Slashdot Mirror
Swiss Town Holds First Internet Vote
felix.rauch writes "According to an article on Swissinfo, a small town near Geneva (Switzerland) held the first Internet-based vote this weekend. 44% of the voters (323) cast teir ballot over the Internet. Officials believe it may have been the first Internet-vote worldwide. While the Swiss media seem enthusiastic about the project, I see serious security and privacy concerns. The voters had to enter a 16-digit password, as well as their birthplace, date of birth and another number sent to them by post. Personally I think Internet-voting should be avoided until it's implemented by an open zero-knowledge protocol and checkable afterwards. Who can give a guarantee that nobody tampers with the results or creates a database with citizens voting information?"
Cool, I wish they would get this in the US. I could vote while playing Civilization. I could setup a leader for each candiate and vote according to which one is doing best against me!
an open zero-knowledge protocol and checkable afterwards.
The only issue is that voting implies that you are who you claim to be! Technically is seems difficult to break the link between identification and vote... especially if you want it to be checkable afterwards.
May I use your sig please?
"Who can give a guarantee that nobody tampers with the results or creates a database with citizens voting information?"
Given that this can already be done now with existing paper-based voting (certainly in the UK and the US anyway), I don't see that it is any different.
I guess the best solution is to maintain the option for Internet or in-person voting, that way people can chose which way to vote as they please.
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
In the US we don't need the internet to tamper with voting result. Heck, even Dead people vote sometimes. In fact, voting 2 times is pretty easy. You can even give someone a beer and cigarettes to vote how you want them too!
So, being able to make the decision making process finer grained is a seriously good idea. Of course people won't vote on everything, why should they, they'll vote on what interests them but then the same is true of MPs. I await the results of the experiment with interest.
Having read some other reports on this, the Swiss are not claiming this is the first internet vote, they are saying that they believe it is the the first legally binding internet vote.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I thought the US allowed some people (military personel?) to vote using internet. The project costs were high (millions) while the number of people served (a few thousand) was very small.
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
Here we'd never be able to trust our government not to track how we voted. I would never enter information like that to vote, they'd add it to their "Total Information."
-- James Dornan
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Who can give a guarantee that nobody tampers with the results or creates a database with citizens voting information?
Who can garuntee that now with the papaer based systems? At some point you have to trust somebody.
are you suggesting all those ballot-stuffing votes for cowboyneal were not legitimate? i actually meant some of them!
Life is short; think quickly.
You do realize that when you vote pretty much anywhere in the US they have all that information on file all ready?
How else to they send you voter registration cards, and political junk mail?
That information is required to verify that the vote was made by a person who is legally able to vote, This means the vote is for person is of age, proper citizenship, not dead.
Without tracking this information it would be near impossible to keep track of legal votes, Prevent someone from voting twice, or stealing another persons vote.
Before a person goes off and throws on there Tin hats they should take a close look at what has already been going on for years before they cry foul and call it a poke into there privacy rights.
Whats next? All toilets should have built in Radiation generators to ensure no DNS can be recovered after you take a dump, because god knows the goverment has DNS tracers in every toilet in the US And can track your movements by them..
Personal Website
Simply put there is no way to protect from direct voter tampering. Whats to keep an abusive husband from forcing his wife to vote his way. Whats to stop Unions from setting up there own Internet connected voting places where they can stand over peoples shoulders. Or what if someone decides to vote from work and thier conservative boss walks up behind them and notices they are voting Democrat. Nope, bad idea.
"You don't need a weatherman/ To know which way the wind blows" -Bob Dylan: Subterranean Homesick Blues
I've never quite understood why people will only use technological solutions which can achieve a logical limit, eg. a system where it is impossible to work out how you voted, etc. , when you don't have that in the current low-tech solutions.
With a paper ballot it isn't too hard to check the ballots for your fingerprints, get the person who gives you your ballot to mark them beforehand. Or do many other things to make sure you don't have zero knowledge. If someone really wanted to they could find out how you voted.
Well then maybe they should hire some decent coders
Well, actually, I think people shouldn't care if their vote can be tracked and seen. I think if we can guarantee 99% accuracy and that the vote cannot be and is not cheated, then I'm fine...whatever is the method.
Sure, privacy is important, but what is most important in voting? A fair and honest result.
I think Internet voting would be more secure for that matter...but maybe not for privacy.
"Who can give a guarantee that nobody tampers with the results"
As opposed to the florida voting fiasco that made the US look incredibly stupid?
seriously there are always possibilities to cheat.
In Belgium everybody has to go to the voting office, you grab a blank credit card type card, insert it in the computer, you do your thing(you can still vote blank) you get the card back, and they insert it in a another computer to count your vote. a good fraction of the cards is kept apart to check them afterward, the others are reused.
the advantages of this scheme:
-you remain anonymous.
-they can still recheck the cards to see if the result is correct.
-votes do not have to be counted manually anymore.
in Soviet Russia, the vote counts you.
Online voting protocols are interesting from an academic perspective, but useless in practice. No such protocol, however clever, can get around the forced vote problem. Only by physically seperating people in a controlled environment can we be sure that everyone is completely free to vote exactly as they please (and that they can't even sell their vote, since they can't prove how they voted). Trying to achieve this online is obviously intractable.
Democratic voting, as a concept, is intimately tied to the nature of the meat space: one person, one presence, one identity, one vote. The very beauty of cyberspace is that these properties do not hold, so the two ideas are fundamentally mismatched. Let's keep democracy where it belongs.
