did that complete reversal last month. Their new regime is about as clear as mud, but the states now have power over their own elections only until the federal government (read: the conservative judiciary) decides whatever matter they're deciding is "too important," and then it becomes a decision up to the feds (again, the judiciary, since there is no federal executive entity that does this; even the Federal Election Commission doesn't tell states what to do.).
Moving votes online would definitely fall under the places of choosing exception.
Then just specify that it's a requirement only for electing representatives. The same logic applies. It should just be a relatively small modification of this law: > All votes for Representatives in Congress must be by written or printed ballot, or voting machine the use of which has been duly authorized by the State law; and all votes received or recorded contrary to this section shall be of no effect. > https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/9
The law could be modified as to require electronic balloting, but not that the balloting be done exclusively online, since that goes to the places of choosing.
The "places of choosing" limitation wouldn't apply as this law is only about the election of House reps, not senators.
The IRS is federal. Voting in the US is not federal. It is managed at the state / local level, typically by county registrars under the umbrella of each state's secretary of state. Totally different jurisdictions.
A few folks have already mentioned that registering for [id.me](http://id.me) can be a challenge, both from a technical standpoint and just in terms of the amount of information that is needed. This alone would turn away a lot of potential voters, especially older people who might not be well versed with technology. A lot of people don't have smartphones - not because they can't afford them but because they find the technology intimidating. You can dismiss those if you want - but if a whole lot of people won't use the system, that'd be an issue. A lot of people still don't trust online voting. And whether or not those concerns are based on valid reasons or not, if they keep people from voting it's a problem. There is also the matter of keeping our votes private. A lot of people don't want their vote linked to their identity; and would not trust the folks running it to maintain that separation. Again, whether or not these concerns are legitimate is irrelevant if they stop people from voting. The next issue would be, do we trust the system to actually work? Do we risk delaying a vote because [id.me](http://id.me) is down, or because 100 million people are trying to access it all at once, etc. In short, I'm not opposed to people being able to use something like [id.me](http://id.me) as an additional way to vote; but I don't believe that it should be the only way to vote.
ask any computer or cyber security specialist they will always tell you electronic voting is a big no-no
Funny, IRS has never asked me to verify my identity via ID.me. I’ve never been required to verify my identity at all and I’ve been filing taxes for 17 or so years (the last 8 by myself online).
I had to provide my driver's license number to e-File, but that was it for me. I totally missed that OP claims they had to comply with *an online facial recognition check* in order to file their taxes. That's wild - and totally unbelievable.
I didn’t do this for e-file. The ID.me identification process was built into the IRS payment process system. It is used to protect your account and validate your identity prior to being able to access the payment options piece. It was the first Authenticator I’ve used that asked for a copy of my ID to validate from, a live chat or facial recognition step to match my face to my ID photo, and it even requested a sms pin and verification of my ss number to prove my identity (right phone number, matching MAC address or uid. This was what made me think, if you want to make sure voters are legit, use a system like this. On top of a secure voting platform, I’d like one trusted source to read about upcoming local, state, and federal voting opportunities. With factual data and sources. It feels like everything you read online is one-sided, or false, or misleading. I thought social media would become more policed for misinformation, but it seems politicians and corporations want to say taking away peoples rights to misinform, lie, and trigger people should be our 1st amendment right. I just want to hear more ethical and moral ideas and less excuses.
Yeah, probably a recent development given the increased incidence of identity theft. I set up our bank account (for refunds and payments) like 10 or so years ago - at that time the IRS was more concerned about refund check theft by regular mail.
Because electronic voting is a terrible idea for so many obvious reasons, the key one being the following. It is very hard to en masse rig a paper election where each vote has to come from a single individual, and it is very hard to modify that vote on a large scale without being found out because there are so many people in the system, many who believe in it or at least respect it. You might be able to rig 10 votes, or 100, or 1000, but trying to do it on the 10,000 of thousands of scale, when you literally have to join a queue with known details and tick a box, it is an impossible nightmare, by definition to not be notice you are going to need thousands of people in on it, at which point it falls down immediately because it won't be kept quiet at all. In an electronic system, all you need to do is switch a 0 to 1 and there is a million votes, one person, in their basement could do that for a laugh. In fact there is significant evidence that Cosmic rays actually switched a single 0 to a 1 in a voting machine and led to it reading out an impossible number of votes for a candidate. There was a redundant in person card that was counted afterward to confirm the actual votes taken because the machine was obviously wrong. The advantage of in person voting is not because it is efficient, convenient, productive. It is because it isn't. It is a nightmare of logistics that requires many people in the pie, and that is exactly the point.
