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.

Comments

Re:Maintain the Status Quo even easier! - on the '

[SirSlud]

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.

Text voting

[stephen_rymill]

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?

I doubt it'll happen in my lifetime

[baptiste]

I think the main point - voting in privacy, etc will be a difficult thing for Internet voting to overcome. There's vote fraud now and even if they do develop Internet voting, there will be fraud then. The trick is figuring out which method would be worse. For example - in Internet voting, it is a sure bet that operatives will go door to door, asking if folks have voted and if not showing them 'how' I also wonder if you could ever develop an online system that hackers could imact (doubt it) Our curren tsystem is far from perfect - but it would be nice to see the Internet used to imprve the current system in terms of validation and vote tabulation from precincts. Ideally we'd have touchscreen voting machines - more accurate with results sent in via secure Internet connections - not from each machine - too insecure, but fr9om each locality. Yes, that too could be compromised, but it would be easier (standardized equipment, etc) to ensure encrypted connections were proeprly used, etc, etc.

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!

Re:It doesn't matter ...

[damiangerous]

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?

Same for real life

[Hard_Code]

"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.

what problems?

[anthony_dipierro]

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.

Re:One of the main problems with internet voting

[TheAwfulTruth]

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.