If you could place these concerns into the categories: Technology, Information Security, Social and Political, it would help provide some structure to the responses. Thank you.
Hacking plus that even more people who are ignorant towards politics would vote.
So Information Security and Political
If the voting app was secure and all who used it were properly validated, more robustly than the paper-based system, would you use the app then? The political illiteracy of the electorate is a constant. Only legislation can overcome that. What do you mean by hacking? Is there not already manipulation and fraud? How would a smartphone app make manipulation and fraud more likely? Surety that would depend on the system you built? 512-bit end to end asynchronous encryption cannot be cracked in less than a millennium.
" The political illiteracy of the electorate is a constant." If it was an app more people would vote, cause it is so easy. Those people who think the burden of going to a physical place is too high are likely to be even less informed than the average voter. You might wanna read Jason Brannon's "Against Democracy".
I also said that the only way to overcome political illiteracy is through legislation (education). It is not participation in the political system that causes or maintains politically Illiteracy. If anything participation raises the desire to be more informed. The problem, as I've mentioned in respose to a different question, is the political system itself.
The electorate is politically illiterate because there is no political will to educate them since an ignorant electorate is far easier to manipulate than than a critically thinking one. The last referendum is a case in point. Our electoral system (or referendums) is a process of manipulation and the party (with the support of the media) best able to manipulate the largest number of voters in individual target constituencies wins the election. The period between elections is focussed mainly on feeding messages to the electorate to keep them thinking the ' right' things. Again an improrant role of the media. (When was the last time the media held a government to account?). Again look at this poor excuse for a Conservative government. A system that clearly gives the Conservatives an advantage in any election. It is no accident that the 19th and 20th centuries were Tory centuries, despite enfranchisemen. Of course algorithms are now the tactic of 21st century political manipulation. Within any election there is always the chance that accurate impartial evidence can escape into public domain and the electorate can inadvertently be informed. But it is the role of the media and each party's spin machine to keep any damage from impartial or even opposition spun information to a minimum.
The solution to political ignorance, then, is not limiting participation in elections to only those who have been taught critical thinking skills. The solution is to teach the electorate critical thinking skills through our education system and training at work to help them make better policy choices for themselves and their communitie.
Elections must not be about manipulation. The electorate is politically illiterate because that's how the political system (class) likes them. I contend that if you increase access to the political system you increase the desire of the electorate to be more critical and to be better informed. Greater participation is also greater democracy. Many people who voted in the EU referendum felt they were informed and on the day made an informed choice. A more accurate description is that they made a manipulated choice based on heavily skewed information that at best barely resembled factual accuracy. Even now what percentage of the UK population could tell you what the 7 institutions of the EU are, or how laws are made in the EU or what percentage of U.K. law is affected by EU law? How many of the electorate know the percentage of total immigration to this country or the total financial benefit of migration to this country?
How many of the electorate even consider that how migration has been handled by successive governments has caused the conflicts in the inner cities and the greatest competition for work for people in low skilled poorly paid occupations. It is the people in these occupations living in the more deprived areas of this country who were told that all their problems were caused by the EU and it is these people who were manipulated into taking this country out of the EU.
What percentage of the UK population still believe Labour caused the global financial crash of 2008?
It is not increased paritication in the political system that results in bad choices, it is the manipulation of the people who have been trained to be manipulated that results in bad choices for this country. Teach the electorate critical thinking skills and allow them to make the choices that are best for themselves and the community as a whole using unspun information whose merits can be ascertained by the people in an impartial way.
Increased participation + politically literacy (educaction) + impartial unspun information = Democracy. Our political system seems to discourage all three. What does that say about our democracy?
I won’t really have much concern about me but I would be concerned about people who don’t know how to vote unless they are given instructions as it is usually done during elections conventionally. The question is whether that would even work ?
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