Kia ora koutou You will have all seen the Zuckerberg manifesto, heard about the Trump campaign's strategic use of FarceBook to discourage their opponents from voting, and glanced at the various e-democracy apps funded by the same VC firms who brought us FarceBook, PayPal, FarceBook, and Palentir: http://www.cnbc.com/id/49347641 You may also be aware that a number of kiwi political parties, including some who should know better (Greens and TOP), are using NationBuilder. I laid out a few of the *many* reasons why this is a bad idea in an open letter to the Greens: https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/blog/2017/04/04/unhappy-with-nz-greens-use-of-nationbuilder/ In the face of this, to focus on preventing corruption of the voting process is missing the point. Elite interests don't need to control or corrupt the voting process if they can control and corrupt the public discourse that informs whether or not people vote, and what they look for in the candidates and parties they vote for. Digital voting can't fix this, and neither can keeping it paper based. The problem is that when such powerful discursive manipulation systems an be applied anywhere, from anywhere in the world, elected dictatorship (or "representative democracy") is fundamentally impossible to secure against such attacks. The only way to prevent whatever system is used to elect an elite of individuals to form governments from being pwned, is to replace it with a system that doesn't give absolute state power to elites, even temporarily. A system where the powers of the state are strongly limited, and highly distributed, and where decision-making is participatory, not representative. Deep democracy, whether using digital platforms, public meetings, or a combination of both (which is probably ideal). Now it's true that these systems too will also be attacked, both directly and by discursive manipulation. For as long as economic power and ownership of the mainstream news media is concentrated in a handful of global corporations, democracy will always be under attack. Economic organisations and media too need radical democratization, and cooperative companies and not-for-profit social enterprises are making exciting progress experimenting with models for doing this. But in the meantime, it's much harder for the 1% to effectively monitor and manipulate a flood of millions or billions of distributed, 'citizen government' decision-making processes, than to monitor and manipulate a trickle of representative government decisions that happen one at a time per country. Deep democracy is not a perfect solution, nothing is. But as far as I can see, it's the only alternative to a corporate-controlled technocracy, where elections and political "news" remain as a circus, distracting the people from where the real decisions are being made. Ma te wā Strypey
Hi all, I've avoided this on the main NZOSS as I feel it's off topic for that list, but since we have a separate one here, rant hat on :) I hear people taking a lot about block chain based X, where X is online voting, where X might be reconciliation among banks, "private" chains in organisations or, in this case, Democratic voting. The one thing these cases have in common is no need for a blockchain. The blockchain is a tool that accomplishes one thing - distributed non-revocation and anti-double-spend by forcing a group to decide which transaction to accept out of conflicting options. So the question is which group decides? In Bitcoin, we have so little trust in any party to decide this, even on a minute by minute basis, that we resort to "who's committed enough to burn work/power/resources" to decide, in a way that only a majority can break the rules and alter the past consensus. This process is extraordinarily inefficient. The Bitcoin argument is that the resources are well spent for what the security they provide, but as an environmentalist it's cringe worthy. The entire issue and all the waste could be side stepped if we can select any group of people where we trust there will not be a majority conspiracy. Proof of stake isn't much better - whoever has the money can set the rules, forever, as long as they don't actually spend it. While this seems to make sense from an incentives point of view in coins, it doesn't really from any other perspective, and Ethereum for example have struggled to implement a scheme that made sense in their context. You might argue that all we need is to fix the algorithm, whether this is proof of work, proof of stake, or whatever, but this comes back to the core question of what the block chain is. It's a tool for mutually distrusting people to decide what version of events to follow. Where we have any pre-established group, we can just rely on a consensus document, like tor uses to produce the tor directory. In tor's case it's a fixed list. In an Ethereum-like network it could be decided by a smart contract on the network itself, allowing voters to add or remove electors as they wish. With electors agreeing on a current state, we don't need the whole blockchain history (only enough for someone offline for a time to validate the changes met the network rules), don't need proof of work or stake. All we need is a method, any method, to select a group who we can trust to contain a majority of honest parties. TLDR: the blockchain is a hammer, and sometimes you're holding a screw. Cheers, Tim
Kia ora koutou Just wanted to clarify that my last email wasn't saying "let's hand this problem over to a government department to solve and forget about it until then". I look forward to a robust and friendly discussion on the pros and cons of both the social practices of e-voting (digitization of existing systems for electing representatives), and online democracy (replacing or supplementing elected representatives with digital consultation and referenda), as well as existing technical implementations of either, and bleeding edge implementations of either that could be useful in Aotearoa. This is something we're talking about in the Pirate Party at the moment too: https://www.loomio.org/d/VkHGaD4X/electronic-and-online-voting "Let the wild rumpus begin!" :) I think Vinay Gupta was on the money in his interview for FutureThinkers: http://groups.nzoss.org.nz/groups/online-democracy/ Global, networked democracy will eventually transcend and include states run by elected representatives, in the same way that NGOs governed by elected committees emerged as states transcended and included pre-existing, community-led governance. Robust voting systems for electing representatives as different scales will continue to be needed for decades yet. But in parallel, both top-down consultation (eg LINZ use of Loomio to consult on NZ GOAL) and bottom-up deep democracy (parties finding consensus on policy using Loomio) will create a whole new decision-making layer, just as open source has created a whole new means of production, that is neither governmental nor industrial (see Yochai Benkler's talks on "commons-based peer-production"). Eventually, deep democracy will come to govern more and more of people's actions, and the dictates of elected representatives will reduce in scope and power, in the same way that representative democracy has transcended and included older systems like monarchy, church, and corporation. He mihi mahana Strypey
Kia ora koutou Thanks to Dave Lane for setting up this list. As I said on the OpenChat list, I think e-voting is inevitable, for the same reasons email taking over from snail mail was inevitable, and freedom technologists need to be pro-active in helping to shape its emergence. Some countries are already taking experimental steps towards e-voting: Estonia: https://estoniaevoting.org/ Finland: https://effi.org/system/files?file=FinnishEVotingCoEComparison_Effi_20080801.pdf Others: http://aceproject.org/ace-en/focus/e-voting/countries The NZ local bodies e-voting trial that was canned this year is also evidence of the inevitable shuffle towards e-voting. The canned trial proposed to outsource the running of the election to a company that's been running relatively low-stakes, private elections, presumably using proprietary software (security by obscurity). This seems so obviously ridiculous, for so many reasons, I can't believe it was seriously considered. I think it makes sense for the Electoral Commission to employ suitably-qualified technologists to research and test e-voting technology for the next few years. I propose this because I think it's politically realistic, especially in the context of the government hovering on the brink of approving NZ GOAL-Software Edition, and effectively mandating a greater use of free code software in the public sector. There may be some NZers whose neo-liberal ideology makes them think the private sector would invariably do a better job of running elections than a private body. I think they would be an extreme minority. I think most kiwis, regardless of their social or economic views, would agree that there are some things that must be done by a vendor-neutral public body, and running free and fair elections is definitely on that list. If government took this advice, and funded the Electoral Commission to employ a team of e-voting researchers, they could potentially network with publicly-funded e-voting research projects in other countries. There may be international research projects organised by bodies like the UN, intended to make sure elections involving e-voting systems remain "free and fair". The work of that research group can then be supplemented by groups like NZOSS, documenting the issues involved (social/political as well as technical) and discussing what kinds of solutions can and can't work and why (like ACE Project have done here http://aceproject.org/ace-en/focus/e-voting/e-voting-opportunities), as well as suggesting technologies for testing, and participating in trials as beta testers and penetration testers. He mihi nui Strypey