Personally, I would like to see this here in the UK as well. It has already been suggested here that voting by SMS might be on the cards for UK citizens, to encourage the 18-25's to be less apathetic. I can't see that being workable though, because it would involve the phone networks who can't necessarily be trusted.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
I guess it's like using some nmber list for internet banking, which mean they shall use some SecurIDs some day which will make it quite secure.
Well, I also think it's better to move to the voting booth but not because of privacy matters, rather because I consider that it shouldn't be as easy to vote as watching tv.
In Switzerland ?
They've got some huge concerns about privacy there, they don't want people to feel harassed so I guess they have the will to make it safe.
BTW, as the Swiss president is elected for one year it doesn't make any sense to fake the vote as, on the other hand, the people will surely know how to turn him other in case he does some stupid things.
Now, they'll retain the possibility to vote in the booth so the Internet vote should rather seen as a possible other way to vote mean as as a replacement.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Arizona (USA) made this claim almost three years ago.
Who can guarantee that doesn't happen with regular voting? When it all comes down you are trusting the people who count the votes, and the people who collect the votes, that nothing shady is happening from when you vote to when it's counted.
They had four points of authentication and if you want two more points have them authenticate both their MAC address and IP. Sure, both can be forged but to have all 6 points of data line up in a database would take a determined person.
The real concern I have with Internet voting is that to the general public, the security concerns it raises makes having identifier chips on electronic devices seem like a good idea. The answer lies in education. So long as you accept the fact that NO security is absolute then you can move into the grey areas of increased security.
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
If Internet voting is ever implemented I will just stop voting. Because not only will it be too damn easy to fix the election. But afterwards the party in power can come after its enemies. Some times the old fashion way is better. Give me a booth and a #2 pencil thank you very much
Need help finding the flow? http://www.myspace.com/naturalismandbalance
The Result:
31% Pepperoni
26% Sausage
17% Mushroom
15% Cheese
6% Capers
5% CowboyNeal's BBQ'd Bits -o- Spam
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Posters / replies have mentioned that online voting should be linked to identity - that poses the question of voters being able to be tracked based on political philosophy. This could become part of a government record and then used against you. For instance, I vote against ANY tax increase, would this flag me for an audit if my voting record were associated with my name in a government database? As it stands now, votes are counted and held for 30 days then destroyed in the US. Any recounts, discrepancies, must be checked in that time period. If not, a revote has to be held, if suspect tampering/fraud has occurred.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Now pregnant Chads... that I leave to science.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
"Now that Arizona has completed the first binding election using the Internet to cast ballots, governments at all levels should work to ensure that this year's presidential election is the last one that will rely solely on paper and "snail mail," according to analysts at the Gartner Group."
The Internet held it's first swiss cheese vote.
"Comedy's a dead art form. Now tragedy, that's funny."
people signing up for spam offers and voting during load time.
and 'hank the angry drunken dwarf' will be our next president thanks to some 14 year old kid listening to the howard stern show....
1.4% voted yes
.9% voted no
97.7% voted for Cindy Margolis
Also, 34% pressed 111 to indicate that they wanted to cyber.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
Of course you can force someone to vote some particular way. "Vote Klopper or we'll kill your child". First of all this could be a very real threat and most people would rather lose their vote than risk anything, and secondly, with todays tech checking up on that vote wouldn't be too hard. (Think small camera, tampered voting cards (radioactive marking?), etc, etc.).
Anyone proclaiming the current systems to be tamper-proof, are of course in a state of sin.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Yeh, I wan't to vote for a left wing candidate......
Fuck there isn't one.
Internet voting, along with electronic voting booths at supermarkets was used in St. Albans, U.K. last year.
Well, I see that Internet voting isn't the magical solution to torn ballots we all thought it would be...
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
"44% of the voters (323) cast teir ballot over the Internet", And what did they think?
Is the internet good,
Not enough sweedish porn out there?
Too many popup adds.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Think about all security precautions you want but Internet voting has one not-solvable security hole concerning the "undesired voting advisers".
./ polls) physical presence and guaranteed privacy during voting is essential.
For stuff that really matters (not
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I'm sorry, maybe I'm a little too old school. Voting is a privelege in the US, and should not be a convenience. When I vote I should accept the duty to chose the better qualified candidate and make the march to the voter booth as if a pilgrimage to Mecca. I shouldn't be able to click a few keys on the keyboard while lying in bed to decide who the next President of the US will be--then be able to roll back over and go back to sleep for two more years.
Distancing the voter from the booth serves those criminals who use absenteeism as an opportunity to stuff your ballots. There are cemetaries across the US that vote in record numbers. Forget that the voters have been dead for years--they vote in absentia. Now all I need to is set up a reasonably sophisticated script and *bang* 60k more votes for the good guys.
Distancing the voter also distances him from the importance of his decision. If you don't think it's important enough to take time off of work, freeze for an hour in a line with two feet of snow, buy a suitable magnifying glass so you can read the candidates' names and pay attention when selecting a candidate--then maybe your vote should not count. Making the effort to vote connotes seriousness to me. There are some people who sacrificed their lives so you could do all of the above.
As an aside, I recall an incident where I saw a 20-something young woman vote using an optical ballot--you know, fill in the bubble. You'd think that after x number of years seeing that sort of form that filling the bubble would be natural. The instructions were clear on the ballot, and there was a very large example displayed whilst in line. Yet, she managed to use checks instead.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
What do you guys think would be some of the security/privacy implications if this was extended to give over the phone voting functionality for those without access to the internet. Maybe using something like VoiceXML?
