The Gaming Den

As you may know, one of the unspoken stories about the 2012 election is Online Registration. This gives me ginoromous hope for a shining future to my filthy socialist self. Moreso than demographics or new media.

Why? Because the acceptance of online registration makes it only a stone's throw from online voting. Fuck year.

I of course expect an enormous backlash from the corporate whore media to do all that it can to stop online voting. Because inconvenient voting hurts the left-wing and completely destroys the far-left wing. But steps are in place to inexorably put us in that direction. Probably not in the western/southern parts of the EU or US anytime soon. But in Canada? Or Australia? Or Japan? By 2016-18, I would be extremely surprised if it didn't happen.

Engineering-wise, all the steps are in place pretty much to implement this. As a US citizen I can already pay a traffic fine, make thousands of dollars worth of tuition payments, pay my taxes, apply for a home loan, and freaking sign up for the New Jersey National Guard online.

So why not online voting?

I don't know anything about the security issues involved, but would it be easier to figuratively stuff ballots given online voting?

Yeah, I'm not sure how you'd authenticate users, unless they needed a SSN or something to vote. It would seem that conventional ballot stuffing would be a lot harder unless you tampered with the machines. Online, some identity theft and scripting would make it easy.

About the only saving grace I can think of is, if a lot of people start reporting that their ID was already used to place a vote, a more thorough investigation would be launched, which might be a disincentive to keep people from attempting to cast tens of thousands of votes at a time.

Online voting is so insecure it's not even funny. I mean, there's a reason electronic voting machines are required to have a paper trail.

Authentication we can handle. I'm much more worried about tampering than ballot-stuffing.

name_here wrote:'m much more worried about tampering than ballot-stuffing.

What do you mean?

Someone getting access to the sever/database where votes are stored and changing the numbers.

name_here wrote:Someone getting access to the sever/database where votes are stored and changing the numbers.

What if the votes were sent to several distinct servers within a superdistrict with different security teams? When the (monitored) officials come to tabulate votes if there's a large discrepancy between the totals for a set of servers:

A.) That's when an investigation is launched.
B.) The affected voters are required to send in a paper ballot if they want their vote counted.

It's worth pointing out that while you can register online, it's mostly just filling in the form online and then mailing it in. There is still a physical paper component that you have to deal with. It's more convenient than going to the DMV or some other place and finding the form, but it's not particularly revolutionary. More tellingly, actual voting in the county is done with a goddamn scantron and an ink stamper. Which is then carried over to a tabulation machine and fed through. Online voting would be a huge crazy step forward for the county, one that I don't see happening soon.

A combination online / mail in (where the mailing was still required) might work though, as that seems to work well enough for registration. Allows for random vote spot checks and other assorted safety and recount bits.

Heh, in NZ we still put a couple ticks on a peice of paper and a bunch of nerds all count it that evening in front of party scrutineers (who have to stand in a corner and shut up or else) and a cop and a local judge (who hears any concerns and clarifies points of law on the spot, setting aside anything controversial for a hearing the next day) and basically anyone who wants to register to watch (which is a pain, because you can't leave or communicate with outside for hours, until they've finished and everything is resealed).

We hold our elections on a Saturday, it's highly illegal to discourage anyone from voting so everyone gets some time off for it, there's polling places in every settlement with over about 20 people, and voting buses visit around the smaller places over the week before. Hospital patients can vote at their bed. The longest cue I've ever even heard of was twenty people and took a couple minutes. Booths everywhere in the cities.

They send you a card before the vote to make identifying yourself quicker, but you don't have to have it or anything, just say your name and address and agree as they mark you off the roll. Homeless people just say whereabouts they can usually be found.

We get about 3 fraudulent voters every time, out of two million participants, and they check absolutely everything. Heaps of people not on the local roll vote, which is fine, if they're not found on any roll they're just not counted, and they'll actually visit you to check if you might have misspelt your own name because they've found something similar where that name didn't record a vote.


Then we hear about the US system, where poor people who need to pay for ID to vote under threat of being fired cue seven hours to punch a card which may or may not feed through the counting machine as a republican-only meeting watches on. Fucking what? Screw online voting, try getting the real thing right.

I worked on several elections in Canada and its much the same as NZ.

Yes it would boggle the mind how thinking of how the US manages to fuck it up until you remember THEY DO IT ON PURPOSE.

Seriously they should do it like Vietnam. Mandatory voting, but one person in the family can vote for everyone. That would work wonders. Oh of course also only let candidates run who are for the Socialists.

I'm of the opinion that electronic voting of any kind makes changing the results too easy, and we should stick with good old mechanical voting machines with lots of little levers.



My reasoning is:

• You can check the design for legitimacy more easily
• Changing the votes once cast is a much more work-intensive process than with an electronic voting machine
• You generally won't have morons putting wireless connections directly to the system into the design
• Power outages don't stop the machine
• We already have the designs
• I'm a M.E.
• I have nostalgia

Don't even get me started on Internet-voting.