e-democracy

Lecture 10

December 1st, 2017

Web voting: what’s not to like?

How to do it?

  • authentication is at the beginning, to avoid double vote (easy)

  • users are taken to a ‘ballot room’ where they deposit their vote (easy)

  • inside the ballot room we loose track of the person-vote connection (very hard)

  • RAM can be read physically!

positive features

  • exploits existing infrastructure: costs quickly go to 0

  • results are immediately available

  • hard to tamper the ballot box

  • the electorate can easily be taylored to address spefic issues

the hoped-for impact

  • (swiss-style) direct democracy: let’s vote often, on single issues

  • no need to elect a (privileged) representative class (Westminster-style)

  • extension to the private sector and societies (trade unions etc.) of direct democracy

And what are the ‘cons?’

limitations, technical

  • forget about security AND privacy
  • the electionmaker controls the vote
  • hard to find out about tampering by authorities

from Wikipedia:

e-voting which is physically supervised by representatives of governmental or independent electoral authorities (e.g. electronic voting machines located at polling stations);

remote e-voting via the internet (also called i-voting) where the voter votes at home or without going to a polling station

from Wikipedia, cont’d

Many insecurities have been found in commercial voting machines, […]

Cases have also been reported of machines making unpredictable, inconsistent errors.

Key issues with electronic voting are therefore the openness of a system to public examination from outside experts, the creation of an authenticatable paper record of votes cast and a chain of custody for records

limitations, conceptual

  • Ok for selection or yes/no vote
  • what about deliberation?
  • More?
  • ???

Case study: Facebook democracy

Nielsen’s “90-9-1” rule

  • In most online communities,
  • 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute,
  • 9% of users contribute a little, and
  • 1% of users account for almost all the action.

So, who should get to vote?

  • universal election appropriate?
  • delegates?
  • a prize on active contribution?

Social Design for participation?

let’s explore participation in

  • knowledge: Wikipedia
  • corporate: Slack
  • professional: Stack overflow
  • artistic: Flickr
  • niche SNs?

initiatives

  • democracy.earth
  • what is liquid democracy?
  • the case for Viscous democracy