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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought that online voting could be made MORE secure than traditional systems. If you combine cryptography with more traditional layers. It can also be anonymous.

Take an existing online registration, allow a user to login, and "create a password". Take the password, hash it with the users registration id, and a salt, and that becomes the id for a ballot. Now a user can always login, and view their existing vote (as long as they remember their password) however no outside or inside user could directly link a ballot with a voter.

In addition, allow all online votes, and registered users (who voted) to be instantly publicly accessible via API by 3rd party non government organizations so that all results can be monitored.

The hashing algorithm can be the same used by any traditional password system.

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Online voting (the kind you could do in the comfort of your own home) suffers from manipulation in the more traditional form: I sit at your house with a baseball bat and make sure you vote for my candidate of choice. Voting at a voting booth prevents that.

I'm generally in favor of overhauling the voting system with technology (especially open source technology that can be publicly validated), but I think there are still benefits to having people vote in a supervised public space making sure people can vote anonymously and safely

Vote by mail suffers from the baseball bat problem, yet it's not uncommon in the US.

You're right. I was actually just about to edit my post to comment on the fact that absentee ballots still suffer that problem, so perhaps my thoughts here are invalid.

However, vote by mail is more likely to suffer from the peanut butter & jelly problem, which is getting food smudged on the ballots while filling them out at the dinner table.

Or I come over to your house and tell you I'll give you $10 to vote for my candidate. If you had to go to a voting booth it might not be worth the effort.

A truly secure system is not going to debut in conjunction with a government vote. It just isn't, for multiple reasons--not the least of which is corruption.

Such a system would have to decide something popular, but ultimately unimportant, first. Examples would be the winner of a competition show like American Idol, or a referendum/sweepstakes to name a new Doritos or Pringles flavor.

Once the system has been proven in a large, but unimportant, nation-scale vote, we can then begin to ask "why can't we vote on important issues in the same way?"

my general take on this is that we are ready to go with online voting when it is as secure as paper based voting. honestly, we're not there yet, but it is something i expect to see in the relatively near future.

How is this not more secure? This actually has a chance at being an accurate vote count while we know that the current system can never be accurate.

Let me know when we go a week without a security breach, and I'll let you know when online voting can be secure.

How has the track record on old fashioned voting been? Do we require a perfect replacement or a better one?

i would go for better over perfect.

While conventional voting is far from great, the first time someone hacks an online vote is going to set it back for decades. It could be better now, but it almost has to be perfect to get people to switch.

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