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Online Voting?
Colin Winters asks: "While listening to NPR this morning, I heard that the Reform Party is going to have online voting this year. Does anyone know how are they setting this up? What kind of security measures to protect against fraud are they using? It seems that if this works for the Reform Party, it could also work for both the Democratic and the Republican parties, as well." A good and timely question considering that once again it's an Election Year. If online voting is to become a thing of the future, these issues and others will need to be dealt with if it is to be effective (and fair).
A very small amount of effort brought me to this press release by eBallot.net. They're the ones taking care of the voting.
Not much information on their site about the technical details - I would be interested in knowing how they maintain security while keeping the voting of individuals private.
These days, it seems most voters are too apathetic about the country (at least in the U.S.A.) to spend times researching the issues, reading the voter's manual, and then actually driving out to the polling place to vote. For people who never trust the government, there doesn't seem to be much reason to put any effort into the process -- but with online voting, all they have to do is skim one page and click to make their voice heard. It's hard to imagine that very people wouldn't vote if it was that easy.
Let's face it: most of the people that vote are either radicals or rich white guys. Middle America, as well as people like you and me -- cynical outsiders -- just don't bother to vote. And yet, these people are often the most vocal when it comes to what should be done about various issues. Online voting could finally give the people the power they wish they had -- there wouldn't be such a wide schism between policy and popular opinion.
Sure, true online voting may be a few decades off still, as there's still numerous security hassles and other issues to iron out. But it's exciting to see that we may finally be able to fulfill the promise of democracy at last.
I've heard on ZDnet's streaming news broadcast that Microsoft donated a million dollars worth of software to the GOP for their national convention. To be 'fair', they've offered the same amount to all the other major parties.
Smells to me like they've found a way around the tightened restrictions on purchasing indulgances.
Having worked as a majority clerk in the Republican primaries, I have a good idea of the checks, double-checks, and triple-checks that go on behind the scenes to verify that the people who are registered to vote are the people who are voting.
It seems to me that the first time online voting is used in local elections, you are going to have every election loser filing complaints with the election boards.
It would be best to restrict online elections to a small number of local races before it's fully implemented into national elections involving millions of people.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
If online voting takes over completely, then the goverments surely will have to put measures in place that allow 100% of the voting population to gain access to a computer connected to the internet. Obviuosly the simple solution is to have polling stations like now just with computers in instead. It does however mean that the rich are more likely to vote and the poor maybe less likely, shifting the balance of power. Ill stop ranting now.
If it costs too much, and doesnt work, you've been conned, stop buying microsoft.
. . .That only have to count 3 votes. ;)
Online voting has the ability to be corrupted in several ways. First, and foremost, most people assume that a "one social, one time" style system could work, since anyone logging into an electronic voting booth would be required to give his/her voter info (some states have codes, others mimic SSN's) once a particular code, or SSN was given, and voting completed, that person would not be allowed to vote again.
There are a few major problems with this though. Quite a few Americans do not vote. While I am not going to go into the psychology, and ramifications of NOT voting, I will say that not participating is their right, and should not be violated. Electronic Voting "could" easily circumvent someones wishes simply because there are sites that have information on them that are more or less unsecure. I'm not saying someone with a couple kiddie scripts could do it, but a true cracker out to "change" the system would probably find it fairly easy.
IMO (which I do not consider humble, by the way) Not voting is extremely stupid. I defend it, but I don't personally think it's right. I also firmly beleive that stealing someone elses vote is criminal, much worse than that person not voting at all.
While there are security items that can cure this, they are still a long way in coming. Retinal Scans, SSN's and hard encryption, along with fingerprint scanners are one way to go. They already exist, and are becoming more mainstream every day. These will make online voting a reality, and a secured one at that.
There will always be ways to circumvent a system. There always were, even in the old "click and pull the lever" systems. Forged Voters ID cards, fake documents, phony voters lists, and multiple voting are a few. The problem was that with these, 1. A person had to physically be there to vote, which took time. 2. Someone had to come up with a voters list, which took time. 3. Documents had to be forged, which took time.
