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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.
You can never verify the privacy of the voters, because they may choose to tell their vote. If they choose to let others watch their vote on their machine - fine. As for 'hacks' regarding viewing people's votes on their machines, this may be solved by vote-boxes or so that connect directly through your physical media, and run some firmware.
:)
If its all digitally signed and cryptographed, vote boxes sound nice to me.
Ofcourse it should always be allowed for people to vote as they do today, if for some reason they cannot guarantee their privacy, or an internet connection.
If people do vote as they do today, give voters a day off to vote, as sane Democracies do
Having to actually get off your arse and go to a polling place to cast your vote is A Good Thing. It makes sure only the truly motivated actually vote.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
The notion that voting on the Internet would constitute an advancement is disgusting. How many people without access to the Internet would have to work /harder/ than those who already are wealthy enough (presumably) to cast their vote via computers.
More wealth stroking. Internet voting would be all about making life easier for those who's lives are always considerably easier than those who couldn't vote online. How on earth can the article not point out how internet voting would undoubedly contribute to less political representation by those already on the wrong side of the digital divide (even if simply by increasing the participation of those on the right side of the digital divide.)
I'm not against using it for over-seas voting, etc, but to hope that one day we'll all be using the Internet to vote is a scary thought - the poor already have enough of a hard time being heard.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Oh, come on, we have a couple of hundred thousand people in the US who can't figure out how to vote using a punch card with printed directions, for crying out loud. And now people are suggesting standardizing voting using a computer and an internet connection to make things easier? *chuckle*
Now, touch-screen computers at the polling station to simplify voting... that'd be a much better idea.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Yeah, so what if it was illegal for the Florida Supreme Court to make the decision for a recount in the first place... why should we care about laws?
Besides, they didn't "decide the election themselves". The people voted for Bush, the original count showed Bush received more votes in Florida, and the after-the-fact review of votes by the media also showed Bush received more votes.
Except that the "Civil Rights Commission" and their cronies have yet to produce one person who was legally registered to vote and was turned away in Florida on November 7th, 2000. But hey, it's only 2002. I'm sure they'll find someone soon.
grep -ri 'should work'
Hello. I have to say that I can't even favour use of the internet for elections (and I mean elections in voting for your government sense). I have to admit here I'm actually someone who would resist the technology.
People are saying voting over the internet, but I would say this was insecure. I believe voting for the government is so important that you really have to minimise the security risks. There are problems with manual voting as it is. But i'm still happier with it than internet voting. When I think voting, I'm now assuming all the computer are ones owned by the government kept in central locations for public voting. I can't see voting from home being too good.
I'm going to throw some ideas out here - if you can find a reason against them, i would love to here (this isn't a challenge, but I'd love to see if someone could put my mind at ease over voting).
(1) I would think that the internet was insecure that you had to use a VPN to allow proper voting. Even then I would still like a closed system where all the power is in government hands.
(2) The system has to have power backups just in case someone starts to tamper with the election. This would be essential in "unstable" areas which are about to vote.
(3) Who controls the system? I would say it would have to be open and free (yeaahhh! - obligatory slashdot herd cheer) with anyone, and I mean anyone, being able to get to the source code. That leaves the fact that the binary produced from the code has to be verified. You'll need qualified people to do this, which costs even more cash.
I also thought about electoral lists, but either way (computer or manual voting) they can still be tampered, although it might be easier on a computer. I just think that allowing people to see the process prevents as much tampering as could be done if people managed to attack the "box" which controls the lists. When i say a "box" I don't mean the central lists, but the one PC which contains the list at the local school where voting could take place.
I do want to believe, but something keeps on telling me that we should keeps things as they are for the now, and restrict this kind of voting to places where it doesn't make too much of a difference. If they could test it in school polls and then corporate polls, and it was shown to be foolproof I wouldn't mind, but I'm very skeptical (the theme of this whole post). I wouldn't mind if they tested this in government opinion polls, where they realise that error could occur, and that it might not make too much of an impression on the governing of the country (i.e. discard the poll if the results are within 5% of each other or something).
Anyway, that's my rant over for the day. Later
We must remember that there are people who cannot make it to the polls. I was in a wheelchair during last year's election due to a car accident, and it was too late to get an absentee ballot. I found it exceedingly hard to get to my place of polling because I live in a hilly mountain town and the bus didn't go close enough.
The Internet would be an ideal place for the mobility challenged to cast their vote. It is better to require everyone to cast their vote on the same day rather than send in early absentee votes because opinions may change over the lag time. I think that, rather than having traditional absentee paper ballots, we should be able to give the local board of elections our public keys and submit our enciphered ballots electronically. If we can't trust the Internet for election purposes, how can we for our financial transactions (ATMs) and taxes (e-file)?
