A system with strong cryptography and high security where people could vote from their homes, that's what should be the ideal, if you ask me. Today there exist a page called norge.no where people can do a lot of stuff online. They have to log in, and they only get access through proving their identity. So there's nothing wrong about voting taking place at the same place.
It is actually a non-trivial problem. If you login with your strong identity to vote then the government would know exactly who you voted for. That is kinda a bad thing in secret elections. There are potential solutions but understand that if it was that easy it would be already be done.
Very good point. I didn't think of that when I wrote my previous post. But please do not underestimate the Norwegian govt. when it comes to getting things done, it usually takes a very very very long time to get anything done, and when it is first done, it usually goes over budget and have a lot of issues in the beginning.
Electronic voting if done wrong is very easy to manipulate and honestly governments are about the worst entities when it comes to making secure public systems.
Yes, you would have to trust the people running the system. But if you had several independent experts, perhaps with various political associations, it would be hard to have them collude without it being detected, would it not? I do not see anything wrong in having the system open sourced either, so a lot of eyes could look at it.
A good electronic voting system would
a) only allow authorized persons to vote and only vote once
b) not link the vote to any persons
c) allow any person to validate their vote was counted (crowd sourced auditing)
d) in the event a persons vote isn't counted provide a method to definitively prove or disprove the claim of voting irregularity.
Haven't there been some systems discussed where a system similar to bitcoin could be used for voting? Votecoin? Each party could set up their own receiving address. This would be public for everyone to see. Then each voter was given a coin. And voting took place by sending the votecoin to the address of the party the voter wanted to support. When the election was finished, you could simply check the balance of the public address of the party, and this was available for everyone to see. Of course there would be the need for some scheme to deliver the coins to voters eligible to receive it.
And at the very least, there could be voting machines in the buildings were voting takes place. It must be a night mare to count all the votes manually.
And regarding rigging, I've heard of countries where entire vans transporting votes gets changed for another van with the 'right' votes. So I guess cheating is something that could be present both with electronic and paper voting.
I think a system where you have auditors, even several layers of them, and safeguards in place could work well.
Hm.. regarding the votecoin system again, I had an idea.
What about the voter logging in to a centralized portal, getting an authorization code. This authcode could be inputted in to an open source client, and the code would allow for the creation of a privkey with corresponding votecoinaddress. and loading the address with 1 votecoin. The address would be generated randomly so it could not be tracked back to a particular user. Of course this is far too complicated for the average user, but it's interesting as an intellectual exercise.
Anyway, I recently read about
Triangular trade and how Norwegians and other europeans participated in this in the old age. First Textiles, rum and manufactured goods were shipped by boat to Africa, then slaves were brought from Africa to America, and from the return trip from America, Sugar, tobacco and cotton were brought to Europe.
So lots of exploitation by the Europeans to enrich themselves. How ironic would it not be if bitcoin businesses started to emigrate to Africa to avoid the chains of their slave masters?
Until governments get it right, there is nothing wrong with good ole paper.
True. But still very old fashioned, and a lot of waste imo.
