i ve been waiting for democracies to go digital for ages. We should be electing mayors like that too. there s no reason for all this gatekeeping and secrecy in politics other than to enable corruption

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croon 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's two competing issues here:

1) You could make digital elections secure with issued digital IDs, and simply recording everyone's vote and it would be easily auditable.

But no one wants elections where (the contents of) your vote is recorded somewhere.

So 2) You use your digital ID to be able to vote once, but if you're no longer connected to your vote, it would be much more susceptible to tampering if you can't establish a double blind chain of custody of the votes, which is what expensive in person voting is doing very well.

The first option would be great if you could somehow guarantee a corruption free future of your country where no one will come after you for your vote (hint: you can't).

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fivestones 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn’t there a way to do the first option, but without attaching anyone’s votes to their digital id, except in a cryptographic way such that any individual person can look up their own vote online and verify that their vote has been counted correctly (with their own personal cryptographic key if some kind), but no one without the key can see which person made a given vote? I’m sure I remember watching a Ted talk about this years ago, but don’t remember the specific talk at the moment.

I’m sure there are other obstacles to surmount, but if that system works, you could have a digital id, use it to vote every time, and audit your own vote without anyone else knowing what you voted.

	▲	rkomorn 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Until someone with the proverbial $5 wrench shows up and tells you to unlock your last election's vote to prove you're one of the good guys? I don't think we should ever be able to know any individual's vote.

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mfru 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

because there is no safe way to vote digitally

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esseph 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Funny, don't you bank digitally?

	▲	gus_massa 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Bank transactions are not anonymous. A big advance in elections has been the secret vote.
	▲	Ylpertnodi 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I do, but I certainly don't consider it safe.