[alk]
Dependent on the community you live in you can vote by mail at no charge. In Zurich it works like this:
3 to 4 weeks prior to a referendum (there are 2-3 per year) you get an envelope, which contains the official information, the voting forms, a card and a small envelope. You fill out the forms, place them into the small envelope, on which you seal the flap (so voting confidentiality is guaranteed), sign the card, stick everything back into the envelope it came in, close it (it's supplied with a mechanism to do just that) and drop it into the next mail box at your convenience (no stamps required).
So there is really no excuse not to vote.
I really don't see e-voting as that much more convenient and loaded with a whole pile of potential problems.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Simply put there is no way to protect from direct voter tampering.
As many people have already pointed out - There is "no way to protect from direct voter tampering" using traditional systems. I would accept the argument that any new system should be at least as secure as whatever system it is replacing/supplementing. However, to not implement a system until it is 100% gauranteed is foolish at best, especially when the result is more participation in the voting process, which is good for everyone (except perhaps the groups that depend on low-turnout.)
Whats to keep an abusive husband from forcing his wife to vote his way.
Nothing. Other than the laws designed to protect wives from abusive husbands in general. i.e. What's to protect her from being beat up nomatter how she votes?
Whats to stop Unions from setting up there own Internet connected voting places where they can stand over peoples shoulders.
Nothing. What's to stop unions from sending a couple of goons to stand outside the polls and remind you about the union stance and imply they might be checking your results?
Or what if someone decides to vote from work and thier conservative boss walks up behind them and notices they are voting Democrat.
This is just dumb. If you don't want to have a political argument at work, don't vote from the office. What's to stop your boss from checking the net logs and seeing that you regularly log into pro-abortion sites (or whatever)?
Nope, bad idea.
As far as I'm concerned, you gave no real reason why this is a "bad idea" - nothing unique to this implementation.
One real concern that I would have if this was implemented on a large scale, would be a proliferation of black-market votes. Certainly people sell their votes now, but as voting becomes easier, entering into the vote market also becomes more convinient. Whether or not this should be illegal is a completely different issue though.
FIRST VOTE!!!!!!!!!!
I mean, what would an online voting system be with out a few random trolls....
I also don't see a problem. When I give out my birthdate and birthlocation noone could identify me. The bigger problem would be when someone is able to modify the database! This would be much easier and cheaper (when the system isn't secured enough) as when it's done with hardwarepaper :)
How do you really know that this does not work? Did you happen to spend any time at all on the workings of their security mechanism?
Because you see as a foreigner living in Switzerland I tend to think if they can do it via the Internet then I know it works.
Swiss are conservative cautious people, who oddly enough embrace technology. Hence if it works in Switzerland then I know it will work. Case in point is 100% attendless gas stations. They are all over Switzerland now. They were introduced in 1995, but caught on really quick. And let me tell you how nice it is to have a gas station that is open 100% percent of the time. Sure people in North America have 24x7 gas stations. But I live in the country and hence that is not always the case.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
This will potentially lose the concept of the secret ballot. There is no way to show that the voters were not coerced into voting the way that they did. It's quite easy to have someone look over their shoulder and tell them which way to vote.
Being an Arizonan myself, I wish I could agree, but I don't think that a primary election for a party is really the same thing as an actual election (or a referendum in the case of the Swiss).
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Even beyond base digital sercurity concerns is the fact that internet voting occurrs from non-monitored locations. So what's to stop Candidate X's staffers from driving a couple of vans through the ghetto or a senior citizen's retirement community, load 'em up, bring 'em to a computer and say "If you let us watch you cast your vote for Candidate X, we'll give you $50".
Even with webcams,etc.,etc., there is NO way to ensure that internet voting is not coerced voting.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
Tampering aside, what's wrong with a database with voting information?
In some countries voting is compulsory (under the penalty of a fine, I suppose) and thus they keep a book on whether a person has voted or not. As far as the candidate who you vote for goes, I have no problem with telling that to people.
I could understand the paranoia if we were living in a dictatorship, but in a healthy democracy like we have in western democracies it shouldn't really matter if someone knows who we vote for.
... And that's how CowboyNeal got elected president of Geneva.
/syle
Vote early, vote often!
Trolling is a art,
the worst danger from not voting in an open and public place is voter fraud and bribery. your vote can be bought.
currently, in the us, you go into a curtained booth and no one knows what anyone voted for. there is no incentive for someone to try to buy your vote as your actions in the booth are unknown.
if you vote from home, a politician could be standing right behind you while you enter in your 2048 bit pasword with a $50 bill and defeat the integrity of the electoral process. this is a problem no matter how secure you make the computer transaction.
Voting is a privelege in the US, and should not be a convenience.
Voting is a right. Period.
All citizens should be given equal access to vote. Currently city-dwellers have a much shorter trip to "Mecca" than those in rural areas. Internet voting, coupled with phone voting, and snail mail voting helps to balance the inequities in access. Not to mention, there are those who are physically disabled and may find it more than just "inconvenient" to go to a poll.
The purpose of a vote is not to challange the citizenry, or setup some kind of obstacle course were they "win" the right to vote, but to provide them with the oppurtunity to express their opinion. We should not loose sight of that end.
There are some people who sacrificed their lives so you could do all of the above.
This is exactly the reason we should enable as many people to vote as we can. That right was/has been/is being fought for and earned for everyone not just those who "take it seriously" and want to navigate some jungle so that the process coincides with their mental heroic fantasies.
1) Issue everyone exactly one ballot. This will require some form on ID, but not on the ballot.
2) Only accept authentic ballots - which have no personally identifiable information, just votes.
