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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

> Of course there is major security risks, and problems that have to be solved, but it is MASSIVELY outweighed by the fact that mobile voting would mean almost 100% voter turn out overnight if done on a national level

Why not just allow everyone to vote online, with no registration? Just type in your full name and select a candidate, no email or password required. It'd guarantee 100% turnout - maybe even >100% turnout, if enough bots join the fun!

The problem with digital voting is that it cannot be made sufficiently secure. It's not a matter of "there are problems we haven't solved yet", but rather "there are problems that we provably cannot solve".

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Sorry, but explain to me how I'm able to submit my taxes securely every year online, or pay for my marketplace insurance securely every month, but voting on our own digital devices is somehow beyond reach of what we can technically fathom?

No one has an interest in impersonating you to pay your bills.

Someone might have an interest in impersonating you to steal your tax refund -- these scams do happen.

Impersonating a bunch of voters is potentially easier when you're just presenting yourself as a computer with an internet connection rather than a flesh-and-blood human body.

I'm not seeing how the verification process of making sure someone is "flesh and blood" behind their mobile app would be appreciably different than registering for a passport, for instance. A person would presumably have multiple levels of identification (state id, ssn, birth certificate) that they can send in electronically to register an account, that is then tied to a username/password/device. A "vote" would need a checkout of not only an existing account but also a new, untampered photo of your face with a piece of id, just like a real-life vote would work.

Simple, single fraudulent tax benefits one person, with everything in the record, and is easy to trace (bank account owned by someone else)

A single fraudulent vote doesn’t benefit anyone, but thousands of them benefit someone greatly, and it’s difficult to trace, as it looks the same as a regular vote.

> Sorry, but explain to me how I'm able to submit my taxes securely every year online, or pay for my marketplace insurance securely every month, but voting on our own digital devices is somehow beyond reach of what we can technically fathom?

Because the threat models are completely different.

For starters, if you get your taxes wrong, or if someone fraudulently tries to file on your behalf, it's a reversible process. You can fix it after-the-fact.

Ballots have to be anonymous (secret ballot) and also non-verifiable (to prevent vote-selling). There's no redoing an election later on, or asking a person to confirm their previous vote.

Good points, but it just means you have to move the verification process upfront like I lay out in another comment further up this chain.

Bottom line is that we have a literal army of software engineers in this country that are capable of figuring this stuff out if it was a priority to get voting to 100% turnout. We split the atom and landed on the moon, I'm pretty confident we can figure out mobile voting.

I admire your confidence, but I always feel uneasy when I hear someone use the line: "We landed on the moon, so we can surely do <some other thing, which sounds not much harder to a non-expert>".

Next time you try to use it, consider how much credibility you'd give to this argument: "We had men land on the moon and return safely, so we can surely land men on the sun and return them safely".

I am a software engineer. I just have the confidence in our community to believe we can use our skills to tackle hard problems in the world. My point is that other communities of engineers in the past didn't shy away from solving hard problems just because they were hard.

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