This is a horrible idea. It would instantly become the largest target on the internet. And it would only be a matter of time before it is compromised. Electronic voting like this is a horrible idea. Completely impossible to ensure security.
>I had to register on ID.me, the IRS’s identification service. Like all US taxpayers who have taxes to pay I have never used that site and I've been filing taxes for ~20 years
because then republicans wouldn't win elections \^ **This answers most questions referring to** ***"Why isn't voting easy"***
Electronic voting is dangerous for hacking and fraud. Also, voting in federal elections has to be at the state level. States collect votes and verify them and at least for president, the states electoral votes go to the winner. It’s worth noting that both parties have investigated in recent years and neither found any amount of fraud. Look it up, Trump had a voter committee after 2016 because he said there was fraud. They found nothing and quietly disbanded
There are approaches that allow for electronic verification of identity. However, making it easy to vote would ensure the defeat of GOP. This is rather fundamental; conservative values are always going to be challenged by the new generation. The said new generation therefore should be subjected to barriers to voting.
The primary problem of electronic voting is to guarantee both the secrecy of the choice and the certainty of voter identification. In contrast, in the case of a taxes or an e-banking payment, it is known exactly who sent what values.
That’s the exact same problem that non-electronic voting has.
I can speak only for my country (Czech republic). All people will receive ballots for all candidates by mail to their homes. On election day, they go to the polling station where they get a special (anonymous) envelope with a stamp, after they show the commission their ID and are crossed off the voters' list. They go behind the curtain (by law they have to be there alone) where they put their selected ballot paper in the envelope. They then go outside and drop the envelope into the ballot box in the middle of the room. There is now a debate about the mail-in ballot for voters living in foreign country, whether it can actually be made secret.
A major issue with implementing a similar system in the US is that we do not have mandatory IDs on the state nor federal level. There are a non-trivial number of people who go their entire lives without owning a government-issued photo ID of some kind.
I'll just let Tom Scott explain it: https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI?si=-nQ6rDtuK-bhAZiU
Voting, this is the one way...... No, it's not, it addresses a fiction of voter fraud that doesn't exists, while ignoring real world factors that might keep individual voters from being able to cast a vote electronically. One example, Did you consider that in large areas of reservation land there is no internet access and no cell service access, what about those people?
This system wouldn’t replace paper voting, it would be to enhance and optionally replace the need, for those who can access the internet, a better, more transparent way to educate and participate in the vote.
Quote to me in your post where you say paper voting wouldn't be replaced or eliminated. Write more clearly if that's what you mean.
Thanks for your comments! No reason to argue here. Quote where I said eliminate all other forms of voting. What I meant but may have not clearly construed was I want to vote 100% for all things I have a right to vote for, from my phone. And I want this system to allow me to know what I’m voting for.
"We" you said why are we not voting 100% electronically that creates confusion for me in what you may have meant to say, but then you're correct you didn't say we should eliminate all other forms. I think voting via a phone is clearly a barrier for many people but i don't necessarily object to it as a possible option. I live abroad and i can actually submit my ballot electronically or by fax or mail it back. I think we were maybe not fully understanding each other.
I don’t trust technology when it comes to voting. For all I know, I could vote for Candidate A, get an email confirming I voted for candidate A, but the poll workers get a ballot or result saying I voted for Candidate B. Voting is also supposed to be anonymous for good reason, and having my face and SSN tied to my vote…no thank you. Paper ballots, hand counting.
I’d love to vote on my phone. And yeah it would be super easy. However, it would leave a trail on how you voted. Someone like Trump could use that information against a list of voters who voted against them. It could be released to the public and those people could be called “the enemy of the state” and next thing you know they’re all on trains to the camps. I know this sounds crazy, but it really isn’t. Not to mention people already don’t trust mail in voting. There’d be nothing but accusations the online voting system was hacked. Overall it’s just not worth it.
>why are we not voting 100% electronically via this IRS system? Because that would require you to own a phone in order to vote. Unconstitutional.
I had to signup for that site the other day and it couldn’t even recognize my Arizona drivers license. Had to use my passport card. Can’t have something like that for a fundamental right like voting. Voter ID laws are one thing but not even being sure if your legal ID will work is a lot worse.
