Current Events > It is INSANE that we cannot vote from a smartphone in the year 2020

(+) Yeah! (+)

The only reason voting isn't easier is because republicans would never get elected again if it was.
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Still not a single good argument against voting via smartphone.

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Not everyone has smartphones. Thats the argument.

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Ludwig Von 2 posted...

Not everyone has smartphones. Thats the argument.

Nobody said you would be forced to vote from your smart phone

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My kid picks up my phone and votes for the wrong candidate. How do you address that?

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Ludwig Von 2 posted...

My kid picks up my phone and votes for the wrong candidate. How do you address that?

Multi-factor authentication. Fingerprint, social security number, security questions, etc.

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Ludwig Von 2 posted...

Not everyone has smartphones. Thats the argument.

You wouldn't be forced to vote through that method. It would just be an additional method of voting.

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Watch this ad to get a second vote!

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I'm all for technology solutions for most things but ABSOLUTELY NOT for voting. Jesus Christ the amount of vulnerabilities that invites is terrifying.

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Ludwig Von 2 posted...

My kid picks up my phone and votes for the wrong candidate. How do you address that?

Dont tell your children your passwords and social security number.

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pinky0926 posted...

Jesus Christ the amount of vulnerabilities that invites is terrifying.

Oh noez. Imagine if we start allowing people to access their bank accounts from their phones.

THE HORROR!!!!

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Saquon-26- posted...

Oh noez. Imagine if we start allowing people to access their bank accounts from their phones.

THE HORROR!!!!

This is an absolutely non equivocal example and since you seem to be incapable of watching the comprehensively sound argument in the Tom Scott video, give me a second to summarise his points in my next post.


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KamenRiderBlade posted...

That's why in person voting should always give you a physical paper receipt.

Then the vote tally should be posted in a large public spread sheet listing off a unique yet anonymous Voter ID# and what they voted for on all voting items.

Then you can easily individually fact check everything.

And have a window for filing complaints and make adjustments with daily updates for 1 work week after the intial voting week (5 days based on work week).

This actually isn't a bad idea.

I always wondered how we knew and why we trusted what these machines are reporting the vote as. Seems like it wouldn't be impossible for people to fudge the numbers and no one could ever know.

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Voting requires two things which seem fundamentally counter-intuitive to each other:

• Complete anonymity - you should be able to vote and no one know who you voted for. This prevents bribing.
• Complete trust - you should be able to vote, have your vote counted and know regardless of your technical knowledge how the system works and that the system can be trusted.

The above needs to be satisfied regardless of what voting mechanism you use.

Paper voting is quite straight forward. You put an anonymous mark on a piece of paper and it sealed. It is not counted until everyone with a stake in the election is present to open it. At no point is a single person put in a position of trust.

Paper voting absolutely isn't perfect. It can be attacked, and has been. The key point though is that corruption doesn't scale well with paper voting. You can bribe a few people, or you can slip in some fakes, but it becomes harder and less corruptible as the stakes get higher and the numbers increase. I.e. the more physical votes you need to change, the more people you need to influence. The more time and money it will take. The less chance it will stay secret. Think about the job of trying to corrupt hundreds of thousands of volunteers across thousands of polling stations.

With electronic voting, the first obvious problem is that voters will not understand how it works. Sure, we can understand that a machine tallies your vote in an internal database, somehow transmits it to another central machine and then counts it all up or whatever, but how does the encryption work? Which party is responsible for the encryption? Where is it going? You don't get to see how or where it is being written. It's akin to just telling a guy in the voting booth what your vote is and he promises to tally it correctly. But critically, you don't get to see how or where he does that.

The second problem is how the results transit from the polling station to wherever they are counted. A usb stick? Easily corruptible on an extremely large scale. See the problem here is how easy it is to scale corruption in electronics. A single paper vote and 1 million paper votes are physically different things. But in digital votes they may as well be the same thing.

So you go with another option. The internet? Man in the middle attacks in abundance. You're now having to trust the software on each end (that you don't understand how it works), and you are making it more vulnerable deliberately by transmitting it across the internet.

Finally, the worst idea is smartphones. It's bad enough how many opaque vulnerabilities a digital polling booth opens up, but now you want to include another variable - people's own machines??

Sure, your phone is secure, no malware right...but would you say the same about everyone in your family? Security firms estimate huge numbers for compromised home devices. And that's just small scammers inventing bots. Imagine what an actual foreign agency could do with someone's vulnerable device if there was enough motivation (like say, Russia wanting to change the voting records of millions of voters).

