rigorousintuition.ca

I think an iimportant thing to remember is that electronic voting is already happening, and here we are in the middle of it. Push for a move back to paper only, no electronics involved. Personally, I don't see it coming about any time soon.

So I'm trying to engage with the situation as it is currently presented to me. If there is to be electronic voting, I'm going to look for ways to make it better.

Have to say I'm skeptical of electronic voting. Too many things that can go wrong, and even if the security of the system is excellent it doesn't account for the human factor. There will always be some moron somewhere who fucks up the configuration, or plugs in a modem so he can check the sportsball score or watch porn.

Paper ballots are tried and tested. We know exactly how they work and what the weaknesses are. With e-voting there are new weaknesses and loopholes popping up every day.

I would be more open to municipal direct democracy utilizing it, of the type "we have $1000 left over in the budget, should we spend it on a) a new lawnmower for the park department, b) a new portrait of the mayor or c) other (specify)"?

Worst case you end up with an ugly portrait that no one really wanted.

We'd end up with an ugly portrait, I'd be willing to put money on it.

And so we should. That's democracy at work.

dada » Thu Dec 24, 2020 9:05 pm wrote:I think an iimportant thing to remember is that electronic voting is already happening, and here we are in the middle of it. Push for a move back to paper only, no electronics involved. Personally, I don't see it coming about any time soon.

So I'm trying to engage with the situation as it is currently presented to me. If there is to be electronic voting, I'm going to look for ways to make it better.

That's fair if that's the perspective you're engaging in it from. But I'm personally not; I want to fight for us to have the most legitimate voting system we can period, and I don't see computerized counting being part of that. Like I said, there is a reason that hand-counted paper ballots are considered the gold standard while virtually every computer security expert is quite concerned about e-voting systems and do not even countenance the idea of Internet voting. Your analogy between paper ballots and encrypted transmissions is right to a point, but the difference is that everything with paper ballots, from the casting to the counting, takes place in a physical, real-world system that the participants can clearly see, while the electronic process still occurs inside multiple black-box software components that are dispersed geographically. There really just isn't a basis for claiming that the problems which might occur with paper ballots come close to the problems of electronic voting systems. Like DrEvil, I would only want to use them for elections of relatively little consequence.

I get it. Far be it from me to argue about what constitutes the physical, real-world.

I'm just saying that technology is evolving at a fast pace.

Although I can't seem to shake off the feeling that a vote is basically a letter with no return address, and that shouldn't be impossible to duplicate electronically. When the user hits vote, the yes/no can be decrypted by the receiver, along with a string which authenticates it as a vote, like a financial transaction. Also the "this message is intended for X" stays. The return address isn't encrypted, but randomized at the user end, scrambled, and so can't be decrypted.

Technology is evolving, but yoga is better than sauna pants.

Yoga is a pretty good analogy. Exercising the right to vote.

Yoga also becomes a spiritual practice for some people. Sacred, religious. This can be a support, something beneficial and healthy. It can also be intoxicating, and what was a support can become a crutch. A body-cult.