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Vulcan_MasterRace t1_j8102ly wrote

I think the tech exists today where we can vote from our phones, tablets and computers.

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tundey_1 t1_j818t64 wrote

There's really no reason to make something as important as voting be subject to the lax security on personal electronic devices. And we don't need it. The expansive use of mail-in voting during the COVID presidential election in 2020 is proof that measures like early voting, no-excuse vote-by-mail etc are good enough.

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kmfstudios t1_j8183zp wrote

It most certainly does not and that's the easy part. It'll take decades to get all the states to agree on a common system.

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ElectricGears t1_j82u5vx wrote

From a fundamental information theory standpoint, it's can't exist*. For secure voting you need to identify the voter and ensure the voter's ballot is included in the final count. The real problem is that you have to do it in a way that not even the voter can identify their ballot in the list of counted ballots. This is necessary to prevent coerced voting. The only way we can do this is by putting ultimate trust in some part of the system. The primary goal when designing voting system is to make that trusted part as small and as simple as possible. All the things you would need to do to make this is work over the internet is diametrically opposed to both those criteria.

That said, you can absolutely design a very inexpensive, easy to use, secure, computerized voting system if you wanted to. It consists of terminals powered by an Arduino, a basic LCD screen and cheap thermal printer. You can have whatever ballot layout (along with any assistive technologies) and the voter makes their selections electronically. The printer prints a voter-verifiable ballot using the same ballot that is mailed to absentee voters. It's put in the same box as the other votes. A scan and counting machine power by another Arduino counts the ballots and displays the number of votes for each candidate/measure.

Ultimate trust is placed in the code and hardware of the counting machine. While that is fairly complex, it is entirely possible to verify it's operation to a reasonable degree of certainly. If you really wanted to be sure, I could design a counting circuit out of fully viable mechanical relays. Plus you can always just hand recount or run them through machines from a different manufacture.

* Theoretically something called homomorphic encryption might be able to solve this, but we have no working implementation and it massively violates criteria number 2.

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R_Meyer1 t1_j833hoe wrote

If you can do your taxes online, there is absolutely no reason why you can’t vote online not that we actually need it, though.

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xal1124 t1_j85cofy wrote

With all the complaining of fake votes, dead people voting, etc., do you think that people would go for voting by phone? People barely know how to construct a password more than 8 characters long. People would have their voting accounts accessed by others, and people would vote for them.

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R_Meyer1 t1_j869xgp wrote

No, I don’t think voting by phone should be allowed, but if you can do your damn taxes online, you should be able to vote online as an added option to the already in person and by mail options. Voting by mail was never a problem until jackass Trump.

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Shavethatmonkey t1_j8dn700 wrote

It does. You can do banking from your phone, we have MFA, etc. The state could have a voting app.

But the Republican party opposed mail in voting and passed 240 bills to make voting harder for citizens. They will never support easy electronic voting.

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