35,765 Internet Votes Cast by Arizona Democrats

tgw writes, "According to the stats page of Election.com, 35,765 people cast votes remotely in what the Arizona Democrats believe to be the first legally binding public election in the world conducted via the Internet. This number is almost triple the 12,800 people which voted in Arizona's 1996 Democratic Primary. For those unable to view the stats page a screenshot of it is available here. 'Remote Voting' in the Arizona Democratic Primary was allowed via any Internet-connected computer from Tuesday (3/7) through midnight on Friday (3/10). The election concludes on Saturday (3/11) when people can cast votes only from the 124 designated polling places - using either a computer or paper ballot to cast their vote."

Comments

WHY IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT BOTCHED IMPLEMENTATION

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Arizona. A friend came by with his voting info and we punched in the URL. He accepted the disclaimer. He entered his PIN. He entered his BIRTHDAY. He clicked 'yes, this is who I am'. He waited for the next page to load. I did not see if any of these pages were sent using SSL. The problem was, the last page, the VOTING page used a JAVA applet (I viewed source) that would not load on my Win 98 system using IE or Netscape. I wonder if I were the only one who had this problem. Quite honestly, I don't see WHY they felt the need to use a JAVA applet for this.

Please, don't tell me I needed to run Linux. (I do, but my Linux box was down this week.) My point is simply that if I had problems under Win98 with the voting page's JAVA applet, (Using 2 different browsers) than there are probably more people who did, too. That makes it a poor implementation in my book.

Why aren't people discussing the how?

A Success Story

[sinator]

This may sound like a shameless plug but at least it's on topic ;-)

I am one of the programmers for The College of William and Mary's student community, The Student Information Network. We've been providing essential student services for over two years (log in as 'guest' and check it out), and we're entirely student run.

Which means, of course, when the time came to run the student elections online, everyone was worried that apathy and ballot stuffing would come to the fore. On February 29, 2000, the entire student body had the chance to vote from any web browser. Needless to say, we had a lot of sleepless nights ;-) but we managed to pull off a fair election.

The results were spectacular!

• So here were the results
• To those who said that voting online was more inconvenient than voting at a dining hall (we set up computer stations at dining halls, and public access computer labs could be used for voting as well) -- we had a 43% voter turnout.
• To those who feared ballot stuffing -- We monitored the logs at all times and maintained many many backups of our PGP encrypted database. It was a fair election.

It may be noted humorously that, as befits most college elections, a lot of people ran for positions unopposed -- why fear ballot stuffing then ;-)

In conclusion, not only am I showing that online elections are doable, but that they are a pleasure to do. If I'm not mistaken, that makes us the first university to have full, binding student body elections entirely online in the nation. Can someone show a date of such an election earlier than Feb 29, 2000 in case we are wrong? I'm curious.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled grits.

Problems in Electronic Voting...

[trims]

I've got my handy copy of Applied Crypto around here, and looked up the section on voting. I would like a bit more information about the actual mechanics of the AZ vote before I would say it's a step in the right direction.

Requirements for Electronic (Internet) Voting, such that the vote would meet normal US voting standards:

1. Authenticity: the voter must be able to prove his/her identity with a very low chance of either being mistaken for someone else, or using a false identity.
2. Anonymity: Any vote that a person makes must not be able to be traced back to a specific person.
3. Verifiability: Any vote must be able to be verified that it came from an authenticated person. However, as per the previous requirement, it should not be able to prove that a specific vote came from a specific person.
4. Security: The voting system must defeat attempts to ballot stuff (attempts by a single voter to vote more than once) and for ballot forgery (attempts by the vote-collecting/counting authority to manufacture/alter votes)

According to Applied Crypto, these are very hard to accomplish. Alot of the problems are centered around where you place trust in the voting system. In ther AZ election, I saw misplaced trust (ie, potential violations of the above principles) in three places:

1. Verification wasn't strong enough. Given their "voter authentication system", I'm note really sure that I would trust it's ability to insure identity. It looked rather primitive.
2. The voting process wasn't secure. What form of encryption was used to insure that the transmission of the vote was secure? SSL? (I didn't see it.) Even beyond that, what measures were taken to securely store the votes?
3. Vote tallying was in the hands of a private company. While this in and of itself isn't a condemnation of the system, did the company have to meet legal requirements on accountability? Was there anything about how it was to be provably insured that the vote was correct? Etc...