3) It must be a high crime to submit more than one ballot or to falsify one. Even so, there should be a mechanism to prevent people handing their ballot to someone else - even though that is a form of voting (I'll pick whatever he thinks is right).
You realize it is easier for corrupt people to compromise a system that requires fewer humans to operate. Perhaps the large effort required to run our present system is worth it. If you're too lazy to go down and stand in line what good are you anyway? By the people/for the people requires the active involvement OF the people.
One real concern that I would have if this was implemented on a large scale, would be a proliferation of black-market votes. Certainly people sell their votes now, but as voting becomes easier, entering into the vote market also becomes more convinient. Whether or not this should be illegal is a completely different issue though.
:)
Due to the logistics of such a system, it COULD be easy to stop vote selling en masse even without legislation to the effect of "No selling of votes". These vote auction sites could simply be blocked from contacting the central vote server cluster(or whatever). That would prevent the LARGE auction (?) sites from doing it, and I suspect you'd get a level of vote purchasing similar to what we have now. Additionally large vote numbers coming from a few subnets could rejected in a non-abtrusive way. Require public voting kiosks to apply/use a public key system pior to accepting votes. (of course a pubkey system can be broken, what can't) What would happen in this case would be a buyer getting very small return on his investment as the clearing houses would have trouble actually placing X number of votes for the purchaser. Hence the industry would never be considered completely legitimate and most potential buyers would stay away.
Or so goes my 8:41 theory.
As much as I do have libertarian leanings, I'm not sure vote selling should be legal though. We have enough bad politicans and legislation now because of voter apathy. To create a above-board vote market would be a bit to scary for me
Actually, only the first vote was cast for someone. The other 322 votes were cryptic "ME, TOO" votes.
>>Whats to keep an abusive husband from forcing his wife to vote his way.
>Nothing. Other than the laws designed to protect wives from abusive husbands in general. i.e. What's to protect her from being beat up nomatter how she votes?
>>Whats to stop Unions from setting up there own Internet connected voting places where they can stand over peoples shoulders.
>Nothing. What's to stop unions from sending a couple of goons to stand outside the polls and remind you about the union stance and imply they might be checking your results?
Lying. In both of these cases you can vote for Alice and tell the husband/union you picked Bob. The original poster makes the point that anyone can observe your vote with Internet voting.
In the current system when you vote in person you have complete privacy while voting which does address all of the issues raised. Now if your arguement concerns absentee ballots then you should state that. If internet voting is however to be used as a replacement/supplement to traditional ballot voting, where we expect the majority (or at least a sizeable minority) of people to utilize it. Then these issues become more significant.
If I am married to a politically ambivilent person, what is to prevent me from casting their vote in addtion to my own? I know all the "identifing" information you might query, similarly I have access to it for my siblings as well, aging parents, etc. There are significant fraud issues which are difficult to address if you attempt to scale this into a primary voting procedure.
I do not much care for the current process, but have not yet been able to envision a much more automated system that does not have larger problems.
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
Even if a system could be invented that guarantees security, integrity and privacy, the "proof" that it could be trusted would be beyond the man in the street.
Everyone (well nearly everyone) can see and understand Xs, bit's of paper, security vans and vote counting.
Try explaining non-repudiation, PKI infrastructure and certification to one of your maiden aunts.
Will she be more or less convinced that the next President really won?
If people don't understand it they won't trust it. And if they don't trust it they won't use it.
VoterApathy*=2;
However, if I were part of the vote market, and I were creating a mechanism to enable it, I would probably create it as a vote client application. The voter never has to send me their information, the application would download the "what to vote for" information from my server, and log on to the vote servers and vote accordingly from the voter's computer. Totally distributed, nearly impossible to catch.
And I'm with you I think - I'm on the fence about vote selling. In theory, I think it should be legal, but I wonder if making every attempt to prevent it is a necessary evil. I would, however, be against it being classified as a major crime - this is just a legislative cop-out. Nothing that should be legal in principle, or in theory, should be criminal in practice - Difficult? OK. Expensive? Sure. But not criminal. How many people are already locked up for the stupidest of "crimes".
I think security is less of an issue than turnout, considering quite a few people still don't have web access and are still quite computer illiterate even if you provide it for them, which will be a feat unto itself. Sorry, but security aside, America is nowhere close to being ready for this.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
One of the rare funny scenes in this movie is when an election for sheriff is being held. (This is the New York City of Tammany Hall, remember.) They show gang members raiding bars, workhouses, and tenements to round up anybody who can walk, and send them down to vote. Then they grab them on the way out of the voting hall, hustle them down the street to the barbershop, clean them up so they look different, and send them back to the voting hall.
One old guy complains how "they done already bought me out, and I already voted. Twice!" And Leo DiCaprio's character goes, "Twice? You call that doing your civic duty? Get back in there and keep voting!"
The next scene was rather insightful, I thought. Cut to Tammany Hall. A clerk walks up to "Boss" Tweed:
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
You missed my point somewhat. At least with public polling places, individual voters can be protected. The abused wifes husband won't know for sure who she voted for, yes she will get beatup anyway, but at least she got to vote the way she wanted. Yes the union can send thugs to stand outside the polling place, but once you are inside, you can vote anyway you want and they have no way of knowing either way. You are probably right about voting from work, but honestly how many people will do it just for the ease of doing it ? Probably quite a few.
"You don't need a weatherman/ To know which way the wind blows" -Bob Dylan: Subterranean Homesick Blues
In fact, some protocols involve the goverment publishing a list of numbers after the election. The people can then perform some (non-invertible) operations on their private key and vote. If the number they obtain is listed, they can be sure their vote has been counted. The number of votes can also be checked to avoid stuffing.
