Cody, I'm inspired to contribute some thoughts to yours. I feel that whatever *fix* is imagined for voting, we should be prepared to adopt it for a long time. The process of testing out new voting schemes may take a few administrative cycles and may become vulnerable to manipulation or degradation as the *concrete dries*. I can see value in putting time limits on the experiment and taking measures to protect this experiment from tampering by any given administration. Precedence set by changing something as foundational as voting demands careful thought. If voting systems be allowed to change with fashion there will be vulnerabilities introduced, perhaps similar or worse than the exploitations we are seeing in almost every other aspect of government. To be fair, the present voting scheme already appears corrupt or out-of-spec from my point of view. I do think it is our responsibility to think about this problem.
Secondly, I would like to contribute some thoughts on the topic of remote voting. Perhaps rather than solving the app based voting issue perfectly, we could aim at having certainty for validating votes that is better than already exists. It may be the case that under a *phone app* voting system, we still end up with voters in Florida that have been known dead for a decade. If we can assess what the present error bars are then we can have a goal in mind. There are certainly many truly good thoughts on cryptography and as Neal Koblitz has pointed out in a bold non-paper paper <https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018.pdf>, one of the functions of the NSA is to act as consultants on cryptographic practice. For our entertainment, let's imagine a collaboration between the NSA and some large gaming company, Blizzard perhaps, where the goal is to develop a *critical application* voting app. While I anticipate aggressive objections from some friam readers, there is something worth thinking about. A friend of mine pointed out that when classic World of Warcraft was recently released, Blizzard was prepared to have over 500,000 simultaneous users. These users are not making 15 one-time choices but rather orders of magnitude more choices. These choices are handled fairly consistently, with few dropped packets and with little lag (each of which is demanded by the online gaming community). This suggests to me that there *are *industries, like the gaming industry, that have thought very carefully and for a long time about the problems of large scale concurrent user bases and verification of its user base. Surely the tech is out there, but I am unsure what the next careful steps ought to be. Cheers, Jonathan Zingale
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