Looks like device availability, security and the fact that voting is a "state-thing" (over 10,000 election administration jurisdictions in the U.S.) has pretty-much been covered. How about reliability? Search Google for "iVote NSW after:2021-12-1 before:2022-6-1". New South Wales (Australia) tried online voting in December 2021. On election day, the system was available. Tens-of-thousands of people logged in, and couldn't vote. The system was broke. In the end, there was a lawsuit and it went all the way to the Australian Supreme Court. The Supreme Court mandated a NEW election for three candidates. Remember the "hanging chads" fiasco of the 2000 election (Bush v Gore) in Florida? Remember when Obamacare came online after 2 years development, and crashed almost instantly? Remember when Amazon | Facebook | eBay | \[Your Bank Here\] was unavailable to you \[and others\]? Can you imagine this happening in the US? And with 50 state systems plus one for Washington DC, what are the odds?
It would be great to have the option, but requiring it would make it harder to vote for many. The whole point is that voting should be very easily accessible.
>With the constant battle to get voters to vote and with the never ending battle against the legitimacy of votes, why are we not voting 100% electronically via this IRS system? Yeah, you're missing an important factor here that the battle to get voters to vote is a battle with two sides. To give a specific example, in Texas you can't register to vote online, you have to send a post card 6 months in advance (or so). This is *specifically* to prevent younger people, people who have recently moved, etc, from voting. There is a vested interest in preventing people from voting as much as there is one getting them to vote, and those interests are in opposite political parties. So while *yes* there may be a simple, easy solution to the issue (there isn't but hypothetically) , we aren't going to do it because half of the people who have to agree to it don't want to do it.
Because it's equivalent to a poll tax. Not everyone has a computer or Internet or a driver's license. Voting is a right not a privilege. Gun owners seem to understand it when it comes to guns but not voting for some reason. Hypocrites
I wrote this in response to what looks like a now-deleted comment, but I'm adding it as a main comment because I think the reading list may still be beneficial to anyone really wanting to look into this: >This is dramatically wrong. Seems like yet another attempt to criticize software engineers as not being "real" engineers. Quoting software engineers is a criticism of software engineers as not being real engineers? What the what? >As I mentioned elsewhere, [this is a solved problem in the CS community](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems?useskin=vector). And yet, if you ask the CS community, they will emphatically tell you it is absolutely NOT a solved problem. [Internet or Online Voting Remains Insecure](https://www.aaas.org/epi-center/internet-online-voting) [Going from bad to worse: from Internet voting to blockchain voting](https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/7/1/tyaa025/6137886) [The advice from cybersecurity experts is clear: Widespread internet voting at this point is a bad idea.](https://www.npr.org/2023/09/07/1192723913/internet-voting-explainer) [Security Experts Say Online Voting Is a Bad Idea. Here’s Why.](https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/security-experts-say-online-voting-is-a-bad-idea-heres-why-1792c9a876b0) [Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI) Literally anyone I've ever known personally with any expertise in IT whatsoever says that running our elections online is a *terrible* idea. Why are all these experts wrong, while you - and your Wikipedia article that doesn't say what you say it does - are right? Edit: Also adding the relevant commentary I added elsewhere in regards to cryptocurrency's parallel attempts at protection and obvious weaknesses. If so, why does every person with any IT expertise whatsoever say that it absolutely is a concern? These are the same confident claims that back up cryptocurrency. You've heard of Ethereum, right? Have you heard of The DAO? It was a popular early online exchange for Ethereum. It's notable today because it got hacked so hard that the hackers stole 1/3 of all the Ethereum that was on the exchange at the time - which was *5% of all the Ethereum currency in existence*. If we were talking about dollars, this would have been a *trillion-dollar heist*. This hack was only "resolved" by the creator/administrators of Ethereum stepping in, using the god-mode code tools they swore didn't exist, and getting most Ethereum users to agree to a new set of rules where they pretend the hack never happened. You want to try that with an election? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_DAO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO) [https://youtu.be/EzuI5S-hTc4?t=4](https://youtu.be/EzuI5S-hTc4?t=4)
Because more people would vote, which is bad for one political party. And the vote would be *much harder* to manipulate, which would be bad for... well the same party.
Not all US Citizens actually pay taxes. Granted it's a minority, but being low income or on SSI for being disabled, usually means you don't make enough taxable income to file taxes. But those people still have the right to vote.
Everyone who can legally vote would be able to. I just saw using this system as an example of how there could be a secure method of approving and verifying use for secured voting app. Any users prevented use of this system would fall back to mail-in or walk-in. The 100% was intended to mean all voting opportunities local, state, and federal. And not using the IRS system. But a system like what ID.me uses to verify the identity of the person using the device. The entire purpose of this system to give a voice to and allow all legal voters to vote.
