If we can vote by mail, why not vote by email? How about vote by phone? If ANY method of scrutiny is considered a violation of the right to vote, then anything goes right? No restrictions!
Comments (21)
sorted by:
If we can vote by mail, why not vote by email? How about vote by phone? If ANY method of scrutiny is considered a violation of the right to vote, then anything goes right? No restrictions!
That's a good explanation. Thank you.
Okay, yes then. Voting is violence. Might enables you to make right.
But what the current might says is right, is that other people with might should not be literally or metaphorically holding a gun to your back to force you to vote their way or face the consequences that they themselves, rather than the policy you're voting for, would bring about. And we do this because we don't want the brownshirts to have more voting power than they should. We do it because we prefer the transfer of power to be peaceful and stable when the might ruling the land in different directions shifts, instead of forcing a revolution that destroys people and infrastructure and economic growth.
That share of the violence belongs to other voters to pool freely in choosing how to apply it.
So how do we solve the problem without transparency involved? Every effort spent on protecting the privacy of the voter is an opportunity to steal a vote because there's no accountability.
That's the question we're trying to answer.
My initial proposal was to make the machine that does the work open source and transparent, so that everyone can know the job it does is correct. That way even despite not watching it work, they can be sure it will do it correctly, which makes the result and process transparent even though the data itself remains opaque.
Similarly, you trust RSA keys to work properly every time you go banking, even though you don't get to actually watch the key generation and transfer. You know it works, how it works is public knowledge, and so you can trust it even though you didn't personally find out what your key was.