For an overview of these protocols, pick up a copy of Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" and look at the literature references in the "Esoteric Protocols" chapter.
This does not change the fact that electoral offices everywhere would NEVER allow this to happen. Imagine aunt Lydia's vote did not get counted for some reason (including her not clicking the SUBMIT button), would they really want to hold another election in the name of democracy?
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
Voting a privilege? I thought it was a right. Constitutional right. And like any right it should be made as easy and convenient to exercise as possible once granted. Otherwise its a paper right like the right to vote in the southern states of the USA a while ago. The more you distance a right, the less it means. Making it harder to vote doesn't make the voting mean 'more' or be worth 'more' in the same way that 'good' 'honest' farm work is more 'honorable', 'worth more' or 'better' than sitting behind a desk and coding.
The current 'representative' model of democracy that most countries have, reflects the difficulty of organising an efficient democratic system. Instead of citizens directly deciding on laws and policies, which would be impractical with paper ballots and poll stations in most countries, these countries have people vote for somebody who they believe will be able to do decide laws and policies. They vote because they trust the candidate or at least trust him more than the other guy.
Switzerland is an exception with very democratic politics (mostly because the basic democratic deciding unit is very local level) and I think internet voting will make it even more so. The easier it is for a citizen to make their voice heard, the more the citizen will be able to say and decide on. This means that the role of professional politicians will decline. I don't have the time to sit in parliament and listen to debates and make deals and campaign and cast paper ballots and solicit financing but I do have the time to click yes/no on a tax rise/cut. And if I have the opportunity to do so, it means less horseplay opportunities for a professional politician and less justification for their existence. And I have more time to consider the issues than to spend freezing my feet off.
If you give people the facts and give them the tools to act upon them and create laws and policies, you give them democracy. Democracy is not freezing your feet off in the snow to put a cross on a piece of paper for somebody who will spend the next half of his term asking for you to freeze your feet off again.
In Soviet Russia the privilege votes you.
If I am married to a politically ambivilent person, what is to prevent me from casting their vote in addtion to my own? I know all the "identifing" information you might query, similarly I have access to it for my siblings as well, aging parents, etc. There are significant fraud issues which are difficult to address if you attempt to scale this into a primary voting procedure.
True enough, but as you pointed out yourself, this is a problem with the current system as well. Nothing stops you from sending in absentee ballots for any/all those people. Assuming traditional polls remain available, I don't see how this introduces any really new complications. It is arguably more secure than standard snail mail voting, and the whole country could choose to vote by mail if they wanted, but they don't - probably the same with net voting.
The Reston Association in Northern Virginia, which manages the city of Reston has held quite a few votes over the Internet.
Frankly, it all depends.
The Swiss government already has all of the above on file anyway. To me, the methodology employed is simply a very serious attempt at making sure that every vote is cast by the indivudual who can prove who he is In Real Life(tm) (and votes are for real, remember)....
Which leads us to: on the Internet you never know what's behind the curtain, but in this case it seems that they do ! :-)
In Switzerland, women were unable to vote on national issues until 1971, and voting on regional issues was restricted in some cantons of the country until 1990.
Perhaps, on the internet, no-one knows you're a woman.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
Who can garuntee that now with the papaer based systems? At some point you have to trust somebody.
Hard to know what you're talking about, considering that the U.S. can't trust people to actually count the paper vote.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
"Who can give a guarantee that nobody tampers with the results or creates a database with citizens voting information?"
Why - the same people who guarantee that a normal election is not rigged - these things are auditable, and so what if the techniques employed might have to change slightly, but certainly the methodology doesn't have to.
Or are we now making the mistake of saying the Internet introduces new things that havn't been around before - again - *sigh*.
"Who can give a guarantee that nobody tampers with the results or creates a database with citizens voting information?"
I think that there ought to be a law that requires any electronic voting system to utilize open source programs (whether it is utilizing internet-based voting in the future or the current electronic voting machines). That way, the programming code that tabulates the votes can be analyzed by the opposing political parties and independent third-parties to make sure that voter fraud is not being committed. With the electronic voting systems now in place across the US (including those in the state of Florida that have now replaced those from the 2000 election), whose to say that they aren't being tampered with now? Currently, we have to trust those who build the machines and those who have access to the programming code to not tamper with the tabulation of the votes. With the power and back-door money in politics, I wouldn't put it across ANY political party or candidate to try to alter the outcome illegally if they felt they could do so and get away with it. Like in many other circumstances where security and accuracy is a priority with computing systems, open source is the only way to go.
Use an old modem and dial a government ISP, from your home phone & while your voting they can get census info for that address too.
As many have pointed out, there are pros and cons to the logistics of "Internet" voting. I tend to agree with those who say you can't wait for it perfect the first time (if we could, computers wouldn't crash, taxes would be easy to file (or even better non-existant:) and the BMW 745i would run an open-source OS with the funding of Microsoft).
What I don't understand is why such drastic steps? As many point out, our current voting system (in the US at least) is fraught with problems and the use of technology as a tool to solve these problems is almost non-existant. I enjoy the priviledge of voting, but would find it better if I didn't have to wait hours in line and deal with a bunch of people who can't shuffle paper enough. Change the voting hall into a room of computers with a few monitors and help assistants and let the computers do the work of identifying you, registering your vote and submitting it...buy bank technology and rent the bank network (which is pretty good at this kind of transaction) to deal with security issues. Perhaps then, polling places can include your local grocery store, DMV, bowling alley or skating rink (all of which are pretty busy and public places).
