[ExI] Immaculate Election

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Mon Jan 18 14:35:09 UTC 2021


...> On Behalf Of Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Immaculate Election


>...Earlier in this thread, Spike asked if any European countries used
voting machines. While Italy and the UK do not, it turns out that Estonia
goes even further and votes over the Internet and apparently quite
successfully.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia
https://www.ria.ee/en/news/e-voting-too-secure.html


>...They call their system E-voting and it works because all Estonians have
national ID smartcards that are tied into a nation-wide public key
infrastructure. It allows Estonians to remotely verify their identity for
all manner of transactions including voting.

>...Why can't we have something like that? What is the main argument against
the USA issuing national ID?

Stuart LaForge


_______________________________________________




Hi Stuart, 

The main argument against the USA issuing national ID is that Americans have
the right to privacy encoded in the constitution, article 4.  The Estonians
do not.  Estonians must do whatever their government orders.  It is a former
Soviet bloc country.  In the US, we don't even enforce citizenship rules:
non-citizens can and do live in the USA.  They don't have Social Security
numbers, which is the closest to a national ID we have here, and since even
that isn't enforced, it isn't clear that a more inclusive form of ID can be
enforced either.

An alternative would be face recognition technology and other biometric
identification.  Since humans already do that, I don't see why it should be
illegal to automate it.

Regarding an e-voting system: that would go in the wrong direction.  What I
urge is greater transparency in our system.  Currently trust in our
elections is eroding because of decreasing transparency.  Our court system
works as well as it does by involving citizens on juries.  Most of us here
have likely been on a jury.  These serve as civics lessons for the public:
we get to see how the criminal justice system really works.  I propose
opening up our election system to public scrutiny far more intimately than
our justice system.  Let the public see everything.  

Our justice system sacrifices speed for public trust, which is why trials
take so long but we trust the outcome.  Our election system sacrifices
public trust for speed, which is why election results are fast but we
distrust the outcome.

spike  

spike





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