Since the newspapers (and the financiers behind it) are too comfortable with an M5S / PD government that does nothing, and therefore leaves everything to others, little is said about what happens in the M5S. This is mainly due to the fascist narrative that is made of politics in the newspapers, but also to the deliberate misunderstanding of a problem.

That politics is narrated in a fascist way is there for all to see. The newspapers speak of currents, and portray them as absolute evil, whereas in other countries there is talk of "internal democracy" and currents are seen as an essential element of democracy. I don't mean, but there are countries where parties are obliged by law to hold formally verifiable elections to elect leadership. (it means that Forza Italia, M5S and others would be illegal).

The fact that parliamentarians do not all think the same way, or that the party does not always think the same way, is seen as a trauma, which in left-wing fascist parties often leads to splits, while in other parties it produces a narrative. of the unflattering press.

In the fascist narrative all parties must have "a leader" who "commands" and the others must have "party discipline". If you can't see the language of fascism here, you don't have salami on your eyes. You are salami you.

However, Grillo seemed to have found the universal inexorable solution zip war airgain: direct democracy is achieved using telematic tools. Since he relied on a company with practically no implementation skills (they are web advertisers, after all: if you don't know how to use even a Desktop Publishing program to make flyers for a pizzeria, you reduce yourself to this) the result was more pathetic than ridiculous. For this reason I am not talking about that pile of idiots who tried to rise to the "voice of the Net" when he knew little or nothing about the Net . If they knew it they would not be asking for citizenship income, after all.

When the story of online voting and the "rousseau" platform came out, as well as "the movement's operating system", (since that night I always imagine Grillo falling into his party's Swapfile, waving his arms in the dark as he falls screaming "change la swappineeeess !!! ") many experts started waving their arms shouting that any telematic system would be insecure (then they would withdraw the money from the ATM to pay for dinner, but remember that any telematic system is insecure and manipulable and no transaction is safe: they don't even believe it, according to what they say), and that therefore we must trust the "very safe" paper voting system, that is, a token that allows the use of countless tricks, from stencils who sign the vote to the numbered sections of small villages with the vote of preference to the scrutineers who mark the small signs agreed to sign the ballots (dots made in pencil, and more) to make an exchange vote.

Other futurists had waved their arms out saying that no, using a dedicated network like that of ATMs it would have been possible to achieve the same level of security as an ATM guarded by human presence (which exists for the duration of the elections) and therefore it would have been much more secure and anonymous than a paper based system.

But the biggest problem was ignored, which M5S is facing today in quarreling with Casaleggio Associati.

The fact that to have a good electronic voting system it is necessary that the manager of the electronic vote is not also a party to the vote.

When we talk about an electronic voting system, whether we are supporters or not, we are always talking about a NEUTRAL system. None of you would run an election on an electronic voting system run by a party running in the election.

On the contrary, the problem arose when one should have voted for or against the Rousseau platform… using the Rousseau platform. That is, they wanted to vote against Casaleggio's presence, using a platform managed by Casaleggio .

Here we go to the real problem of electronic voting: it needs an infrastructure that must be managed. What does it mean? It means that while for "normal" voting all that is needed is a space protected by the state, some printers and manufacturers of cartons and pencils, in the case of an electronic vote in an entire country, an infrastructure is needed.

It may be objected that an infrastructure is also used to print cards, cartons or supervise schools, but the point is that the printing house that prints the cards can be as friendly as you want with this party, but cannot print cards. capable of changing the outcome of the elections.

On the contrary, if we were to create an infrastructure that allows electronic voting, we would have to contract out some IT company, for the sole purpose of being able to do so. But any computer structure used (including blockchain) can manipulate the outcome of the vote, if only by refusing to register it (in a blockchain you could simply make sure that your transaction does not reach any quorum by adding dedicated code), and so on, the fraud is served.

Entrusting the contract to foreign companies would become even more difficult, since all the conspiracy theorists would go wild saying that "this American company, being American, does not want my party to win because it is afraid".

The problem, therefore, is not so much one of technology: it is one of legitimacy. Who certifies that the platform is neutral?

This is about the problem of M5S that you want to remove from Casaleggio boxes and you see the answer that by statute you have to vote on the Casaleggio platform, whose data are managed by Casaleggio, and whose algorithms are written by people from Casaleggio.

This is the real problem of electronic voting, or of direct democracy on the Net, which nobody wanted to notice. Let me be clear, the security problems are laughable if we trust those who build the infrastructure .

We can think of a system in which the municipality assigns me a token, a simple disposable smartcard with a cryptographic module for the Authorization, Authentication and Registration phase, I enter the seat, withdraw the card from the hands of the president and with that I go to the seat , where I find a kind of ATM, which like ATMs uses a network disconnected from the Internet, and leads directly to the mainframe of the Ministry of Defense. Who, possessing the cryptographic credentials of the smartcard, can know if it is authentic and validate the vote.

If the implementation is correct, such a system could hardly be manipulated, let's say that it would be more difficult than manipulating the paper vote.

The problem is that no one could really certify that the implementation is correct, and that it is neutral .

But let's be clear, you can't even certify the count: all we know is that a group of "scrutineers" will count the votes. If in a given provincial town there is a looming presence of a pervasive criminal force, so to speak, it is very possible that all the tellers feel threatened if they do not cancel enough ballots to the party they do not like.

Ultimately, therefore, the problem of electronic voting is identical to that of "normal" voting, on paper: the real difference is that we know how to make an electoral system SEEM neutral in the case of the paper system, while we do NOT know how to make an electronic system seem neutral.

All elections are tampered with, both on paper and in electronic systems. The problem is that giving a contract to some IT company automatically creates a conflict of interest, while with the vote on paper the conflict of interest is not the problem (and there are others).

Potentially, therefore, electronic voting is safer than the catastrophe that you get with the card (none of you would trust a credit card that works like the polling stations of a polling station) but it has the great advantage that the possible manipulator it's not obvious.

And entering into conflict with Casaleggio, the greatest prophet of online voting finds himself confronted with the problem of the neutrality of the electronic medium, in the first person.