[Closed] Voting - Why is it such a manual, outdated process?

That'll sort the old folk out!

Have you ever had any experience of publicly funded IT projects?

not just that, the votes would then be traceable
if you used punch cards then you would get the famous hanging chads 🙂

snap!

You want fancy e-voting?

Move to Estonia then.

Seriously.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia

Err, cos I don't use a 'smartphone'

£5-8 a month PAYG.

[quote=esselgruntfuttock ]Err, cos I don't use a 'smartphone'
£5-8 a month PAYG.

I pay £6 a month for the contract for my smartphone...

we use a form of electronic voting in Belgium where you show your ID card, get given an electronic voting card from a big box, go to a computer which encodes your card with your choice and you then shove it in a box which reads it as you put it in. Seems to work ok without actually linking you directly to the vote (in anyway that I know of)

People didn't trust pencils. Come on....

That'll sort the old folk out!

Racist !

I know plenty of 'old folk' who have phones.

Polling stations with iPads in booths?

Polling stations with iPads in booths?

If someone can't be arsed going to a polling station to vote or arranging a postal vote in advance then i dont want their vote to count the same as mine!

Loads of electronic voting machines have been proven to be hack able.

Not sure anybody has ever proven the exploit in the wild though.

Just get off your lazy arse and vote the traditional way, its not hard. I find it quite sociable and can actually bring people together. Voting on an app wouldn't do that, it would just result in more lonely, angry people sitting in front of screens and then frothing about it on Facebook.

I might be making this up, but I think there was a study done that getting up and going out to vote made people take the whole thing more seriously and less likely to vote for extreme stuff.

Electronic voting means you have to trust the people who wrote the software for the machines.

There's much less (no) visibility into the process. With paper votes you can watch the ballot boxes, and watch the counting process. With an electronic voting machine, you have nothing but blind faith in the process.

The biggest problem with electronic voting is how seldomly voting systems are are used in relation to the progress of software and hardware. We have general election every 4 - 5 years.. iOS has gone through 8 new versions in 6 years, Android has gone through 11 in around the same time, 6 or 7 versions of 0SX and so on

Something else nobody's mentioned is the very real possibility of systems going down, either in entirety or locally, which could mess the whole thing up; look at bank ATM systems, it's been known for those to suddenly crash for no apparent reason, a cross on a slip of paper is immune to that sort of thing.
Of course, it's also not unknown for voters to be threatened, for votes to be rigged by using nefarious means, but that's less likely here.

Yeah, the TL;DR is that it's not as secure, transparent or auditable as paper voting.

Plus, check out some of the coverage on US voting machines!

People didn't trust pencils. Come on....

Every hacker and mischief maker would have a go.... Multiple DDoS attacks plus usual insufficient bandwidth. The odd few % in x factor don't matter, bit more serious with elections

And all the reasons above about trust, anonymity, verifiability etc

There are plenty of ways it could be done (if we ignore American attempts) and it wouldn't HAVE to be online which would circumvent a lot of the worst issues - but at the end of the day a few people, a village hall and a pencil and paper works surprisingly well still.

With council budgets incapable of fixing potholes I think a heavy investement in portable, secure voting devices wouldn't win a referendum on it 🙂