I have to warn that this is a work in progress and the authentication issue seems so massive that someone please alert the friendly trollls
mmm. as you might have guessed the system for direct voting relies on the vote-challenge-confirmation scheme used by many web based services ie. You get an email that says that "somebody (propably you) voted on these and these issues with your account and to confirm this you have to reply something to this message". As to the question of if this an adequate level of security will propably remain an disputable issue always, but will not propably crash the whole system due to the fact that people who feel that direct voting is not reliable can choose to view only the indirect votes, which are authenticated by cryptographically strong methods ie. GnuPG.
This permits several factions to develop and align behind different views, and for those who choose a faction or a point of view defined by a faction on one issue, it permits buy or not decisions to be made clearly. Without this facility, there will be less "green light" and "red light" clarity, and more "yellow light" ambiguity.