By allowing electronic voting, you can speed up the above three things to damn near instantaneous. A small group of people playing over a large field could have a exponentially more significant impact on the final tally than before.
I would approach electronic voting with eyes open, alert, and fully concious of the ramifications of getting it wrong the first time. After all, the people we chose to lead, lead us to where THEY want to go; pray you chose someone you can stand to follow.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Personally I can't think of any ways to safeguard against fraud; maybe they exist, but they're not coming to me. Besides which, I don't really see the point of introducing online voting. If you can't spare the effort to walk a few blocks (or request, fill out, and mail an absentee ballot), why should you be allowed to do it at the click of a button? Apathy is the problem, not the fact that not enough votes are recorded. Making it simple to vote won't remove the apathy, it will just flood the system with uninformed votes.
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Voting booths, and their amazing low-tech privacy method (a cloth drawn behind you), literally beat the socks off of anything available in the digital world... Right now husbands and wives can cast separate votes on issues and not have it thrust in their faces, so they get by. What happens when voting is done from the den, with one person sitting right next to the other? What if they've been arguing about an issue for hours and one party just wants to get to sleep so they cast their vote, in plain site of the other, for something they don't necessarily agree with?
Aside from all the verification and other security concerns, confidentiality is one that had better not get overlooked.
I'm just wondering what the benefit in on-line voting is? I can't really imagine that turnout is going to increase, especially in countries where a large proportion of the population are not net-connected yet (most of Europe). Those individuals who are not able to travel to the polling station through work or disability in the UK are entitled to a postal vote. Given these two facts, why would a government want to introduce a new form of voting other than because it makes them look as though they are embracing new technologies?
With regards to how you can secure this system, well, you certainly can't do it over the net until governments start recognising electronic signatures and biometric authentication is more common. At the moment, if all a website does is ask me for my electoral role number, then I can pretend to be anybody on the electoral role. It's a bit like the Amazon system whereby you can submit a review as the author, and the authentication to make sure you are the author is a form that pops up saying "Are you really the author of this book? Yes/No". Not exactly the best way to run a democracy.
You decide to put up a fence in your yard and the inspector tells you you need a zoning variance to use the land on the border of your lot. You get your case together, and go before the local zoning board in your city and make your case for a variance. Your case is apealed to the city council along with a group of neibors seeking the same variance.
During the hearing, as each citizen gets up to make their case, the councel quietly passes a piece of paper among themselves as they listen. On the paper is the voting records of each citizen. City council, Mayor, Sherrif, Corener, Judges, and the political affileation of each speaker.
Quietly, to themselves, each city coucil member thinks to themselves "Will I loose a vote if I blow this person off?", "Did this person vote for my opponent?", "Did they organize for a party other than my own?", and the soft bigotry of voter idenification is revealed as the citizens loose their appeal for a variance as their voting records work against them.
Why is this?
Well, here are a few of my reasons:
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I know it's good for a lot of things, and maybe voting on small things can be one of them under certain circumstances. I don't think I'll ever believe that the net (as it is today) is anywhere near an ideal infrastructure for voting in major and important elections.
Even if all the encryption and validity and security and anonymity issues were worked out, there's nothing to guarantee that a neighbour hasn't walked into my home, pointed a gun in my face and ordered me to vote for someone.
The net could play a role in some areas, but allowing people to vote from places where the environment isn't controlled is a bad thing. Allow this and there's no way to guarantee that voters are voting at their own free will.
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I think the other posts are covering online voting's problems and advantages pretty well, so I'll write about the other half of the question: the Reform Party and what the web can do for them. Disclaimer: I don't like them, but I will try very hard to be impartial.
The Reform Party is falling apart. Two years ago, when Governor Ventura was elected, the Reform Party was deeply divided between Ross Perot's people (pro-balanced budget, protectionist) and Jesse Ventura's faction (basically libertarian). Governor Ventura's campaign team made heavy use of the Web and email to organize his campaign, and received no help from the national Reform Party. Ventura felt that Perot was trying to dictate everything to his party.
