Why would the vote buyer do that? Unless he was hacked, you can be pretty sure that he has nothing to gain by sharing the password with other people. Email was just a simple example, in reality, what’s likely to happen is that the vote buyer distributes his public key and all communication to him is encrypted using that te verify that it is the actual vote buyer.
Again, what motivation would he have to stiff you? Presumably if he found it worthwhile to do it once, he would find it worthwhile to continue doing it. And yes, most people would be leery of someone the second time as well, but like ebay, it’s a reputation thing. If he’s pulled through the last 50 times, it’s highly unlikely that he would stiff you on the 51st time.
Drug deals don’t have to happen in person and neither side has to know of the others identity. True, both sides have to trust each other or trust a 3rd party absolutely but trust can be established without the need for face-to-face interaction (if you make the consequences of breaking trust worse than the benifits of breaking trust).
But here’s the thing. How much is an individual vote worth to a buyer? How much trouble will someone go to buy a vote? $10? $100? How much is an individual vote worth to a seller?
And the model of the buyer having to sit down and watch thousands of cell phone videos of the sellers proof of voting for the correct candidate…how much time does this guy have? And how do you stop people from “selling” their vote for a candidate they were going to vote for anyway? If you’re buying votes for George Bush, what happens when the (say) 50 million people who voted for him anyway apply for the money? How much are you paying per vote?
Wasn’t there some scheme that people tried in '04 to swap votes between people in different states? I can’t remember the details, but I’m certain there was something along those lines.
BTW, my vote is worth $1,000 if anyone is intersted.
This would be a massive job for just one person. It would likely take a team of vote buyers working together. If the person in charge hires and fires people, you’d have buyers on the team who weren’t there last time.
Remind me again what keeps more than one person using the same private key if they want to? More, the average person is now completely unsure that they’re dealing with one person or that they are dealing with the same people who bought their vote last time. ‘All I know is that they use the same code key’. Trust on voter’s parts drops to zero.
Again, you keep saying how anonymous and untraceable this is. If that’s true, voters can’t be sure what the buyer has done in the past. Ebay has rules and membership agreements that are enforced by the staff. Who’s watching over the vote buyer?
Why would he stiff me? Because if he can get what he wants for free, why pay for it? Plus, if he stiffs me, I have no recourse.
Yes, consequences of breaking the other side’s trust in a drug deal generally include death. What consequence is the buyer facing if he breaks the trust of the voters? They won’t trust him the next time? No biggie. If he wants to buy votes next election, he can always create a new online persona.
How are the people behind the scheme going to enforce it? I could easily produce a convincing video* showing myself voting for Pat Buchanan or Michael Moore – hell, I could produce both videos and get double the money.
*It helps that the video quality from a device small enough to sneak into the polls and using ambient light is necessarily going to be pretty crappy – there are fundamental limitations on how good a picture you can get with such-and-such a lens size and illumination level.
You wouldn’t have to get every voter. Just voters in swing states or even swing counties. If you got it accurate enough, you could probably get away with paying as few as 10 million people to significantly affect the outcome of an election. Lets say you have a budget of 100 million, that seems reasonable. That would come out to about $10 per person. That would be the ballpark figure. And how much would it cost to verify? Assume you pay someone $10 an hour and he can verify a vote every 30 seconds, it would cost approximately 10c per vote to verify. Trivial compared to the payment amount.
precisely because trust would drop to 0 if you did.
He wouldn’t stiff you because his reputation is more important than a short term result. Theres not much stopping ebay scammers either, ebay almost never goes after them. Yet the incidences of scamming on ebay are remarkably low because the benifit of scamming just one person is overwhelmingly lower than the cost it takes to build up your reputation in the first place.
Yes, but nobody would go for his scheme if he creates a new persona just as nobody would buy something from a first time ebay dealer. He would have to begin the process all over again.
It’s not a “fundamental” limit, the human eye is an example of a camera that is small, high res and light sensitive. Theres nothing to indicate we couldn’t build something much better than a human eye. And I’ve gone into a bit about how to make it less forgable.
Only if the vote buyer gives the entire world his private key which he wouldn’t.
Why not? We have cameras even today that are specifically designed to be hidden inconspicuously and resist casual inspection. It seems fundamentally reasonable to me that such things will get smaller and more indiscreet as time goes on.
The human eye is actually not that great as a camera – you don’t notice because its very narrow angle of good vision is moved around to focus on your point of attention without conscious intervention.
Assume that some schlub so bereft of skills that he can’t do better than $10/hour can distinguish a computer-generated fake from a real picture in 30 seconds?
While we’re assuming, can we assume that I win the lottery?
And tell me who it is that has a hundred mill in untraceable, off-the-books money they can spend every four years?
And how is it that none of these dozens, if not hundreds, of video inspectors figure out that they can make a big payday ratting out this huge conspiracy? If cameras are so ultra concealable, what’s to stop one of them from recording a video at the top-secret vote-buying HQ, then blackmailing the criminal mastermind?
The other problem is that the vote sellers are anonymous. A vote seller could sell his vote hundreds of times, every time he provides the same “proof” that he voted for the right candidate. Anonymous authentication can prove that an anonymous person is the same person, but it can’t prove that the anonymous person isn’t also another anonymous person. So you get 1,000,000 requests for payment but you have no way to tell if those requests represent unique individuals or are duplicates.
This seems to be to be the real killer for the scheme.
Another point. Mr. Big can’t just call up his secretary and tell her to transfer 100 million dollars to an untraceable anonymous electronic account. Even if the untraceable account really is untraceable, the payment to that account can’t be. You have to tell your bank to transfer 100 million dollars to some account number. If the bank makes the transfer then you might lose track of the money, but the bank WON’T make that transfer. They would suspect, rightly, that there was something illegal going on. So future banks will have to report transfers of this nature, just as today they have to report cash deposits of over $10,000. Transfer more than $10,000 dollars from your account to an anonymous untraceable account and the bank calls the cops.
This assumes that the buyer is interested in buying votes long term. This is not necessarily a safe assumption. If the next president is likely to appoint three justices to the supreme court, then the next presidential election is important and worth buying. If no further justices are expected to retire for the next dozen years, all those presidential elections can be skipped.
Why does this need to be done more than once?
How do they know the anonymous buyer that they are dealing with now isn’t the persona of somebody who stiffed voters? And, unless a buyer is buying national and local elections, they have four years to build a new persona.
This is due to fail simply because of the huge number of people involved. You’re assuming a conspiracy of 10 million average people, who have to keep the whole thing secret. You’re also basing the whole thing on reputation of vote dealers who are supposed to be completely anonymous. You’ve given the cops a whole lot of personal connections to check out here (over 10 million). At least one of those (more likely hundreds or thousands) will unravel, probably taking the whole thing with it.
That’s assuming it even gets off the ground, which it won’t. Mostly due to reasons already mentioned.