Seems to me these baby steps might eventually lead us to private internet voting (though I doubt it because of the whole forced vote issue -which seems rather insurmountable).
My 2 cents.
The first binding internet vote was the 2000 Democratic Primary in Arizona:
1 2/ arizona.online.voting/
http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/03/
Brian
They use a "town hall" style of voting, where they meet in the town square, debate and vote normaly by a show of hands
;-)
this is called "landsgemeinde" and is only used in two very small cantons. the rest of switzerland votes "normally" www.admin.ch
Yo may think that is arcane. But at least the woman got the right to vote in the late 1980s
women can vote on national elections/referendums since 1971 (not much better)
on the other hand, the death penalty was abolished in 1944 (mmm... maybe that's arcane too)
This is a bogus argument. Essentially you're saying that because regular voting isn't perfect, we might as well use Internet voting. The reality is that voter coercion and vote buying are very easy in an Internet election and rather hard to do inconspicuously in an regular election. For example, those union goons might imply that they have the ability to check my vote in a old-style election, but most voters know that it's pretty unlikely that in fact they can. On the other hand, with Internet voting it's fairly obvious that they can by requiring you to vote in their presence.
You were right about one thing:
I would accept the argument that any new system should be at least as secure as whatever system it is replacing/supplementing.
Exactly. And Internet voting is fundamentally less secure with regard to voter coercion/buying than traditional secret elections.
Once upon a time, I was greeted by a poll-worker upon exit from voting, with "Thank-you for doing your duty to vote".
I turned and replied, "It is not my duty, it is my right and privelege. No one has a duty to vote, and in fact, anyone who hasn't taken the time to study the candidates and issues needs to stay home and let those of us who have run their government for them."
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
"Who can give a guarantee that nobody tampers with the results or creates a database with citizens voting information?"
Good old Confederatio Helvetica (.ch, or Switzerland) is Europe, which means they don't get the kind of privacy bullshit and misuse/abuse we get here in the U.S.
I've just recently been there and actually looked at the privacy issues trying to compare it here with the U.S., and let's just say, it was beautiful, not having to deal with information resale and spam like we have to deal with here. Over there, everything is protected, even from the government, for example, Steueramt (the IRS equivalent) *CAN'T* find out how much money you have in your bank account because the bank won't tell them, and that's just a small example.
In other words, I can't wait to go back and settle there.
I think now a majority of Swiss people votes by mail, and in the cantons Geneva and Basle-City it's usually over 90%. I think most risks of Internet voting that have been mentioned are the same or even bigger with voting by mail.
- Tampering with results: With voting by mail, abuse is relatively easy, and some cases have been detected. In a neighbouring city, an employee of a home of elderly people filled out and sent the ballot papers of old people about whom he knew that they wouldn't miss them. It was detected because he filled out all of them with the same pen and sent them all together. If he had to enter all these additional data (birthplace, date of birth, password etc.), such abuse would have been much more difficult.
- Privacy: To make it a bit easier to detect such abuse of mail voting, the envelopes with which the voting forms have to be sent have unique codes (at least in Basle). People who choose to vote by mail have to trust, too, that the information on the envelopes isn't connected to the vote. I think that surveillance of the process and making sure that anonymity of the votes is guaranteed is even a bit easier with Internet voting than with voting by mail where local cases of vote tracking might be more difficult to detect.
- People being influenced: Of course, we do not know whether someone is in front of the computer alone. But that's the same when ballot papers are sent by mail.
On the whole I think that possibly, in-person voting offers a bit more security, but as soon as voting is facilitated - be it by mail or by Internet, there are some risks (in my view, they aren't too big), and then Internet voting is perhaps even one of the more secure methods.
The main reason why voting by mail was introduced was probably that there are so many votes (referendums, initiatives) in Switzerland because of the system of 'direct democracy', so there is the fear that turnout will be too low because people get tired of voting (even with the possibility of voting by mail, on average only about 40% of people participate).
Don't forget they have a very open democratic tradition, and a strong social fabric to back up the technological security. Incurring the severe displeasure of the usually well-informed Swiss police is also not something one risks lightly.
IMHO, Any big voting fraud would require a monumental social engineering hack before you got away with it there.
Well, actually, I think people shouldn't care if their vote can be tracked and seen.
Great. And if you don't vote for who I say, your job is kaput.
Someone please mod down this dumb-ass.
Pleez.
--I voted from a touch screen last election and registered a complaint. In the past, you could physically see the ballots. Before voting, a box was opened, verified by eye, then re locked. End of the day if there was any dispute, those paper ballots were available to review, again, by anyone with a set of eyeballs and the ability to do simple addition. Now, this isn't possible, any ballot review consists of running the ballots through a closed source propietary piece of machinery that will spit out whatever result it's programmed to spit out. Get it yet? It's CLOSED SOURCE. It can be programmed to do whatebver it's makers tell it to do. There is NO forensic sytle review or audit there that can be VERIFIED by a third party. In addition it would be trivial to use existing biometrics and miniaturization to collate a voter with a face scan, eyeball scan, fingerprint scan-all on the sly-and connect an exact human to an exact vote, eliminating the "secret"part of voting, which was designed to insure that you could vote your conscious without being afraid of retribution. It's gone now, both any actual verifiable tally and also any anonymity. And with the machines all connected by modem, there's nothing to stop the so called "independent"and "trustworthy" company running the vote from messing with the tallies and announcing the "winner". think about very close elections, a few votes altered in a few key precincts can deliver an entire state's electoral tally completely differently. A critical position can be changed with a few keystrokes and YOU CAN'T TELL IT WAS DONE.
