Is OnlinePrimary.us a “Showcase of Naivete?”
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008Zoli Erdos, having read about OnlinePrimary on ReadWriteWeb, has branded it a “showcase of naivete.” An excerpt:
I think the critical issues all boil down to these points:
- Identification / Verification of who votes (did not ask for any)
- How many times can you vote (I just voted twice)
- Can your vote be tampered with (sure…)
Plain and simple. Not so plain and simple to resolve. And this simple webform does not attempt to address any of these issues.
In a comment to Zoli’s post, I responded…
…it’s not naivete that has kept OnlinePrimary.us from addressing the issues of voter identification and non-duplication. It’s lack of ability to leverage the machinery of the state. In the OLP illustration, one must assume the ID and non-duplication problem could and would be solved … via some state-assigned unique and non-predictable ID at the time of voter registration. (I use UUIDs in the OnlinePrimary illustration, but assign them at the time of voting rather than in a preliminary registration step.) A more troublesome design issue for me is preserving the auditability of the system while strictly separating the voter’s unique ID from the votes cast by that ID. The intent of OnlinePrimary is to stimulate community dialogue on how to solve such issues as you raise, not to present a fait-acompli solution (though I’d love to present one if I had it all figured out).
As for voting twice, yes - in the absence of any “one ID - one vote” controls you can do it. The best OLP can offer in its present state as a barrier to “vote early and vote often” abuse is a not-terribly-sophisticated algorithm that assigns a “credibility score” to each vote. I didn’t want to limit a given IP address to a single vote, since computers are often shared. (In some cases, as at a public library, shared by many.) So I try to factor in recency and frequency of votes from a given IP address to arrive at a measure of credibility for each vote. It’s an intentionally porous screen right now, and Zoli slipped through it easily with his second vote. I haven’t exposed credibility scores on the siter yet, but I plan to, as well as providing a way for visitors to set a “minimum credibility” value as a filter on their view of the results.
Regarding the potential for tampering, I have some thoughts that I’ll share in a future post, but acknowledge that it’s not addressed in this simple illustration.
OnlinePrimary.us is indeed a “showcase” - but not of naivete, I hope. Rather it is intended as a showcase of possibilities that, with a lot of constructive criticism and input, we might be able to achieve.