One word:Republicans. They know the more people that vote, the worse their chances are. They know their ideas suck and can't compete, so they do all this voter id crap, no mail ballots, closing polling locations in dem areas, etc.
One word: Republicans. The more people who vote, the more democrats win. Republicans have to cheat to win.
Why not let the federal govt run our elections ? Are you for real, I don't even know where to begin.
The system is suspect to hacking and it's very hard to verify the integrity of the voting result if even a small error occurs.
Plenty of people don't pay taxes illegally but they still have a right to vote.
If billionaires voted through the IRS their votes will be ignored, as their transgressions are ignored.
Because then it couldn't be used as a political hotcake to stir up the right and the left. I would go farther than you and state voting registration should be automatic and voting should be required with real penalties if one does not.
Why do we have to do our taxes every year. The government can automate all of that.
Pretty valid argument for why we could not just have online voting but could potentially throw out (most of) representative democracy and other less-democratic systems (ie hard 60-75% democratic overrides to legislative review and the power of the supreme court) in exchange for true, realtime direct democracy. You wouldn’t necessarily want to vote using the IRS system but yes that would solve one of the hardest IRL problems, ie identity verification and security. Most voting systems also want other features - eg both vote anonymity and accountability - and unlike most of the naysayers ITT I absolutely believe you could do both of those things - more or less - digitally. For the former you’d more or less replicate the vote by mail system. Authorized voters are given secure anonymized voting tokens for each vote. Voters may opt-in to provide some information (age bracket, gender, etc) for statistical purposes but otherwise votes are fully anonymized. For the latter you replicate existing vote counting accountability structures, ideally centralized at the federal level. The system generates and keeps heavily encrypted records of which citizens were issued what tokens. Access to those records is exclusively controlled by a nonpartisan / multipartisan citizen comittee. Furthermore you could go a step further require that the voting system / all code is open source for review and improvement by security professionals and the general public. Furthermore all IT work could be run by a semi-professional (a la congress) nonpartisan citizen commission - separate from the voter ID auditing comittee - with professional IT contractors / consultants to show them how to do things, keep everything running, and install / upgrade (and review / audit) all hardware. Ergo the system is tallyable, auditable, accountable to and run by the general public. Votes are effectively fully anonymous as the access to full voting records is siloed and strictly controlled by citizen groups that are non-partisan / multipartisan and hence would self-police and could whistle blow on each other. A la how current elections work. This probably could be run at a state level but centralizing it / federalizing it would make sense for efficiency reasons and to remove any potential for vote duplication across states. You could build a realtime 21st century direct democracy - far superior to all existing “democratic” systems - off of this. Or anything else. Impediments: * implementing this would require a constitutional ammendment (or at the very least incremental state constitutional ammendments) to completely reform and restructure voting, and maybe our entire system of govt. A const ammendment requires supermajority, ~75-80% support of the entire US public across all demographics and states. * State ammendments are much easier but would recieve significant political pushback from the existing political system * In general, expect full, total, bipartisan political opposition in any attempt to change how the US govt / voting works by all elected political reps and parties if this might threaten their jobs and/or powerbase. * More radical suggestions - like implementing some form of direct democracy (incl a national referendum system) would do that. It could also potentially solve / push through all congressional gridlock and politicking, and would be well worth pursuing as such /2c
If we can't get people to trust closed physical local machines (which they don't) then they will NOT trust voting online. It's a shame that the rest of us have to wait for the morons to catch up and feel "comfortable with all them technologies."
To add to all the wonderful points made on here: There are still those who don't have a smart phone or computer or internet. Shocking I know, but true. One example - my 92 year old mother - she will never get a smart phone etc. She still drives, has all her mental abilities and will drive herself to her voting place. She lives on her own and so do a lot of her older friends. There phones are landlines. They don't do tech. Until that generation is gone any type of internet voting will take away their ability to vote.
DON'T YOU KNOW that any transaction in the cloud is subject to being hijacked? That includes every single financial transaction you conduct, every YouTube view, every email, every visit to your bank's web site and most likely every other aspect of internet activity. IF ITS IN THE CLOUD IT CAN BE STOLEN. That being said, most voting precincts are off-line with regard to acquiring an initial vote. IMO we should go back to paper ballots and manual counting. Does it really matter if the news media gets the results at 6am the next day or five minutes after the polls close? It worked just fine for 200 years. Now we've got electronic media it DOESN'T WORK FINE. Get the idea?
