Electronic voting systems are generally an attempt to get something faster and cheaper.
As implemented nearly everywhere that is not fully auditable. I have no way of verifying that my particular ballot was actually included and counted correctly.
We can do much better, while still staying with paper ballots, as shown by some of the proposed system in this article [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/politics/mail-in-voting...
What are you trying to say? I can read this as either 'humans are trustworthy', or 'humans are corrupt'.
Meanwhile, Spain uses exclusively paper ballots, counted by ordinary citizens who were randomly selected for "election board duty" in their local voting sector (akin to jury duty in the US), and easily finishes counting more than 99% of the votes cast before midnight on the day of the vote. You can go to bed and expect no major upsets when counting is finished, other than the occasional swing of a single seat from one party to another when the d'Hondt assignment was very close.
And this is all for a country of 48 million people (23% more than California), counting votes to fill a 350-seat Congress composed of 50 multiple-seat constituencies of varying size, from 37 to 2 (plus 2 FPTP seats), as well as 208 Senate seats which are voted by check-box selection.
It is truly baffling how some US states manage to take so long to finish counting a handful of FPTP positions in federal elections: 1 president, a couple dozen representatives, and 2 senators.
I think there's a really serious communications challenge to a system based on sophisticated cryptography. It's hard to explain and get people to trust it.
It has existed for several years. Paper optical scan ballots, augmented by some printing using a special ink and a special marker used to mark them when voting, with some clever cryptography going into what to print on the ballots with that special ink.
See:
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...
Like, totally open society, man. If you can't stand and cast your vote among your peers in a public and 100% open form/manner, you're not doing your job, citizen.
Change my mind ..
We'll make sure to check the public logs, hence you forget, which I'm sure you won't, right, Jimmy?
We could of course save us both the trouble. I"ve got your mail in ballot papers right here. Just sign on the dotted line and we'll post them for you, no biggy.
You enter the booth, the light goes on, anything you want to say will be recorded for posterity by the state, for the public sphere, and you state who you support. Its an open public record, and therefore also the right place to let the government know that you are under duress and need assistance with exercising your right to vote.
So it goes more like, "I'm Jimmy, and I'm being forced to vote for Madam X, I want my government to address this grievance", and so it does.
I mean, the point of this theoretical is to realize that we have the mafia shit-storm we have right now, because things are secret.
That secret veil, once removed and turned instead into 15-minutes of fame for everyone, because its your right to do so, means you're gonna have a lot more people interested in voting, buddy.
No matter how many chumps Madam X has on the payroll.
If it can be determined - by treating open, free and immutable communication as a public utility - that a significant set of voters made statements about corruption, or if this moment of protection of communication were available to whistleblowers .. we would have the forum we need to root out corruption.
Open. Publicly. Transparently.
And when I step into the booth, I can say "last time I voted, I got fired for voting" and it'll be on the record, too.
I mean, this is all a theoretical, but lets play it out.
Given that, you're left with needing to argue that the societal benefits of non-secret voting would outweigh the harms of voting-based discrimination. To me, that doesn't seem like a close call, but I'm open to the counter-argument.
Because actually a lot of people might argue that not having this, in the first place, is why our societies are so easily corruptible.
The open society dogma, and I admit this is just a thought experiment, might very much include the fact that, when someones rights are abused, it doesn't just get lost in the noise.
Being able to vote - and address grievances for which I require government support - seems to me to be a way to complete the vote as a proper transaction, between the individual and the state.
Right now, you vote and get nothing back - well, you get the assumption that your government is still going to be, relative to the last one, livable (or else you'd be a refugee and potentially pursuing statelessness..) - but when you use your Vote Statement as a way of communicating something public - per your own free will and agency (and thus right) - this is also a responsibility that must be addressed by the next administration .. giving your vote even more relevance to the incumbents and challengers, alike ..
I'll have to bow out of this convo at this point I think as we seem to be talking past each other, or at any rate you seem to be talking about something different than what I thought we were discussing.
With this function, a vote not only becomes a static erg towards ones favoured party - but a way for the future government to a) be sure it was voted in without corruption, and b) address any corruption occuring during that process, based on open, public, verifiable data.
Yes, this is just theoretical, and thanks for the time anyway .. it was just a thought experiment.