The problem here is again scale. Yes, paper voting is vulnerable, but corrupting one vote is easy, corrupting a million paper votes is incredibly hard. Over digital software there is no difference. A single vulnerabilty looks the same on 10 million devices as it does on 1. Even worse, the conspiracy is still as secret as it ever was. You've scaled up the damage and created little to no extra footprints.

Another problem Tom Scott didn't really touch on much is anonymity. Since you brought up your banking app, think about how that power dynamic works. You're implicitly trusting that the bank doesn't store your credentials, doesn't take your money, doesn't lie or lock you out. But fundamentally it can do these things. There is a log of what actions you made. Consider that in terms of how voting works. There will be a tick in the system to say you put an X for Y candidate. Whether it's encrypted or not. It might be encrypted, but you're just going to have to take their word for it.

TL;DR - every time technology is designed to streamline things it fundamentally makes it less secure. And we're not talking about some russian bot farmer stealing $400 out of your account. We're talking about the KGB changing the course of American history. The stakes are not comparable.

To break an election, you dont have to break it, you just have to cast doubt.

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Pinky, don't worry, if it gets hacked we can just say "whoops" and do a do-over election.

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AssultTank posted...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

What are your thoughts on rampant Republican gerrymandering, closing 95% of polling places in a county, etc.?

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Again, the underlying, unspoken argument against smartphone voting is that Republicans cant suppress minorities from voting using the methods explained by @Shablagoo

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Saquon-26- posted...

Again, the underlying, unspoken argument against smartphone voting is that Republicans cant suppress minorities from voting using the methods explained by @Shablagoo

Ok, what's worse. Republicans suppressing the votes of some Americans, or foreign influencers suppressing the votes of all Americans?

Maybe there is another solution to this problem that doesn't involve giving foreign parties a free invitation to fuck with your voting directly?

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pinky0926 posted...

Maybe there is another solution to this problem that doesn't involve giving foreign parties a free invitation to f*** with your voting directly?

Said solution is Republicans not doing blatant voter suppression at every turn, but we've been waiting decades at the very least for that to happen.

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Saquon-26- posted...

Again, the underlying, unspoken argument against smartphone voting is that Republicans cant suppress minorities from voting using the methods explained by @Shablagoo

Now imagine if Republicans could suppress the votes of Americans without them even knowing.

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pinky0926 posted...

Ok, what's worse. Republicans suppressing the votes of some Americans, or foreign influencers suppressing the votes of all Americans?

Again, are these unnamed foreign influencers able to hack your bank account and drain your funds?

Why does anyone do banking online?

Why havent millionaires opened up their checking accounts to see that someone in Europe just stole their entire balance?

Your argument is invalid.

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CableZL posted...

Said solution is Republicans not doing blatant voter suppression at every turn, but we've been waiting decades at the very least for that to happen.

I get you but inviting more, immediately scaleable vulnerabilities doesn't seem like a good solution. As you say, the voter suppression is blatant. Imagine if it wasn't blatant.

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Saquon-26- posted...

Again, are these unnamed foreign influencers able to hack your bank account and drain your funds?

Why does anyone do banking online?

Why havent millionaires opened up their checking accounts to see that someone in Europe just stole their entire balance?

Your argument is invalid.

If you woke up tomorrow and your bank account was empty what would you do? What would the bank do? You would know, right?

You would call it in immediately. The bank would investigate it immediately. The bank would be liable. But everyone would know straight away you were swindled, and how.

Remember, voting has to remain anonymous. And in your example this is not anonymous at all. We know who's bank account was stolen from and how much.

Try and imagine a circumstance where we allow a database to be filled with untraceable write-only records. I.e you can't tell who submitted it or where from. Now try imagine changing those records back to how they "should" be.

Solutions that provide more defenses also provide less anonymity. If it was as simple as you're suggesting, why are cybersecurity experts extremely reluctant about it?

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pinky0926 posted...

why are cybersecurity experts extremely reluctant about it?

Which ones?

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https://www.zdnet.com/article/south-african-bank-to-replace-12m-cards-after-employees-stole-master-key/

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Alteres posted...

This actually isn't a bad idea.

I always wondered how we knew and why we trusted what these machines are reporting the vote as. Seems like it wouldn't be impossible for people to fudge the numbers and no one could ever know.

There's a lot of segregation of duties and divided powers. It means you'd need several people spread over a lot of ridings to do significant damage. For al of TCs "but banking" thing, it's the difference between having one account hacked doing damage to that one account, and any potential opening leaving every bank account open to the hacker. Systems could be in place to prevent that, but at the same time, as technology advances, so does the technology to trick it, and paper ballots, at least provide a paper trail.

Before TC goes off on that, I work for a very anal auditor that single handedly undid a lot of my office's efforts to go paperless because she has not trust in digital information. People like her run the voting process and their job isn't to make voting easier, it's to keep it as secure as possible.

