Joe Kiniry, a An election security expert, he was attending an annual conference on voting technology in Washington, DC, when a woman approached him with an unusual offer. He said he represented a wealthy client interested in voting systems that would boost superpowers. Did he have ideas? “I told him you should stay away from Internet voting, because it’s really, really hard,” he said.
Later he learned who had sent him. It was BRADY HUSKS, a political consultant from New York City and preparing companies like Uber Faving off the law. He made a fortune doing that (the first stock of ubeber helped a lot), and he was willing to spend a good chunk of it to follow the technology of online voting. Tusk convinces Kiniry to work with him. At least, Kiniry thought, it would be an important research project.
Today the tusk shows the fruits of that collaboration. His mobile voting platform is releasing VoteSecure, a Cryptography-based law that seeks to help people carefully cast their votes on their iPhones and Androids. The protocol is open source and available on GitHub for anyone to test, develop, and build. Two election technology vendors have already committed to implementation — possibly as early as 2026. Tusk says mobile voting will save our democracy. But getting it accepted by legislators and the public is going to be the really, really hard part.
Prices are low
TUKS has been slaughtered for mobile voting for a while. Around 2017, he started to take a serious step, to support small elections that used existing technology to allow deployed soldiers or people with disabilities to vote. He estimates he’s dropped $20 million so far and plans to keep the savings on track. When I ask why, he explains that working with the government has given him a respectful perspective on its failures. Tusk believes there is one pressure point that can fix many of the mismatches between what society deserves and what it gets: more people using the ballot box. “We get Loousy, or we are corrupt, the government because there are very few people who vote, especially in the elections of others and ages, where consent is wrong,” he said. “If the Primary Accout is 37 percent instead of 9 percent, the political motivations of the base of the chosen election to change – they have graduated to the center, and they are not rewarded by shouting and pointing fingers.”
At The tusk, mobile voting is a no-brainer: We already do banking, marketing and private messaging on our phones, so why not challenge voting? “If I don’t do it, who will?” he asks. In addition, he says, “If it doesn’t happen, I don’t think we’ll be in the same country in 20 years, because if you can’t solve any one problem that’s important to people, eventually they decide not to go.”
Teky had kiniry aimed at existing online voting platforms – including some paid platforms. “Joe is considered an absolute expert in electronic voting,” said Thsk. So when Kiniry realized those plans were inadequate, Smoke decided the best way forward was to start over. Hired Kiniriry’s company, free & fair, to develop VoteSecure. It is not a turnkey solution but a bacsender part of the system that will need the user interface and other pieces to work. The protocol includes methods for voters to check the accuracy of their votes and ensure that their vote has been received by the election board and transferred to the paper.
Tesk says his next step is to “run legislation” in several cities to allow mobile voting. “Start a small city council, a school board, maybe a mayor,” he said. “Prove the thesis. Problems of Vladimir Pupin Hacking the Queensborough election seems far fetched to me.” . “Once the genie is out of the bottle, they can’t bring it back, right?” you prune. “That has always been true of every technology I’ve worked on.” But first the genie has to come out of the bottle. That’s no cinch.
Crypto Enemies
The biggest opposition against mobile or Internet voting comes from Cryptomars experts and security experts, who believe that the security risks are insurmountable. Take two people who were at the 2017 conference with Kiniry. Ron Rivest is a well-known “R” in the RSA Protocol that secures the Internet, a successful award winner, and a former Professor at Mit. His opinion: Mobile voting is not prime time. “What you can do with mobile phones is interesting, but we’re not there yet, and I haven’t seen anything to make me think otherwise, which is that we need to do it differently.”
Computer scientist and polling expert David Jefferson is also unpopular. Although he admits that Kiniry is one of the top scholars of the high voting system, he sees Teks’ effort as done. “I’m willing to downgrade rock-solid cryptography, but it undermines the argument about how insecure online voting systems are overall.”
