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The Perils Of E-Voting
ozric99 writes: "
Voting in your pajamas is unsafe. So says the latest study published by the Voting Integrity Project, a non-partisan group based in Arlington, Va. that has openly attacked the Arizona Democratic Party's Internet primary election in March." As far as I can tell, this comes down to an authentication issue -- much the problems that certain voting wards have had in the past, e.g. the recently dead mysteriously arising from their graves and voting.
Ctimes2
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Hee hee :) Thanks for that...
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
The goal of every conservatice should be to reduce spending. Some Republicans feel the best way to do it is to "starve the beast", by which I mean cut taxes so far that government is then forced to make some hard choices... there's not much pressure to reduce waste when the budget is running surplusses. What you need to keep in mind about modern conservatives (by which I mean fiscal conservatives) is that their agenda is not just less money taken out of your paycheck (although that is part of it), but also to reduce the size of the federal government, which has wrested too much power from the states, cities, and people.
Democrats, on the other hand, are no so much anti-tax cut as they are pro-spending. The honest ones, like Walter Mondale, were willing to admit that all of those nifty federal programs cost money, and that high taxes are needed for them.
For most of his two terms, Bill Clinton has been very moderate and very honest about the books. He has raised taxes a little (we are still way below the pre-Reagan socialistic days), and has introduced a few targeted spending hikes, but he has also signed more Republican budget bills into law than Reagan and Bush combined.
The fact that there is a political scrum over the current budget proposal comes as no suprise. Clinton probably proposed it while knowing it would be rejected, specifically to resurrect the "do nothing congress" label that has worked so well for Clinton/Gore in the past.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
No we should gas them all, ridding us of an inconvenient burden on the state and save us billions a year. Idiot.
What's wrong with being a socialist anyway?
Some have suggested that the current paper system is not entirely anonymouse, but the point is that it is transparent. Maybe someone could figure out some way of deducing which ballot paper came from which voter, but here in the UK, counts occure in big halls with representatives from all the competing parties, press and council officials milling about. Doing any large scale ballot paper cross-referencing in this environment without anyone noticing would be seriously difficult.
I am not going to use any sort of electronic voting until the entire system (including source code) is open to full scruteny to ensure than anonymity is maintained.
The requirements are:
1) your vote cannot be connected to you
2) 1 person, 1 vote
3) only registered voters can vote
4) no 3rd party interception can change or read the votes (math level, not TCP/IP level. you need one small channel that can't be modified.)
5) you can verify that you voted 6) you can check who you voted for depending how paranoid we want to be, we can make the server not implement 5/6.
So here it is. You and the server exchange public keys. You verify the public key you are given against the MD5 hash on your card, to prove there is no middle-man attack happening.
You tell them you want to vote. they acknowledge.
Now, for simplification purposes, assume we are only voting on one candidate. its not too hard to see how to expand to many different options, but for now assume we want to decide on the president among n candidates.
You now build ten (or a hundred, or whatever) valid votes for candidate 1. It includes a GUID, created by selection of a random number from a 128bit keyspace (or 1024, or whatever is sufficient to reduce collision probability below 10^-100 or something equally insane). These are then passed through a blinding function, which obliterates the information if you don't have the blinding factor. In modern crypto, this is a simple as multiplication by a large number. You should now have 10 (or however many) votes for each candidate. the first vote for all the candidates need to share a GUID.
You then send all the votes to the central server. They decide they want to see all but number x. You send the relevant 9 (n-1) blinding factors. They then verify that all above proerties are true - votes number 1 has the same GUID for each candidate, they all vote for the same candidate (within each block), etc.
They then sign the remaining votes (DIFFERENT KEY PAIR from the one used for general communication). These are then sent back to you (encrypted and signed, of course). At this point, you have one vote for each candidate, all with the same GUID, validly formed, signed by vote central. your id number, key, name, etc are no longer in any way connected to this vote. You can now be paranoid, put the votes on disk, move to a different computer, etc. Select one vote and send it in. You have now voted.
the last two proerties we must verify are numbers 5 and 6. This is accomplished by vote central tracking GUIDs and posting corresponding votes, or by a GUID/vote request system, or whatever. complete post is bad, as it prematurely gives out results.
Mission accomplished.
This general problem has been discussed on several occasions in comp.risks. Here's an observation (from 1986) that may (still) be relevant:
[Traditional] systems appear to be
reasonably secure, but this is primarily due to effective vigilance (e.g.
poll watchers from each party). When enough of the "system" falls under the
effective control of a single organization then fraud becomes possible,
hence inevitable (e.g. Chicago under the Machine).
The "risk" involved in computerization of the ballot collection and counting
process is the centralization of much of the process under the control of a
single organization (hardware and software system). The challenge is to
assure that the resulting system is sufficiently distributed and subject to
routine checks so that the potential for fraud is not increased.
I decided that behaving ethically was the most nihilistic thing I could do. - Paul Pavel
Comments like this always remind me of the benefits of living in a semi-socialist European country. A society which allows a person (not just his/her business) to go bankrupt and doesn't take care of its members who need help is not a proper society at all.
And what makes you think that people who rely on public healthcare, for instance, can't take care of themselves? I have a good, well-paying job, but I still use the public health services. Why? Because it's good enough and I'd rather use my extra cash on that new computer, instead spending it on ridiculously expensive private healthcare. Oh yeah, I routinely use public transportation too. Should people who can't afford to purchase a car (and pay for its upkeep) not be traveling at all? Afterall, the people "who can take care of themselves" have to pay for all of this! It's just unfair, isn't it.
David Chaum pioneered cryptographic blinding, the technology he implemented in DigiCash with its concept of double spending. It has application to anonymous systems.
You could plausibly design some kind of system where citizens are given identities that they can use to spend via. online voting systems - its just another form of payment system.
This could actually be quite neat: because individuals could even 'give away' their votes to a representative (i.e. they like the local transhumanist party member so much, they transfer their votes to him and say 'vote as you please, I trust you').
The blinding technology ensures that people do not double vote, and it ensures that the votes are from authentic people, and it also preserves anonymity.
QED.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
Actually, electronic voting *is* unsafe.
t .html
I did my Master's work on this topic.
There are two major types of modern electronic voting schemes. The first type is based on the work of Fujioka, Okamoto, and Ohta (FOO). The second type is based on the work of Cramer (C).
For a good introduction to all of the problems associated with electronic voting, look up web publishings of Lorrie Cranor, who also developed a (FOO)-type scheme. A good link is http://www.ccrc.wustl.edu/~lorracks/sensus/hotlis
The major problems stem from trying to assure simultaneously that the election is tamper-proof, and that ballots are secret. This turns out to be very difficult. Even paper-ballot elections aren't really very good (e.g. Kennedy-Nixon presidential election, Chicago, "vote early, vote often"), but they have the virtue that to corrupt them an attacker must physically handle lots of pieces of paper in lots of different places.
(FOO)-type schemes try to use 'blind signatures' to let voters get a ballot using their real identities, then cast it using 'blinded' identities. However, blind signatures aren't perfect, and in particular schemes of this type let voters prove how they voted, which could lead to vote coercion or the selling of votes.
(C)-type schemes don't try to blind the identity of the voter. Instead, voters encrypt their ballots in a special manner, and submit them to a trusted group of individuals. This trusted group first combines all the encrypted ballots, then (by virtue of the special encryption) obtains the election result by decrypting the combination. Here, voters trust a relatively small group of officials not to collude to decrypt votes singly, thus revealing how each voter voted.
There is no clear solution to these problems, and the cutting edge is not 'good enough'. The election in Arizona did not use a type of scheme even as good as either of the ones I describe above. Instead, a private company is trusted to count and announce the results (BTW, it seems that nobody could prove that they did not invent the results they wanted), and to keep the identities of voters seperate from their votes (they have one database of voters vs. IDs, and another database of votes vs. IDs, and they swear that they won't cross-reference by ID).
Really, e-voting isn't ready for prime-time.
Really! If people cannot be bothered lifting their fat asses to go voting, why would making it easier be better? Would you rather have a lot of people voting randomly or for the person with the louder mouth? I don't.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Sig has a VERY good point. 80% of guns are owned by 10% of americans.
Absorb that real quick
These people are NOT going to lose their guns, hence they are a very vocal group that uses their right to vote.
Not a lot of people do that.. Hence these people get listened to and we still have guns (thanks?) to them. I believe it is to late to take firearms from people but thats not my point.
Its small minorities with rather extreme views one way or another who are heard.
Jeremy
If you think education is expensive, try ignornace
Actually, the networks have been pooling their reporters and are all using the same data for years now. This is why you never hear 3rd party results anymore in US elections because the media cartel decides when to cover or not cover a candidate and they've made a collective decision to not cover libertarians, greens, etc. with occasional exceptions for Reform.
DB
Neither is a voting booth.... or universal suffrage.... or representative democracy. It's a bit tougher to count tens of millions of votes than tens of thousands (In the case of the first known democracy; Athens with a citizen population of less than 20,000). Pottery shards in a basket just doesn't cut it anymore.
Even in Athens and Republican Rome though, election days were holidays and what passed for voter registration was handled by Philum or Tribe (respectively). In wonderfull America we have to take time off of work to register and vote which is, of course, harder for the poor than the rich.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
What if all voters were given some "voting" credits... each voter would be given the same number of voting credits. If a voter felt very strongly about an issue, s/he could use a lot of credits for that vote. For other issues that s/he didn't care much about, only one or two credits could be used.
In the end, each voter gets the same amount of influence as everyone else, but they get to express their opinions better.
A test of this could be done on Slashdot. A moderwould could be allowed to mark up a post anywhere from -0.5 points to 3.0 points. I find myself ignoring my moderator points because I don't feel that a lot of the posts are so wonderful that they should be marked up that much. Instead of having one person mark a post up 1.0 points, you could have 10 people mark it up 0.1 points. That would result in a more diverse and substantiated rating than you could get from a trigger-happy indiscriminating moderator.
--
Assuming that you're using an SQL database to store the results, disassociating the voter with the vote isn't that hard. Observe:
create table tally (
vote_id int primary key,
issue_id int,
candidate_id int
);
create table voted (
voter_id int primary key
);
Obviously, the database would need transaction and foreign key support, but you get the idea. When a vote is cast, a lookup is done in the voted table for the voter id. If no id is found, add the vote to the tally table, and add the voter id to the voted table.
While this will tell you who voted, it won't tell you who voted for what. It still leaves the problem of being absolutely certain that the person casting the vote is a person who should be voting.
Sorry, brain fart
Look at what's [not] happening in Congress right now: Clinton wants to get something done before he leaves office - for his 'legacy' - not the most honorable reason, but still...
So, he offers a compromise: Democrats pass Republican tax cuts in exchange for Republicans passing Democratic healthcare reforms. Sounds great. Everybody wins, right? Guess again.
Neither side agrees. Why? They want to have issues to distinguish themselves from the enemy for the upcoming elections.
Both sides agree that playing the center is no longer a viable strategy.
Browser? I barely know her!
As for using it for elections, I think that having universal GPS with the ability to report your location at any given time has it's own frightening consequences. You know that the FBI or other police forces will want access to be able to ask your cell phone where it is with a court order. Sort of scary if that kind of override is added into the device.
My personal feeling is that location verification is only part of the problem (and misses the main problem). Trusted third party identity verification that isn't centrally managed (yes, I know those are almost mutually exclusive) is going to be necessary. Something like your face, that you carry around, that other people know about, and people recognize.
Sujal
politics, food, music, life: FatMixx
And the question no one asks in these cases, is "Why were those people still on the voting lists?" I know there's talk in some cities (in the USA) of people going into graveyards and writing down names to register, but here in Cambridge, we have a huge "inactive" voting list of dead or moved people who just are never removed. If you're good at reading upside down, you can look at the voting list as they're finding your name and notice three or four other people still registered at your address who are just not going to be removed, ever.
Ballot stuffing is not assumed to be a big problem in this down, but the bloated rolls still are. In the last municipal election, a citizens action group wanted to get a challenged question on the ballot. They were told they had to have signatures from X percent of Cambridge voters. But because the percentage came out of all registered voters, not just the active list (those who voted in the last election) some folks estimated that they were asking for more signatures than there were real cambridge voters!
So when people talk about the dead voting, they're not just talking about a lack of control at the polls or on line or whathaveyou. They're also really talking about a lazy election commission not keeping the rolls in shape.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
At the beginning of this century, when the question of allowing women to vote arose, someone wrote in a newspaper that allowing them to vote was ridiculous because they will simply vote for the man with the best hat. Isn't that what electronic voting would be? People too lazy or uninterested to go voting would just browse the net, find the buttons for voting and will just vote for the candidate with the nicest button!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
I've seen dozens of stories around the whole "rising from the dead and voting" thing. Why are the dead always democrat? Don't republicians support dead rights? Is this a whole special interest group that republicians overlooked?
Finkployd
That's solving the wrong problem - while maybe it'd be nice to change your vote, it still doesn't change the fact that you'd be traceable because your "token" still is marked. And even if you do have checksums preventing J0hn Sc1p7 k1dd13 from creating phony tokens, once they validate and get a token, there's nothing to stop them from attempting to use it twice. The solution might be "don't associate John Doe with his token" but there's still a problem with that - it still might be possible to trace you to your ballot.
