Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app(docs.voteism.org)
docs.voteism.org
Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app
https://docs.voteism.org/
8 comments
Hi Everyone,
The Covid-19 situation forced many things to shift online. We wondered what it would be like to conduct democratic elections online. While that is the far-far future, we set about building something that could get us a step closer towards that future.
VOTEism is a secure political opinion poll app to express your preference for one electoral candidate or the other. VOTEism currently works for the 2020 USA Presidential Election only.
Current political opinion polls are riddled with low sample sizes, interviewer biases, push poll tactics, self voting sock-puppets, and worst of all, the lack of privacy. VOTEism seeks to change that.
Your vote is encrypted with a public key and is decrypted with the private key on an air-gapped system. Anonymized and aggregated results are published on the VOTEism mobile apps.
VOTEism is built, published and funded by a small and independent software company (AskDesis INC.) based in the United States. We have no political, governmental, corporate, or media affiliation. Please take time to read our transparency policy here: https://docs.voteism.org/transparency
We hope you find VOTEism useful.
The Covid-19 situation forced many things to shift online. We wondered what it would be like to conduct democratic elections online. While that is the far-far future, we set about building something that could get us a step closer towards that future.
VOTEism is a secure political opinion poll app to express your preference for one electoral candidate or the other. VOTEism currently works for the 2020 USA Presidential Election only.
Current political opinion polls are riddled with low sample sizes, interviewer biases, push poll tactics, self voting sock-puppets, and worst of all, the lack of privacy. VOTEism seeks to change that.
Your vote is encrypted with a public key and is decrypted with the private key on an air-gapped system. Anonymized and aggregated results are published on the VOTEism mobile apps.
VOTEism is built, published and funded by a small and independent software company (AskDesis INC.) based in the United States. We have no political, governmental, corporate, or media affiliation. Please take time to read our transparency policy here: https://docs.voteism.org/transparency
We hope you find VOTEism useful.
Interesting idea, but it raises many questions.
- How do you prevent people from voting multiple times?
- How do you ensure a representative sample of the population? Google tells me that only 70% of Americans have smartphones, so what about the other 30%?
- How do you prevent people from voting multiple times?
- How do you ensure a representative sample of the population? Google tells me that only 70% of Americans have smartphones, so what about the other 30%?
So, a closed-source, non-audited polling app with grand security claims? What could go wrong?
This comment breaks more than one of the Show HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and also the global HN guidelines, which include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Would you please be more mindful of how you address other people's work, and not just apply the usual internet snark rules of being a maximal jerk about everything? I don't mean to pick on you personally; it's a common phenomenon, of course. But when the first response, indeed the only real response, to someone's Show HN is a nasty putdown, poisonous fumes fill the thread. Not to mention it's a sucker punch to the person who did all that work and went to the trouble to share it.
Would you please be more mindful of how you address other people's work, and not just apply the usual internet snark rules of being a maximal jerk about everything? I don't mean to pick on you personally; it's a common phenomenon, of course. But when the first response, indeed the only real response, to someone's Show HN is a nasty putdown, poisonous fumes fill the thread. Not to mention it's a sucker punch to the person who did all that work and went to the trouble to share it.
You're right; thanks for the fair call-out. I apologize, especially to the developers of VOTEism!
We are in the process of publishing the code on Github.Allow us a few weeks.
I did have one question though, are you reliant upon the integrity of the platform upon which you're running your voting application on? In the sense, if I had malware on the phone you were voting from, would that be enough to compromise a system like this? An addition, did you have any plan to identify the voters to make sure you couldn't cast an unlimited number of votes?