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Comment by sethbannon | Hacker News Reader

Hey Debra,

Thanks for everything you're doing to increase participation in our democracy!

I know it's a bit far-sighted, but would love to hear your thoughts on electronic voting. Is it feasible? Desirable? What do we need to get there?

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Anyone interested in electronic voting, I would suggest reading the article: Internet Voting: A Requiem for the Dream in the last issue of Phrack. It was eye opening for me.

http://phrack.org/issues/69/11.html#article

seth, it's feasible, but not with existing technology. i'm off-hand, somewhat flippant rule of thumb is that this isn't something we can realistically discuss until we can go a single week without a major security breach. right now breaches are so common that they barely merit a news mention.

once we're there in terms of security, however, i am confident that we will see a radical increase in voter turnout.

I get that security is a major, major concern but scanning headlines seems like a really poor metric for deciding when technology is "ready". There will always be bad/rushed/under-staffed developers and bad business decisions that lead to security breaches. That doesn't mean existing technology isn't capable of being secure.

we agree 100%. technology is capable of being secure, it just isn't secure yet. think of the stakes here. if a 16 year old hacker working out of his mother's basement in belarus could change the outcome of the US presidential election, we'd all be farked.

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