The original idea was "you validate, get a token. You go over to a different server, and vote." The problem was, then that token supposedly evaporated (I guess.). To make it so that I can't vote twice by figuring out what the token looks like means that the tokens need to be marked, so that the server can see if they've already been used. Even if in the database of registered voters there is no indication of what token they received, I'll bet it would be possible to look at database transaction logs for even just server transaction logs and figure it out.
Even assuming there's NO WAY server-side to figure out who voted for who, it still might be possible to figure out which token a certain person received and then via packet sniffing and cracked encryption figure out who voted for who. And in ellections, there's much more of a chance of people interested in doing that, so security through obscurity is even less of a solution here than it is anywhere else.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I found this report on their web server... don't bother looking for it because it seems to have disappeared. Huh.
"Insiders say that they decided to fix the problem after a person named "w3 r00ted ju! ph34r m3!!!" was elected Governer by a margin of 36,000 to 147. Police refuse to comment on the identity of this mysterious person; an anonymous source has stated that they are too busy due to those 147 people all having their credit card number stolen."
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
We have all the technology available to make a safe electronic voting system. Voting is a really simple problem:
1 - You need to establish that the voter is who he says he is.
2 - You need to establish that the voter is allowed to vote.
3 - You need to establish that the organization taking the votes can be trusted.
4 - You need to be able to control that the all of the above is done fairly in a democratic way.
Obviously, in many countries the existing, old way of voting does not meet these criteria. In those countries the voting process would actually improve and be more fair if it were implemented properly.
So on to the solutions:
1) Authentication: this can be done in several ways. A basic start is that all the people who are allowed to vote are registered somewhere. This is currently not true in every countries. I recall several scenes of third world countries actually using paint to mark the people who had voted! Once you have a database of people allowed to vote, you can sent them an invitation to vote (in the Netherlands people receive a voting card that they have to bring when they vote). In an electronic system a public key approach could be used: each voter receives a private key and only he can use that key to vote, the public key is stored in the central registration database.
2) legal votes, if you have a central DB, it is trivial to set a flag once somebody has voted (storing the actual choice would damage integrity of the system). So only people who are allowed to vote, can vote and they can do it only once.
3) Trustworthyness. Obviously delegating the voting to a private company with a propietary system is inherently unsafe. Both the organization as the system must be open and subject to public reviews. This is however not a technical problem and applies to regular voting as well. In countries where this is not properly arranged you see dead people voting and unpopular politicians being reelected.
4) Control. In a democratic system, a democratically elected person (e.g. the president)should hold the end responsibility for the voting process. I.e. if somebody screws with the votes, he should be held responsible. Of course a president cannot personally check the system, but he can see to it that trusted organizations and people deal with the voting.
So, to conclude, a good democracy, already has the last two points taken care of and should have no problems moving towards an electronic voting system. I think it is a mistake to assume that the current traditional way of voting is safe, after all, who counts the votes? Who checks whether a vote is legal. Who checks whether the voting process is fair?
Jilles
Um, I think women are a fairly large percentage of the voting population... around 50% in fact.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
Is there a central authority that monitors the transactions? If so, there is a conceivable system to ensure that doubling cannot occur. However, if there is no authenticating organization, then I can't come up with a theory to keep you from being able to make a machine that will cheat.
The problem is, if you know the internals of a deterministic system with no random factor (like a public/private key system), then you should be able to trick the card. Even a system that used a clock timer in conjunction with the amount of money transferred would be easy to compromise. At least, thats my understanding.
Any ideas, anybody?
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Well i have a Modex based smart card. That actually stores on the microchip on the card how much money I have stored on the card.
:), makes it very difficult to track money. This has actually make it quite popular since drug dealers and porn merchants no longer have to carry about huge wads of bank notes. It's estimated that there are people out there that have over $100,000 on a single card in their pocket. Roll on free speech
When I purchase something from a mondex aware retailer (few and far between) they have a little machine which takes my card and their card and transfers the amount of money between them.
There is no connection required to the bank so this is an ideal system to use on buses & taxis (not that any actually DO use it).
The shopkeeper at the end of the week will take their mondex card to the bank and shift the cash off it into a real account.
The problem is that the algorithm as I understand it would be very easily compromised if it were known. I see no reason why you couldn't build machines which 'accidentally' doubled the money as you transferred it.
There are also further problems brought up by systems like this. Mondex itself is actually qutie accountable, but the system used in sweden, kashkortt (forgive my spelling
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
...but this really isn't any different from any other form of voting. I can pretend to be a dead guy in person, or I can do it over the computer. But most politicians aren't smart enough to use a computer.
So here it is. We have millions of ATM's around the country spitting out cash. You go to them once or twice a week (if you lucky). They are going to be the ones putting up the bioscans first, so we give them a small tax break to host elections through the ATM's. Your ID is more accurately confirmed, security is naturally a little bit better (financial services and all), it'd be more convenient than finding the voting stations now, and to use dead voters you'd have to drag them to the ATM - but then the ATM's have camera's too, and you'd have to do alot of digging, which would really suck.
What do you all think? Or rather, how do make this a reality?
Ctimes2
PS- We could do a lot more with this type of thing too, like give you the opportunity to vote on local and state bills, see the basic information on candidates, etc. but lets not get ahead of ourselves. Voting first, overthrow of the current government second, progress third.
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
This was sooo obvously going to happen sooner or later. I mean, what can they possibly do to prevent knowledgeable people voting again, or FOR other people, not that i can see why any knowledgable people would want too, just some sad and lonely lamer... Anyway, what method of authentication were they planning to use on this thing? It was probably some shite digital signature or summit...
Of course, your wonderful ecosystem of politcal parties hasn't done you a whole lot of good, and it won't prevent the inevitable.
... i'm from duluth )
;-)
-JD
(PS: *cough cough* joke *hrmm* *cough*
In college, my hippie Poli Sci prof used to call the Libertarians, "the party so far to the right that they came back around to the left again."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Eggs crack when hitting the ground!
water is wet!
cats sleep in sunspots!
It's hardly newsworthy that electronic voting is full of perils. What *is* interesting is that anybody *doesn't* see why it's full of problems.
Also, he report doesn't go far enough. The secret ballot is a *very* big deal, and was instrumental in breaking some of the machines and company-controlled elections. Having noone in the booth with you, whether you like it or not, and no way for anyone to tell how you voted makes reprisals/vote-selling/preferences from voting impossible. Remote electronic voting is a direct assualt on the secret ballot, and a giant step backwards.
We vote for a fraction of the population (congressman) that are(presumably) smarter than the rest of us.
I don't ever remember voting for someone that I thought was smarter than me. Although, I admit sometimes I'll vote for someone because he doesn't appear to be as stupid as his opponent.
-- Freedom means letting other people do things you don't like.
I meant to comment on this in my last post, but your subject "Put the poor up against the wall!" is the same liberal non-argument which has been made time and time again. "You don't accept my views becuase you HATE the poor!" No, you did not use the word "hate," but that's really what it boils down to, isn't it?
You do realize that this is an ad hominem, don't you? Instead of responding to my argument, you accuse me of "hating" someone. If you can demonize me by labeling me as someone who "hates" someone, then you don't have to respond to my argument. Hillary Clinton has said several times, "I'm not going to dignify that hate speech," or something along the same lines.
Notice how the democrats like to call talk radio "hate radio." Notice how they have been using the phrases "hate crimes" and "hate speech." What is "hate speech" exactly? Well, it can be anything! Anything that you disagree with can be called "hate speech." And if "hate speech" is a "hate crime," and "hate crimes" are illegal, then how difficult is it to use the force of government to silence free speech?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Here is a new project attempting to provide a tool for groups to democratically write any sort of text: vvv.sourceforge.net. I believe it is related to this article.
I haven't thought deeply (yet) about authentification, anonymity and security, but as far as I can see, the bottom line rely on the administrator and how much you trust him... will he encrypt the database? Will he sell your data? Will he ensure his system is secure?
sorry for my url, altern is having legal trouble lately (douce france)
Look people, the Voting Integrity Project went to court to try and stop the internet primary, and lost. They tried arguing that the votes could be forged. So can real votes, and they're watching both intently. They tried arguing the Digital Divide. Wrong again, the court said, because the party took extensive steps to make sure the polling places were out in the rural areas, with several in each county. VIP tried to attack on a loss on anonymity, and lost again, because there is a double blind for ballots cast in polling places as well - in Arizona you sign in at the polling place, and they assign you a ballot number. The ballot is passed along, and later, if challenged, can be traced back to an individual voter. The electronic system worked similarly.
Being familiar with computers, I talked extensively with Arizona Democratic Party Chairman Mark Fleisher, Executive Director Cortland Coleman, consultants from Election.com, and state party lawyers. I expressed much concern about the setup because of the potential for DoS attack. They had actual humans sitting monitoring the severals round the clock, watching the votes tally up, looking for things symptomatic of a DoS attack, waiting to take action against it. You'll note that NO ATTACK OCCURRED.
Yes, I hammered them because their client software didn't support Macs - it was a Java error which tested out on some Macs, but not others. I'm a Mac user, and was denied the ability to vote from home on my G3. I was able to speak with a human at their tech support line without waiting on hold at 1:30 am in the morning who directed me to another location that I could vote from.
The long and short of it was that there were not really any major problems, no voting abnormalities, and turnout increased 622%. The electronic voting, combined with mail in voting and polling places, gave people more options to vote. regardless of the naysayers, I think it was a success and will likely be repeated soon. The "Voter Integrity Project" did not have a case then, and it doesn't now, either.
ObDisclaimer: I do not work for the Arizona Democratic Party, or election.com. I do not speak for my employer on this matter, and they have no position on the Arizona Democratic Party's electronic primary election. I am a lawyer, but there is no legal advice in this message for you. Before acting on anything in this message, please consult your own attorney.
==
"This is the nineties. You don't just go around punching people. You have to say something cool first."
what if the majority decides that black men should work for free, or that we should have a state religion?
That's not devil's advocacy at all. Precisely that happened in Germany early this century. Perhaps you have heard of the "Nazi" party?
Just substitute "Jew" for "black" and "Teutonic mystical babble" for "religion"...
This is why we have constitutions, so that we have *limited* democracy, not true democracy. True democracy is best defined as 'three wolves and a sheep voting on who's for dinner'.
Just goes to show the power of the word "representation", in conjunction with "voting".
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
This could be done by setting up something like an anonymizer service. Use two servers: one for the authentication, another for vote counting. Votes are sent, encrypted with the counter's public key, to the authentication server with the voter's digital sig. The authenticator checks to see if the sig is valid, if the person hasn't voted already, etc., then sends the vote on, still encrypted (since the authenticator doesn't have the counter's private key), to the counter. The counter verifies that the authenticator's signature is valid and logs the vote.
Simple. The authenticator doesn't know the contents of the vote, and the counter doesn't know who sent the vote.
Of course, you have to take it on faith that the authenticator and counter won't share data they shouldn't. But then, at the ballot box you have to take it on faith that they won't dust your ballot for fingerprints...
---
Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Why in California was the extremist Burton turned away in favor of the moderate Davis. Clinton is also a famous centrist moderate (who won his last election by a landslide).
Your Chomsky-esque comments about some greater conspiracy of marginalization is absurd.
You have only gained moderation on this because the average slashdotter knows even less about political theory and practice than yourself.
Actually, for this application you need higher anonimity standards than usual. For most applications, you do not need to be concerned about the user willfully giving up his anonymity. However, for voting, we must guarantee that the user cannot prove to a third party for which candidate he voted, even if we wanted. Indeed, if he could prove how he cast his vote, he could sell it, or cede to "mild" coercion.
With computer voting, proving how you voted is trivial: just let your buyer look over your shoulder as you cast your vote...or just give him your smartcard
Say no to software patents.
If the economy is humming, most people are happy most of the time and there's not much real difference between the candidates (or one of them doesn't scare the shit out of them due to negative ads), 50% turnout is actually pretty good. And despite your claim, the Presidential general election generally has the highest turnout.
Many other democracies have 90+% turnout, but what people forget is that these countries have stiff fines if people fail to vote. Try passing a law mandating a $100-250 fine for failure to vote here! (Besides, it would almost certainly be unconstitutional.)
Ironically, the highest turnout is in communist countries where every registered voter (who is also a member of the party) turns out to vote for the parties candidate. That, by itself, should tell you to take *any* number citing turnout percentages with a grain of salt.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
And there you have it. Another report to quietly edge the people away from the truth.
Yeah, when is the important issue of alien cow abductions going to rise to the top of the electoral agenda? Only when the special interest groups stop jamming the airwaves with "politics" and other such distractions.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
while I agree in theory, I don't think the "Rainbow Coalition" voters are any less informed that a person who got a Xtain Coalition "voter information guide" at their local church. Or the people who come out to the polls and vote straight party line. Its not that I think partyline voting is always evil - I just worry when they can do it just by looking at the ballot. My solution to uninformed voting would be to remove party affiliation from the ballot. If you want to vote party line, you should at least have to go to the trouble of finding out who your candidate is before you enter the voting booth.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
Actually - another thought, you could construct an interesting system, so that people could propose important issues as a proposal, and other citizens could sign that proposal - and having enough signatures means that the proposal is put up for popular referedum. The political system could become more democratic, something like Switzerland where periodic referendums occur all the time.