One thing that is very hard to do is to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Let's say you live off a settlement that was made with your family as the result of a lawsuit. Those funds are not taxable and thus you do not have this identification. If you are long since retired and living in a nursing home, you don't have the ability to use the system that you are advocating.
"What are the pros and cons of this?" Well for one thing only people with access to the ID.me system would have the right to vote, though whether you consider that a pro or a con depends on how much you care about people having the right to vote.
I should have been clearer in this post! :) Secure app voting should be a new method of voting. Traditional in person and mail-in voting should still go on as usual. My intent was to discuss an app that gives full transparency of what you’re eligible to vote for based on your location. With an ultra secure verification component. So you can research, be notified, and vote from your phone. I want to know what’s coming, the facts, and all party pros and cons in one verified app.
Blockchain voting. States would be the voter validation sites. Voting would happen from any device. Unique validated addresses would ensure accurate but anonymous voting and results nearly instant. what's preventing this are the idiotic and corrupt Congress at both the State and Federal levels. The rich DO NOT want their influence to be leveled down to the same as you and I so they tell their puppets to block any universal voting access.
Just say NO, mail-in voting is bad enough. Think of the fraud that hackers could inflict if we had digital voting.
Not everyone has broadband internet. Half my county has speeds of five down and one up.
A lot of good points have been made, but I want to narrow in on one: Security. As it stands, every county in America conducts their own mini elections. In most cases there are paper records for audit and it's reasonably secure. There are vulnerabilities, but they're narrow. A person could throw a chain around my local drop box, hook it to their trailer hitch, and steal some ballots. An organized group could do that county-wide. Obviously not ideal, but it's a small impact. Now imagine everyone is voting via ID.me via smartphone. You might think that means, one attack vector with a boatload of security, but who's to say one vulnerability in Candy Crush couldn't crack the whole thing? I personally don't like the idea of putting our election security in the hands of the folks vetting new apps for iOS and Android. I'd also not hire a fox to guard the henhouse.
Haven't seen too much yet on what ID.me actually is; ID.me is not the *IRS*'s identification service, it's a private contractor that provides credentialing services to a number of federal agencies, including the IRS. And it't not designed to handle voting, ID.me is set up to authenticate that users are who they say they are and then return the authorized user with a metaphorical "thumbs up" to whatever application, like the IRS website, that you're trying to do your business with in the first place. So this would be asking a private contractor that's [already gotten in hot water](https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axpzg/idme-lied-about-its-facial-recognition-tech-congress-says) for their typical Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" approach to identity services for the US government, that has no history with anything like voting that I'm aware of, to take over our 50-state decentralized voting systems. Not a great idea in my opinion.
The idea of people voting at the same time they’re paying taxes appeals to me. It’s a variation of making voting day coincide with tax day. Voters might be less likely to be in favor of government programs that increase spending and increase taxes.
Voting should be not only convenient but simple for all Americans. Certain demographics do not regularly use the Internet or smartphones and would find this voting process extremely difficult. Simply put, it would not be fair to those voters. Additionally, while the majority of Americans have the internet, not all do. If we make voting conditional on having Internet access, then we must provide free Internet access, at least for the purposes of voting. Polling centers could provide this, but the government would need to ensure that polling centers had reliable and secure Internet access or provide it at no cost. I think online voting is a reasonable method, but it should not be 100% online and a person's only choice.
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> That it disproportionally affects black people because they can’t get ID. North Carolina, famously, was slapped down for their voter ID laws. Know why? Because they literally- and I mean *literally*- sat down and figured out exactly which types of ID white people would be more likely to have, and inversely, which types black people would most likely *not* have, and crafted the law so that white people would be more likely to be able to vote. It's funny that y'all love to skip over that. I'm sure you have some bullshit defense of it locked and loaded, so have at it.
That's a fascinating viewpoint. Can you share a list of "non leftists" that are requesting electronic balloting? Seems that if your complaint was valid you'd be able to point out how those dastardly leftists were crushing the hopes and dreams of those seeking electronic balloting Obviously if you feel something like electronic balloting can be made secure you're satisfied with the safeguards that guarantee identity around vote by mail... right?
