Gadgetory

when you stop to think about it it is amazing how much of our lives has moved online you can work a full time job trade hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stocks and even meet your soulmate all without getting out of bed but one of the things we still can't do over the internet is vote and I'm not talking about Twitter polls but like real voting for things like the president or mayor and coroner but why we have a multi trillion-dollar digital economy that's managed online so what's so difficult about running an election without having to drag everyone out to a polling station well unsurprisingly one big issue is security online voting is subject to the same vulnerabilities as shopping over the internet but the concerns are actually more severe think about what happens if an attacker steals your credit card info I'm gonna try to buy something it's obviously not ideal but thanks to fraud protection algorithms and redundant record-keeping such incidents can often be resolved and you can get your money back but this is more challenging when it comes to voting not only our records kept by election authorities usually quite a bit thinner but in close elections even a few incidents of an attacker changing votes could alter the results of the entire election where the outcome at least theoretically affects everyone who voted the stakes simply aren't that high when someone's credit card number gets stolen also reliably tying a ballot to an individual voter undermines the secret ballot system which is used by most democracies to help ensure that neither the government nor anyone else can intimidate voters or seek retribution against someone for voting a certain way although jurisdictions that allow voting by mail or absentee voting try to tackle this issue by using two envelopes to keep the votes and the voters separate detecting fraud in an online election may be more likely to require tying a ballot back to an actual voter if irregularities arise in order to verify who a specific person actually voted for so if we want to avoid this we'd have to come up with some new case two fairly keep track of votes without compromising privacy too much but even if we do come up with such a system simply identifying who's actually eligible to vote through a browser could be difficult many places are currently grappling with just how much identification a potential voter should have to show when they register to vote or cast a ballot and moving elections online throws another wrinkle into the system although you could ask each person for something like a national ID number before voting there still isn't much of a way that the authorities can know that you didn't sell your vote or just allow a different person to vote in your place biometrics have been suggested as a solution but that could prove to be very costly but okay Linus can't someone just go into a physical polling place and give someone else's name and fraudulently cast a vote anyway well yes they could but studies have shown that in-person voter fraud in developed countries is fairly uncommon partly because it's difficult to find a bunch of people that are willing to participate in such a scheme and get them to go to the polls to cheat the system by comparison online it would be a lot easier for one person running a botnet to achieve the same results which I guess leads us perfectly to another obstacle even if you had a super secure voting infrastructure and a population that's dedicated to upholding the integrity of their elections there's no guarantee that individual users wouldn't have vote altering malware on their home PCs plenty of voters have a very limited grasp of technology and probably wouldn't be able to tell if their computer had been made part of a botnet or if they'd fallen victim to a phishing email that would redirect them to a site that would submit altered votes throw in the possibility of widespread computer errors as we've seen with electronic voting machines and these are ones that aren't even directly connected to the internet plus government-run servers trying to accommodate a massive amount of traffic on Election Day and it isn't that surprising that most places haven't jumped on the online voting hypetrain such as it is but this isn't to say though that we will never figure out a good way to conduct elections online for example Estonia is well known for holding its elections over the internet with its citizens using special national ID cards and readers to vote from home their government also says it keeps a close eye on proceedings to ensure fairness but would this system work in a much larger country a research study also indicated that estonia system is still vulnerable to outside attacks so the jury's kind of still out on this one and i don't expect it to rapidly catch on in other places anytime soon if we can figure it out online voting promises to not only save time and improve accuracy but also encourage more people to participate in civic life until then though I guess we'll just have to put up with standing in line on election day to get our I voted stickers so we can walk around with a sense of unwarranted self-importance afterwards today's video is brought to you by the mass drop Sennheiser HD 6xx headphones these are one of mass drops all-time bestsellers with over 50,000 units sold and I don't blame a single one of you who bought them because they sound fantastic they haven't changed the driver or sound structure compared to the HD 650 s so that means a nice balanced mid-range and natural sounding bass and the 10-foot cable has been replaced with a detachable six foot one based on community feedback it includes one eighth inch plug that is versatile enough for everyday use so you can plug it into pretty much anything and it comes with a quarter inch adapter and it also includes Sennheiser's long-term support so check out the link below to join the drop and get your own pair of HD 6xx headphones today we're gonna have that linked below so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos leave a comment with a video suggestion and don't forget to subscribe see subscribing is just like voting don't forget to do it and also even if you like do forget to do it anyway see subscribe doesn't have a deadline like voting so you can remember at any time come back and subscribe