Younger software engineers who grew up doing everything on their phones see this as something worth solving, because it would vastly improve access, end voter suppression, and people wouldn't have to take time off work to vote anymore. Universal mail-in ballots do address many of those points, but also have downsides (signature verification is tricky).
Older engineers on the other hand don't seem to want this to be solved.
I don't think that's fair. I'm young enough? And thing that given our current electoral systems and shoddy educations, paper voting is definitely better.
If everyone knowingly did some basic applied asymmetric key cryptography every day, and it was thought in grade school, that could change things.
If we voted far more often, so that the benefit of a single compromised vote was far less, that could change things.
I don't think first electrifying the vote, and then trying to bring about the above reforms, is a good strategy at all.
Meanwhile people have difficulty filling out paper ballots, because it's terrible UX. If you want to have a nice voting system like STV or even ranked-choice, shading ovals on paper ballots is not ideal.
Sometimes it feels as though existing problems get a free pass because of tradition, but new issues (even if addressed) are scary and so the entire thing should be stopped.
I think the right strategy is to pick a state, implement a voting system there for people to vote on their phones, and then see if it works out or not. Had this been done a couple of years ago, we would have been more prepared for covid-19 this election. And we're only going to have more pandemics and other disasters going forward.
> Sometimes it feels as though existing problems get a free pass because of tradition
In safety-critical systems, known problems are often tolerated because they are predictable. In these cases, mitigations are understood, and there's a well-defined upper bound on the amount of damage that can be caused if the mitigations fail.
> but new issues (even if addressed) are scary and so the entire thing should be stopped.
New issues are unpredictable, and do not have known mitigations. (Once they can be reliably predicted and mitigated, they are no longer "new".) There's also no known upper bound on the amount of damage these issues can cause.
As an added bonus, the quantity of bugs in a long-deployed system is generally well understood, while it's difficult to place an upper bound on the number of bugs in a system that hasn't been tested in production yet.
To make this concrete: Imagine finding a bug that causes several thousand phones to occasionally reboot unexpectedly. Pleased with yourself, you publish a patch and push it out to all affected devices.
One week later, a thousand of those devices power off and never power on again--they've been permanently bricked by your update.
Are your users angry because you refused to give the random reboots a "free pass" because of "tradition"? Or are they angry because you made drastic changes to a system that basically worked without taking the time to understand the consequences?
> In safety-critical systems, known problems are often tolerated because they are predictable. In these cases, mitigations are understood, and there's a well-defined upper bound on the amount of damage that can be caused if the mitigations fail.
Oh, voter suppression is well-understood and predictable. I disagree with you that mitigations have been effective.
> Meanwhile people have difficulty filling out paper ballots, because it's terrible UX. If you want to have a nice voting system like STV or even ranked-choice, shading ovals on paper ballots is not ideal.
I am 100 for voting with machines that spit out the cannonical paper which can be hand-reviwed. The point is not the paper UX, but the paper trail.
> Sometimes it feels as though existing problems get a free pass because of tradition, but new issues (even if addressed) are scary and so the entire thing should be stopped.
As somebody who has spent weird years pushing Haskell where it wasn't requested I know the feeling exactly, OK? :). It's just an unfortunately truth that the messy unprincipled systems today happens to involve using paper, which is in fact good in principle.
I would love if we had a 3 way discourse on 1) good paper systems 2) bad current hodge-podge 3) bad purely-electronic, in order to speak truths while avoiding status quo bias.
The general public wasn't informed about it, the app was from a company nobody had heard of, and evidently hadn't been tested well.
No, this should be an open transparent effort, with code published online (they need not accept PR's with code BTW). It should be trialled in a few states during an off-year election.
Signature verification only really matters if you have several ballots purporting to be from the same person.
Otherwise, they usually don't bother checking the signature.
How do you propose to do user authentication more securely on your phone? Keep in mind that several people may have access to this phone, including spouses and children.
I only bring it up because they suggested that they had a verification method in mind better than signatures.
A kid can access the paper ballot or the phone, for sure. The kid might be able to convincingly forge their parents' signature. They can almost certainly do whatever "e-verification" that diebeforei485 had in mind.
Younger software engineers who grew up doing everything on their phones see this as something worth solving, because it would vastly improve access, end voter suppression, and people wouldn't have to take time off work to vote anymore. Universal mail-in ballots do address many of those points, but also have downsides (signature verification is tricky).
Older engineers on the other hand don't seem to want this to be solved.