At the end of the day, the government is just a body of people wielding power to try and keep society stable (even if they have their vested interests, as does everyone). Legislation and laws are in some respect rules for how people and systems should interact and operate. I am sure you could codify some of these into provable cryptographic systems - the process of popular refendum and votes could become widespread with informational technology, and provide better feedback and input to the people that often 'think' that they know who they are representing, but are often out of touch with the people. That's my idealistic view - you don't want to hear my cynical perspective suggesting that the government is not their for the people, but just for itself (perhaps in United States, you call that the 'realist' perspective?).
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
I think that you are making a naive assumption about what online voting would do to voting patterns, specifically that if the government allowed people to vote online, more people would vote, and those extra people would be a representative cross-sample of eligible voters. While I think the former assumption is probably true, the second doesn't seem to follow. In fact, there is ample direct evidence that people with Internet access aren't a representative cross-section, as Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf is well aware =).
Seriously, the key to making voting fair is to make it, so far as possible, equally difficult for everybody to vote. Think about it: what if I took the richest fifth of the country and installed wireless secure voting antennas in their heads, so that they could vote just by thinking about it, and let the poorest four-fifths go to the polls normally. You would clearly expect the results to be unbiased towards the richest fifth? Naturally you would, because they will have close to 100% voter turn-out, whereas the poorer section will have the same voter turnout that they have always had (what are the figures for the last election? 20% or something like that?).
That is obviously undemocratic, and no sane politician would suggest implementing it. But, for some reason, when you change "wireless secure voting antenna" to "internet voting," people forget about it. But Internet access is still unevenly distributed across the economic scope of Americans, with the more wealthy spending far more time online per day than the less wealthy (think about it- what percent of people making over $100,000 a year have a computer with Internet access on their desks? What percent of people making $15,000 a year?). Online voting, even if implemented securely (which doesn't seem to be possible- security in voting means that you also have to be sure that nobody is buying votes, that the vote actually came from the person you think it is, not just their computer, and that a person votes only once, without at any point being able to link a person to a vote, authenticating that the person voting is eligible to vote, and a whole host of other problems that are not just a matter of finding a more secure crypto protocol) will actually tend away from democratic election and towards rule by people with easy ubiquitous internet access, which naturally are the IT professionals and not the grocery-store clerks.
In short, online voting is a bad idea that is impossible to implement anyway.
--
-jacob
-jacob
... and then the minority with rootkits can take advantage of the apathy of corporate software engineers.
DNA just wants to be free...
So open source the voting software. Sheesh.
The body who governs the election could even digitally sign the source code, the compiler & environment to be used (in advance,) and then anyone can re-make the voting software and verify that their binary matches the one being used via checksum.
And how many of the registered voters are real? There have been a number of voting frauds in the US where instead of the hassles of finding and reusing dead people, they just registered imaginary people. The present "Motor Voter Registration" makes it especially easy to register imaginary people.
It also makes it really hard to remove imaginary people. When I moved most recently I checked for registered voters at my new address. It went back several occupants. I found that I was still validly registered at my old address in my old precinct. And you needed a formal challenge hearing to remove these people. So for several years my address had less than 50% turnout.
You know, this actually reminds me of a short story, I think it was by Asimov, in which each election had only one Voter, drawn randomly from the populace.
The Global Supercomputer had enough information on the population that it could determine which way most people could vote... except for a certain amount of Randomness attributable to Human Nature. Thus, the Voter, to add the human element.
It was an interesting story. Anyone remember the name?
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
How much more different is this from absentee balloting. The only difference between Internet voting and absentee voting is the latency you go from 3 to 5 days to 3 to 5 seconds (your mileage will vary). There has never been enough fraud or it been too insecure with absentee voting to have them ever stop. Why is this any different? It is just quicker then the old system.
No one says I have to, but no one says you have to read Jon's stories either.
Yet out of the kindess of their hearts they let you stop them from showing up. Which would be nice for posts as well.
While the convenience of voting online seems kind of interesting, the potential for losing the anonymity that is a hallmark of our political process is scary. Obviously I would have to provide evidence of my identity, but I have to do that now. But voting by computer doesn't detach the identification process from the balloting process. I'm still using the very same connection that I authorized myself with to cast my vote. Now, those running the show would certainly take steps to keep the two processes separate, but clearly the potential for tracking votes by individuals is available, and if it's available, somebody at some point is going to try to take advantage of it.
Current "manual" polling decouples the process of identification from the process of voting. In fact, the next time you hit the polls, look at just how decoupled it is...you get your blank ballot and once it hits your hands, nobody at the polling place touches it again. You vote at a booth that is completely detached from the identification and registration tables. You place your sealed, anonymous ballot in a locked box along with hundreds of others.
What we have is a good system. It's truely anonymous. Yes, it's a little unweildy, but not only does it work, it works quite well. Now, I'm not paranoid, but I am very happy with the way our balloting system works, and I'd just as soon leave it alone.
=h=
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
That (in combination of the necessary and proper clause) is where it says that Medicare is a valid function of the government. Congress provides for the general welfare of the United States and so it is the duty of this government to ensure that we are all taken care of. Furthermore, you assume that a private solution may be found, and I tell you that there are those people out there for whom no one cares, though we don't care to admit that to ourselves. People without family. Jane and John Does walking amongst us who have no safety nets. And when they fall sick, only the government is left to provide for them.
I know all too well what the taxation rates are like (I work - a LOT), but you know what? If someone is making under 10 or 15 grand a year, I'm really not going to bear them any malice if they don't have to pay income taxes. They probably already have it tough enough.
One of the panels at CFP2K was about Internet voting. One of the most interesting comments made in that forum about the Arizona Primary was that people were having voting parties. That is, a bunch of people would go over to someone's house and infront of everyone, they would cast thier vote. Your ballot was no longer secret. Voter appathy is a very different problem from that of garaunteeing free and fair elections. After the novelty has worn off, voter appathy would be just as bad. Right now you have to go to a polling station, with Internet voting all you have to do is (my emphasis) hit a web site. This is still something active that the voter must do. The voter can still be just as busy, or forget, or be uninterested. Case in point, I've missed one online ieee election simply because I forgot about the notice I got in the mail (I put it in a safe place, so that I would remeber... doh!). The point is that the uninterested voter will remain uninterested no matter how easy you make it for him or her to vote. Sacrificing the integrity of the system to attempt to interest those who aren't is simply putting the cart before the horse.
We could all care less - I mean, yeah, I have an opinion... but will I go out and vote for it?
<flame>
The electoral system is, like any other process, garbage in, garbage out. You apparently are sufficiently pissed off at the garbage going in and out to talk about it, but not sufficiently pissed of about it to do something. This is because, you really aren't interested. Nothing matters enough to you to get involved. Or more precisely, you are comfortable enough in your life that getting involved is not high on your to do list. Public policy is exactly that, public. You (as member of the public) have to make your agenda heard, no one else will do it for you. So you cry, Technology will fix it, I will be heard not knowing what the problem really is. No, technology will break it. It will make it much harder for you to fix the problem (vote at work, under the watchfull eye of your employer, your job may depend on it), if you ever chose to get off your ass to fix it.
Stop belly aching, wahhhh... They're not listening to me, stand up for your self and set the agenda!
</flame>
--locust
adios karma
Well, if they're gunna go through all that trouble, they might as well just make u come and vote like u used to....
It's not a foundation, it's a development.
According to their FAQ, they only have around a half-million members. The last I heard, there were 270 million people in this country.
Browser? I barely know her!
She freely admitted that she had been called "so far to the left that she had lost radio contact with the lunatic fringe". I disagreed with her about everything, and had a great time in her class. I respect people that are smart enough to know their own bias.
Many of their stances are quite left of center, others quite far right.
That was the whole point of her joke. The LP is so dogmatic about scaling back governmetn, that they end up champions of a lot of causes that people normally associate with left-wingers, but they are completely inspired by thinkers like Burke, Voltaire, Toqueville, and other guys with french names that are hard to spell. Adam Smith is their Budda.
As for me, I have never been a member of their party, but confronted with a frat-boy Republican that is basically a dumber version of Bill Clinton, a Green schmuck who has made a career out of annoying punditry, a Reform guy who plays on racial fears to court the trailer trash vote, and a Democrat who thinks my pickup truck is more dangerous than an atom bomb and considers himself key to the evolution of the Internet, I may very well vote Libertarian this year.
I saw Harry Browne on PBS the other day, and he struck me as one of the few voices of reason in the entire election, and the only one with a Social Security plan that actually shows where all the money is coming from (sale of Federal assets to cover short term obligations while privatizing the system). He is not so delusional as to think he can win (unlike a certain wing-nut from the Green Party), but knows that he can advance his party's ideals a lot if he can muster up a slightly larger minority than he did 4 years ago.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
yes. i'd like uninformed mindless idiots to stop voting (regardless of whether or not they'd vote on my side). wouldn't you prefer people understand the issues they're voting on? if not, then why even bother to vote? just flip a coin.
How few?
i'd like a lot of people to stop voting; i get the impression that there are lots of ignorant, stupid voters out there.
Limited by education? Limited by taking a test? Limited by what?
currently they're limited by their own laziness and unwillingness to get off their asses and to the polls. personally, i'd like to see less of these go-vote movements (eg, rock the vote), and more movements to encourage people to educate themselves on issues before voting on them. if you don't understand what you're voting on, you shouldn't be voting!
Some places have very limited democracies. They're called /dictatorships/. We dont like those.
neither do i.
Whats going on is a recurrence of what has happened when a new "class" has been empowered to vote in this country - the status quo is being challenge and is scared.
what status quo are you refering to? democrats? republicans? both? if this new class is lazy ignorant people, i'd prefer that they don't vote.
Online voting now better enables the people that were too lazy to go out and vote, but cared enough to compose rants on the internet.
if someone doesn't care enough to even get off their ass to vote, do you really WANT them to?? i don't want every internet rant writer voting, either (assuming they fall into the ignorant or too lazy to goto the polls catagories).
you're also forgetting the online voting is EXTREMELY risky and VERY likely to be tampered with. it is IMPOSSIBLE for online voting to reach the level of security a physical polling center has.
It gives bite to our bark.
only if in their ignorance and laziness they happen to be on your side.
Arizona had its largest voter turnout in recent state history with internet voting. This scares the hell out of the politicians and those in control - they have an entirely new set of issues to deal with, because there are an entirely new demographic voting.
you're stuck in that mind-set of "more is good". voting is (or should be) about quality of voters, not quantity (though lots of quality voters isn't bad).
A very good example of increasing voter turnout causing unexpected results - Jesse Ventura - this is a state that had motor-voter registration, and Jesse managed to mobilize a large amount of disenchanted voters with common sense and straight talk.
as i've said, laziness and ignorance don't make for good voters. if someone doesn't want to vote, i say good!
huh? you'd rather have choas and random election results than informed voters? what's wrong with predictability?
blah, blah, blah.
lf.o
Nothing is stopping you in principle for weilding your Nerf Supermaxx, but you won't be able to do it enough times to affect the result of the ballot in a stastically significant way.
As others have already said, the risk with computer based voting is that if you can write nerf_supermaxx.java , to frig with the database, you can affect many more people than you can in person.
Here (San Mateo County, CA) we have paper ballots, machine-counted. The ballots are big mark-sensed sheets, like test forms. At the polling place, the voter checks in, poll-watchers from each party check them against the registered voter list, and the voter gets a serial-numbered ballot with a tear-off coupon bearing the serial number. The voter fills out the ballot using a heavy black pen. The ballot is then placed by the voter into the slot of the "ballot box", which resembles a portable dog kennel. The ballot box scans the ballot and drops it, neatly stacked, into the large translucent box below. At the end of the election, the box reports its results back to election HQ via modem, and the paper ballots in their sealed box go into storage in case there are any challenges. The paper ballots are sturdy enough that they can be recounted either by hand or by machine.
So results are available shortly after the polls close, and there's paper backup of everything. That's the way it should be. And it's a lot better than it was in several corrupt cities I've lived in.
I have read over many of the posts here, and I have several comments. I have studided internet democracy, and have even written a paper about it, available here, although that paper introduces something far beyond just casting a vote thorugh the web.
A large portion of the posts are about how people who want to vote online are too lazy to actually get up and walk to the polling place. It's not about being lazy, it's about accessibility. Not all employers allow people to leave work to vote, or I was extremely sick at the time of the last election. For the events you can forsee in advance, we have mail-in absentee ballots in every state, but mailing is even *more* prone to fraud than internet voting.