While interesting as a first step, I think that this was a good example of exactly how far we have to go before Internet voting can become real.

Nice Try, but Not Quite.

-Erik

Voter Turnout, Internet Voting, and Civic Duty...

[trims]

Unfortunately, in the US, the number of citizen that are eligible to vote which actually do is very low. Last I looked, for a nationwide campaign like the Presidency, about 15% of all eligible voters would vote come Nov 2000. Now, that's about 40% of all registered voters (since not everyone who is eligible actually registers). I've read that there is a similar situation in many other "western" democracies that don't have mandatory voting laws (yes, some countries are much better, but not many). Complacency in the system is a nasty disease that hurts a country.

A big argument (which you will see in previous posts) is that people who cannot be bothered to participate in their own future by voting should not be accomodates, and indeed, would be harmful if they were accomodated by a universal voting law. A similar argument is that if we force uneducated (about the candidates/issues, that is) voters to vote, then the system will be skewed towards unhealthy trends (ie, those with a high profile/large PR campaign/demogogues), since those uneducated voters will be unable to make meaningful decisions on complex issues.

I'd like to put out my views on this, and as how Internet/Electronic Voting might help solve some of our voter turnout problem...

• Voting should be compulsatory. Alot of people argue that by making voting mandatory, you remove the right of people to opt out of the system. Unfortunately, this really doesn't make rational sense. A more rational proposal would be an enforcable "None of the Above" vote (that is, if "None of the Above" would win a specific election, all candidates would lose, and be prohibited from running for that office on the subsequent re-vote). Citizen really need to participate in their government, for it to be a democracy. Only through direct participation can the benefits of a "true" democracy be available - otherwise, you end up with a "limited" democracy by default (the ancient Roman Republic was such a limited democracy). In a society of universal citizenship and universal rights, a limited democracy is an unsound fit.
• Voting isn't just a right, it's a Civic Duty. While being a citizen grants you certain rights (in the US, everything enumerated by the Constitution (and other stuff)), you are also required to perform certain duties for that priviledge of citizenship. In many Western democracies, military service is required for all citizens (in the US, we have the Selective Service). Jury duty is another civic responsibility. Without mandatory participation in these civic duties, the system as a whole suffers, and thus, there are penalties for those who shirk their civic duties. My argument is that voting is no different - everyone should participate for the good of the whole, and there should be penalties against those who refuse to pull their own weight.
• Universal voting does not mean rule-of-the-uneducated (voter). I love it when people somehow suggest that the average active voter is somehow more educated than the non-active voter. And I'm not talking about formal education or even intelligence here. Systems where only "interested" voters vote are heavily subject to what I call "issue stacking". That is, if a certain small minority of people are motivated to vote, they can dictate policy to the entire group. We see this in US politics all the time - you get high participation by certain special interest group (high participation driven primarily though targeted money spent in PR) that will skew the vote. With everyone voting, it is much harder to stack the vote through a small core constituency.

  Also, the relative education (voting-wise) of a person has alot to do with the ease of access to solid information. If large amounts of both summary and detailed position information is available in an easy-to-access format (see, the Web!), then voter education is much higher. Granted, there will be a considerable number of people who do not read this information, and are swayed by PR, but if managed properly, this percentage should not be a majority (or even a large minority).

• Internet Voting doesn't discriminate. What people seem to forget is that electronic-only voting is (and probably won't be for a very, very, very long time) not the only method of voting. Sure, by allowing Internet Voting, the people who vote online may be more wealthy/educated/whatever than a "typical" voter, byt all those "typical voters" can still vote traditionally. Alot of this is tied into voter turnout. With mandatory voting, there will not be any issues here - since everyone has to vote, how they vote is immaterial (as long as it is secure/verified/et al.) We should be doing everything to make voting easier for everyone. Knocking a voting method because it caters more to a certain percentage of people is stupid.

Oops, this is getting long. Conter-arguments, anyone?

