cg27

22july2013 said:

A small part of my job was writing and updating a "digital certificate policy" for my government, which includes a section on identity-proofing, and the document was approximately 100 pages in length. Voting with a personal device (which I believe would have to use digital certificates, and therefore require certificate policies) is theoretically possible but opens up multiple cans of legal, procedural, and financial worms. And neither the article nor the comments have addressed the biggest problems. I don't think most people are even aware of what the issues even are.

I won't make a list of the problems, which would take tens of pages, but I'll tell you this. If it was easy, why doesn't Apple already do it? E.g., when I buy an iPhone, Apple has NO IDEA who I am (even if I buy it in an Apple store, [rather than Walmart] they didn't even require a credit card until recently, and even then, some credit cards are corporate and not personal.) I don't have to show them any ID to prove my identity. I could be an illegal alien. I could be a foreign diplomat. I could be a shared corporate phone. So exactly how does Apple propose that the government know who the person at the other end is, if Apple doesn't even know themselves? Is Apple going to rely on the identities provided by the telephone company which provides the wireless services? Wouldn't that be an important part of the process since Apple iPhones can be privately sold without informing Apple? And this is just 5% of the problem.

Most countries probably have their federal certificate policies online. Just google your country's own certificate policy and read it. I suspect that in the US only the federal government (no state government) has a certificate policy, and since voting is largely a state responsibility, each state would have to write one before any of this could work. I don't think the federal government has the constitutional authority to set up the certificate policy required for voting in the individual states. But the feds may have authority over voting in D.C., (also Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.) so that would be a good place to experiment, since it's such a geographically small zone, which is important when part of the policy involves visually verifying IDs to approve the device's certificate. If you can't get it going in a small jurisdiction first, then you certainly can't get it going nationwide.

The US probably won't be the first country to achieve voting on personal devices. It might be one of the last to get there due to constitutional issues. It's more likely that some dictatorship which already holds everyone's personal information can achieve this first. I can certainly see a country like China, which recently introduced digital currency, attempting this in the near future, since they are heavily invested into tracking their people already. Of course they don't have elections in dictatorships, but I can see China wanting to prove their technological superiority (and at the same time improve on their ability to track citizens.) My bet would be on Singapore getting there first. They have an interest in these sorts of technologies, and they have a good mix of high tech, small geography, and a very dominant single political party to make this happen fast, if they want to.

Happy_Noodle_Boy said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

Happy_Noodle_Boy said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

Happy_Noodle_Boy said:

lpaaaapl said:

Deirdre O’Brien

Yeah, serious oversight on the part of AI to leave her off the list of potential candies. 

Read up.

"She was considered, but not included. She has no real technical chops, and seems like she'd be below our "third tier." She's 55 at present, in a decade, she'll be 65."

I read it when I posted. It's an opinion piece right? I have a different opinion. 

Sure! You're welcome to think it was an oversight -- but the facts are, it wasn't. She was, in fact, considered.

This is a semantic thing.

Oversight: an inadvertent omission or error. 

I'm not saying the error was not considering her, I'm saying leaving her off the list is the error. 

elijahg said:

I think Federighi would be great. He'd put the products and engineering first as Jobs did, not profit like Cook (and likely any operations guy) does. He has charisma, he's funny, he is genuinely passionate about the products, he is obviously a very smart guy. It'd be great to have someone at the top who actually uses all the products the company produces, someone who is hands on in the engineering as Jobs was - someone who understands the limitations, the usability, the bugs and the functionality too. Someone who is a "power user" who understands the needs of those who need more than Pages and two USB C ports. He is much more Jobsian than Cook ever could be.