I was expecting skepticism about that in my comment and choose purposefully the word “referendum” for that reason.
I dont think electronic voting is ready for important electoral votes but it may be sufficiently secure for referendums that are fully digital. In France, you can sign petition to force certain questions to be asked to the government. A cryptographic mean to sign that petition would be very useful and in this case prevent people from attempting to sign multiple times.
We already have a hardcopy ID to travel internationally or ID to drive vehicles. The risks of an electronic ID being easily copied would have to get me visiting other solar systems or driving a time machine before I considered it.
I think the opposite. Standard papers are and always have been fraudulently copied by criminals. Cryptography can make it impossible to copy an ID card the same way it makes it impossible to clone your credit card.
The main risk is for governments to try to emit fake ID cards for imaginary citizens, but they were already doing it mostly for their “spies”.
I honestly think it will completely stop criminals from copying papers or creating fake ones. At least as long as the government takes security of the ID card emitting body is taken seriously and audited transparently.
Really a lot of your criticism of digital means applies very much to older paper based systems. I personally participated in counting votes in my local elections and despite many counts by multiple people, we didn’t get the same count everytime. So while mass fraud is very unlikely, the count of all elections is not really accurate.
But again my original point was for this digital ID card to be used only for referendums and not electoral voting. Anonymity is not necessary when citizens petition for a cause to be heard.
It is true that paper ID can be forged but where it differs is the inability to do it at such a large scale compared to electronic. Slightly different results can be attributed to human error as it is very difficult to change a single paper vote when other parties are watching. It’s impossible to have confidence in a black box electronic system (even if the code and machine were auditable, who’s to ssy what it’s actually doing at run-time when may users have access to it).
Software is written by humans and humans make mistakes, therefore software contains mistakes. You could perhaps argue electronic ID could be difficult to copy but the mere suggestion of a bug should push over the idea of it being impossible.
I was expecting skepticism about that in my comment and choose purposefully the word “referendum” for that reason.
I dont think electronic voting is ready for important electoral votes but it may be sufficiently secure for referendums that are fully digital. In France, you can sign petition to force certain questions to be asked to the government. A cryptographic mean to sign that petition would be very useful and in this case prevent people from attempting to sign multiple times.
I think the opposite. Standard papers are and always have been fraudulently copied by criminals. Cryptography can make it impossible to copy an ID card the same way it makes it impossible to clone your credit card.
The main risk is for governments to try to emit fake ID cards for imaginary citizens, but they were already doing it mostly for their “spies”.
I honestly think it will completely stop criminals from copying papers or creating fake ones. At least as long as the government takes security of the ID card emitting body is taken seriously and audited transparently.
Really a lot of your criticism of digital means applies very much to older paper based systems. I personally participated in counting votes in my local elections and despite many counts by multiple people, we didn’t get the same count everytime. So while mass fraud is very unlikely, the count of all elections is not really accurate.
But again my original point was for this digital ID card to be used only for referendums and not electoral voting. Anonymity is not necessary when citizens petition for a cause to be heard.
It is true that paper ID can be forged but where it differs is the inability to do it at such a large scale compared to electronic. Slightly different results can be attributed to human error as it is very difficult to change a single paper vote when other parties are watching. It’s impossible to have confidence in a black box electronic system (even if the code and machine were auditable, who’s to ssy what it’s actually doing at run-time when may users have access to it).
Software is written by humans and humans make mistakes, therefore software contains mistakes. You could perhaps argue electronic ID could be difficult to copy but the mere suggestion of a bug should push over the idea of it being impossible.
Perfection is the enemy of good.