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Comment by leppr | Hacker News Reader

It may be a bad idea for a vote so important that it happens only once every 5 years and citizens have no recourse in the periods between.

But if we want to scale Democracy to the modern world, where today tens of thousands of important decisions are taken without any citizen input during those 5 years, electronic voting is a necessity.

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Without a secret ballot, you cannot have democracy. Instead, you have a rule of those who bought the most votes.

If voting does not happen in public, you cannot have democracy either. Instead, you have a rule of those who are best at manipulating the vote.

Electronic voting is either not secret or not public. You cannot use it to scale democracy, it destroys it.

you can definitely have cryptographic schemes where individual votes are secret but the result is publicly verifiable.

i don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea because it’s better to have a low tech system that people can understand, even if it’s a little cumbersome and expensive. but it is possible!

I wonder if this is just a case of preferring the devil we know.

"Without regular (daily) votes you cannot have a democracy. Instead, you have a series of temporary dictators selected from those with the connections, charisma, and budget to run campaigns and get put in charge."

Experimenting with something as important as our form of government is really scary, but it's not clear to me that it's more likely to destroy it than improve it.

Like others have mentioned it’s easy to develop a cryptographic system which would provide both vote assurance and and vote anonymity the problem is that unlike paper ballots people can’t understand those systems and people don’t trust what they can’t understand and democracy doesn’t work when there is no trust.

Everyone can count paper ballots having 10 crypto experts that given that they are experts wouldn’t say that a system is 100% foolproof isn’t the same thing.

But if you solve this problem which is trust in something you can’t ubdsrstnsd, you can definitely scale it and have it both being secret and verifiable.

> tens of thousands of important decisions

I think of myself to be a well-informed person. I will not be able to cope with that level of decision making. Probably makes more sense to scale it up slowly, adding more and more issues to be voted as the citizens learn the consequences of their vote and are able to keep themselves informed.

But, I do not think that ever we will be taking tens of thousands of votes. That also looks like a very centralized system where all decisions are made from one place. If an issue is local it should be delegated locally.

Exactly. This is why we developed republics instead of direct democracy: nobody has the time to weigh in on every decision.

I've been thinking about this: people are generally eager to jump into pointless political flamewars.

What if it's just a question of having a platform to express these opinions?

Perhaps it's not the only case, but Italy's M5S party has built exactly that kind of platform as a mean to differentiate from the other political groups. Somehow it workded and now they're governing the country (along with other forces). From a democracy point of view, the result is a mixed bag but i think it's a start.

Switzerland manages to hold state-wide votes four times a year, usually combined with local topics, with a paper/ballot based system quite well. Voting more often than every 4 or 5 years is not a reason to introduce eVoting.

But then, for grown-up democratic countries with a stable political system, hardly anything is a reason to introduce eVoting :-)

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