I’m now a Senior Engineer at a German-owned Mobile Carrier in the Messaging Systems/Social Networking department.

Seeing first-hand how we deal with Short Messages, my first question is how we would get past dealing with private mobile carriers. Even if the Mobile Terminating vote ends at a government facility it has to pass through the voters carrier on the way to that endpoint.

First, most carriers can’t even handle the New Years rush of SMS’s, with statistics at high as a 30% failure rate and delays in the hours to days.

Second, the point from the phone to the carriers SMSC is completely open to tampering. Also, most carriers rely on a third party to actually hand off the message to a different carrier (or in this case, a government endpoint). That would mean routing all votes through a single point of failure and tampering.

I understand the desire to enable developing countries to vote, and latching onto the idea of cellphones as they are more ubiquitous than computers, but I think the capacity issues and security issues would make it a near impossibility. I’d rather focus on a per-ward(/district/city) open voting platform with numerous standardized checks and safeguards (all visible, testable, and open to public scrutiny) that is then merged to a main open system and then tallied in real-time to the populace.