It is one of the STUPIDEST uses of computers I can think of, once you stop the "geek appeal" of using a computer and look at the results. Here in georgia we were the first state to go all touch screen the last election. Funny, all the pre-polling and exit polling done by human beings showed a set of trends, but the vote tally showed something totally different. What a coincidence. And the early reports during the voting day were showing a lot of people complaining about the voting screens registering NOT what they selected, but those stories have almost poofed away off the net and were completely dismissed by the 6 o clock news shows like it didn't matter. People would select one name, another name shows up for the "verification" before hitting "enter". this was happening a lot, and there's no way to tell how many people just yanked a party lever, clicked on some names, and had their results altered. I was looking very close at mine, that didn't happen, but I am thinking in key precints where the vote was close is where these "glitches" were appearing.
Here's my analogy I used with both my precinct officer and with some person they shunted me to on the phone when I complained. "If you went to buy a car and wanted a v-8, and noticed the hood was welded shut, would you take the salesman's word a v-8 was in there?" Along those lines anyway. neither of them could answer that except repeating "we can run the ballots through the program again". It's not they didn't get it, it was more they wanted me to just shutup about it because i was loud in the line when I complained and people were looking around trying to figure out what i was talking about. They REALLY pushed how "easy" it was with this election, they almost completely ignored pointing out the unverifiability of the count..
The new computerised voting will end any meaningful vote, it will not make it better, only make tampering more efficient and easier to do on a mass scale. And my guess is it happened already, but there's no way to even check on it, none, zero. You are FORCED to accept the "word" of a small handful of private suits who are running a private corporation (connected in ownership to political figures, this is verified) as to who "won" this or that election, even down to a very local level. And we know how "trustworthy" private corporations connected to either big money or big power are, don't we? They never lie or do "bad things", do they?
--zogger (no cookie on this machine I'm using so posting ac right now)
What we want, as with other voting method,is not a bulletproof system, but a system that doesn't allow mass poll fixing.
/. reader might like to know that the first version of the Geneva e-voting program didn't do end-to-end encryption (re-shudder). It was only after the local Linux user group (http://www.linux-gull.ch) complained loudly that a audit of the security was undergone and improvement made.
The problem with e-voting is that it doesn't totally eradicate this eventuality, as it relies on the user's PC, which is very weak security-wise.
Therefore, if someone can spread to enough citizen a small "fix" to their internet browser, or operating system, or java VM, whatever, he has the possibility of fixing the poll without anyone noticing.
Exemple, the little virus would just swap the answer (YES fo NO, or reverse) before sending it down the line. It would do it smartly, on a percentage of answer... There would be abolutely no way to notice it from the server side, and little way to know it from the user side... shudder.
We have to focus no ensuring that the poll cannot be mass-fixed without it being noticed.
Raphael, Geneva, Switzerland
> Who can give a guarantee that nobody tampers with
> the results or creates a database with citizens
> voting information?"
That isn't good enough. Not only must the system be provably secure, an ordinary citizen must be able to examine it and see that it is so.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
These are such a compelling arguments for in-person voting, that I am going to be against any online voting plans I hear proposed. This isn't because I'm afraid of my own vote being stolen or forced. I do not want to admit the danger of other voters being forced to vote against their will and nullifing the effect of my vote.
...since there wasn't a choice for 'neutral'.
The Swiss president is elected by parliament, not directly by the people (and the office of the presindent isn't that important in Switzerland, the government consists of seven ministers, and the one who is president for a year keeps his or her ministry/department, being president mostly matters for some representational duties).
This is a problem with absentee voting in general, not Internet voting per se.
Something like this probably doesn't baffle/alarm/confuse the techie crowd (I.E. us) at all. The average AOL-using citizen, on other hand, is receptive to all of the coming conspiracy theories which will be based on misunderstandings of such technology or blatant ignorance of the facts.
This isn't even a big deal to me, we should have started testing this form of voting earlier. For one, the convienence of voting at home will persuade many people into actually using their personal political power (voting).
With this new electronic system, there is no polling place where returning officers (title varies with jurisdiction) monitor the voting process, and ensure that no supervision, campaigning, or coercion take place within the polling place.
What's to protect her from being beat up nomatter how she votes?
With polling stations outside the home and secret ballots, she can lie about how she voted. I won't run through the remainder of your arguments, because they are all similar cases.
As far as I'm concerned, you gave no real reason why this is a "bad idea" - nothing unique to this implementation.
We would be back to the bad old days when votes were bought with whiskey or a cudgel. This is why all the elaborate mechanisms of a secret ballet were developed in the first place. Clear enough for you?
~Idarubicin
Out of a voting population of 323:
253 voted for the incumbant
70 voted for the runner-up
and 87,445 voted for Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I understand what you're saying, but it's not a case of only secret ballots in public places versus internet only ballots, is it? There is no requirement that you vote in secret, at a polling center (e.g. absentee ballots as previously discussed), therefore, in what way will these cases change due to internet voting?
An abusive husband can still force his wife to vote his way over mail, etc. Additionally, we can only speculate, that if this were to be increasingly used in the US, if it would be designed to replace the polling center or supplement it - which are very different alternatives in terms of this particular argument.
$50 per vote, and the politician needs to verify each person's vote visually? Yeah that's a pretty convenient way to stuff the ballot box. ;)
The problem you are talking about already exists - they are called absentee ballots. Heard anything about vote buying with them? Nope. You know why? Because if a politican was caught soliciting votes they would be arrested and their political career would be over.
