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Washington state does all its voting by mail now, which is good in a way because it means all the ballots are on paper and subject to verification, but it's vulnerable to all the voter influence problems you just listed.

(It also reduces voting from an in-person civic ritual to just one more form you get in the mail and have to fill out and mail back, like paying a bill. But that's a whole separate problem.)

Could you clarify why you think not voting in person is a problem?

Just what I said: Voting in person is a ritual. You can take your kids with you and show them the foundation of our democracy, right there at your local polling place. Doing things in person has a different psychological effect.

Whether or not that's enough of a problem to outweigh all the benefits of voting by mail, I don't know. It certainly lowers the actual barriers to voting: You don't need time off work to drop an envelope in a mailbox. But I do worry about the loss of ritual, and what it will do to voter engagement over a few decades.

If votes could be updated until the polls close, wouldn't that resolve the issue? You could simply vote in front of your husband/partner/group and change it later when you're in private.

This would rely on having is no method to determine how your vote has been cast, before or after the election. But this should be a feature of any online voting system.

Yup, exactly what we do.

It does. The article says that you can always cancel your vote later.

So vote pro-flowers in front of husband, and then change your vote on your cellphone or in the library

That just shifts the problem, and encourages pretty awful behavior like abduction.

No need for abduction, they just need to hold on to the ID to prevent revoting.

So basically like buying votes on paper? You force someone either not to vote or vote in a specific way by restricting access to their id. See, as the paper ballot trumps the electronic voting, all the attack vectors end up being about controlling the physical voting. Which is the exact problem with voting right now everywhere. Also, if you are already capable of doing this, why not take everything the person has? The digital signature is equivalent to the physical one so all non-notaried transactions you can execute exactly as voting. To my knowledge there has been exactly zero cases of forceful id extraction in the past 15 years. Basically, if you can significantly influence the voting outcome, you can significantly alter the financial wellbeing of the society. Which is, yes, a risk but would be more desirable for an attacker.

You can't buy votes on paper because you need to be alone in the voting booth. You could disable people to vote, but not force them to vote as you want.

As for the value of digital signature, I don't think it's legally equivalent to the physical signature, at least in my country. I've yet to see any administration accepting a digital signature.

Same problem. There has to be some deadline, so if you want to ensure compliance than you wait until the last minute and watch them until expiration.

You can also vote in advance (in person), which overrides the e-vote

> It does.

I read through your parent comment and could not find any sentence for which the response "it does" makes sense. (Maybe the parent comment was edited?)

> The issue is specifically that you aren't in a voting booth

Too bad. You can claw my mail-in ballot from my cold, dead hands.

Combined with early voting, and you could have a political event with tens of thousands who all vote a month early online in front of each other, the crowd pressure adding to the emotional fervor.

I can't imagine elections being any more screwed up, even including Jim Crow. Jim Crow has nothing on this.

But I'm still of the opinion that anything electronic is by nature untrustworthy. Just ask Microsoft, who for more than a decade or more has tried to lock down their O/S.

I know how the theory works. But that's just a theory regarding abstract concepts. Real voting doesn't work like that. At all. It's much more than the theory describes.

And if we get past all of that? Then we can start talking about how nobody who founded the U.S. wanted a democracy. Democracies are inherently extremely dangerous.

It's just a terrible idea masquerading as some cool new thing tech can do.

Is voter coercion actually a threat today? Or is it just a boogeyman to derail discussion like voter impersonation is used to promote biased voter ID laws?

> With online voting, the husband or wife can force the other to vote in front of them

For what it's worth my ex-wife slightly reprimanded me after a general election some time ago because I hadn't told her with whom I was voting for, because she would have cast the same vote as me.

On the electioneering thing I have no strong opinion. Just wanting to say that if a person's vote can be so easily influenced by a "volunteer hyping up" someone on the street then maybe, just maybe, that person's vote (and lot of other persons' votes) does (do) not accurately represent la "volonté générale", to quote Rousseau, meaning that universal voting might not result in what's actually best for the people. Related wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_will

The Estonian system pretty much fully prevents that by allowing to vote whowever many times you want. You can sleep on it, re-cast the vote and sleep on it again. And then, if still not happy, go vote on paper. The last vote cast counts.

How is this different from mail in ballots? Why are mail in ballots allowed?