The next category of posts are about how it is fraud, and as I address above, it is very easy to fake your identity at the polling place, and extremely easy to fake it through mail. The internet has the ability to make this much more secure, by using OTP or such. People trust thier banking to the internet, and most people value thier own money a lot more than the governments. (i'm not trying to start an economic argument, i'm just stating a fact)
The next category of posts say that less informed voters will vote. This is not true. Currently, many people vote who get their political news spoon-fed through MSNBC or their local nightly news. They get little information on local politicians and as such vote purely on party lines, or because their friend told them to. Access to the internet affords much greater access to information, and people would be prone to read about the candidates before clicking submit on their vote.
The final category of posts that I have witnessed is fear for anonymity. Again, the internet has much more ability to be anonymous. A system where you authenticate to one system, then vote to another, or where your id is converted into a hash value, then input into a hash table, which is then tallied at the end, or any number of other solutions can guarantee anonymnity a lot more than the guy sitting at the polling place.
Internet voting (and as i say in my paper, coupled with internet deliberation) has the ability to make societies more democratic and alleviate many of the problems with traditional voting. Of all places, I expect slashdot least to fear this technology, but to embrace it and brainstorm ways to make it work. I don't think the time has quite come, but within a few years, this is a very viable and beneficial system.
-Alison
You nailed it. I remember reading that George Bush's campaign manager for Bush's first term became Bill Clinton's campaign manager for Clinton's second term. Both times, he had great success by using his triangle philosophy. This philosophy was to place the candidate right between opposing groups in three key areas. These areas were something like moral, financial, and social.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
I see your point there... however you slice it though change needs to be made.
Society as it stands right now is inept at dealing with the way or government operates. The way our government operates is inherently fsck'd to hell.
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
Actually, I think they're voting in the next internet election.
There is one group of people that do not have the right to vote, in my opinion.
People who do not pay ANY taxes, BUT receive government checks OTHER than social security do not have the right to Vote.
Why? I pay taxes. I pay a LOT of taxes. I think that I have more right to decide how my taxes are spent than someone who does not pay taxes and spends the tax money I pay.
I voted for Jesse Ventura because his campaign promise was to return the approximatly 1.4 Billion that Minnesota taxpayers paid in, back to us.
Now we got back less than 1/3 of that, and again year after year Minnesota collects a BILLION more than it had budgeted to spend.
Now Jesse is trying to spend it all, and does not want to give any back (as he promised).
Jesse will not get reelected.
um, perhaps because fewer than 50% of computer users are script kiddies? (although some days I do wonder...)
... or are you using some definition of "minority" that's not in the dictionary?
DNA just wants to be free...
I am getting damn tired of this strawman argument.
Few people are concerned about the possibility more LIVE people will vote. To be sure, we often question the wisdom of pushing apathetic and ignorant citizens into the voting booth, but nobody disputes the right of the LIVING to vote.
What terrifies us is the ease with which DEAD people vote when you eliminate all human contact from the process. Ditto our pets, fictional characters, resident and illegal aliens, citizens living (and voting) in other jurisdictions, etc. Some of us are also concerned that, to keep the total ballots cast reasonable, that the votes from the DEAD will actually replace the votes from the living.
This problem *must* be honestly addressed - and solved - or we'll see a massive civil unrest when "hot button" issues are decided by narrow margins. It will only take a few cases of election fraud to undermine confidence in all elections, and where are you when people refuse to obey controversial laws because they believe - with reason - that these laws were passed via fraud?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
For example, here in México there is a lot of vote buying by some political parties, and a lot of people try to force them to vote for that party (PRI). So even if the voting system is as SECURE AS EVER, with each person needing a password and login in to verify you, etc., some people could gather a lot of voters and watch them vote for that political party and maybe give them some food and money because they voted for them.
--
EHC
Here in the US, the extremists on the right are the Libertarian Party, and the Constitution Party. Extremists on the left include the Green Party, and visiting Canadians.
Most of the Democrats and Republicans are very mainstream, middle-of-the-road types, who only express rhetoric from one side or the other to rally support away from the minor parties.
(Canadians: Most of you are smart enough to tell that my negative comments about Canada are just jokes. I like Canada. As third-world nations go, it is one of my favorites. To those of you who can't seem to tell when I'm only kidding around: shut up, go back to your igloo, and keep lying to yourself about how much better the beer is up there.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
No, you ar esimply confusing Canadian parties like the Liberals and PCs with actual moderate or conservative parties - the truth is, both are absurdly liberal. To the point - the PCs never questioned the fact that Canada should have a state-run television station, regardless of the fact that it broadcast complete garbage when it wasn't broadcasting hockey.
No conservative party in Canada ever questiuoned whether Canada should continue to fund and absurdly mediocore education system, or an ridiculously moribund health care system, all state financed.
The US parties may be to the right of Canuck parties, but the point is that they are fairly closely aligned and similar.
I said, "Cramer (C)".
I think I meant to say, "Cohen (C)".
Sorry for the mix-up.
If you really believe you can trust a program just because you've read the source code, I strongly urge you to read Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust. In it, he shows that you can't trust any program on your system unless you wrote the assembler, linker, loader and compiler yourself. In machine code.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
No we should gas them all, ridding us of an inconvenient burden on the state and save us billions a year.
Strawman.
Idiot.
Ad hominem.
What's wrong with being a socialist anyway?
Several things: First, it takes money from those who achieve and gives it to those who don't. This income redistribution stands against the very notions of responsibiliy and justice. Second, socialist leaders always share the same quality: they believe that they know what's better for you than you do. Because of that, they are opposed to free speech, free expression, free press, and freedom in general.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Ok this is not a trivial problem, because Arizona managed to screw it up to a certain degree, but it can be done. The MIT grad (I hope he graduated) above hinted that good protocols existed, and here's an example off the top of my head:
Step 1: A long random bit field is given to each voter via mail. This is no more or less secure than vote by mail.
Step 2: The vote counter gets this field also.
Step 3: Voter goes to the poll page, and submits the first half of the key to the poll system 1. It is matched against the first halves of all the keys in the system. No match -> no vote else
match -> then send the second half of the key to a second vote system.
Step 4: Delete the entire key on the first system.
Step 5: Voter uses second half of key to authenticate with poll computer 2.
Step 6: Voter submits vote (protected by ssl or whatever) to system 2. Vote is paired with second half of key, and tallied.
Step 7: Second half of key is posted in public.
Step 8: If truely paranoid, destroy computer 1.
Result: Voter is anonymous. Voter is authenticated at levels better than what is curently in use. Dead people cannot vote unless they can get mail, which is more expensive than the current vote-the-dead schemes. Voter can prove the voted by matching second half of key to list of published keys that voted. No one else can prove that you voted. You can't prove how you voted, so you can't be bribed.
Executive Summary: Faster and more secure than current system.
If people can't be bothered to vote of their own accord, they shouldn't have a vote, since they likely have put no thought into their eventual choice. This is why I vigorously oppose movements like the Rainbow Coalition (Jesse Jackson and co.) who canvas neighborhoods to bring people out to vote.
Society would be better off if the people who have not researched their vote didn't get the opportunity to enter a ballot.
Currently, politicians get into office by NOT playing the middle.
In fact, roughly 60% of the electorate describes themselves as "centrist", and accordingly that is where both Bush and Gore have been trying to position themselves for the last four months. You may be confusing the primaries and general election. In the primaries GOP candidates especially are usually forced to play to the more conservative elements of the party because they tend to vote with far higher numbers than the general public; this is especially true when you've got scenarious like Pat Robertson telling all 2 million of the Christian Coalition which candidate to choose and watching them pretty much do it. There are a lot of huge conservative interest groups out there who can be motivated to turn out in force in the primaries, and because voter turnout in general is far lower in the primaries, they wield a lot of influence. Thus Bush was forced to into a very conservative position in the primaries - taking a hard line on abortion, coming out in favor of guns (NRA is another huge and vocal right wing interest group), and in general adopting most of the traditional GOP platform. McCain refused to do this on principle (and what a great, glorious man he is for that =] ) and lost.
This has been the dilemma of most Republican presidents - how to appear conservative enough to get the nod in the primaries and then moderate enough to win the general election. Dole was unable to do this, and lost because he was seen as too conservative. The ironic thing is that McCain would probably present a huge problem for Gore if he was the GOP candidate, because he appeals to 2 key blocks: disenfranchised voters and the center. Combined, they make a majority of the electorate, a majority which he would poll and probably win in November. However, he wasn't conservative enough to get the primary nod.
Now we see both candidates moving to court the center by moderating their stances - Bush especially. Bush established himself as a hard-line conservative not four months ago to get the primary vote, but right now he is trying to get into office by DEFINITELY playing the middle. The middle is where the votes are, which is why you will see Bush (and Gore too) tactfully moderating their platforms to make them palatable to the center:
Some of these programs are borderline social welfare, and if that's not a push towards the left, I don't know what is. This has all happened within the last three to four months, by the way - they are positions that he would have never dreamed of taking earlier in the year. So I'd say that, yes, he is courting the middle, because he knows that he, like all politicians, has to. That's how elections are won, my friend.
Al Gore has done basically the same thing - he initially took a turn hard left early on after the primaries, lost 10-15 points for it. He is waxing conservative on certain key issues now for obvious reason. I'm going to cut this long-winded post short, but suffice it to say that both the presidential candidates, and pretty much every other politician in America, will be courting the middle in the coming weeks.
As an aside, I've seen you "petrified and naked", Signal 11, and you look like a pretty young guy
With that in mind, I hope now you see the merits of this report, because it's right in a lot of areas. Contending that special interest groups control the general election is preposterous and a gross exaggeration. We had about 150 million people turn out in 1996. The idea that SIGs control all of them, or even a large number, is just dumb - obviously wrong. Please stop painting this as a case for "the man" holding us down - it's not. There are some valid concerns in the report, specifically that online voting should not get too widespread without a much better method of authentication. Think about if online voting were to proliferate, to the point where we were electing presidents with it. In an age where impovershed Russia has the ability to implant security bugs inside the wall of the top-level of the State department, how hard do you think it would be to hack into a computer and throw a couple million votes in a different direction, and then cover your tracks? Not very, especially not for a government with unlimited money and computing resources and personnel to throw at that problem. I'm just making this up, but you've got to see the danger here. I was not in favor of online voting in Arizona, and I'm not in favor of it spreading. Not only does it present an obvious security risk, but I think it's unfair and a bit undemocratic to make it so easy for a certain sect of voters (affluent, white males, who compose most of the Internet) to participate in elections, while still excluding people who have always been underrepresented. Maybe when everyone has Internet access, then we'll talk.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Duh! How do you verify that the voting server runs the software it claims to run? Think Quake cheaters.
In fact there's a simple, tested, working solution. Uh, well, not so simple, but working nevertheless. Anonymous e-cash protocols work for voting with minimal or no changes.
A government by the intelligent or the rich or the white or the male would be an aristocracy (or an oligarchy if you don't want the wealth connotation, I suppose))
Amusingly enough, I've always found it odd that people find the phrase "democratic communism" to be a pardox. Communism is by definition a democracy. Admittedly, the USSR and other supposedly communist countries have redefined the word a bit to more of a one-party rules all approach, but I think that fundamentally they at least contain some elements of democracy.
Speaking of which, how is Cuba's leader elected? Do they vote for ol' Fidel every year, or what?
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
What if we used smart cards and readers. You can get a smart card reader for pretty cheap wholesale. You get the reader when you register, and the card is sent via snail mail to your house.
Use the card for authentication, hence no dead voters that didn't register, and its cheaper than biometrics. I think that in bulk you can probably get cards for 0.50 or less and I bet readers for less than ten bucks. If you want to vote from home, just pay a small fee for that convienence. Or, the parties could pay for the readers and distribute them for free. Plus, then you could install readers in libraries, schools, and the home.
-"You'll have plenty of time to sleep when you're dead."
The reason why those shenanigans don't work in a polling station is obviously that the clerk would object if two persons tried to sneak into the same voting booth...
Say no to software patents.
election.com's system separates the voter and his PIN from his vote within his browser. The server never sees the two pieces of the user together.
"There's an ever increasing reliance on computers for calculating totals, without any serious testing to make sure that there aren't any overflow bugs. Rather than spending time correcting errors, the spend a lot of money on making it possible for comoputers to do even more."
for (long int i=0; i (less than) 250,000,000; i++)
{printf("Vote #%d received\n", i");
}
Are you suggesting that computers have overflow errors adding simple totals less than 250,000,000? If you know C/C++, are you suggesting that the above code will fail with any observable frequency?
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
I've got a couple of problems with online voting. Sure, it allows more people to vote but if people are too lazy to get to a poll then why cater to them? I really hate dumbing down to the lowest common denominator, or in this case lazying down. There are some valid reasons such as for shut ins but there are already mechanisms for that.
The more alarming thing to me is that nobody has yet built an internet based system that was capable of working through a denial of service attack. Most cities aren't homogeneous masses, they are clusters of people with common economic or social status. There are rich neighbourhoods and there are poor neighbourhoods. Depending on where you live there are Italian neighbourhoods and there are Chinese neighbourhoods and gay neighbourhoods and so on.
This dilineates the vote, voters from certain neighbourhoods are more likely to vote in a certain way. A denial of service attack against one or more target neighbourhoods effectively could sway the outcome of the vote.
It's theoretically possible to do this in real life of course. Stand in front of the poll station with a gun (popular in many of your favourite third world stations) but the repurcussions tend to be rather immediate and drastic.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
In this specific case: imagine that a large employer or union decided to endorse a candidate. Sure, it would be illegal, but that would not stop them from "reminding" employees to vote for the Favored Candidate, perhaps with the help of WinWhatWhere or other snooping software. It could make a difference in, say, San Francisco, where city employees all magically got a vacation day last year to campaign for Mayor Willie Brown...
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
You do realize that they do keep track of who voted for who. They're only supposed to access that data when there are indications of fraud. At least that's how they do it in Michigan.
I only used frontpage to prove that they can't even secure the stupidest program, imagine if someone knew what they were doing. The site is unsecure, and you are suppose to believe that they can guarantee that they can make voting online secure. That is my point. Sorry that I was not more specific.
republic (r-pblk)
n. Abbr. rep., Rep., Repub.
b. A nation that has such a political order.
b. A nation that has such a political order.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is precisely my thoughts on the topic. It does however seem that voting online would be the next logical step, seeing how Clinton just passed into law the ability for a digital signature from a so-called "smart card" to be admissible as proof of identity. This just has too man implications which are VERY serious and VERY bad. What happens when someone steals your verified identity online and votes for you? This is a very dangerous scenario. How would you know any different if the government itself wanted to fix the election? It could simply process your "voting transaction" right into the bit bucket, all the time confirming that your vote has been counted. then what does your vote count for? Online voting is a good idea in theory, but leaves too many areas for extremely easy and dangerous corruption. Built a better mouse trap? Build a smarter mouse. As much as elections cost these days, I am sure someone would be willing to pay a well educated cracker quite well to fix some of the votes. What we really need to get people to vote more today is to do things the way they used to: close every damn thing and give everyone the day off work for voting. People had no reason NOT to vote back then. But noone gets voting day off anymore. It just isn't as important as the corporate bottom-line anymore...
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Anyone stupid enough to consider that voting online is in a state where it can be used in a real life situation is living in a fantasy world - thanks to the backdoor actions of 15 year old hackers guaranteeing a fair vote is next to impossible, especially for an organisation like the government which has repeatedly shown its complete incompetence and ignorance when it comes to technology in general and the net in particular.
Why is anyone suprised?
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
An interesting interpretation, but one with which I must disagree. The phrase in question is, of course, "general welfare." What does "general welfare" mean? And to whom does it apply? According to the constitution, it applies to the "United States." Apparently you interpret this to mean, "Everyone has a right to health care, and the government shall take money from the rich in order to maintain this right." Tell me, where in the constitution is health care enumerated as a right?
Furthermore, if you agree that health care is part of America's "well being" for which the government (and not the private sector) is responsible, then, tell me, what else is part of America's "well being"? Do people have a "right" to be happy? Do people have a "right" to internet access and cable TV? Once you accept that some people have a "right" to plunder others' pockets, then the only thing left to decide is how much the government is allowed to take. Tell me, what's the limit?
Furthermore, you assume that a private solution may be found, and I tell you that there are those people out there for whom no one cares, though we don't care to admit that to ourselves.
I made no such assumption. Sometimes a private solution may not be found. Sometimes people will "fall through the cracks." But guess what! That happens with the shitty, inefficient government solution as well! Nothing will be perfect, that's just a fact of life. Furthermore, I am not obligated to care about anybody.
And when they fall sick, only the government is left to provide for them.
Do you not yet understand that the government "helps" people by robbing other people at gunpoint? What happens to me if I don't want to pay money into any of the government's bankrupt, immoral income redistribution schemes (Social Security springs to mind).
If someone is making under 10 or 15 grand a year, I'm really not going to bear them any malice if they don't have to pay income taxes.
Nor do I bear them any malice on behalf of the government's corrupt, income redistribution schemes. But you didn't answer the question. How much of the federal income tax is being paid by the top 50% of wage earners? If you need a hint, click here.
They probably already have it tough enough.
And whose fault is it that they're in a tough situation? Who should bear the responsiblity if they choose not to get educated and to spend their money on beer and cigarettes and have children that they can't afford to raise?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Sorry, but this is just too transparent. Currently, politicians get into office by NOT playing the middle. Think about it - who's more likely to show up at the polls - the average apathetic american voter, or the rapid right-wing one? This is why groups like the Christian Coalition and the National Organization of Women (NOW) are so influential - they take a very small percentage of the voter population and make sure most of them vote. Combined with low voter turnout we have our current system of special interest groups essentially running the country. Our politicians aren't blind to this either - you'll note why the media makes such a big deal out of seemingly innane stuff -
For example, think about the current issues in the next election: abortion, gun control, crime, technology, or religion in schools. You'll note none of those are extremes likely shared by your peers. We could all care less - I mean, yeah, I have an opinion... but will I go out and vote for it?
And there you have it. Another report to quietly edge the people away from the truth.
ATTEMPT TO USE TOKEN #1F-00031337-1337 - TOKEN INVALID: have some sort of checksum (like credit card numbers).
As well as:
ATTEMPT TO USE TOKEN #AA-01431940-F294 - TOKEN NOT YET VALIDATED: if they manage to figure out how to generate working tokens, can't use them until someone authenticates and gets them.
That, or you could simply have subsequent votes on the same token CHANGE the vote for that token.
--
Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
To my mind, society's original function was to provide safety in exchange for something.
I will assume that you intend to use the word "government" in place of "society."
In modern times, you get safety in exchange for the money you pay to the society (taxation).I fail to see what's wrong with this picture.
What's wrong with this picture is that government does a piss poor job of "protecting" its citizens. In my country, the Supreme Court has ruled more than once that police in any jurisdiction are not obligated to protect anybody. Furthermore, if governments are not providing 24-by-7 armed guards and attorneys for each and every citizen, then how could they possibly protect anyone? But we weren't discussing how government fails to protect people. We were discussing income redistribution and who is responsible for health care and other non-rights.
And regarding your stupid vs. smart people argument. It is far too simple to claim that poor people are poor because they are stupid. People get poor not only because of stupidity (which is, I admit, one possible reason) but, for example, because they simply got hit by the hard economic times they (and NO-ONE else) could not see beforehand.
Should you be forced to pay your money because someone else was stupid and irresponsible? Under the current system the poor get money regardless of what made them poor. And it's usually because they made decisions which made them poor, not because of hard economic times which affect everybody.
I'm not sucking on anything. I have paid my part of the expenses (taxation). The benefit of the shared system is that there are many people who supporting the system, so therefore I don't have to pay as much as I would have to if I used private clinics.
Just because you pay taxes doesn't prevent you from sucking as much plundered money out of the government as possible. And believe me, there are people who probably pay much more in taxes than you do, but get much less in return. How is that fair?
And it's not a "shared system." It's a government system.
And if there was no government system in place, and the medical industry was truly allowed to compete in the fair and open marketplace, then I guarantee that the price would go down. The very fact that so many people get to use government health care guarantees that the market for private health care will always be small and always be expensive.
I think it is a Moral Thing to share a part of your wealth as long as it doesn't affect your own standard of living. Give a dime to a beggar or donate several millions, it's all the same to me as long as you participate.
You did not answer my question. I asked you how it is fair that the government uses force to take money from one person and give it to another. You responded by telling me that charity was moral. I agree with you, charity is a moral thing. There are times when tragedy strikes, like when a hardworking family of four has their house burn down. Those are a perfect time for charity and usually a private solution is very effective.
Now, how is it fair that the government takes money, through force, from one person who earned it and gives it to another who didn't?
As for myself, I work hard for my money but I am glad that I can help others by sharing a part of my fortune. If it wasn't for the government, I'd be handing out a part of my income to charity. Call me stupid, call me naive, I don't care. Sharing gives me pleasure. Not because of some dogma or recognition (which I obviously don't get), but simply because I feel good about it.
I don't think you are stupid, but you might not yet have all of the facts which can help you make a good decision. The fact that you feel good about being charitable is a good thing, but what about those of us who disagree with the government's policies and want to see charitible acts function through a private solution? Too bad for me! I am forced to pay, and I go to jail or get shot if I refuse. You make is sound as if it's a willful, charitable thing, when, in fact, it's not. The government takes your money whether you like it or not.
Right now in the United States the top 50% of wage earners pay 95% of the income tax. That percentage is growing every year as the big-government types promise for tax cuts for the poor. Tell me, what happens when the top 49% of wage earners are paying 100% of the taxes? Will their votes matter after that point?
Apology accepted.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Not only do we need "a system that prevents the government or voting authority from tying votes to the voter", we need one that prevents family members/gurus/cult leaders/the computer owner/drill sargents/the boss from watching over the voter's shoulder. Or, for that matter, pushing the voter aside after authentication and casting a vote "for the good of the community".
However, authentication is obviously a very big problem. Maybe once all uk citizens carry smart ID cards then we can start to consider doing this but so many other problems have to be overcome first.
What is there to stop an email worm virus from posting votes for candidate X?
Also we all know just how well secured most government servers are and i'm sure that they would never be hacked by terrorists or bored 12 year olds.
Then of course you have the problem of closed source and i'm sure a zillion other people will point out that you cant trust a system until it is fully open sourced... but then I would rather the smart cards in my pocket are closed and that the cash i have stored on them is safe (be it in a proprietory format or not).
There was a report on a UK television programme a few years back concerning a diasabled woman who turned up to vote, but was told that her proxy had voted on her behalf. In the UK a proxy can be nominated to vote on your, but a voter can still vote before their nominated proxy, if needed.
It appeared that one of the local parties had been registering themselves as proxies for a number of local disabled people, then voting on their behalf. I don't think any charges were ever made, which was odd as the majority for this seat was very close.
Good points, I must say. I suppose if under a limited democracy, a particular group was being very unfairly treated, that is an obvious indicator that we need some social changes, and any government including no government would still enforce (or pseudo-enforce) this viewpoint on the populace. I mean to say in a purely capitalist government, if people are racist as a whole, then it doesn't matter if they are part of a democracy or an authoritarian regime or an anarchy, those whom are being targeted will be treated unfairly.
Any super-libertarians/right-wingers out there want to add something about the virute of little/no government?
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
You have to remember that encryption is a tool like any other, and its use or misuse is determined by personal ethics and law. In the same way that a gun advocate can advocate that every citizen should be able to bear arms while saying murder is bad, geeks have a seperation between "owning" and "using".
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You are a fucking moron.
"Only people who are knowledgable should vote."
Geez. That's one of the reasons they wouldn't let blacks vote 50 years ago. They would give out reading tests for voters. They could carefully screen out poor, uneducated, BLACK voters.
Let me tell you this. Anybody who is effected by legislation should have a say on who gets put there. Not everybody knows about all the issues, but everybody at least is knowledgable about one or two of them.
Letting a minority of people getting votes. That's not really democracy. That's fascism.
Voting should not be restricted to people who own land or have college degrees. Geez. What are y'all thinking!!! joel
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
Here is a thought. How do you authenticate a voter online is a valid registered voter and then keep their vote anonymous? 1. Prove you are John Doe 2. Ok, so you proved it with a pki certificate 3. Go ahead and tell me your vote now. I promise I won't divulge your vote and it is anonymous Mr. John Doe... Pandora's box.
Mensah keeps turning me down... Why?
"Some mud slung at times,
A good race," says Gore. "Now may
The best hacker win!"
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
vote at work, under the watchfull eye of your employer, your job may depend on it
Without a secure, physical, unique location to vote from, not only could they forge your digital identity and vote for you, but they could just as easily force you to vote for them right in front of them!
Scary.
lf.o
The Real Problem with online voting is not that it provides for the likelihood of hackers. I think a reasonable system can be implemented ultimately, and it's not as if physical voting fraud has been entirely eliminated. Never mind all that.
The Real Problem is the literacy test issue, which still haunts most of the country despite having been outlawed during the Reconstruction. It was once necessary for voters in some Southern states to pass a literacy test before voting, meaning that uneducated ex-slaves would be effectively unable to contribute to the democratic process despite the Constitution's 14th Amendment. Now online voting presents the opportunity for a new computer literacy test--if you've ever watched over the shoulder of a first-time Internet user at a public library, you'd probably see a frustrated person with little comprehension of what's going on. Computers aren't obvious, at least to most of the population! The "digital divide" really exist--I don't know figures off-hand, but essentially a lot of poor folks don't have computers, much less training or Internet access. This means that online voting, for the time being, poses a serious threat to democracy.
Republicans should be going nuts in favor of online voting and the elimination of any other means (although that probably won't happen). Luckily for them, most people wouldn't vote either way so maybe it won't make a difference.
Admittedly counteracting the poverty issue is the issue that elderly folks can't use computers either. They're more likely to vote conservative (by accident if not by choice (ask my Grandma)), so Republicans may pay as well for the conversion, should one ever occur. However online voting is fundamentally ideal for the elderly--not having to leave the house--and could be established in retirement homes.
