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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.
The city council has moved to mail-in ballots for municipal elections in my jurisdiction. This too was a schmozzle of the hugest proportions, and think of how trivial that is compared to electronic voting...
you know where people live, they don't change their address every time they go home, you know from tax returns how many people live at an address. Who can verify anything electronically. Remember that old saw "on the internet no one knows your a dog"?
--everytime you learn something a piece of your brain is replaced by something that someone else said
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"
... Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf is elected President.
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"
What a great pity... I'm sure I'm not the only one who was looking forward to voting for CowboyNeal. :)
These sigs are more interesting tha
You mean we can't use the Slashdot polling engine? I thought that was accurate to within .001%...
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?
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.
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. That's how the election was really stolen and the only decent coverage of it that I ever saw was by the BBC.
Okay, that part was off-topic but this part isn't.
The real problem is two-fold. Making sure every voter is permitted to vote and making sure the ballot is understandable.
If you don't accomplish these things first, it doesn't matter how/where/when you hold the vote. Fix what's broken first!
You might argue that the Florida 'butterfly' ballot was understandable but the mere fact that people are arguing about it (to my mind) proves it wasn't clear enough. It should be undisputably easy.
Given the current state of the web, I don't see how they could hold an election over it. I can see the complaints now - "I pressed the VOTE button and...".
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.
You can never verify the privacy of the voters, because they may choose to tell their vote
Two points on this
1) You can lie "Sure I voted for you Mr Big Gun"
and the second is that this isn't the issue the issue is Mr Big Gun standing next to you as you put the X on the sheet making _sure_ that you vote for him.
Not sure which countries allow people the day off to vote either.
Imagine managing the digital signature for everyone, BUT STILL ENSURING ITS ANONYMOUS.
The problems are huge, and they are right to reject it, especially in light of the problems of access to the internet.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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.
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...
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!
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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?
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
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.
"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?
- 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...
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.