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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.
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
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.
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...
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...