Eventually, everything came to a head during the race for a Reform Party Chairman. Ventura and Perot each had their favorite guy, and Ventura's won. Perot spent about a year undermining him, and then his faction organized a 'surprise general meeting' where only Perot people managed to show up. They voted the chairman out, over objections that the convention had been illegally called. At one point, the situation at the meeting was so strong that the police had to be called to break up a fight. Ventura quit the party, saying the party was dead.
That's when Pat Buchanan showed up. His views are very different from Perot's. He believes in a national industrial policy, heavy protectionism, opposes immigration, etc. In many ways, he is the opposite of the Libertarians-- a liberal radical on economics, and a conservative radical on social issues.
He ran for President, and this time, Perot laid low. I don't know if he is trying to get out of politics (realizing that the Reform Party is pretty much dead) or if he is just trying to let the party onto its own feet (I think the Ventura thing killed the possibility of that happening).
Perot's faction, though, is pissed. Buchanan won the primary, but they say that he used non-Reform Party voters to do it (the point of a primary is to let a party know who its members support-- there isn't much point in having one if many of the voters will jump off the ticket if their man loses). Buchanan says he has expanded the appeal of the Reform party. The dispute got so tough that apparantly, the two factions are each holding their own convention, have nominated their own candidates, and each claim that they are the One True Reform Party.
Whichever party is the One True Reform Party is entitled to fifteen million dollars in federal campaign funds, so this question will probably end up in the courts. Ultimately, the Reform Party still isn't sure just what it actually stands for. It originally tried to be a vote for a moderate in a time when the Two Big Parties were seen as radical, ideological opposites who couldn't agree on anything. Now, people are more worried that the parties look too much the same. That pretty much squeezes the Reform Party out.
Now, at last: how will this affect on-line voting? Well, I'm not sure what they will be voting for at this stage-- they have their candidates (in fact, they have too many candidates!) and they have had their convention, such as it is. The web might have been a good forum for them to reconcile their differences, or hammer out a set of guiding principles. But their problem is that they are not a community.
Everyone on Slashdot starts with a certain level of similarity-- RMS and ESR (to shamelessly pick at a longstanding political feud) are still very similar in many ways. I don't know that Reform Party members have anything in common other than a feeling that they don't like where the country is going. They have formed into cults of personality which all have radically different views on what the party should be. And so, to be honest, I don't think that the internet can band-aid over all these differences and make their party work.
I think that Perot hung on for too long, and by not allowing the party to digest his views and Governor Ventura's, he turned the party politics into an adversarial mess. Parties are built on compromise and dialogue-- Perot basically destroyed the faction which didn't agree with him. I think the party is now suffering for it, and will finish flying to pieces this year. Add to that that people want the major parties to be more, not less, radicalized this year (that's why the Greens and Libertarians are doing so well), and you pretty much leave no place for Perot's people.
Let's take the opportunity to bring the whole system up to date and in line with modern thinking.
Everyone votes with their credit cards. a quick swipe and press a button. It makes sure you're eighteen, and it excludes anticonsumerists, poor people, immigrants and slackers. Do you want those people setting your taxes? right.
two votes for platinum.
And they were interviewing one of the members of the Reform party whose job it was to arrange the vote and they also interviewed the folks at eballet.com for small time.
Firstly, this wasn't only online. They conducted the ballot via mail, phone, as well as online. Also, the way they verified the votes is the same way they verify all votes whether online or not: the voting registration numbers. The internet voting was only open for a short window of time anyway...like 3 days if I recall correctly and the dates were mailed to reform party members.
As to the validity of the vote, both people interviewed assured that no votes were counted twice. Even so, the validity of the vote has been questioned and has something to do with the breakup of the reform party. I don't know enough about what happened to comment on that aspect.
According to this Yahoo story both Reform Party conventions rejected the national mail-in and Internet vote, claiming election fraud.