And persoanlly, at this point it isn't even about security for me. What is it about people today afraid to get off the couch to do something away from their phone. Hell, you don't have to be away from the phone the whole time. Play games while you wait. It won't kill you.

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Saquon-26- posted...

Which ones?

Are you being contrary for the sake of argument at this point? I mean it's not hard to google freely available information, I don't make these things up for the fun of it.

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/755066523/cyber-experts-warn-of-vulnerabilities-facing-2020-election-machines?t=1593012844666

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Saquon-26- posted...

Still not a single good argument against voting via smartphone.

there have been plenty of solid arguments made in this topic that make perfect sense to anyone with a basic grasp of information security

i'm all for enfranchising voters but without heeding such precautions, you're running the risk of direct botnetocracy

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TheMikh posted...

there have been plenty of solid arguments made in this topic

False

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AssultTank posted...

Again I remind you that a child of 11 can literally compromise the Election Tally site for the State of Colorado in 10 minutes and get it to report anything they want.

They managed to have Kim Jong Un win an election in their test environment...

I just dont get why the current method of voting is seen as so much more secure than that. And what are your thoughts on mail-in voting?

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Saquon-26- posted...

False

So...you had no actual intention of discussing this topic? Just satisfied with the simple idea that smartphone voting doesn't exist because no one really tried to make it happen or something?

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Shablagoo posted...

I just dont get why the current method of voting is seen as so much more secure than that. And what are your thoughts on mail-in voting?

It's not more secure on a one to one basis. The issue is how easily with digital voting you can propagate a vulnerability into a huge breach, how checks to make it secure tend to make it less anonymous and how people will not understand the technology that runs it.

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Sort of removes anonymity, which is important.

Plus, I still don't trust it. Call me a paranoid old man all you want.

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They will supress the black vote 100% guaranteed.

This is a pro trump topic. Vaguely nazi-ish

It is pretty insane. Pretty sure I've been registered to vote for 10 years but im pretty sure its not valid anymore. If they want people to vote so bad make it easier

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Alteres posted...

This actually isn't a bad idea.

I always wondered how we knew and why we trusted what these machines are reporting the vote as. Seems like it wouldn't be impossible for people to fudge the numbers and no one could ever know.

Because they don't want a "Honest System" or "Fair Representation".

Imagine people having to talk to each other, negotiate, and work together.

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Anteaterking posted...

Pinky, don't worry, if it gets hacked we can just say "whoops" and do a do-over election.

Or you can do it the right the first time around.

Paper voting, public spreadsheets with anonymous Unique Voter ID #'s.

A week for corrections if there are any issues. Another week for final tally.

Zero Influencing of voting by making it a Felony to Speak, Predict, Speculate on Numbers at polls.

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We don't trust them tho

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I'm more than happy to extend the voting day to a "Voting Work Week".

Imagine 5 contiguous days to vote.

Isn't 5 days better than 1 day?

And expand DMV hours to 18/7 status so that DMV's process proper ID's faster.

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You can go online and change your home address get a new I.D. make an appointment for a lost SS card, apply for government help/benefits as well such as food stamps, medicaid, etc....where you have to put in your personal information.

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Saquon-26- posted...

Paranoid old man.

What about people who don't have smartphones?

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The technology is there to do it securely and accurately. The problem is keeping it anonymous (which is important to prevent coercion and bribery) without compromising either of those things. In a lower-stakes election where you're willing to accept the loss of anonymity you can do it online.

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Solid Snake07 posted...

What about people who don't have smartphones?

They can vote the traditional way

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https://xkcd.com/2030/

I'm more than happy to extend Voting from:
1 day
to
1 Work Week = 5 contiguous days (Mon-Fri)

Expand DMV hrs to 18/7

Offer Transparency of voting via Public SpreadSheets
Additional Work-Week for corrections

Proportional Representation per seat with no limit on candidates per seat
You can also allocate your voting power of 100 points split amongst any number of candidates that you like in any whole number combination that you wish to split up as long as it adds up to <= 100

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Saquon-26- posted...

They can vote the traditional way

Don't you think it's a bit undemocratic to make it easier to vote for people a than people b?

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Solid Snake07 posted...

Don't you think it's a bit undemocratic to make it easier to vote for people a than people b?

He just wants to be lazy, he can't be arsed to get off his bum and show up to vote for some reason.

I'm more than happy to give him a nice large chunk of time (5 Contiguous Work Days).

And he doesn't seem to want to move.

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Solid Snake07 posted...

Don't you think it's a bit undemocratic to make it easier to vote for people a than people b?

Actually it makes voting easier for everyone.

The more people that vote by smartphone means shorter lines at the polls.

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