Even though online voting does NOT mean the end of physical voting, surely the switch would change priorities, perhaps shrinking the number of physical polling places. I'm a big proponent of online voting, but it should not be established countrywide until it can be demonstrated that equal access is ensured. Democracy is only real when everyone has a voice.
Ben Chadwick - Editor, Zero Future/Post-Collegiate Malaise
"Greetings, Citizen. For the next four years, you will represent your district in the United States House of Representatives. You will report to Capitol Hill no later than..."
I dunno, I think it's a neat idea...
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Every time I vote at my local firehouse, I walk in, smile, a friendly election volunteer smiles back, and I vote. I *never* provide *any* proof of who I am. They never confirm my driver's license or voting card, or even my SSN. It's ridiculous. Who's protecting my vote? NOBODY!!!
I would assume that subtelty is a prerequisite for an attempt to affect the result of an election in a country with a strong rule of law.
The more people that Evil Overlord (tm) tries to illegally coerce, the more chances there are that the story might make the front page of the newspaper. And hence the courts might just force a rerun of the ballot.
Of course, this did not happen in Zimbabwe recently, despite independent observers saying that coercion was widespread. It seems that in practice the courts in that country are not independent of the government in any meaningful way. Or perhaps noone challenged the result.
Sure there are authentication issues, but is it any worse than the current system? A few years ago I remember reading about an election in Louisiana I think it was where the supporters of one of the candidates drove around rounding up people off the street on voting day. They took them to the election booths and got them to vote for the candidate they were supprting. I don't rememeber the details of how they made it work, but the current system is certainly not perfect.
Who runs the Smart Card system, and are they in widespread use already? I personally feel you should be able to see whatever info is on it. It's yours anyway. I can't conceive of why they wouldn't let you see it.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Here's a little politics continuum. You have left and right, and then you also have libertarian and authoritarian.
2 873
1 =1&p2=2&p3=2&p4=1&p5=2&e1=1&e2=1&e3=0&e4=0 &e5=0&pres=Ralph+Nader
http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html?clicktrade=37
I think that absolute libertarianess borders on the irresponsible (it IS in our constitutional charter to provide for the wellfare of ALL citizens), while absolute authoritarianess obviously brings a whole bag of liberty infringements. Yes, I thought Harry Browne had a lot of intelligent things to say. Both Browne and Nader agree that the war on drugs has essentially turned into a war on the people. But I think the total laissez faire economic policy of the Libertarian party is completely irresponsible and reprehensible. So this leaves me dead center with respect to libertarianess vs. authoritarianess. That leaves me as a "Left-Liberal" and the acurate description:
"Left-Liberals prefer self-government in personal matters and central decision-making on economics. They want government to serve the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Leftists tolerate social diversity, but work for economic equality."
Somebody called Nader a "wing-nut". I have no idea what they are talking about, and apparently they haven't spent much time listening to Nader. I am less pro-Green-party than I am pro-Nader. Of all places, we here on Slashdot, the internet community, should have realized by now the great force that megacorporations have, and the corruption they have brought to politics. Nader has been fighting this since the SIXTIES. This is nothing new. He is not some Johnny-come-lately jumping on the federal matching funds bandwagon. If you listen to him, you realize that this is a normal citizen, not some career politition. He takes this position reluctantly because no one else will. So I urge you, before commenting off the cuff how "wing-nut" a guy is, to actually listen to his ideas. Sure, perhaps the Green party has some kooks in it, I don't really know, but Nader is right on. There is not one thing this guy has uttered that I have not completely agreed with, which is so refreshing and surprising that I am going to donate to his campaign and vote for him. It's about time us "apathetic" silent majority get off our keisters and take back control of our country.
http://www.self-gov.org/cgi/sec.cgi?quiz=quiz&p
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I voted naked with hot grits in my lap. I should be safe then right?
;)
(sorry, just can't help it
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
And what you, good sir or madame, are showing is your own ignorance of the ideals this nation was founded on. Among the amendments to the constitution is one which forbids any states to enforce a poll tax on its citizens in order to vote. The poll tax was set so that the poor, most especially, the newly freed slaves, would be unable to vote in our elections. It was a means of weeding out the voices which the powerful did not want heard.
And likewise, what you show is an ignorance of what is currently happening in this country. Tell me, what percentage of the people in this country pay no income tax? Also, can you answer for me this: what percentage of income tax is paid by the top 50% of wage earners? If you can answer these questions, think of the Democrats' "wage cuts for the poor," and put two and two together, then you will probably realize a very frightening thing.
You do have a valid point though, and in my ire I spoke too soon. The poll tax was wrong and I agree that it was right to repeal it, and for the reasons which you mentioned. But I'm not talking about "the poor." I'm talking about those who are using government as an instrument of plunder in order to take money from the wage earners and fill their pockets with it. Tell me, isn't "public assistance" supposed to "help" people get out of poverty? Do you think that the people getting a free and guaranteed check from the government (which was taken from someone else) are going to vote to have those checks removed? Or do you think that they might rather vote for these to be increased?
When we introduce restraints on voting - tests, taxes, etc. - we give those in power a means of filtering out from the voting public those persons which would threaten their power.
Good point. At the same time, when we allow stupid people to vote, then these easily-manipulated people (who are receiving plundered money on behalf of the federal government) can also threaten freedom. Certainly there must be a balance.
You would seriously bar those on medicare from voting? People who are often too sick to pay their own medical bills? I'm frightened - really.
You were doing so well, then you had to go and say something stupid like this. "Those poor, sick people! Who will care for them?" This is very much like the "Let's do it for the children," argument often employed by the Democrats.
I am not on Medicare. Yet the government takes money from me against my will (with the right to use FORCE if I don't comply) and gives it to someone else for their medical bills. Tell me, where in the constitution does it say that this is a valid function of the government? Also, tell me why I am responsible for another person's medical bills? And tell me why you think a government solution is necessary for health care rather than a private solution?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Demotek is a device to include an ultaviolet reader in the election box so that people still use paper but the calculation is electronic.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I know there are several problems with this:
Any thoughts?
You betcha. Here in Oregon people voted in vote-by-mail a few years ago. No more polling stations for us, we punch out our ballot cards in the privacy of our own homes.
Not only that, we have this "double-majority" amendment wherein new tax measures can't be passed in primaries unless half the registered voter base votes in the election.
Never overestimate the laziness of a bunch of rednecks...
There's an ever increasing reliance on computers for calculating totals, without any serious testing to make sure that there aren't any overflow bugs. Rather than spending time correcting errors, the spend a lot of money on making it possible for comoputers to do even more.
It has been suggested that rather than look at the figures from elections, we should look at the exit polls. The exit polls from different news corporations tend to correlate much more closely with each other than they do with the actual figures. In fact, surprisingly closely given the statistical error estimate.
Well Mondex has some level of accountability. I dont have any particularly specific details since it's so closed source, although my friends and I believe that the cards save records of the past few transactions and probably shift these up to a central server the next time the card is placed in a bank machine.
At the point of sale it would be quite easy for a pseudo random id to be generated and then each card store it's own copy of that transaction for reference.
However it's this sort of accountability that destroys the free speech aspects of the system and which i'm opposed to.
As for finding a way to do away with the need for tracing I can only guess that the bank would have to issue something akin to a public key for each penny that got put into the system. The smart chips would have enough power to verify if a penny was a geniune one from the bank, but they wouldn't have the power to discover the banks public key.
However if something like distributed.net had a go at it then that could really cause serious problems.
The advantage of having to "physically" go to vote is that we deliberately stand up from a computer, a tv set or whatever and we go in a neutral looking place to get properly identified and to put a chosen piece of paper in a box.
E-Vote suppress all these and make voting as easy as randomly clicking links on the Internet.
If voting is a social act, then one should vote phisycally or not at all.
So, yes, I understand that it is technically interesting but IMHO this is not according to the original voting concept as invented millenia ago and this is and should stay a curiosity rather than a socially-obstructive way of life.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
If you don't trust them, take your ass to the polls physically.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I remember a local university election where the computer system went down for a day during a critical part of the elections.
There is always the possibility of forged votes or outright modifications to the DB by hackers. But even without getting into the system, could hackers wait until the votes count is just what they want, and then start a denial of service attack. Or the system could go down on its own. You can bet the winning candidate would want to keep the results, while the other would scream for a re-vote. How bad of a system failure do you have to have before you conduct a re-vote? And do you conduct the vote on the Internet again?
One final, facetious question: Do we really trust our political future in the hands of 10 million AOL users?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
5. Voters should have equal access regardless of socioeconomic status.
Internet voting tends to undermine this, from what I can tell. That is the real issue to me, not ballot stuffing or anonymity. Those are issues, too, but I feel this one is first.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
But my fear is that automated tools provide evry subtle ways to effect fraud. Coercion can occur in the workplace, where users may feel unable to blow the whistle (particularly when union and management are in cahoots) to the press.
And - think of the potential for hacker fun! Someone could design a Back Orifice-style tool that allows badguys to cast a vote for each user, hijacking any private keys sitting on the hard drive ... with automated tools that allow the badguy to select exactly how many votes of each kind, demographic info, and so on. Without physical security, which I think means locked-down hardware certified by a credible outsider, you have no protection against this type of attack.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
If you think that the media in America is free then you really are blind. And if capitalism is all about freedom, why are they so keen on trading with that most repressive of regimes, China. Maybe you should try finding out the difference between the vicious dictatorships that called themselves socialist and what socialism actually is. BTW capitalism != democracy.
The way I see it voting people fall into two categories:
:(
a) People who analyse politics carefully and make intelligent informed decisions about who to vote for
b) People who pay little or no attention to the real issues and put a tick in a box for someone with a few 'cool' policies
Now if it is true that people in group a make better choices than people in group b - then we get a random result because the people in group b are far more numerous.
The other outcome is that the people in group a make a random distribution of choices - and we get a random result again.
No win situation anyway
Though I found the report to be a bit alarmist, it raises several valid points about concerns that many people are just used to coping with - viruses, hackers, security issues, corruption of data.
It's easy to take these things in stride because, simply, we're used to them - we apply a patch, run the antivirus, restore that corrupt file from backup, etc. Even the various problems we've seen at e-commerce sites are ones we get used to - bad interfaces, DDOS attacks, etc.
However, when you look at how these problems can affect important social/political operations (ie voting), it becomes apparent that one has to put in extra effort to deal with these "common" problems in these environments. What we "put up with" people will NOT risk in a political/social operation like voting.
It shows how far, at times, technology has to go and how far responsibility (accountability of the service providers) has to go before we can rely on the Internet for some of our political/social tasks reliably. The chance of some of these problems may occur could be rare, but the concern is not.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
If you think that the media in America is free then you really are blind.
I did not say anything about the American media, so this is a strawman. Furthermore, since you had to resort to calling me "blind" it is also an ad hominem. I suggest you study some logical fallacies which are common in debates. It would do well to improve the quality of your arguments.
And if capitalism is all about freedom, why are they so keen on trading with that most repressive of regimes, China.
There is a difference between capitalism (which is about competition and free markets) and corporatism (which is "whatever makes money is right"). You seem to like beating up on arguments that you try and put in my mouth. Personally, I think it sucks that we're trading with China.
Maybe you should try finding out the difference between the vicious dictatorships that called themselves socialist and what socialism actually is.
Since it seems that you are the keeper of the true definition of socialism, why don't you just tell me what it is? I do take notice that you didn't actually respond to my charge that socialism implies that some people are making decisions for someone else.
BTW capitalism != democracy.
Obviously. Did I state the contrary? Democracy is mob rule. I believe in the rule of law; hence, Constitutional Republic.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Lets assume the slashdot poll is as secure as any vote for a president might be. Whats to stop me going to the office next door, pointing my Nerf Supermaxx 1500 at his head and getting him to vote for 'Hemos'?
Can I do that at a public voting station? No. Polling stations are public so that we can all see whats going on, and we have booths so that the individual has privacy. These two conditions seem essential to a fair and free vote. I dont see how they can be duplicated via the internet.
Baz
There is no way to make e-voting work anonymously. If you don't want to have rampant overclocked script-powered election fraud, you have to have some way to get a one-time certificate that can be traced to the voter registration system, and anyone who has access to that system can figure out a way to intercept who gets those certificates and who they voted for. SSL only protects the voting data enroute to the server -- the admins that run the server could still compromise the whole thing.
..
And trust me, you don't want your local political machine to know for a fact you voted against them. Especially if they win
73 de N5VB (ex-KD5BIV) AR SK
You sign a paper, proceed to a... what's this... booth! And the booth has a... curtain! One of the most important parts of voting is that it is private! How will this be ensured when voting is done from your home? What would prevent someone paying me or threatening me into voting for a particular candidate?
Currently, they have no way to ensure the desired vote takes place. What happens when I can do it from home?
--
Well then, come out with a better authentication method (not that I can really c that happening in the near future) Before letting the public use the system.
People sacrificed their lives for the right to freely vote, and I think that this is a classic case of rampant technology perverting a process that has worked fine for years!
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
I don't think that online voting should be given any more oohs and ahhs unless 3rd parties can jump on the ballet unrestricted. What's the difference between an online voting ballet and an offline voting ballet if they only have the Republicratic candidates?
