It seems we have the technology to hold elections through phone or online applications. But we do not. I’m guessing there’s some security reason involved.
In your opinion, do you think it will always be like this – that casting votes must be done in person at established voting locations? Or will this manual process give away to technology, eventually allowing everyone to vote from their phones or computers?
First of all, not everyone has a smartphone.
Second, not everyone has a computer.
Thus, there will continue to be a role for in-person ballots. Although in my area it’s been years since they installed electronic ballot machines, which are essentially computers for recording votes.
90% of US adults have a cell phone, of them about 60% have a smart phone. Considering that smart phones didn’t even exist in the US until 7 years ago that is a pretty rapid trend and I’m sure in another decade it will be even higher (unless we already reached saturation and the remaining 40% don’t have them simply because they don’t want them). You wouldn’t need to abolish voting in person, but opening up online and cell phone voting would in theory increase voter participation.
To the OP, that would be awesome if you could vote over a cell phone, it would in theory not be much different than voting absentee ballot.
There is a realpolitik aspect of doing this though, generally speaking the democratic party benefits from higher turnout and the GOP benefits from lower turnout, in large part because many democratic voters are ‘disadvantaged’ and will not bother to vote with even the mildest barriers in their way. So I could see the dems pushing for this and the GOP pushing against it. So this idea of voting online or via cell phone isn’t one that would have bipartisan support or anything, it would be a fiercely partisan issue.
double post
This is a horrible idea. Banks and retail corporations lose customer’s credit card info every few months. Now you want hackers to be able to change our votes too? Making it available on mobile phones just turns the security into even more of a disaster. A wireless network is always going to be harder to secure than a wired one.
This sounds like a blanket criticism for all types of electronic data storage and transfer.
I bet the “disadvantaged” are the ones most likely to have their vote stolen if you implemented this system. Do you really want someone to be able to secure a couple of million votes for themselves just by knowing that “123456” is the most commonly used password?
It isn’t like our election system is secure as is. Why not use exit polling to verify that votes match what the voting say. I’m sure there is a more secure way to do this.
People do banking and financial transactions online and via cell phone. Even when my credit card is stolen, the bank tends to catch it and stop it.
There may be a technical method available to this in a secure manner, but money, power and politics will prevent any guarantee it would work as publicly intended.
I don’t think that the technical issues are insurmountable. It would make it easier if we didn’t require votes to be secret, but even with that limitation, there’s a technical solution. However, I don’t think that we’re going to see voting apps anytime soon for the following reasons:
I’ve worked on a few government software projects (on the civillian side), and in my experience, there’s a lot of government places that rely on physical security for their software infrastructure. By physical security, I mean that the computer network is completely isolated from the internet or any other computer networks. Of course, a lot of places don’t do this, but I do think it requires some government agencies to rethink they way they handle security issues, and that is going to be a slow process.
A lot of people are mentioning things like banks and the like. But let’s say the bank software fails (like they mischarge your account or there’s fraud on your account). Well, there’s mechanisms to deal with that (you call the bank, and they do an investigation). Could we come up with mechanisms to deal with this kind of failure with voting software? Sure. But it means adjusting the way we think of voting to deal with the limitations of software. And I’m not sure that’s going to be an easy sell.
In keeping with the bank example, let’s say the bank’s website is down. Maybe I just wait until the website is back up to do my banking. But what happens if the voting app goes down all day on election day? I think that’s solvable, by allowing the extension of voting time by the amount the software was down. But that requires legal changes, and again, this goes back to how do we think of the concept of voting when we’re doing this using an app. I’d be fine with extending the voting period, but that would probably be a big fight.
Right now, I think the vote counting system is fairly opaque to a lot of people. It works well for a lot of people. It fails for some. Where it fails, it’s difficult for most people to figure out how exactly it failed and if it actually failed for them. For example, I mailed in my ballot a week ago. Did they count it? Did they count it accurately? I have no idea. But some failures in a voting app are going to be immediately apparent to everyone. That’s going to cause a lot of grief for politicians, and they may not be willing to take the risk on that kind of grief.
