from Hacker News

Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

by perseusprime11 on 1/23/20, 3:00 PM with 191 comments

  • by skue on 1/23/20, 3:44 PM

    This is for a voluntary county board position without regulatory power that by statute needs to be elected by March when no one is paying attention. So someone decided to try this out.

    OTOH, the WA Sec. of State opposes mobile/online elections due to security concerns, as does her upcoming political opponent [1] and FWIW the Seattle Times recently wrote an Editorial also opposing the practice. [2]

    Bottom line, this hardly constitutes some trend that WA state is moving towards, just something set up by a county office that is otherwise drawing skepticism.

    [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/secretary...

    [2] https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/resist-push-...

  • by legitster on 1/23/20, 4:44 PM

    I want to point out that voting in Washington state is incredibly easy. They mail you a ballot, and a packet with detailed information on every single candidate and issue, and then you can drop your ballot just about anywhere - supermarket, mailbox, probably the street (who knows). It's probably the best voting system, hands down.

    I don't buy that a smartphone magically hits some convenience threshold that turns out voters.

  • by mhh__ on 1/23/20, 7:39 PM

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI hopefully they don't prove Tom Scott right.

  • by tzs on 1/23/20, 4:14 PM

    > King County voters will be able to use their name and birthdate to log in to a Web portal through the Internet browser on their phones, says Bryan Finney, the CEO of Democracy Live, the Seattle-based voting company providing the technology.

    If they mean that there is a public URL you go to, and then on the site only have to enter you birhdate and name to log in, and then you can vote--that can't be right. There's gotta be more than that.

    My guess is that what has been lost in the stories is how you get the URL. I'm guessing that they either email you the URL or they send physical mail which includes a QR code with the URL, and the URL contains some sort of unique per voter identifier (hopefully randomly generated anew for each election). When you go to vote the site knows who you are supposed to be from that identifier in the URL, and the name/birthdate is just for a consistency check.

  • by deogeo on 1/23/20, 3:15 PM

    In related news, Saudi Arabia hacked Bezos' phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22122779

    Could a similar hack be done on a larger scale, and used to alter votes before they are sent, without changing the electronic signature?

    Lets assume no until proven otherwise. And if proven otherwise, lets assume it was an isolated incident, and it won't happen again after a "commitment to do better".

    Lets also assume Mr. Tusk's firm can be trusted - after all, why not put a private middle-man between voters and elections? As Mr. Tusk correctly points out, the only plausible explanation to resistance is wanting to suppress voters.

  • by cwkoss on 1/23/20, 6:35 PM

    I hope someone hacks the vote to make Mickey Mouse or some other stupid name win.

    Phone voting is a cybersecurity nightmare.

  • by cookie_monsta on 1/23/20, 9:55 PM

    Being that the main driver behind this seems to be voter turnout, I have some suggestions:

    1) Stop making all these penny ante jobs elected positions. These people are bureaucrats. Let them apply for their jobs like every other bureaucrat. If 99% of voters are saying they de facto don't care, maybe you should take the message.

    2) For jobs that do matter, make voting compulsory.

    Bonus point: have elections on the weekends when people actually have time to vote. Very few people need two days to drive their buggy in from the farm anymore ffs.

  • by macspoofing on 1/23/20, 6:49 PM

    I like the pageantry and ceremony of paper ballots at specific voting locations followed by manual paper ballot counting. I know in principle it's easy to automate this away by introducing online voting and other things ... I think those things will further alienate people from their local communities and society at large.

    Keep paper ballots because they are inefficient.

  • by choward on 1/23/20, 5:10 PM

    I still don't get what this has to do with smart phones. The article says you log in through a web based portal. They made a mention of phone apps though. I don't understand why voting would only be accessible by phone and not a normal computer.

  • by m0zg on 1/23/20, 8:32 PM

    This is idiotic beyond belief. Unless you have a verifiable, re-countable paper trail, elections can be made to go whichever way the person running the elections wants them to go. It's as simple as that.

    I guess I shouldn't be surprised though. I vote in WA and most people on the ballot seem profoundly unqualified for the positions they're running for. For me it basically boils down to picking the person with the most robust education credentials, unless they're a commie, in which case I pick the next best thing. It's pretty bad. If I were hiring for myself, I wouldn't hire most of these people.

  • by unethical_ban on 1/23/20, 3:39 PM

    It sounded like a really silly verification system. Matching finger signatures on a smartphone with previous records?

    Perhaps the voters should get a set of one-time codes along with a PIN from the voting office, and use that to validate their vote.

