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Elections on the Internet -- Not Any Time Soon
jACL writes "From the Technology Review article: "After several years debating minimum requirements for voting equipment, the computer science and public policy communities appear to agree that the Internet--as it exists today--can't sufficiently safeguard the privacy, security and reliability of the voting process. Pitfalls range from the obvious, such as malicious hackers, to the obscure. For example: Every state requires that votes be cast in secret, but how can officials verify that a party hack isn't standing beside a remote voter?""
Unfortunately, this is probably all to true.
A report on the reliability of various voting systems (including Internet) from MIT/Caltech.
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I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
Those already exist. CNN was showing them last election; I think in a west coast state (Oregon?). Touch screen with pictures and text of the candidate, possibly in multiple languages.
An untraceable, universally verifiable voting scheme
Recent electronic voting schemes have shown the ability to protect the privacy of voters and prevent the possibility of a voter from being coerced to reveal his vote. These schemes protect the voter's identity from the vote, but do not do so unconditionally. In this paper we apply a technique called blinded signatures to a voter's ballot so that it is impossible for anyone to trace the ballot back to the voter. We achieve the desired properties of privacy, universal verifiability, convenience and untraceability at the expense of receipt-freeness.
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One real, unsolvable difficulty with both absentee ballots and internet voting is that it becomes impossible to guarantee people are voting in secret. But we also accept that blind people won't be voting in secret -- although there are both technological and non-technological ways to give them a secret ballot, no American district I have ever heard of has implemented them. For that reason alone, absentee ballots should be restricted to real need, not Oregon's policy of giving them to anyone who just doesn't want to stand in line.
Aside from the secret ballot, at present paper absentee ballots, properly run, are considerably more secure than internet voting could be. You'd have to suborn a lot of people to be able to tamper with paper absentee ballots in the mail, and someone would talk, but for e-voting you just have to crack a computer.
The bigger challenge in either system is verifying the identity of the voter. This gets worse when election officials aren't following all the rules. Florida rules required the request for an absentee ballot to include name, address, and voter registration number. Missing ID #'s got a lot of applications thrown out, but for certain voters in certain counties, republican party workers filled in the ID #'s. Furthermore, ballots were supposed to be postmarked before election day, which creates a difficulty when the damned post office doesn't date it's postmarks; in some counties, Kathy Harris got that rule waived, but not in others. (Who was it that sued about not counting everyone's vote the same?) But if the system had been run honestly, very few bogus absentee ballots would have been counted. It's just too hard to steal large numbers of identities when you have to send paper documents by snail mail, unless you create an organization big enough to make leaks probable.
My best guess is that if Florida had accurately counted all the votes statewide, George II would still have won. But we'll never know, now. And if the entire system had been running honestly, I do not think that either the Bush's most wayward son, or Mr. Roger's evil twin (Gore) would have had a chance at the nomination...
Well, I won't name her (because she's not here to speak for herself) but ONE of these people was my ex-girlfriend who called me in tears because they wouldn't let her vote. It kind of broke my heart because when we met she was totally uninterested in politics. I'm the one who convinced her to register to vote. They wouldn't even let her cast a provisional ballot. Together, we called and wrote the local newspapers in the weeks following and got zero response.
= 1 .
The US Civil Rights Commission acknowledges the issue on their website where it says "Non-felons were removed from voter registration rolls based upon unreliable information collected in connection with sweeping, state sponsored felony purge policies;". I know this is quoted out of context but feel free to check it out for yourself.
The BBC report estimates between 80,000 and 100,000 voters were wrongly prevented from casting ballots in Florida. The link to that report is here - http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=29&row
I'm not suggesting we re-do the election but let's do admit there was a problem and work to fix it.
Having worked for several political campaigns, I can tell you that if you contact your party they will send someone to take you to vote and drop you back off at home. We do it all day long during election day -- And some campaigns even send lackees door to door trying to find people that haven't voted yet and offer them a ride (albeit in neighborhoods that heavily favor their party). "But I'm an Indepedant" or "I belong to . Not a good enough excuse, for ever party there are people that will come pick you up and take you to your polling place, and as well there are non-partisan groups that do the same thing for people with any party affiliation. You may not think your one vote counts, but the different political parties do, you wouldn't believe how much they scratch and claw for those single votes. "But I'm too lazy to pick up the phone to call someone for a ride." -- Put down the voter registration down and back away from the ballot!! ;-)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur