> If the same security demands were required when postal voting was introduced in 1990, it would never have been allowed

He has a point there. Transportation, heavy machinery, power grids, cruical infrastructure, healthcare, economy and so on all increasingly run computer systems with questionable security. Lives and world order depend on them. Are we really going to draw the line at voting? (edit: expanded on this point a bit)

Trust on the scale of several years is a difficult thing. People go from lovers to archenemies in that time. But yes, some long term projects do need stability and long term support to become fruitful. You could introduce constraints to support this, or trust the voters to take it into account.

But even more important than time is the granularity of trust. Just as in everyday life I trust different people to different degrees in different domains, I would love to have a voting system that reflects this with regards to political representatives or activists.

Yes, we need to draw a line at voting. It's a single event, where a choice that can be encoded in a single byte of pure information has enormous consequences in terms of power allocation.

If you can change that byte across even a small percentage of voting machines, you can leverage that into control of the country's government.

All of the examples you listed are continuously running, auditable, highly heterogeneous systems that can have multiple parties cross-checking because there isn't the absolute need for the actions of the participants to be untraceable back to them, the way it needs to be with voting.

> make good decisions on a scale of several years

I work with government often. I am often outside begging to be given access to help my community with one civic project or another. Interactions that take hours in open source communities, take months to coordinate with City staff.

I'm the last one to advocate taking the brakes off the car, but there are many many many parts of government where decisions require several years only because everything takes years to do. I think there is a perspective, if you step back to imagine this world, where we as citizens can participate and make the turn-around quicker. Not everywhere. Many government functions require care and caution and sober second/third/fourth thoughts.

But many of these actions need not take years, if we could re-imagine something better. And right now, the lifeblood of government runs like molasses, not because each slow process has been intentionally made slow, but because the processes and practices and hierarchies are structurally slow at their core. That's not clever slowness. That's a calcifying fossil.

I personally think giving citizens more decision-making access will keep civil servants on their toes, keep them learning, and speed up the cycle time in many needlessly slow areas of government.

I see your point and often share your frustration. However, none of what you said necessitates electronic voting. In fact, it may be detrimental to the democratic process at the local level. A couple thoughts: (i) First, taking time to do something means that people that don't agree get a chance to discuss and possibly mobilize against it. (ii) More subtly, forcing people to vote between options means that the options themselves have already been codified. This process of choosing what to choose between is fundamental to local governance. A somewhat absurd example but imagine being given the choice between reducing the tax rate on the wealthiest people to 20%, 15% or 5%. Sure, we can vote on that but it doesn't seem very democratic...

Switzerland has a population of 8.4M, about the population of NYC. US has >300M and a land area two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland.

> Switzerland has a population of 8.4M, about the population of NYC. US has >300M and a land area two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland.

Can we start with the city? Bill de Blasio (bless his heart) won 282,344 votes in the 2013 Democratic Primary. What's worse is Lhota won his primary with just 32,236 votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election...

I hate to agree with President Obama on this topic but I have to agree with him. The first problem we need to tackle is not to fix the electoral process. The first problem we need to tackle is getting people to actually care enough to show up and show up in large enough numbers so we can effect change.

Preferential voting and (and I realise this is pretty much impossible to get implemented if not already so these days....) compulsory voting.

Maybe they should try splitting the US into smaller, self-governed districts. Maybe call them "states"?

The US also has more people that work on that sort of thing. I don't see why it should not be able to scale.

Sure it might get harder with increase scale, but I don't see it as a huge problem.

Voting by mail enables coercion and bribes.

Where is you evidence? Bribing voters is too difficult and expensive to be worthwhile. It's much easier to block the people through voter suppression laws.