  • by joejerryronnie on 1/23/20, 11:05 PM

    Me and 10,000 of my bots would like to participate in this election.

  • by annoyingnoob on 1/23/20, 6:26 PM

    Vote is the new app that makes voting easy. No more paper booklets full of legal mumbo jumbo. Just press the Vote button and Vote does the rest, done and done.

    Vote automates your votes by choosing the best candidates for you using SocialAI technology.

  • by diebeforei485 on 1/24/20, 2:47 AM

    I think that everything except federal elections should be done by smartphone (or mail-in for those who don't have a smartphone).

    There is minimal risk that Russia cares about who serves on your local school board.

  • by slipheen on 1/23/20, 4:21 PM

    Beyond the security implications (which are huge and ought to be a deal breaker on their own), this seems to have a huge problem in that it's not private.

    Your abusive spouse/boss/dealer could tell you that they want to see you use the app to vote their way, and there's not much to prevent it.

    While going to a local precinct is inconvenient, no one knows what you do once you walk in that booth. That's important to avoid coercion.

  • by Ohn0 on 1/23/20, 7:25 PM

    Why is this an app? Why not web?

  • by joshuaheard on 1/23/20, 4:26 PM

    I don't understand why a bank's website is secure enough to transfer hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I can't cast a single vote online.

  • by _bxg1 on 1/23/20, 5:54 PM

  • by lgleason on 1/23/20, 3:54 PM

    As a mobile developer I think this is a REALLY bad idea because of the security implications surrounding it.

  • by aazaa on 1/23/20, 3:47 PM

    > King County voters will be able to use their name and birthdate to log in to a Web portal through the Internet browser on their phones, says Bryan Finney, the CEO of Democracy Live, the Seattle-based voting company providing the technology.

    Oh, really?

    > Once voters have completed their ballots, they must verify their submissions and then submit a signature on the touch screen of their device.

    Huh?

    > Finney says election officials in Washington are adept at signature verification because the state votes entirely by mail. ...

    Finney must have never had to sign on a phone screen with a finger while driving before.

    All of this digital theater of the absurd in a desperate attempt to engage people in the political process:

    > The board of supervisors election in the King Conservation District, for example, in past years has drawn less than 1% of the eligible population to the ballot box.

    People don't vote because they don't care. Not because they can't make it to the poling place. They don't care because they don't see anything at stake.

    There's no app for that.

  • by mslong on 1/23/20, 4:54 PM

    Absolutely amazing that almost all techies in this thread are against this. Of course there is major security risks, and problems that have to be solved, but it is MASSIVELY outweighed by the fact that mobile voting would mean almost 100% voter turn out overnight if done on a national level. What are we at right now, 60% on average, maybe? Our nation's policies would change immediately with such a massive swing in voter turnout, with adjustments towards forward-thinking, liberal policies.

  • by anon463637 on 1/23/20, 5:18 PM

    Voting by mobile is extremely problematic and shocking.

    1. No paper record.

    2. No privacy.

    A better way would be to use anonymous physical RFID pebbles that are placed in a container to indicate voting preference. Votes can be both weighed and scanned for counting redundancy very quickly.

    Mail-in voting would consist of mailing back the pebble chit in an outside return envelope with an inner vote envelope designating the preference; the outer envelope is removed and mixed with many others before sorting.

    Then later, no matter how a vote was cast, it's possible to find how a vote was counted (by the voter searching for the RFID code(s) they used) in real-time because all votes were mass-scanned in RFID containers... that is, there will be a number of large containers that contain all votes for a particular preference in a particular election. Subsequent elections reuse the RFIDs to eliminate waste. No hanging chads, no provisional ballots, no hacked voting machines and no voting by mobile.

  • by mikece on 1/23/20, 3:15 PM

    Making a big case about voter turnout not being as great as other countries is a red herring. We have it really, really good in this country. So good that, practically speaking, it doesn't matter who gets elected because things will continue to stay good. I read low voter turnout as an implicit vote of confidence in the system as a whole. You can be sure that if [stuff] was actually hitting the fan then everyone would show up to vote (and try to vote twice) to fix the horrible mess the city/state/country is in (whether in reality or perception).

    While I would agree there are definite issues with security, I really don't like the "print out the digital ballots" idea would rather see something block-chain based which is public and easy to audit.

    And I think it's unavoidable that some sort of biometric or other proof of identity will be required (take a selfie in order to vote!) before "voting with your phone" become commonly accepted.