How can it be implemented without any risk of deception or sabotage in the democratic process?
Citizens could vote on all new laws or changes to laws by using modern computer technology and the use of the Internet.
Everyone has a mobile phone. This is an Internet-connected computer. The government could create a special voting app for the mobile phone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer that will
- provide guidance on upcoming referendums,
- verify the identity of the user of the computer device and
- securely send the data to a central government computer that will collect the votes and process them.
Providing guidance on upcoming referendums
The voting app will need to educate the voter on the background to each referendum and the probable effects of each voting choice that will be available on the day of the referendum.
One way this can be done is to randomly select a group of people to debate each referendum on national television. They will debate the background and the pros and cons of each choice that will be available.
Website resources can be prepared by qualified people to present background information on each referendum question and the pros and cons of each choice that will be available.
These qualified people will obviously need to be vetted to assure their qualification is relevant and they must obviously provide supporting evidence for each choice that will be available.
Verifying the identity of the mobile phone user
A small electronic device containing a computer chip that contains a hard coded unique identifier such as the national insurance number of one citizen, can be manufactured and given to each citizen. This device can appear to be similar to a USB memory stick.
This USB ID stick will be inserted or connected by cable to the mobile phone or other computer device such a laptop, desktop or tablet. It will then install a voting app onto the mobile phone or computer device and it will sign every piece of data it sends over the Internet with the signature of that USB ID stick thus establishing a relation between the data it transmits and the person handling it.
Securely sending the data to a central government computer
This is the realm of cryptography. Everyone who surfs the Internet encrypts data often. The padlock icon you see at the top of your web browser indicates that your connection to the website is encrypted.
Only intelligence agencies can probably decrypt certain encrypted data (I theorise), but we can use an open source technique of encryption that will be publicly available to scrutiny. The best scientific minds will be able to ensure that any encryption that our voting app uses is of a type that cannot be tampered with even by intelligence agencies.
Even so, the ultimate way to make the tampering of electronic voting data pointless is to make the results public. If each vote including the voter’s name, post code and their voting choice that they submitted via the voting app is uploaded to a website and publicised or made downloadable as a (rather large) file then everyone can verify the results of each referendum in a simple spreadsheet program such as LibreOffice Calc or Microsoft Excel.
The only reason against publicising a vote with a name and postcode is that certain family members may be violent towards another family member if they vote “the wrong way” however this is the realm of the police force who can investigate such occurrences which will probably be rare.
Additional methods of ensuring valid votes
To avoid undue or unwanted influence of the mass media, who are probably all controlled by people that do not have the interests of British citizens foremost in their mind, the time period between announcement of a referendum and voting taking place can be short, e.g. 24 or 48 hours.