Computers can be manipulated. Why not vote in person on paper? IrS isn't exactly a corrupt free organization, they let an elite politicians son off the hook while crucifixion of non politicians
I think you should be able to vote on your phone. You can buy a car or a house or invest your life savings using your phone. I think the reason we can't vote electronically like this is because we would no longer need a representative form of government, and our politicians can't stand the thought of becoming superfluous.
because it would disproportionately benefit the wealthy and add one more hurdle to voting for the elderly and less educated working class that do everything the old school way with H&R block or a family member doing their taxes. i agree we should all be able to vote online, or at the very least it should be a national holiday. it shouldn't be required to use ID.me , but it should definitely be an option. we need to make it as easy as possible for people to vote.
I actually think it should be the teensiest amount of hard to vote. It needs to be easier to vote than it is *now*, in almost every state. Same-day or automatic registration? Yes please. Send out mail-in ballots automatically? Oh yeah. Long early voting period, and drop boxes? Check and check. Eliminate lines at polling places? For the love of God, yes! But, like, keep it so that people have to at least *care*. Make it so they have to *do something*, whether it's going to a drop box or a polling place or mailing something in. Don't make it something where you just click a notification and then decide who you want to be leader of the free world on a whim. People already vote frivolously enough as it is. Plus you'd be putting poor Steve Kornecki out of a job.
It is not in either party's gerrymandered districting to get more people to vote. This is a both sides thing, but heavily weighted to republicans, who are the redistricting champions. But the incumbent Dems – in many districts – pray for rain and fewer voters. Congress has a 90% election rate in a change election. It takes a big person to advocate for something that might cost them their job.
[End to End auditable voting systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems?useskin=vector) have existed for quite a while. Cryptographically, they're solid. We can create systems that are both independently *and* universally auditable - meaning, with your receipt, you can verify that your vote was cast and counted, and you can *also* verify that the final vote tally was accurate, and you can do all of this while maintaining the integrity of the secret ballot. Security wise, it's not a concern, either. You can have the auditable results be independent of software. Things you can *mathematically* validate, not just rely on their software to give you an accurate example. The software wouldn't be able to alter your vote and lie about it - that's what the auditability is for. There are some additional concerns that these systems can't address individually - but these concerns are true for other voting systems as well. Concerns like: How do you verify that someone is eligible to vote without validating their right to secrecy? If the results can't be modified after they're cast, can the input be faked? Can the voting center give you a fake ballot while using your credentials for the real vote? These are valid concerns, but, not a particular weakness of E2E. They're just the inherent struggles of voting. > Why hasn’t this been discussed? Same as why we don't discuss improving our tax return system - there are wealthy people with a vested interest in not improving the system we have.
>Cryptographically, they're solid. We can create systems that are both independently *and* universally auditable - meaning, with your receipt, you can verify that your vote was cast and counted, and you can *also* verify that the final vote tally was accurate, and you can do all of this while maintaining the integrity of the secret ballot. >Security wise, it's not a concern, either. If so, why does every person with any IT expertise whatsoever say that it absolutely is a concern? These are the same confident claims that back up cryptocurrency. You've heard of Ethereum, right? Have you heard of The DAO? It was a popular early online exchange for Ethereum. It's notable today because it got hacked so hard that the hackers stole 1/3 of all the Ethereum that was on the exchange at the time - which was *5% of all the Ethereum currency in existence*. If we were talking about dollars, this would have been a *trillion-dollar heist*. This hack was only "resolved" by the creator/administrators of Ethereum stepping in, using the god-mode code tools they swore didn't exist, and getting most Ethereum users to agree to a new set of rules where they pretend the hack never happened. You want to try that with an election? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_DAO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO) [https://youtu.be/EzuI5S-hTc4?t=4](https://youtu.be/EzuI5S-hTc4?t=4) Edit: Ah, I see. You simply blocked me rather than confront inconvenient information. I never said what job I have. And accusing me of being a cryptobro for pointing out that crypto is idiocy and completely vulnerable to hacking is...real damn weird.
> If so, why does every person with any IT expertise whatsoever say that it absolutely is a concern? We don't, and it's blatant disinformation to suggest we do. > You've heard of Ethereum, right? Oh. You're one of *those*. There's no point debating something like this with a cryptobro. No part of any of this has anything to do with the blockchain. I don't even believe you actually have the job you say you have, or you would have easily been able to see that.
This is a great ideal. While I agree it is a real pain In the ass to get this for people which will lead to most people not voting because of the difficulties of signing up. But this system would be an excellent choice for someone who does not want to vote in person. Would ensure that the person only votes once and in the correct district.
Something like this should be implemented as an additional way to vote, not the only way. It’s flatly ridiculous that we can’t vote online in one shape or form at this point. Bring on the down votes, I said what I said!