A startup working on a secure digital voting system should be one of the top priorities here. As it currently stands, this is what the voting experience is like:
- Always on a weekday, so if you have a job and then a family to take care of after work, good luck finding time.
- Long lines, so that even those who find time are discouraged by standing around in November weather.
- The countless cases of voting locations in minority areas conveniently having broken machines or other barriers that prevent them from voting.
This environment has essentially optimized the experience for one group: retirees who have the time and energy to prioritize their day around voting. It's no surprise that legislation often favors this specific group as a result.
My high-level vision of how digital voting would look:
- A secure open source app that verifies your identity before letting you vote.
- Every candidate on the ballot would have a bio detailing their policies and views, to be filled out by them.
- A digital approach would make it easier to eventually adapt the system to involve things like ranked voting.
This would allow everyone to vote whenever and wherever they want, no relying on external factors like those mentioned above. It also provides one consistent place for every voter to see the same information about the candidates, rather than placing that task in the hands of media and their inherent bias/interests.
That's my 2 cents, I'm excited to see how startups tackle this.
IMO there's no such thing as a secure digital voting system. Complexity is how vulnerabilities and exploits get into in-use systems. You want things as simple and obvious as possible, and that means using and counting physical objects of some sort.
After all, it's much easier to notice a hundred thousand pieces of paper getting added to the vote-counting system than flipping some bits that represent a hundred thousand votes.
The voting system definitely needs improvement, but a digital app is absolutely not the way to go. Vote-by-mail solves nearly all the issues you've brought up, and seems to me to be a good intermediate step.
I am exceedingly skeptical about digital voting systems being adequately secure.
But the problems that you cite can be resolved without them in a number of different ways anyway. Vote by mail, for instance, or even making "election day" 24 hours long and a national holiday.
From silent malware changing votes on voter's machines, to an authoritarians manipulating the servers, to inability to verify what is actually run on the servers, to hacking of air-gapped servers like Stuxnet did, etc. etc.
Perhaps a smart contract on a publicly verifiable blockchain could alleviate the black box concerns. Privacy issues remain. Most democracies see it as absolutely vital for the population not to disclose who they voted for, so whatever smart contract we come up with, it has to be blockchain analysis-proof.
3. Paper-backed ballots (which are the official record of the vote) that are physically voter-verified (as a requirement for the above)
4. Paper ballots are anonymized after submission, so as to avoid coercion and vote selling
5. Usability improvements
An app may be a solution to some of #5 above, e.g. as a ballot marking device at the polls, but in order to be secure it should absolutely have #1 and #2. FWIW, voting.works will likely support these.
The solution to long lines and timing is a complicated policy issue, which may not be solvable with technology.
- Always on a weekday, so if you have a job and then a family to take care of after work, good luck finding time.
- Long lines, so that even those who find time are discouraged by standing around in November weather.
- The countless cases of voting locations in minority areas conveniently having broken machines or other barriers that prevent them from voting.
This environment has essentially optimized the experience for one group: retirees who have the time and energy to prioritize their day around voting. It's no surprise that legislation often favors this specific group as a result.
My high-level vision of how digital voting would look:
- A secure open source app that verifies your identity before letting you vote.
- Every candidate on the ballot would have a bio detailing their policies and views, to be filled out by them.
- A digital approach would make it easier to eventually adapt the system to involve things like ranked voting.
This would allow everyone to vote whenever and wherever they want, no relying on external factors like those mentioned above. It also provides one consistent place for every voter to see the same information about the candidates, rather than placing that task in the hands of media and their inherent bias/interests.
That's my 2 cents, I'm excited to see how startups tackle this.