Tomorrow's Democracy Is Open Source
Technology can realize greatly intensified forms of continuous democratic participation, but such applications must be openly developed and publicly owned.
@Penguincoder I have no degree in Computer Science. I graduated International Relations. However I am still really passionate about FOSS due to the way it brings real world democracy into technology.
While there are some places in which technology has no place (particularly voting), I believe that technology can help our societies become more open, transparent, involving and better functioning.
There's nothing wrong with using technology in voting, it just has to be done in an open, verifiable way.
The problem is how difficult it is to ensure it is open and verifiable. Not to mention how much easier it is to scale up attacks on digital voting systems.
If I want to forge enough paper ballets to swing an election I’m going to need a few hundred people in on it, with a group that large, someone is going to squeal, or get caught doing something dumb and uncover the conspiracy, if I want to forge digital ballots, well, I just need one person with know how and the right exploit.
It is certainly possible to make a digital voting system that is immutable once the votes are submitted, it is nearly impossible to make one that ensures that the votes being submitted are legitimate.
It’s a lot of effort and increased risk to roll out an acceptable electronic voting system, it is much easier and safer to just keep using paper ballots.
For voting where it can be seem who voted on who, this can be and was done.
But don't even try to touch voting where everyone has to have exaclly one secret vote. There is no way to do it currently and math is debating if it's even possible with computers.
More on that topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
Pirate parties were already using it in practice.