1) On your computer before being encoded and sent. This would require the installation of some sort of malware onto your system. If you’ve ever had a virus you know that can certainly happen but its preventable by exercising due diligence. Furthermore, it is not easy for a piece of malware to recognize that what you’re doing is voting, and even more difficult to send out the results of its snooping.

2) In transit. Assuming the vote is encoded with standard algorithms used in cryptography (every browser is enabled for this – thats what the little lock icon in the corner when you enter your password for a site means) and that no mathematical genius comes along proving P=NP, its not going to happen. Your vote would be safe at least until we get a serious quantum computer at which point I assume it would be directed at decoding in seconds every single piece of confidential information ever stored on any system anywhere.

3) In the government owned database where your votes are tracked. Ok, thats a possibility but not a particularly grievous one. Off the top of my head, if I was to design such a system I would associate your vote not with your card’s id number but with the output of some hash of your number. What this would mean is that given that you know your id number you can see and overwrite your vote, but it would be virtually impossible to reverse the process to find out which ID number is associated with a given hash.

If you are interested in learning more look into cryptography, RSA hashing, and public key algorithms. It’s really nifty stuff and the math behind it isn’t all that difficult, certainly nothing that someone whose taken college level math courses shouldn’t be able to handle.

we don’t need no stinking paper trail.

The most comical part of this is the rich, deeply textured irony. Here we all stand amidst the wreckage of an economic failure caused largely by placing trust in a series of schemes that hardly anyone bothered to really understand at a basic level….mortgage backed-securities, subprime loans, credit default swaps, , and so on. This was in turned backed by folks blithely reassuring us that real estate prices would only ever go up. “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” they told us.

And yet here’s someone advocating for the wider spread of a system of voting whose mechanics are ultimately far beyond the comprehension of 99.9% of the people. For the vast majority, how these things work becomes a black box, sooner or later. But I’m sure it’ll be fine.