10-10-2015, 06:29 PM
(10-10-2015, 04:28 PM)Canard Wrote: Why can't they just buy a couple thousand iPads and use the Touch ID pad, you just touch that, press one button for who you want to vote for and you're done in 3 seconds? Or (gasp!) vote online??? It's frickin' 2015.
Because it cannot be done securely with current technology. Period. End of story.
Anybody who argues otherwise either is not a security expert or is trying to sell voting machines.
It may be possible with future technology, but personally I doubt it. The reasons it cannot be done securely now aren’t things like insufficient storage space or processor power that might reasonably be expected to get better with time; instead, there is a fundamental conflict between the requirement for a secret ballot and the requirement for auditability. The usual comparison you may have heard with banking security is completely invalid because in banking transactions are not secret. In case it’s not clear, when I say it’s “completely invalid”, you may take that as an accusation of dishonesty or incompetence against anybody advancing the argument — either the person is lying, or they are falsely presenting themselves as implicitly knowledgeable in computer security.
I myself am not a computer security expert, but I know enough about the subject to know what I know and don’t know.
The real fix to long lines is simply to provide sufficient resources, or to change the way the process is organized. It just now occurred to me that it could work to make an appointment online to vote, then show up at the appointed time. The system could manage the appointments so there is essentially no waiting time at the polling place. I don’t believe there is any serious fundamental security problem with using computers to book a time to vote. This would also provide knowledge ahead of time that certain times were popular, which could allow provisioning additional resources only when needed.