;-)

-Erik

Re:Giving-in to lack of motivation

[Coward, Anonymous]

By your logic that people's votes should only count if they have to go out of their way to cast them, should we award multiple votes to people who live further away from voting centers and offer people who live close to a voting center a fraction of a vote? Should there be a bonus for people who don't have cars? Extra votes for people who are sick that day?

No, of course not. Everyone gets one vote becuase everyone is one citizen, period, end of sentence. It's the responsibility of the government to make our lives better, if they can make our lives easier (which they can with internet voting), then they have the responsibility to do so.

A little more info . . .

[ahogue]

I worked as an intern for Election.com (formerly Votation.com) this past summer, before they had signed the AZ democrats. A couple of brief insights:

• The first online election they did as a company this summer was for the IEEE. Believe me when I say that IEEE representatives went through the software with a fine-toothed comb, and made absolutely certain it was secure by their standards, which were extreemly strict. While I can't talk much about the software itself, suffice to say that just about any security problem you've thought of they thought of a long, long time ago, and fixed.
• As far as the anonymity of the elections, yes, this is difficult to preserve in a strict sense. However, as far as I know, the PINs and names are kept in completely separate databases and never cross-referenced at all. Valid PINs are generated independently of the voters. Election.com also obviously signs strict confidentiality agreements with the AZ democrats, etc, so the chances of vote tracking are remote (and illegal) at best. The PINs are also generated from a pool large enough to make the aforementioned "Birthday paradox" extreemly improbable. It would be infinitely easier to get a fake ID and walk into the physical polling place and stuff the ballot that way.
• As far as the disparity between different socio-economic classes, several of the press releases stated that an additional 29 polling places would be set up (above the traditional polling places) in under-privelidged neighborhoods to compensate.

Just on a personal note, regardless of my connections with the company, I think online voting is absolutely one of the best things that could happen to the democratic process in this nation. From the voter turnout in this election alone, we can see that many, many more voters have turned out to express their opinions in this election. Voting this way is not catering to the "lazy" voters out there, as was suggested. Rather, it is giving the opportunity for everyone to take part in their government without ever having to leave their desks. I think if this catches on in other states (and eventually nationally) the democratic process in this country will improve exponentially - more people will care more about what is going on in their government, and for once, more people will do something about it.

Giving-in to lack of motivation

[dogberto]

Back in a U.S. History class a few years ago, my teacher was discussing the topic of low voter turn out rates and registration rates. In his discussion, he mentioned a case in which a congressman proposed that all U.S. citizens be automatically registered in order to see a higher voting rate. However, that idea was shot down quite quickly by another congressman who indicated that we should not register people who are too lazy to put in the time and effort to obtain an application and register to vote. There were no rebuttals.

In some senses, voting via the internet seems to fall along similar lines. Such an action seems to be giving-in the people who are not motivated enough to drive to the polls to cast their votes. The above action should thus be avoided.

Re:The U.S. Constitution DEMANDS gun control

[Arctic Fox]

You're definately on the right track here, but let me guide you back on course.....
The Amendments to the Constitution, and the Constituion in general is for limiting the powers of the Federal government. Look at the 10th amendment for proof. The text of the Declaration of Independance (which most of the Constitutional delegates also signed) says, "...that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Because it is an amendment, does not make it so.
To the gun thing....in the next sentance or two after the unalienable thing is this: "...that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." So to the gun-control advocates I say this... If a goverment cannot trust is citizens to be armed, why must the citizen trust the goverment? The Framers knew that personal possession of firearms was *critical* to any people being able to keep their government in check. Hell, when Redcoats are facing you with muskets, all the name calling and rock throwing won't get them to listen to you.

(stepping off the soapbox)

What kind of security do they have? Not much.

[ratsdliw]

It's a great idea that you can now vote online. The process looks simple. You type in a pin number that they sent to you a few weeks earlier, cast your vote, and your all set.

I see one big problem with this.
Aren't elections suppose to be annoymous? Can't they simply track your voting record by cross-referencing it with your pin number?

Another thing that worries me about this is that the pages don't look SECURE. When IE is on a secure page the icon of a webpage turns golden. They have a bunch of screen-shots and the icon doesn't look golden. You can grab them here. Wouldn't this be a little problem? Hmmmm.