Online voting has more potential than just replacing the existing voting system. Online voting is a perfect fit with direct democracy, through online referenda. Votes could be held not just once every 4 years to choose which politicians to elect, but also for any important issues that come up during the term. Online referenda could be citizen-initiated, requiring a certain percentage of the population to digitally sign a petition to hold one on a given issue. This would put power back into the average person and make them part of the country's decision making process again, rather than have just one vote every four years, with dubious likelihood that the person you vote for will actually represent you the way you want.
Once the initial overhead of setting up online voting was through, the cost to hold elections/referendums would be low. We may not be ready for this yet (many people don't have access to the internet, and we need to iron out the security detials..) but in the coming years, this could become more and more possibile. This is the reason that I think online voting is an exciting prospect.
Buchanan received 49,529 votes to Hagelin's 28,539 votes in the primary balloting. Now they are both claiming to the be the "Real Reform party", they will likely end up in court to try and fight for thier gub'ment handout.
personally, I think that Buchanan is being a good little 'publican and is (knowing that no resonabley mineded moderate would consider voting for him), destoying the reform party and taking away the conservitive protest vote (thus helping bush).
Through normal channels, each person gets their voter registration card. This card has a unique number on it, very long to reduce chance of being able to guess one correctly. Person goes to computer, sets up key pair, connects to central server, and encrypts and signs their number + ID info (name, age, etc). This proves that key pair belongs to person. Then comes the actual voting protocol. Let's assume for simplicity only one thing to vote on (Pat v. whoever).
I create 10 votes for pat and 10 votes for Ross (I am pretty sure it's not him but I don't remember the real guy's name; I'll use Ross). Each vote consists of a GUID, and who the vote is for. The GUID is a long number (128bit; longer if neede to prevent collisions) that is randomly generated. However, each Ross vote is paired with a Pat vote (same GUID). I then Blind the votes with a blinding function -- need the blinding factor to get the vote out. This is actually just multiplication by a large number; DES or equiv doesn't work here. I then sign each vote and encrypt to central office.
Central office gets all the votes, picks one to make valid, and asks for the blinding factors for the rest. It then decrypts, verifies, and unblinds these. It then checks that each is a valid vote and that the GUIDs come in pairs. For the last vote it decrypts, verifies, signs with a DIFFERENT KEY PAIR, encrypts to voter, and returns the vote (both of them). The voter then decrypts the vote, unblinds it, picks one, and sends it in to vote. This last step (submission) is not connected to the others; I could put my vote on a disk and take it to the library to vote if I'm paranoid.
So, this meets all the needed requirements:
One person, one vote: registration + GUID (can't submit vote more than once; central office won't sign more than one.
Anonymous: when I send in my vote, it no longer has my key connected to it, and the central office doesn't know the GUID.
can't be faked: partly in the registration, partly in the crypto.
Third party can't see: its encrypted
Third party can't change: same
I can cverify that I voted and who I voted for: I can send a request "who did this GUID vote for" to office, and it can tell me. If I'm paranoid, I worry about the central office tracking IPs and such, so I don't ask or ask from a library etc.
Did I miss anything?
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The "John Hagelin" idiots have really destroyed the Reform Party. If you look at the Natural Law Party page you can see that this guy has NO chance of getting votes -- the whole NLP is a bunch of eastern mystics who want to use 'transcendential meditation' to solve all the world's problems... yeah, right. This guy should be running for the Legalize LSD Party, not the Reform Party.
Pat Buchanan might not be very popular in some circles, but at least he gives the Reform Party some legitimacy. He is the right wing's equivalent of Ralph Nader.
I pretty much agree with you except on Buchanan, but I didn't want to inject more opinions than necessary into my analysis of the Reform Party's structural problems.
It is a common misconception that Buchanan is radically conservative. But George Will argued persuasively in 1992 and 1996 although Buchanan's old job was to be conservative on Crossfire, that his actual beliefs on most issues were radically liberal (government controls on trade and the economy). What excites radical conservatives was that he was very conservative on social issues (gays, abortion, etc).
