I’ve long been against the concept of electronic counting of votes on account of the possibility of subverting them. Dave Bismark describes a cryptographic system that short circuits all of that by making the elections completely verifiable while maintaining anonymity of the voter. The idea of publishing the entire data corpus of every election as a mater of course is a fair bit more freeing our data than a couple of hundred CSV files.

I’m sure there are still some attacks against the system. One that springs to mind is vote stuffing. Any “ghost voters” won’t be checking their own votes and no one else can although you might be able to find them statistically.

Of course experience with the e-Petition site has shown governments are quite capable of ignoring causes with popular support. There are also issue of selection bias, astro-turfing and inclusion of people without broadband connections. However it’s an interesting experiment and we’ll see where it goes.