Slashdot Mirror
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.
Note that the above assumed by 'voting on the Internet', we mean voting from home. I'm not neccessarily against using computers at poll stations, as this doesn't discriminate against those without access to the Internet at home, or disproportionately empower those that do.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Didn't someone used to have a sig like 'the supreme court ruled it legal to screw voters, and demonstrated how to do it'?
Just proof that throughout the whole election mess people's opinions - from ordinary citizens right up to the members of the US Supreme Court - were dictated by who they wanted to be in office.
Voting by mobile phone text message is going to be trialled in the UK at the next election. See this BBC News story. This has a lot of the same issues as internet voting - have they really been thought throught yet?
First of all, to institute a federal mandate to require all votes to be cast over the internet would require an amendment to our Constitution, which currently gives the States the right to decide how they want people to vote (within limits). Assuming this is done (a herculean feat), securing the internet for voting shouldn't be that hard a thing to do really.
Imagine this, each county in every state runs their own VPN between the voting offices. Each VPN would feature a different encryption screen, and each vote would be encypted as well. This means that not only would every vote feature 128-bit encryption, the entire VPN would as well, making it impossible to know who placed what vote. Also, ballot stuffing could be eliminated because not only would you have to crack the VPN, you'd also have to submit a properly encoded vote in order for it to count. One misplaced 0 or 1 scratches the entire ordeal. Since the VPN's would only be up for one day, hackers would have little time to break the encryption.
Just a few thoughts.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
This reminds me of the problems we had at the Universty of Michigan a number of years back with the student government elections, which allowed students to vote online. The problem arose because candidates would walk through the dorms pumping their platform, knock on people's doors, log them into the voting website and show them how easy it was to vote for them. Obviously, quite an uproar came about because of this and I'm sure a similar situation would occur on the bigger scale elections.
Couldn't you just imagine the candidates to sending out their lackies to people's homes showing them how to vote online and how to click on their candidate's name and then click the submit button? I wouldn't put it by any political party to try this type of underhanded scheme, and I hope we never ever see that.
We won't get online voting for another 10-20 years and especially not until we can safeguard against "attacks" like these.
On a sidenote, I'd be interested to hear from any current Michigan folks to know if the student elections are still happening online.
Peace out.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
That makes a refreshing change from the usual 'We must combat voter apathy!' Instead, a laissez-faire attitude, on the principal that if they are too lazy to walk to a poll booth then their vote is pointless anyway.
You know, I'm beginning to like that idea - the only problem is that the highest percentage turnout will be the fanatics (on whatever side - but not necessarily cancelled out) and the disabled would be under-represented.
It amazes me how old our voting system is. I live in teh sitcks, but somehow we've managed to use fairly recently technology - like the tactile button/LED machines with scrolling paper a few years ago to the new touchscreen machines in the last election (modelled just like the tactile button machines) to reduce confusion
Just because we CAN do something doesn't mean we should. I'm not sure Internet voting would improve the integrity of the voting and in teh end that's what relaly counts. If you don't care enough to get off your fat butt and vote in your local fire station, etc, then you don't need to be voting!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Except for the tens of thousands of mostly black, mostly Democrat voters who were disenfranchised prior to the election simply because they had the misfortune of sharing a last name with a convicted felon.
Oh, please. Name one. The election was November 7th, 2000. Fifteen months ago yesterday. In that time, not a single person has come forward to say that they, personally, were turned away from the polls. Two people have said that they saw police cars near the polling area and felt "intimidated" so they kept driving. Yet not a single person has claimed they showed up to vote and was refused. Surely, out of "tens of thousands of black voters" you could find a single one who was turned away?
Except for that the prevailing attitude is, "Don't give them food, and, okay, well, sure, teach them how to fish. But don't tax me for it. And I don't want to be the one to teach them. And make sure they have to buy their own fishing rod. And I don't want to be forced to fish less because now we have more fishermen."
;-)
Yes, maybe it is. But it doesn't have to be yours, and surely it's not mine (and I am not saying that it is yours either, just that I don't know you enought to confirm this or that). What I meant is that attacking ways to facilitate the wealth to choose the governament it's not the best way to help those on the pyramid's bottom to achieve a better life. It doesn't matter, IMHO, how you choose, but whom do you choose and why. Give people information and release them free.
The wealthy want their cake, and then they want to eat it.