Not many reporters listened to Will at the time, but it is telling that as soon as Republicans who were radical conservatives on all issues appeared (Alan Keyes, Gary Baurer), Buchanan lost nearly all his support.
When a primary ends, the factions form a compromise based on their voting strength. They form a message for their party which everyone in the party can live with and which can win the general election. But how do you compromise between Hagelin and Buchanan? They're nothing alike, and that's why the Reform Party is breaking up-- it has no overarching message. It is a cautionary example for people who want to just vote 'no'. I could summarize the Greens, Libertarians, Republicans and Democrats in about five minutes. All we know about the Reform party is who's in it.
I agree with you that Ventura isn't a big-l libertarian. He would be at home as a New Democrat or a Libertarian Republican (both are strong, growing factions in their party). I think he chose the Reform Party for recognition, but also because with them, he wouldn't have to compromise on his message. Very rare that you can do that and win an election-- it only works if you accidentially represent a good compromise between the major parties.
While anyone may submit to Risks, some of the people who post there are respected experts in their fields, and will often write very well-thought-out criticism of online and telephone voting schemes as they are actually practiced - usually without much regard for security and privacy - as opposed to the ideal schemes thought up by security experts and cryptographers.
I can't remember any specific posts on online voting, lets see what the search form produces:
Just searching for "voting" produces dozens of submissions, mostly related to computerized voting - that is, electronic voting booths, which have their own reliability and security issues but are not what we're discussing here - but see Computer Causes Chaos in Brazilian Election in which a program designed to weed out fraudulent voters (like dead people) canceled the voting rights of 70,000 twins.
Searching for "voting;online" produces a few hits such as the announcement of Arizona's online voting and a comment that there is no promise of privacy in online voting - that your identity and your vote won't be correllated, which is forbidden for conventional voting.
Wonder about the accuracy of unofficial online votes? Check out the risks of paying attention to uncontrolled e-voting in which a public opinion voting site on abortion funnelled votes from both sides to the anti-abortion side.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
What amazes me is that ANY person on Slashdot would identify more with tyrany than with those being abused. ESPECIALLY after the Napster, DeCSS and DMCA affairs.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Once populations got past a certain size, pure democracies stopped working, and republics had to be set up where people elect delegates to represent them, and these delegates in turn vote on the issues. Of course with this came greater opportunity for corruption, with candidates pandering during election time, and doing whatever they wanted while in office, relying on the power of their office, media control and spindoctoring to slide through. For a long time the excuse has been that since pure democracy is impossible, that these are just the evils we have to live with for the next best thing. However, I can see the internet enabling a pure democracy. Imagine instead of relying on mr. politician up on capitol hill, hoping that he votes in line with your opinion, hoping that PAC money isn't coloring his vote, knowing that there is pretty much nothing you can do about it if he doesn't (until the next election when you'll again have to choose the lesser of two evils), that you just sit down at your computer (or at some public voting facility) and vote *directly*. I do not believe the amount of bills Congress votes on (or your local government for that matter) is too large for the average citizen to handle. For instance, in California, as far as I understand, they have public voting on individual issues. Imagine, in a matter of a few hours, the consensus of the nation could be tapped...instead of each special interest buying chunks of media to feed a perception to the populace, then waiting then rehashing all over again. Think of all the hotbutton topics...you have a poll *blam* there you go - irrefutable, discussion over. Of course there are the technical and logistical issues, but I think these can be surmounted. I'm just talking about an ideal situation here, but I would love to just be able to come home, have dinner, and spend 15 minutes casting my vote on the issues that mattered to me (not to say that 15 minutes would be the only time I thought about these), and feel good fulfilling my responsibility as a citizen, rather than waste years filtering out media noise just to vote for the candidate that will screw me less hard.
Of course for a democracy of any kind to work, citizens must be informed (witness our own democracy). But I have faith that populism will create better citizens - give people a reason to care, and they will.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?