Okay, maybe youd didn't mean, but it was implied. You didn't mentioned people would have the option to not vote over the internet.
If I made a mistake, I am sorry, it's the way I read your comment that made me assume what I said. If I am wrong, again, sorry.
But now I have to agree with envelope's comment. If you believe that different types of access to vote will create barriers for a better development of the democratic system, and a better choice of governament, then you should extend your argument to convince me why, why other facilities are different than the one possible using the internet.
I have to say, that if you want to break the status quo, it's not about HOW we choose our representants, but instead, like it has always been, about WHO you chooe.
Instead, if this situation must be changed, first convince everyone (from the bottom of the social pyramid) that voting is important (since in USA is optional), that they must vote, and, inform who are the candidates, why they must vote for whetever they choose, give them the ability to think and make they know that there are ways, peaceful ways, to change the system.
It reminds me of 'Don't give them food, teach them how to fish'.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
If they want to try to maximize security, then just dont send the data over the internet. Just create a national voting intranet.
I will bend your mind with my spoon
- Are voting in a standardized fashion
- Are voting alone
- Only vote once
- Understand the voting instructions
Ironic that on the heels of the whole MS security discussion, and the rehash of the "computers will never be truly secure" conversation, that we somehow think that one of the fundamental tenets of our democracy can work not only on computers, but over the Internet. Doesn't anyone else see the lunacy of this proposition?Now, computer terminals safely ensconced at the polling places themselves might offer a few advantages...
Was that out loud?
Let me not address the technical issues of how people's identities will be validated if internet voting is tried -- that's an implementation problem, and I'm sort of a big picture kind of guy... :) Or just unqualified.
Instead, my question is how internet (or any type of remote, instantaneous) voting will affect people's attitudes toward elections in general.
I can, on the one hand, see how internet voting would open up great possibilities -- people's votes are counted exactly, no room for error, people don't have to trudge through rain or snow to get to the ballot box, people living overseas or traveling at the time can vote just as easily as people in their home district, and people who may not have had access to voting before now get a chance. Internet voting might also give people a more direct feeling of influence in a vote's outcome. If the results could be released immediately, you would see how your one vote stacked up with the rest of them.
But on the other hand, and what worries me more, is that these very advantages might erode the significance and importance of elections. Or, change it into something that I might not like. Is it possible that voting, if made so easy as a click of the mouse, placed right next to the CNN poll, would become as meaningless to the average person? If every day, we encountered 10 polls asking for our opinion, how would voting for a person for office be made something with more weighty consequences? I know how little thought I put into an online vote, how would most other people feel?
The thing about voting, the way it is now, is that the physical effort, trouble, or fact that it is an extra-ordinary event, gives it significance and reminds people that this isn't just another mouse click after opening a web page. I worry that if we make it too easy to vote, or too commonplace, people may forget what voting actually means. They ought to travel to polling places, and see the other people who're voting, see who the members of their community are, and at least be mildly provoked to consider thoughtfully what their physical vote translates into. To that end, we should make the current process of voting as easy and as fair as possible. We can improve the system of registration to make it easier, create more sophisticated voting machines, help people get to the polls if they have difficulty, remove barriers to people who have been unfairly treated -- by all means do these things -- but in the end, voting should remain a special event, I think.
I find it funny that we can file our taxes over the internet to the IRS, but we can't get an anonymous voting system put together.
1) Different challenges. Anonymity conflicts with security. You can't keep an audit trail on computer without identifying information. With internet tax filing, the ID has got to go along with the records; with voting, it's supposed to be stripped out.
2)Your vote is supposed to be entirely private. Your tax return isn't (your spouse signs it, your accountant may know more about it than you do). I'm not sure there is any real security against internet snooping, except that finding your return in millions of packets would be a big job...
3) No one is going to come around to your house offering $100 if you will let them file a tax return in your name. Before reforms were instituted in the late 19th century, there was a lot of flat out vote buying in the USA, but now only congressmen get to sell their votes...
If we allow for internet voting, how can we prevent some thug standing next to you to be sure you vote for the "right" candidate? This would give organized (as well as less-organized) crime an opportunity to corrupt government far beyond what the lobbyists have done so far. And just imagine what Big Tobacco (or some other well-financed special interest group) could do under those circumstances. Hell, imagine what organized religion could do: "Vote for the democrate and you're going to hell." "Make sure that your brethren in God don't slide down the slippery slope."
The bottom line is that without a guarantee of secrecy (on the large-scale), the voting process would be exposed to corruption so bad, Iraq would have freer elections.