#internet voting

By the Editorial Kennel In what was supposed to be a lighthearted, end-of-year tradition, Political Party Animals has officially scrapped its annual vote for Best Political Mascot, after a routine audit revealed that an astronomically suspicious number of online votes for the Democrats’ Donkey were being cast from IP addresses located in China, Russia, and Iran. According to internal logs, the…

Indian citizens have been demanding the right to vote online for many years now. Non-Resident Indians and other citizens have even moved to the Supreme Court demanding the right to vote online. The Supreme Court has asked the government and the Election Commission to find solutions for these non-resident voters to be able to vote.

However, to date, the government has not shown real initiative. Politicians make a lot of noise about the need to adopt advanced technology, but when it comes to the election, they want to go back to primitive paper-based voting as it is easier to manipulate.

Recently, Bihar announced that the Bihar State Election Commission (BSEC) is introducing online voting via a mobile app in the municiple elections. The news has created a lot of excitement in the media and among the citizens. This is an amazing initiative by BSEC, and they should be applauded for it.

Right focus – EASE OF USE

I used to work for a nonprofit. A one of our fundraisers, the topic of internet voting came up. I said I thought it was interesting that the internet was considered secure enough for banking and medical information, but not for casting a vote.

One of the attendees said, “Terrible idea. Currently, bad actors could only change the outcome of an election by hacking dozens or even hundreds of individual, separate voting machines. A centralized online voting system would be a magnet for hackers, and it would be guaranteed to get taken over by one group or another.”

I said, “So the more you centralize power and influence, the more likely it is to be taken over by bad people?”

How to win online voting competitions or contest easily

Win Online Voting Competitions

Online voting competitions are not a new thing. They have been around for a while now. But as the number of people using different social media platforms increased more people got to know about these competitions. These online contests and competitions are now one of the most famous things on the internet these days and the number of people participating in them is…

By Victoria Richards. There is a belief, at least in democratic societies, that every individual has a right, and the responsibility, to vote and participate within the civic/political arena.  We b...

Yesterday, I was chatting with my dad about the implications of the Oculus VR acquisition (still a good thing), and specifically, the crazy fan backlash against it. While we were talking, he said something interesting:

“I was reading the comments on Palmer Luckey’s reddit post, and it was incredible. The comments were universally negative.”

I wasn’t entirely surprised, but it also made me wonder - was it really universally negative? My knee-jerk reaction was negative too, so I expected gobs of negativity, but there have been plenty of cooler heads that have come out at least cautiously optimistic. Was that optimism really just limited to journos and developer celebrities, too removed from the real people to have a similar reaction?

I didn’t think so, so I headed to the comments to do some investigation…

Negativity? Check. And just LOOK at all those upvotes! Scrolling through the comments, sorted by the default by ‘Best’ comments, it looked like my dad was right. The response was overwhelmingly, shockingly negative. You could scroll through comments for DAYS before seeing anything remotely positive. But I wasn’t ready to give up yet, so I changed the comment sorting from ‘Best’ to ‘Controversial’. And wow, what a difference it made:

There’s still plenty of negativity mixed in, but now the response looks WAY more balanced. And that seems more real to me. And this, ladies and gentleman, is why voting systems in comments are a terrible idea. And Reddit goes a step further than just allowing voting - if a comment receives too many downvotes, it gets hidden by default, and you have to click a button to expand it. For example:

A couple things to notice. First of all, there’s no indication whatsoever just how far below the “threshold” this comment was, or, indeed, what that threshold is. It screams “Hey man, this is a really awful comment. Open it at your own risk.” And we all know how terrible the internet can be, right? That’s one heck of a risk. But, for the sake of Science, I took one for the team and opened up this horrible thing:

MY EYES! THE GOGGLES… THEY DO NOTHI… oh, wait, that’s actually a super reasonable opinion, followed up with another person agreeing with him. For this sin, the comment was banished to the nether realm supposedly reserved for comments about eating babies or hitler or other such Internet-horribleness.

Also of note: it got hidden with a score of -10. Keep in mind that the upvote/downvote count next to the total is essentially fictional, and only the total is correct. So it’s impossible to say whether this post got 0 upvotes and 10 downvotes, or 100 upvotes and 110 downvotes, but the fact is, a net difference of 10 people not liking what the post said was enough to banish it to comment-hell. That is absolutely silly. Let’s do some napkin math here. That post has nearly 6,000 comments on it. Let’s be really, really generous and assume that 10% of the people who read the post then went and made a comment (I bet its really closer to 1%, or maybe even .1%). That means that 60,000 people were looking at this post, reading comments. That means that those 10 net people who didn’t like that post represent 0.01667% of the audience. If you use 1% instead, it’s .0016%! This is giving an INSANE amount of power to an absolutely infinitesimal portion of the audience.

The other side of comment voting - upvoting - holds true as well. If you look at the ‘Best’ sort, one of the top comments is a long one about how disappointed the person is in Palmer and the rest of the team at Oculus VR. It has 3751 net upvotes. If we use our figures from before, that corresponds to between 0.6% and 6% of the total audience of the post. Less ridiculous than the earlier negative example, but still a crazy minority compared to the number of eyeballs that were on this post. Just so we’re clear, the post is good - thoughtful and earnest and not at all vitriol-laden. I don’t agree with his opinion in the slightest, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be able to share it. What I don’t agree with is this idea that because a few percent of the audience feels the same way, that it should be presented as the best comment, ahead of all other comments. Nothing about it is better than that comment above, that got -10 votes and was doomed to never be looked at again, other than it is expressing the right opinion. Where “right” is defined by this very active, very loud minority.