Until there is a concerted effort to make sure that 3rd parties like the LP, Green and Reform party can get on the ballets everytime online.... you won't get me excited about this.
Last thing we need is to AOL the elections. The way I figure it, if you are too lazy or too put off to go to a polling place and vote, we don't need your input! Yes, I do think that folks who need help getting there should get the help. Also, poll hours should be extended to allow for people working odd hours.
Simple fact is, we don't need a bunch of thirteen year old hackers slamming votes in for who knows. There are some things that should be made slightly inconvient and be very very secure. The voting process is one of them.
The $ole i$$ue involve$ the ea$e of approachabiltiy by a $pecial intere$t group to a voter. It would be ea$ier for me if I were a lobbyi$t to go door to door and a$k people to vote for a particular candidate and offer monetary gain$ or gift$ in exchange, than it would be for me to do $o at the voting booth. Becau$e of thi$, corruption i$ more likely. The pro$pect of having true participation right$ in our government i$ overwhelming and one can only be hopeful; however, it is a pipe dream a$ thi$ government ha$nt been for the people $ince the day the green back wa$ i$$ued.
Sigh. The OR has a bad enough image problem as it is, without you advertising them in your trolling posts. Please either remove the OR URL, or preferably grow up and stop trolling...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
It was a hotel where some Nixon supporters broke into a Democratic Party campaign office.
(A relatively minor crime in the great scheme of things, which Nixon was not involved with. The major scandal was that Nixon tried to cover it up, which surely would have resulted in impeachment had he not resigned.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
So if Internet voting becomes widespread, you could either click on your choice as your precinct captain / pastor / PHB looks on, or choose to vote in private (electronically or on paper). I don't want to find out how many people would end up picking the first option.
--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
i sent this earlier this week in response to Mike Elgan's WinLetter . i'm sure that the slashdot communtity can come up with better ways to implement specific portions, but.....
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specifically regarding online voting:
since the DMV is already a large part of the voter
registration, use them to your benefit. use the
individual's license number in combination with a secret previously agreed upon (say, when you renew your license) to authenticate the individual. this will also provide authentication that the individual is over 18, where they live, etc.
along with the authentication from the dmv database, a token is generated and encrypted via a one-way hash and sent to the actual voting server. the voting server uses this token to determine what "issues" the individual gets to vote upon
based on voting district, conveniently encoded into the token. this allows the individual to physically be anywhere in the US (or not ) and still be able to vote on the issues that are local to where they are registered.
once the individual has completed his/her vote, the voting server passes the token back to the authentication server, indicating a successful vote. this allows record of who voted, preventing multiple votes as well as providing an indicator of individuals who tried to vote, but (presumably)
couldn't. since only the token is returned to the
authentication server, the there is no way for the vote to actually be tied back to the user.
if the authentication server does not receive an
acknowledgement that the vote had taken place within a time period, a notice could be issued (via mail, web, other) to let the user know that the vote was not recorded. it also should use a different token for successive attempts. using
a secure webserver for all transactions should prevent all eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle -type attacks.
what do you think?
There is a lot more progress to be made before online voting can become a reality. Authentication, verification, and privacy are all major issues.
But another interesting issue is platform support. Unless you support all platforms, online voting is not going to become reality. The fact that you would exclude people from a form of voting simply based upon their platform is not going to fly in court. Sure you can go out and physically vote, but in sparsly populated states (Montana, Arizona, etc.) this may be much harder and more time consuming than point, click, vote.
Consider the Arizona primary. The online voting allowed was Windows-only. This caused a stir (small, but still...) based on the fact that many people were locked out of voting because they choose not to use Windows.
This article discusses Arizona's online voting.
And this one talks about the disregard for all other platforms in the primary voting.
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
Given time, technology will supersede any reasonable fears e-voting may evoke ...
Technology has not yet advanced to the point where all reasonable fears can be laid to rest. Security is not yet easy enough to be idiot proof.
Hell, even with automobiles, if you were to add a feature to automatically lock the doors after a specified number of minutes, there would be a legion of morons who'd left their keys inside in just a few weeks.
I don't know what the answer is, everything that I can think of is "too easy" of a fix. We'll have to wait to see where the technology goes.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Take it a step further and omit the voting altogether. Just elect whomever is leading in the public opinion polls (Gallup, et al.) on the day of the 'election'. :)
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Your master's work seems only to have been a survey of current accepted practice.
.vs. database of known voters gets you qualified voters. Now separate the voter ID and his vote results. A one way crypto function will do. Next let the qualified voter mark his authenticated ballot. Then send the results to a tally server. At the end of the vote, tally server counts all votes for authenticated ballots AND qualified voters. Since ID has been hashed to smithereens, there is no way back to mating voter to his vote. Voter can get a receipt which he uses to verify that his vote was included in the vote tally. No one knows how he voted, ever.
I developed years ago, 1995, voting protocols which protect the privacy of the voter. Using a three tier voting process. ID
Since there are three processes, an intruder must corrupt not one but three crypto-secure processes simultaneously (nearly). Not likely, security is a function of separation of the domains under which the processes reside.
-r
Anonymity is the problem. Even if the system is 100% secure against unauthorized voting and ballot box stuffing, we still need a system that prevents the goverment or voting authority from tying votes to the voter.
Sure, there exist hypothetical systems for secure anonymous voting, but they are atrociously unscalable. See Schneier's book for the details on these schemes.
The problem boils down to "How do we ensure that only citizens vote, each only votes once, and still not be able to tell for whom they voted?"
Oh, and you want it scaleable????
This is very difficult.
We shouldn't make it any easier to vote. The last thing this country needs is more votes from people who don't care enough about the issues to drive three miles to their polling place.
Browser? I barely know her!
The idea of poeple voting from their computer. Bah, who needs it? I feel much better actually going down to the local voting booth to do it. What is wrong with taking a short day just to make it down to the school/fire station/what not to vote? Oh-its too hard to get a day off, or a short day, there are still ways to vote through "proxy" I believe is the term. If you don't care enough about who gets elected to get off your duff, then you don't have a say. Go ahead and complain that you don't like who is in office, you didn't put them there. But remember its partly because of your laziness that who you wanted didn't get into office.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
On-line voting would allow a lot of people who do not regularly vote to vote. Currently (in US at least) a small percentage of people (I'll keep them nameless) basically control the voting in this country. Not through any weird conspiracy, but by virtue of actually getting out there and voting. So the minority that votes gets to control the majority that doesn't.
The "fear" in on-line voting would be that the status quo achieved by these people would be broken. No longer would they be able to control elections by simply taking advantage of the apathy of the masses.
Authentication is probably just an excuse to those who fight on-line voting to try to keep themselves and their interests in power.
Rosie_bhjp
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
This reminds me of the episode of Max Headroom involving politics. You voted for your favorite candidate(represented by a TV network) by leaving your TV on for their network(ratings=votes) One network had this scam called "view doze" where you could watch TV in your sleep. Needless to say, their ballot stuffing scam worked.
The internet and all that is really a wonderful thing, but people are too much in love with the idea that because of it they don't need to make an effort to do anything anymore. Why do we need on-line voting? Why isn't an election important enough for people to get out of their homes or offices and go to the polls? Soon we'll be looking for a way to use the internet to go to our refrigerators and get us a beer... or maybe internet based butt wiping from our combination computer chair-toilet seats.
-ARF!
...Jerry Garcia as a Republican?
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Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
Apparently the connection over the Internet itself is insecure for voting, so I think that a virtual private network is in order. VPNs provide a tunnel through to a network that is publicly online and allows you to be on their network while still being on the Internet, and it does it all securely.
Wouldn't this help with this problem? Would a VPN be a viable solution that could result in everyone being able to vote online? Or is there too much overhead?
-- iodine
On a slightly different note, perhaps the issue is not just 'proving' who you are.
Is there any requirement to be 'of sound mind'? Does it matter if people are too drunk too stand but able to vote with a mouse-click? What would happen if you turned up at a polling booth hammered out of your brain (but with your id etc) - would they let you vote?
How about if you turned up with someone else holding a gun to your head?
I wonder if for some applications (and I have no idea if voting is one of them) simply verifying who the person is (should that ever be reliably possible) might be insufficient.
Online banking? Transfer all my money into "Nasty Thug's Account" please. Yes, its me - here is my digital signature and biometric information.
At the moment ATMs have limits on how much cash you may retrieve, presumably to avoid this problem.
Any way around this?
An important feature of old-style voting is the inability of a voter to prove that he voted for or against a particular candidate. This makes it more difficult to buy or obtain votes through intimidation.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Without a doubt, the corruption element of on-line voting is the biggest single risk to making this work. I can't imagine this in a state with a powerful "political machine" in place. However, the issue here is around the overall security of the net, not just the voting process. Unless we can come up with some method of resolving the basic set of "Who am I" and "Don't watch what I'm doing" the general population will never find it a safe place. How many of you filed taxes on line (I did). How many of you used an ASP like online form (I didn't). I paid my money, used my wifes system and ran TurboTax. I ended up with a requirement that used a federal ID in the field, and validation on the other end, after processing. Voting is tough. Currently, the people who vote are outnumbered by those who don't vote. (And, of course, everybody _knows_ that SlashDot readers always vote ). I'm stuck in the middle on whether it is a good idea for more or less people actively voting. Of course we could go the route of Costa Rica. Everybody is _required_ to vote. All public establishments (Bars, etc) are not allowed to serve alcohol for the 3 days around the election. And, of course, Costa Rica has one of the highest literacy rate in the world, and no standing army. davemc
Open Source Ronin
Some of the thing that are fundamental to the ideal e-voting aren't yet developed. A basic idea is that a person who votes, puts their vote into a sealed evelope with carbon paper in it and a piece of card board. The voter signs their name to the envelope but no where the carbon paper is. This signed evelope (with vote inside) is sent to a voter registration person. They check that the name on the outside is a legitimate voter (legite implies registered and has not yet voted). This validator signs the envelope where the carbon paper is - thus signing the ballot inside as well verifying the ballot (and vote) as legitimate and countable. This envelope is sent back the voter where they can open the envelope (ie remove their name from it) and send the validated ballot to a vote counter.
This works great with signatures that can not be fordged, and carbon paper, and envelopes. Getting it to work as a system of encrypted transmissions and "signing" these gets a little tougher. Got a neat way of "signing" an encrypted vote to authenticate it and removing the signature of the voter completely, cleanly, and (preferably) eleganctly email me and we can go on tour!
Wheeeee
When you think about it, voting has really always been unsafe, not only from an informational integrity standpoint, but also from a physical security standpoint. Voters in Mexico recently dealt with nasty physical security issues, as did Syrians in their recent vote to elect Bashar Assad.
As for information security - hell, even our own slashdot showed just how flawed online voting can be. 36% of the votes in that poll were for one of the valid choices - the other 64% went off to la la land, but were still recorded.
Now, granted, real-life elections are orders of magnitude more secure than slashdot polls, but the problem of assumed identity exists in real life, not just in the online world. Dave Barry even touched on the subject in his recent novel Big Trouble, where an immigrant without so much as a greencard is picked up and paid to stuff votes in a Florida election.
The technology is there, and it would be exploited by people who are already exploiting it anyway. The benifits far outweigh the drawbacks - physical security issues disappear as voting doesn't take place in a central location, and even if the system isn't perfect, it will be no worse than what's in place now.
this is a sig.
A relative of mine ran Nixon's 1960 campaign for Illinois (the one stolen by Mayor Daley, as in Richard the First, by cemetary voting.) Given this experience, I should be able to identify the current problem.
If it is possible to perform secure credit card transactions over the net and even transfer large sums of money relatively securely then it obviously is possible to accumulate the votes in a relatively secure fashion. The problem write now is in securing the tally computer. Perhaps if we used a special only election operating system so antiquidated and arcane that no one else would bother (insert joke about Apple OS here.) Or instead of bother, just be so easily detectable that it could be firewalled off. This would involve tying the communications protocols into an intelligent system for detecting hacking.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
its a commonly held fact that you need to capture only 10-15% of the total populations votes in order to be elected president.
Think about it. Not everyone is registered to vote. I think that its something like 50% right there.
Voter turn-out of registered voters is less than 50%.
That means that 25% of eligible voters are voting in presidential elections. So what do you need to win? 12.5% of eligible voters need to vote for you.
This is the principle that the "Christian Coalition" and the "Christian Right" are founded on. Yes, they are a very small minority, but they will all vote, and since they will all vote, they have power.
Ever notice that a lot of the pandering goes to older people? Wonder why? The senior citizens know the importance of voting, and vote.
If "we" are unhappy about the way things are going, "we" need to get all of "us" out to vote. There are enough of us to make a difference, and to be heard. If elected officials start fearing for their job security, our itches will be scratched.
We can change this country and its laws using the existing system, but the key is - we have to USE it.
So - if you are over 18, and an american citizen, I suggest that you go vote this year.
Thank you
... hi bingo
Anyway, my point is, I would far rather have it be open source. If the algorithm is good, then they shouldn't have to close source it. They just have to set up a system that will allow them to replace the algorithm before it becomes outdated. How do they authenticate anyway, an n digit pin number or what?
