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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
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.
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.
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-jacob
-jacob
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
...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.
With a few minor differences. Once the system has been compromised, or a way to submit phony votes devised, computers make it very easy to do on a large scale. And if system security has been compromised, all bets are off. WRT voting in the flesh, the fact that you just can't hire enough homeless with fake IDs limits the amount of damage that can be done.
But most politicians aren't smart enough to use a computer.
Politicians (other than Al Gore) don't generally do their own dirty work. They hire consultants, and there's no reason to believe that it would change in this case.
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"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
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
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
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
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...
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.
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
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
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
...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!?
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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