[liberationtech] E-Voting

[carlo von lynX]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 04:18:59PM +1300, Eleanor Saitta wrote:
> Yes, there has been research done.  The summary is "if you do this,
> forget about any chance of having a free and fair election, because it's
> hard not to end up accidentally hacking the election, let alone stopping
> anyone who might want to actively hack it".
> 
> There's a decade or so of research on how bad just electronic voting is,
> and another decade of research on how bad mobile phone security is.  The
> combination is geometrically worse.

Full ack. It is already a bad idea to elect people instead of making
choices on issues, it is a lot worse if you expect technology to
maintain secrecy.

But if you are interested in having people debate and decide over
issues rather than people, and they understand this can only work
in full transparency, then you can look into LiquidFeedback and
suitable apps to go with it. You should not go for anything less
since direct democracy has shown time and time again that it is
a platform for demagoguery. Liquid democracy combined with proper
methods and a legal structure can bring out the collective
intelligence of the participants instead, empowering them to take
fact-based and properly reasoned policy decisions. The technology
is like the use of paper in a virtual parliament of the people. 
Any participant should have the ability to confirm the accuracy of
the procedures, something the software does not perfectly provide,
but that is just work to be done.


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