I’m sure we’ll see it eventually, but there’s just so many non-technical hurdles, that I doubt we’ll see it anytime soon. I always think of the way legislatures vote. There’s absolutely no reason to require a legislator to vote in person. We’ve had the technology to allow legislators to vote remotely for decades now. And yet, most legislatures require in-person votes. And that’s a much simpler problem to solve. If that hasn’t changed yet, I don’t see voting apps in the near future.
I think Duckster is right. There is one powerful political party that tries it best to make voting as inconvenient as possible. I doubt they would ever let anyone vote over the internet.
Vested interests aside, there’s also the issue of general confidence. It’s not enough that the ballot should actually be secret and the count honest and accurate; the voter has to have a robust confidence that this is so if the result is to have legitimacy. I’m not sure that voting-by-app will command that kind of confidence any time soon.
Plus, it would become easy to identify who voted for whom.
If the system has been in place during the last few elections, a Democratic hacker could run the board by just bit-bucketing all votes from accounts with “obamasucks” and variations thereof as passwords.
Sometimes, you can take convenience too far.
I doubt it, if by that you mean voting from anywhere via your cell phone or computer. The technophobic will never allow it. Look at the howls to get electronic voting machines verse the supposedly secure old mechanical type (and the mechanical type verse the supposedly secure paper ballots…which replaced rocks painted black and white :p).
There would be security involved, no doubt about that. It could be done though. This wouldn’t be a technical issue so much as a political one. With many new phones coming out with the ability to read and use biometrics, and phones being able to be used in place of credit cards or boarding tickets for trips the potential is there.
It actually isn’t like it always was now. Today, you have a lot of choices in voting that you never had before. There is early voting you can do at multiple sites. You can mail in your ballot or do an absentee ballot. Or you can vote on election day. Lots of choices. So I think this trend will continue and even more choices will be available in the future. Maybe you won’t ever be able to vote from home, but you might be able to download a ballot on your phone or mobile device, fill it out, walk into a voting area, verify your identity through biometrics and tap your phone on the voting machine and get an electronic receipt of your vote and walk out as yet another choice in when and how you vote.
Well, leaving aside the luddite and technophobic types, I think it will remain all about choices. People will have the ability to vote in the ‘traditional’ ways they have today, but there will just be additional choices for those who want to use them, IMHO anyway.
[quote=“boffking, post:5, topic:704139”]
Now you want hackers to be able to change our votes too? QUOTE]
There you go. 54% of the voting population has smart phones, meaning that (counts fingers and toes) 46% of us do not. Given that slightly under half of the population won’t be able to participate due to lack of smartphones, there is no hurry to adopt smartphone voting.
Also, let’s not forget that the odds of smartphones being replaced by another technology are rather high. “Man, when my parents were my age, they had to carry these big old clunky pieces of plastic that they would have to physically type into. I’m so glad we have cortical shunt technology so we don’t have to be so burdened!”
So, again, no rush. Adoption isn’t as high as needed, nor is there any indication that the technology will be long-lasting.
Your argument assumes that smart phone or computer voting has to replace other voting methods. It can simply be an addition.
The reason to adapt new technologies is that they have lower costs than old ones. Lots of people have to drive somewhere and stand in line to vote. Occasionally, for hours. There’s no particular reason they should have to do so, and the fact that a new technology couldn’t be used by everyone isn’t relevant. People who vote by mail or smartphone still reduce the costs of voting person.
Regardless of what future technologies arise, “personal device that can interact with a webserver on the internet” isn’t going away any time soon.
I agree with everyone that you’d have to be very careful about the security and privacy implications of this. But, then, we didn’t do so when we introduced electronic voting machines, so I’m doubtful that we’d really do a good job the next time either.