Here in the US, my debit card only has a 4 digit pin. Not very reassuring, but I suppose my bank would notice if someone guessed a few thousand times. :) Paying by credit requires only a signature that will never be checked.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
why should we have internet-based polls? i'm not seeing any phone-based polls, and i can't imagine what would make the internet "better" at this than the phone is...
i think internet-based registration would be cool. using the internet to publicize poll locations, provide registration forms, and even to allow the user to order an absentee ballot are all good ideas. but internet-based polls seem bone-headed to me, on so many levels...
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
People, complaints about how "The Man" is keeping "The Truth" away from "The People" are not insightful, they are REDUNDANT.
For instance, the above post. The underlying assumption is that all (or most, or many) politicians are evil geniuses whereas all citizens are uninformed sheep. But where do politicians come from? The citizenry. It's unlikely in the extreme that politicians are more evil OR intelligent than your neighbor.
In other words, a broken system does not imply a conspiracy. "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity."
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I happen to think e-voting would be a great benefit, but MANY conditions need to be met first.
This list of conditions is far from inclusive however.
1. An accurate, encrypted out-of-band authentication method. Someone mentioned europes ID cards. screw that, someone will figure them out. Now, a cybernetic chip implanted would be a start. Although this could still be replicated, it can be made extremely difficult.
2. Independent, external verification on MULTIPLE levels. Ie verification ot the authentication processes, verification of the tallying processes, verification of the gathering processes.
Granted, there are a LOT of stupid people out there, but there are also a lot of smart ones. I would feel more comfortable making voting more accessable and putting the government BACK in the hands of THE PEOPLE, whether I agree with the masses or not. Right now people don't bother to go vote, because things are so bad they truly do not see the point. If you make voting easier, at least they may say their piece, and actually start some change.
Regardless of how much I dislike things, I feel that the next 10-20 years are going to bring major change to the worlds sciopolitical structure, and the internet is going to hold a big piece of that, like it or not.
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
Huh huh. You said 'ass'. Uh-huh huh.
Today letters were despatched to 80 million americans telling them that they were no longer eligible to vote. DoubleClick, who pioneering the banner ad, have built up sufficient banks of information on these individuals that the government has deemed it ineffiecient to ask people for thier own opinion.
A spokesperson for doubleclick said "We see this as the future, people no longer have to make up their own minds since our advanced profiling system builds up an electronic representation of their mind"
She continues "Soon people wont have to think for themselves, simple by the way they check their email in the office we will buy, ship and bill to them everything they need and want to enjoy thier lives"
In a bid to silence internet free-speech activists, doubleclick also took the unprecedented move of shipping out over 10,000 overclockable duron systems to individuals with disruptive profiles, estimating that the media hype will have died down by the time they install the supplied prerelease copy of 'Windows 2005 Next Generation+'.
Would a system of democracy through economic voting work, a system where what you pay for indirectly makes your viewpoint heard? Is it feasible to have police, fire, militia, etc. all managed by the people without a formal organization with sweeping powers to tax, legislate, imprison, etc.?
Quite an interesting idea. I think that Marx says that this is the final state of government, a return to a peaceful anarchy.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
...is reading "Applied Cryptography" by Bruce Schneier.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
To paraphrase Mel in The Patriot:
Why would I want to trade 535 tyrants in Washington for millions of them a network's length away?
(Yes I work for NSI. No I don't pretend to speak for them since they don't pretend to speak for me.)
...electronic voting is a really difficult thing to pull off. Having been, in the past, the primary consultant with the Florida Department of State, Division of Elections, for their electronic voting tests and election-night return systems, I have been exposed to the wild fluctuations in traffic these sites are exposed to. The sites are hit by huge numbers...and the staff within the state agencies tend to be among the least-qualified to administer the technology capable of handling the traffic. The states act as though they are capable of monitoring their elections, but the amount of reliance that they must place on their consultants makes this task impossible for them to successfully complete. Their level of technical competence is just not up to the task.
I believe that there must be some amount of trial and error involved in putting together a successful online voting application. Some sites and some elections are going to be corrupted, and some bad things are going to happen. If the process can get through such an ordeal, we may one day have a workable voting system. The states will have to change their hiring procedures and pay scales before anything of the sort will ever be possible.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
you really advocate limiting voting and decision making power into the hands of /fewer/ people?
/dictatorships/. We dont like those.
How few?
Limited by education? Limited by taking a test? Limited by what?
Some places have very limited democracies. They're called
Whats going on is a recurrence of what has happened when a new "class" has been empowered to vote in this country - the status quo is being challenge and is scared.
Online voting now better enables the people that were too lazy to go out and vote, but cared enough to compose rants on the internet.
It gives bite to our bark.
Arizona had its largest voter turnout in recent state history with internet voting. This scares the hell out of the politicians and those in control - they have an entirely new set of issues to deal with, because there are an entirely new demographic voting.
A very good example of increasing voter turnout causing unexpected results - Jesse Ventura - this is a state that had motor-voter registration, and Jesse managed to mobilize a large amount of disenchanted voters with common sense and straight talk.
/That/ is what this is about - losing control and predictability.
... hi bingo
The main issue at stake, at least from the article, seems to be the lack of openness and peer-review of the voting system. They didn't say that online voting is inherently insecure, but rather that Election.com seems to be relying on security by obscurity, and are not allowing any outside evaluation of the security model. I think we should definitely be supportive of online voting, but highly suspicious of a single company that wants to commandeer the process, without conforming to basic (at least in the OSS community) security standards.
Watergate was an attempt to undermine the will of the American people.
Browser? I barely know her!
This way, those who want to vote electronically can, and the election process can go on.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I actually live in one of the (few?) countries where voting is compulsory. So perhaps one might think this would be the solution because everybody would have to make up his mind and is forced to think about the important things for his/her country. Well, it is how it is meant to work
...But (you knew there would be a "but", didn't you?") It just doesn't work at all: Joe Sixpack hates to get up early on a sunday too vote or even worse perhaps he gets picked to *count* the votes. Oh hell, no! So what will Joe Sixpack do? He'll vote right wing, or green (nothing against the green folks) or another minority without even knowing what he is voting for...and that just to p**s off the established parties.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
For example, think about the current issues in the next election: abortion, gun control, crime, technology, or religion in schools. You'll note none of those are extremes likely shared by your peers.
Yet these are the issues that our politicians have chosen to emphasize. These are the issues that the average american does care about. People have killed over some of these issues.
The group that our politicians do not care about are the extremes. Why worry about the far right-wingers? They're too busy declaring their back-water town the "Independent United Nation of Rednecks" and the only vote they're interested in is the one that elects Billy Joe Bob as supreme commander.
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Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
Yeah, but that guy used the same phony personal info for each of his 30,000 votes. A simple find took care of him.
Besides, have you seen the _real_ All-Star balloting? They have stacks of ballots that you mark by punching out holes. Nobody checks to see whether you vote multiple times; even I've voted several times without any repercussions. Some simple machinery could be used to punch patterns of holes in thousands of ballots, should the need arise. The balloting is almost as silly as the All-Star game itself (and I consider myself to be a baseball fan, BTW).
Elections are different. I'm certain that people had to use some sort of unique identifier to vote exactly once. If they notice 30,000 votes coming from one person or one IP, with bogus info, then they'll throw those votes out no questions asked.
For more information, click here.
If you ask me, the only people who would really put online voting to use would be the technologically-savvy people out there, i.e. the 18 to 30 crowd. And the U.S. has enough trouble getting that age group to even vote.
Before we get concerned about online voting, we should worry about even getting people to just vote.
Just my two cents...
--
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The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
Theres something to be said for the whole Internet voting thing. I mean it would get alot more people in the country to vote. Instead of having to go out to a place at a certain time and go to the hassle of waiting in line and such you could easily dial up your ISP and vote just before you sit down for a good round of whatever your online fancy is.
Some people think it is a bad idea and I can see why they think that. For every honest Joe in the world theres about 40 people that would just as soon stab honest Joe in the back with a really pointy object. And it is the same in the voting concept...the laws in the past haven't stopped people from trying to rig elections. Voting through the Internet would just give them another way to go about it. And on top of that we have hackers and such to go out and destroy any hope of a good clean voting system when instead of being pains they could just as easily have a fair and legal voice.
Just my 2 cents, plat, whatever currency you recognize.
-Sarkdas (Im not a hacker, Im not a fink, I do many things, but I do not stink!)
One of the foundations of democracy is the secret ballot.
A system robust enough to resolve the authentication problems is not that far a step from providing secrecy from the gov't, but what about secrecy from your peers?
The nice thing about the way we vote now is the voting booth. It has a little curtain, and you go in alone, and for that moment you can make your choices free of coercion.
But if you vote from home, someone can frogmarch you to the computer, and peer over your shoulder while you vote the "right" way, stealing your vote. An overzealous head of household might force his family to vote in lockstep. An unscrupulous religious leader might convince his flock to accept his guidance, and hold little voting sessions.
Script kiddies hacking the system don't frighten me nearly as much as normal people abusing it.
So what they do is send me an individual PGP key for my vote, let me vote using it so they know it's me and not anyone else, then if I didn't vote the right way come round and kick my door in demanding that I give them the key under the new RIP bill. seeing as i can't provide it I get carted off and miss the next set of elections in two years time. isn't it wonderful to see a police state sprouting before your eyes
at last I see why they need the new powers
Anyone remember Max Headroom? Instant online voting, the ad-space on TV in the minutes up to the election window went for astronomical amounts. The swing in the polls fluctuated 20% in thirty seconds as last ditch scare commercials and fantastic promises were made.
The motor-voter laws are bad enough, if people can't be bothered to fill out a form at the post office AND show up on election day (we'll forget about actually reading up on the candidates and issues) then they get what they deserve.
As for the poster that said (paraphrasing) the masses would finally get their due and topple the special interest groups, are you kidding? Think of all the morons you work with or know socially. Then consider that the people you work and hang out with are a self-selecting group. The rest of the population looks like god-knows-what.
-spRed
.sig Karma out the wazoo, better to spend points elsewhere if this is above 2 or below 0
The protocol provides the following:
Only authorized voters vote. No forgeries.
Authorized voters vote at most once.
Voters remain anonymous with respect to their votes. While it is possible to determine who voted, it is not possible to determine what their vote was.
Voters can verify thier vote was counted.
Elections can be co-administered by parties with opposing interests (i.e. political parties), to prevent collusion.
The question in my mind is, does Election.com use a protocol which provides this level of security? And even if they do, why do they seem so opposed to independant security audits?
Security by obscurity... you know the rest.
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When we introduce restraints on voting - tests, taxes, etc. - we give those in power a means of filtering out from the voting public those persons which would threaten their power. The day we allow such restraints is the day that we give up our freedom - because we will have lost all power to check that of the governing branches.
You would seriously bar those on medicare from voting? People who are often too sick to pay their own medical bills? I'm frightened - really.
The only people who would vote would be those who care enough about their sufferage to not sell.
Unfortunately, I'm not as good of a writer as O'Rourke, so I doubt that any explanation of mine could do justice to how funny the column was. :/
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Although the authentication issues are a problem (I live in AZ, so I get bombarded with editorials and so forth about the issue), it's not the problem that the critics really go after. After all, most people don't know anything about computers, so they can't say whether it's safe or not. It's hard to say whether an online system would really be more prone to abuse.
What they really say is that it 'discriminates' against people who can't use the internet. Supposedly this favors those who have net access at home. (I don't buy it, since people who are apathetic won't vote anyway, and everyone can go to a polling place, but that's what many, including this Voting Integrity Project, say.) Personally, I think that all the arguments at this point are just political maneuvers and fear of change, not really motivated by real concern.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
e.g. the recently dead mysteriously arising from their graves and voting.
That's one thing I've always hated about America, all the damn zombie-democrats.
*gets shotgun*
What do you mean, "voting in your pajamas is unsafe"?
I mean, are you saying that when you vote, you shouldn't wear pajamas? 'cause if I tried that, I think they'd kick me out of the polls! You need to wear *at least* pajamas to go anywhere in the US--it really isn't fair.
...or do you mean that if you only vote *in* your pajamas, then that isn't safe? Well, I don't see how you'd tally the votes, or even what you're calling *voting*, you sickos.
In conclusion, I must say that when I vote, I am often in my pajamas--if by voting you mean "Slashdot polls". And I haven't gotten injured yet, except when my mouse hand starts to hurt. (Yes, I mean my *mouse* hand! You sickos!!!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Remember, to design a system that is fool-proof is to underestimate the ingenuity of a fool.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
Here in France we have a big problem: the mayor of Paris has been elected partly thanks to the vote of more than 3k dead people.
He and his wife are currently under investigation!
It sounds like a joke? Unfortunately, it is real!
So, even in the real world (tm), authentification of the voters is a big problem!
On the Internet, I fear that the authentification of the voters will remain a big problem for a loonng time, and this will prevent any serious voting on the Internet.
PS:
Just a question, are you really sure that in UK the system has not been abused?
ROFL
If you think education is expensive, try ignornace