No, everybody wants the cake. It's not only the wealth, this is a classic falacy of A = B, B = C, so A = C (whic is not true). It's not because the wealth have more cake, and they want more, and they have better ways to have it, that the poor won't get any piece, or that they are forbidden to try to get it.
But, I must note, I DO THINK that this happens, poor are forbidden to touch the cake (at least the sweet part of it). I just don't agree with the way you put it, since everyone wants the cake.
That whole "Well, things are already unequal, so what's wrong with making it a little bit more unequal" argument is self-affirming redderick, and I have no doubt that it only contributes to the social 'fault line' that has exploded many times in history before.
Me too. I am against what is preached. But the car argument IS NOT the reason why the world is fucked up. If so, we should not be allowed to vote. If we were to forbid every way to make people vote easier, we would have simply to have only one voter. If you present the argument that distance from the voting point is harmful to those far away from it, you will get to the point where the only possible solution is to have only one person casting their vote.
It's a bit strange, because practically, that's what happen. You have the 'one' media in favour of a candidate, the 'one' society sector in favor of a condidate, etc... Our socials desire to have interactions with other humans and the concessions that we allow to make these situations possible, generates an attrition to the final objective of a democracy.
Sadly, this has been said many times, since the governament wants to keep their power, and they have to get votes from people to do so, democracy is in fact a denial of the truth, the 'ultimate' truth. Because the power is always bending itself to allow the continuity of the status, and NOT pursuing a real, real close to, truth.
PS: I am enjoying having this conversation, and don't take anything personally
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
"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?"
And how do they do the same for physical elections? They have vote "watchers" or some such. Even with vote watchers people can be influenced by others [1]. There is nothing stopping us from voting electronically (disregard over the net) in the same way we do physically, in central locations. What voting electronically DOES do, is allow us to have verified results as soon as votes are cast, without introducing human error and speculation (yes yes, subject to the usual haxoring of the process, but that is probably lower than the margin of error introduced by over-speculation and human error).
[1] Real event: the mother of somebody I know was told upon going to vote for the first time in a new county, that she had to reregister, but was strongly dissuaded from registering as a Democrat, because, as the pollster said, the county was largely Republican and she "could not vote if she was a Democrat" (a half-truth: she wouldn't be able to vote in *Republican primaries* (DUH!), but this wasn't made clear to her.), so she registered as Republican. Yes it might have been her fault for being persuaded, but AFAIK, it is a *Federal crime* to defraud the election process...it's even more horrible that the people supposedly watching over the polls to keep them neutral do it.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
It would be amusing, were internet voting (or, for that matter, any computerized system like a touch screen) to ever be implemented, to have the system also provide information on the candidates. For instance, a full listing of all the financial information that the FEC requires, plus their voting record or other history as is relevant and of public record.
;) )
("Vote for ---? This candidate has been funded by... and his party has been funded by... Please confirm."
Plus, allow the candidates to specify a short statement, and maybe the same for news services. *shrug*
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Privacy, security, and reliability, all seem like problems that are easy to solve. Just give each person in the U.S. a CD with their public/private key when they register to vote. As an added bonus we'd eliminate spam.
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?
Simple solution: let them change their vote. Even if someone watches them vote, that's no more than their word that they won't change it.
The bigger challenge in either system is verifying the identity of the voter. This gets worse when
Well, almost.
I did my master's work on electronic voting. The real problem is that it's hard to simultaneously provide a secret ballot and obtain adequate proof of the voter's identity. This is true even when you don't consider the case where someone might be looking over the voter's shoulder during the voting process.
There are several schemes that have been proposed for dealing with this, but none are really adequate. Actually, it has yet to be shown that an adequate solution exists.
Two problems with that.
1) I've programmed for touchscreens for almost 1 decade. None of them are 100% foolproof. Depending on the type all kinds of contaminants, dry air and wear can register incorrect selections. There'd have to be a more complicatd setup of "Are you sures" making the entire process slower and maybe even MORE error prone.
2) Secondarily, the idea of an electronic only system is also bad. At minimum, this touchscreen terminal had better punch out a physical card that can be recounted! There needs to be a hard record of every vote. Otherwise power failures, HD failures, both accidental and not, will lose votes FOREVER.
I believe that the only proper way to do it is mechanically with punch cards. Now the machines themselves can be greatly improved over the cheap ass pin systems most states use today. But I really don't want to use a computer to vote in any way and I've been a software engineer for 23 years! I know what there is to be afraid of.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!