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I think all of them should be subject to democratic control.
The three most controversial would be Property Rights, Religious Practice and Monetary Policy.
Property Rights are thoroughly undermined by taxation. What good is having 'property rights' if you're forced to give some fraction of your property to the state? You can't have a state without taxation.
Religious practice being beyond democratic control sounds good in theory but in practice it's thoroughly undermined. Polygamy is illegal in most places, as is female genital mutilation and a host of other religious practices. I'd argue that sharia law is a religious practice. There is no clear divide between religious practice and law.
There's an argument for the technocratic control of monetary policy on the basis that some pain is necessary for long-term gain, if politicians run wild they'll print too much money bribing voters. This is a legitimate argument. But technocratic control of monetary policy is just as easily undermined by lobbying and manipulation of banking and bailouts by elites. Monetary policy effectively means giving money to banks or manipulating their ability to generate money. Obviously bankers have a vested interest in this - and guess who runs central banks?
The alternative to democratic control is control by elite policymakers. These more knowledgeable actors also have their own special interests, which may diverge significantly from the rest of the country. They are often in a position to privatize the gains and socialize the losses of their decisions. They ought to be held more accountable. George W. Bush was formally responsible for starting an idiotic war on false pretences that squandered trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives and caused serious harm to US interests. And yet neither he nor Rumsfeld or anyone else was punished for this! If this was ancient Athens, he'd have been ostracised or worse. Woe to the generals who lose their wars. Even though Bush somehow managed to win the 2004 election, he wouldn't have been permanently safe. Why were so few of the Wall Street crooks who caused the GFC punished? Even if the public was prone to being deceived by the media, their anger could actually be vented on a target (including those who decieved them) after they realized what happened.
Lack of control breeds learned helplessness and indifference. Citizens should have much more power, voting via a cryptographically secured phone-app on all major issues. They decide what is a major issue by securing a certain number of votes for their suggestion. Direct digital democracy rather than leaving issues to bureaucrats.
I just randomly checked half of the FOMC committee members' Wikipedia articles. None ever mentions them working at a bank besides the Federal Reserve Bank.
Am I missing something here?
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While a cool idea, direct democracy via app would present an incredibly juicy target for cyber threats. I don't believe such a thing could be secured.
Well you'd need to bring in experts to design it from the bottom up. Not the sort of people who design government websites, people who know what they're doing.
If I can do banking from my phone, why can't I vote from my phone? Or desktop PC for that matter? In principle, I can pay my taxes from my phone and that is a much more important function for governance than voting.
Is does not matter how secure your system is if people can vote from their app at home, because you just send your hired thugs to go door-to-door to "remind" people about the vote and "let us take a look at your phone to make sure you understand what you are doing."
Banking is trackable by design and very easy to reverse.
A simple answer to that would be to add a feature where if you put in a certain code on login, you could make it appear from your end that you'd voted differently on certain questions. One username, two or more passwords. You'd have a preset for thugs coming in and saying 'This is MAGA country' and holding you at gunpoint until you revealed whether you voted for a border wall, not that this is a terribly likely scenario IMO.
Why don't you have a problem with the existing system? You could just get lots of mail-in ballots, fill them out yourself, allege that they're from legitimate voters and deliver them. There are many more ways of defrauding the paper system. Voter suppression, everything that each side complains about.
The fact that I am criticizing your amazing new dreamed-up-in-5-minutes system does not mean that I have no problems with the current system.
There are lots of issues with mail-in ballots, and I have discussed them at length in other places. But this attack is impractical in nearly every location. I cannot say definitely that it never works anywhere, but if you have a particular place where you think it works, let me know so we can discuss that specifically.
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What if the thugs don't tell you which side they're thugging for until after you enter your code?
Can't you tell who they're thugging for based on dress or logical assumption?
Under our system, can't the thugs just go to the polls and look through what everyone voted for? They can't because hopefully police will stop them. The same applies to you in my system. Call the police. Or draw a gun and tell these strangers to get off your property! That's another answer.
I don't see how my proposal is qualitatively inferior to the existing system.
No.
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You could solve the above problems. Just let people vote multiple times, only counting their latest vote.
These theoretical thugs make sure I vote for Alice. They leave. I vote for Bob. They come back - there's no trace of my previous Bob vote. I guess they could make me vote for Alice again, but, once they leave, I can again vote for Bob.
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Because the secret ballot makes the latter much much harder to audit. If malware does a MITM attack on your banking app you'll eventually notice the bad transactions and malware guy will get hunted down like a dog. If you're able to review voting transactions after-the-fact, though, then your boss or husband or union leader or whoever can pressure you can review them with you, to make sure you voted the "right" way. So we strive to prevent that ... but in doing so we badly undercut our ability to detect all sorts of attacks.
IIRC there are ways around this with crypto systems that let you "verify" a vote for anyone but only you know which is the true verification, but then human error becomes a factor if you want to know whether an attack really occurred.
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People are really pessimistic about the possibility of this because we generally suck at security, but on paper it's doable. The math primitives required exist and are routinely used for cryptocurrency stuff.
Hell arguably it's already deployed for DAOs and actual decisions that affect non trivial sums have been made from completely online and anonymous votes. It just hasn't risen to the level of politics yet.
It's not the math I doubt, just the ability of professional developers to outsmart professional threat actors. The balance is very much on the offensive side right now, especially for people with state level resources. Imagine if North Korea or China's hackers could change US policy directly.
I am quite skeptical of crypto-voting systems for many reasons (particularly user education), but high-quality first-world security researchers will voluntarily throw massive amounts of resources for free at various implementations.
We can also come up with various attack scenarios and decide which ones to particularly defend against. There are lots of systems to choose from. Each individual implementation can be reviewed, tried in small mayoral elections first, and reviewed again.
If we had to do an E2E system for some reason, we could do it.
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I understand the issue, but then this is an issue with democracy in general. What if China could do that by bribing representatives (as they do) or financing propaganda (as they do)? And possibly an issue with any system of governance.
I'm quite familiar with how rickety infosec is in particular but I feel like when this is discussed people assume that the existing institutions are much more trustworthy than they assume in literally any other context.
The relative effort required is vastly different. Right now you need to compromise thousands of systems and individuals, in the app democracy scenario a single zero day could deliver you any policy you choose and nobody would be the wiser.
This is not how crypto-voting systems work.
You get the series of numbers from the voting system and can run them in your own computer, or even by hand with pencil and paper, and verify that your vote was counted.
The entire point of crypto verification is that you are not relying on someone else's computer. The threat model is the other person actively trying to screw you over, so "someone loaded a zero-day onto the voting equipment" is not even relevant.
I don't quite understand your reasoning here. What quality of crypto voting secures it? It's still software running on a client or server, yeah?
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The problem with infosec in the context of voting etc. is that it's much easier to interfere without getting caught (and from a continent away) and the magnitude of possible interference is much greater. Bribing senators scales linearly or exponentially in difficulty with each additional senator, changing one vote is as easy as changing 100,000 with electronic voting.
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