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The Dangers of Moving All of Democracy Online:
To protect governments as well as people's rights from coronavirus, we need to use tech as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
[...] Governments around the world are struggling to deal with the public health and economic challenges of coronavirus. While many have pointed to how authoritarian regimes exacerbated the pandemic, we've so far paid dangerously little attention to coronavirus's challenge to democracy.
In a democracy, citizens need to be able to vote, politicians to deliberate, and people to move about, meet, and act collectively. Democratic politics is a mixture of mass involvement and endless meetings. All this is hard when people can be infected with a potentially deadly virus if someone simply coughs nearby. The obvious answer might seem to be to move democracy to the internet, but some parts of democracy translate badly to an online world, while others are already being undermined by emergency powers (for example, Hungary's parliament just passed a law that allows the prime minister to rule by decree) and by the rise of digital surveillance.
[...] Democratic politics also happens in the streets, at political rallies, public meetings, and demonstrations. It is hard to see how such mass gatherings will return any time soon if they continue to be dangerous, or even banned, on grounds of public health.
[...] state efforts to fight the virus by tracking citizens might undermine democracy by concentrating power in the hands of an unaccountable authority. This might even happen from the bottom up. Citizens in fear of contagion might start liking the idea of ubiquitous and decentralized surveillance as a service, as evidenced by the popularity of coronavirus symptom-tracking apps in the UK and elsewhere.
[...] Some pundits argue that information technology is the answer to democracy's problems. There would be no risk of catching coronavirus if physical democracy became virtual.
[...] online voting systems, such as Voatz, which was used in the 2018 midterms in West Virginia, have critical security vulnerabilities. As cryptographer Matt Blaze says, many experts believe internet voting is a bad idea.
Online voting may one day provide the illusion of democracy while actually destroying it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @03:48PM (10 children)
I've long been an opponent of any form of electronic/black box voting. But from what I see Democracy in the USA is already in a bad state... And no the problem is not the Electoral College.
https://newrepublic.com/article/146884/america-stuck-two-parties [newrepublic.com]
Like a magician letting the voters mainly "choose" between Tweedledee and Tweedledumber.
But I guess being able to choose between Two Parties is still one better than China's elections where voters can in theory vote for different candidates but there's effectively just One Party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China [wikipedia.org]
Still more choice right?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday April 03 2020, @06:41PM (8 children)
I'd like to see:
Other than that, by this point, votes should be on submitted paper, the paper should be saved until the election is complete, and you should have both a receipt and a code where you can verify your vote online.
IMO, the only way to more-or-less-dependably make US citizens act responsibly is to firmly tie the responsibility at hand to their financial circumstances.
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Want about to a race conditions? hear joke
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @09:30PM
Verificable votes means anyone can break your fingers if you do not vote as they want. Legs would be a problem with your mobility idea, but fingers, not so much, you only need to carry the paper they give.
Public count of the paper votes should be enough. Anyone that wants to check, just stay around until the box contents are counted.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Saturday April 04 2020, @07:26AM (4 children)
And what if you feel none of the candidates deserve your vote? It's my preference to vote "for" someone and not "against" someone.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday April 04 2020, @12:34PM
You should be able to vote for whoever you want. Write-ins should always be allowed.
The "party" system where they control who can be a candidate is what got us in the horrific mess we're in today.
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Democracy: Where any two idiots outvote a genius.
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday April 04 2020, @05:22PM (2 children)
Leave your ballot empty or otherwise destroy it or have a none of the above vote. For a long time we had a joke party, the Rhino's who were a good choice if you didn't like the real ones. Occasionally they even came in second.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros_Party [wikipedia.org] take note of their promises.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday April 05 2020, @07:47PM (1 child)
...and now we arguably have two of them, but even though that's the case — they aren't the same, so the choice continues to matter.
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You can lead a horse to water, but that doesn't
mean it won't just wade in and shit in it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dry on Sunday April 05 2020, @09:02PM
Yea, your political system is even more broken then ours.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @02:32PM (1 child)
If many voters don't want to vote despite a day off, it's better that their nonexistent votes don't outweigh my vote ;).
I'd be tempted to allow campaigns to tell people NOT to vote, so that the ones who fall for such tricks don't actually vote but that's probably too evil and prone to other problems.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday April 05 2020, @07:34PM
Because representative government without at least some input on what "representation" one actually is subject to is functionally identical to fiat rule over those who do not contribute to choosing said representative(s.)
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"You the bomb."
"No, you the bomb."
...
A compliment in the USA.
An argument in the middle east.
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday April 04 2020, @05:17PM
Well you can have different wings of the one party, which I believe described China's party up till Xi, where the more liberal wing and the conservative wing took turns governing. One party split into 2 wings isn't much different then America with 2 parties.