Same thing with Union bosses who tried to force everyone to vote in the plant while Teamsters stood over them - they would all be arrested as soon as someone squeeled.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Personally I think Internet-voting should be avoided until it's implemented by an open zero-knowledge protocol and checkable afterwards
Well, most voters already have "zero knoledge" of whatever it is they're voting for anyway...
Those Swiss folks obviously didn't search for e-voting info in the UK, because 13 towns in the UK had e-voting for the local council elections in May 2002. So the Swiss initiative certainly isn't a "worldwide first".
I want the option to keep my vote a secret. Imagine all the trouble you would get for voting for someone most people loathed. You would become an outcast.
If we want the legislators to represent the opinions of the people, we can't have exposed voting.
Of course we need to know how our legislators vote in their office, but that's another matter entirely.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
At my school, the University of California, Irvine (UCI), We've been having electronic voting booths for years. And all it requires to vote is your student id number and pin to vote.
Why does this little shit town make any kind of a headline? Our student body, even though we don't represent a city population, is much, much larger than this city's population. Our student government (ASUCI) probably deals with a much larger budget as well. This is a stupid fuckin story, that has no relevance to the real world. How about you post sometime when a city with approx 30,000 residents (or more) actually attempts something like this. Oh, hell. Just wait until you have a city with 30,000 registered voters to talk about the first internet vote.
Pfffft. Slashdot has been doing it for years, and on WAY more important subject than electing a mayor in a small town... Geez. :-)
In Oregon there are stiff felonies to punish anyone who attempts to influence a vote cast via our mail-in system. AFAIK, these have never yet been used. These are, unfortunately, the hardest crimes to find because the victim must voluntarily alert the police.
"I think we should tax people who stand in water! " - Mr. Gumby
Use Freenet for anonymous voting. All you need is a n authentication method so people vote once and only once.
Unix is a standard, DOS is a standard, windows XX is not.
I'm sorry, but I don't think this was the first Internet-based vote. I thought that's what the 2000 Arizona Democratic Primary was.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
in switzerland u have an govermental division which is called * Swiss Federal Data Protection Commissioner*
//snip //snip
or http://www.edsb.ch/e/aktuell/index.htm ( in englisch )
So a little snippet out of "e.mail use @ the working place"
When an employee feels that he has been controlled by the employer in an impermissible manner, he can take civil action against the employer for violation of personal rights. Pursuant to penal law the employee proceeds against the employer before the competent authorities on grounds of violation of privacy or unauthorised acquisition of personal data. As a rule he goes to the police to file charges.
so we also have no identifier unique, which allows a person's cyber or govermental tracks be followed 100 % ).
as sample (germany has it also) a provider ISP is allowed to store connection data up to 30 day's , which is the period which are used to make the bill's, the bill data itself must be stored 10 year's, but the connection data ( mac/ip/referer) 30 Day's, if a provider give's out such data,he can be sued by law.
so there was a case when german T-Online ISP has deliver 80 day's old data without an law case, so now there where sued by the data commisioner, n pay penalty.
so u can be shure that the data commisionier will do anything that data cannot be tracked, or stored too long.
This is also a reason, why u have a serial number on normal snail-mail for the vote. if there's a Certificate it would not be possible, exactly if the same certificate would used multiple times, the vote system would not be allowed..., or let's say if you're votes where trackeable , you'd could not vote per internet.
I think that internet voting should provide an improvement compared to casting paper ballots, but from there to saving the world, the expectations are quite high! Can you ensure that nobody tampers with your paper ballots? (Of course not).
My father went many times counting ballots and told me that he could recognize the vote's owner from his or her writing (out of about 500 ballots cast there). And in Ticino (southern Switzerland), all vote results are published by town: some are so small that they have only a dozen voters, so that it's quite easy to reverse engineer the vote!
I think this vote was an improvement, not because it was more secure that casting paper ballots (nor was it less secure), but because it encouraged more people to vote. 22% of the voters where regular abstainers.
-Patrik
-------------
Discover the Bluebottle OS!
Paper votes, can be checked from a group of people, minimizing the risk of someone tampering with them.
Electronic votes can be hacked during the data travelling from point A to point B without taking notice of it.
It is not the same.
Check Virtual Trip ltd at http://www.vtrip-ltd.com
They have a cryptographically strong voting system (VoteSecure). All system is made in Java, voters just access a web-page and use a signed applet and their private/public key-pair to vote.
http://www.geneve.ch/chancellerie/e-government/ove rview.html
see u're self
Because the husband can beat the wife if she uses the secret voting mechanism. Even without full replacement, in a coersive situation that can force you to change your vote can also force you to pick the voting method.
-no broken link
I don't see how you could call this Swiss vote the first, Arizona had online elections during the 2000 election year here in the States, I think it might have been for the primaries only, but it is still an online vote for a public postion. This happens with cloning as well, do a search on CNN for first cloned human, and you'll get a different article for each year.
Intelligence is a matter of opinion.
"Whats to stop Unions from setting up there own Internet connected voting places where they can stand over peoples shoulders.
Nothing. What's to stop unions from sending a couple of goons to stand outside the polls and remind you about the union stance and imply they might be checking your results?"
One of the biggest battles of the 1980s was getting unions to hold secret ballots. Probably had much more to do with the reduction of strike action than any other legislation. Guess what, you can now vote for someone who does not have goons. This was also one of the biggest reforms of the Westminster system in the 19th centuary. Don't underestimate the power the guaranteed secret ballot gives to the people. Our ancestors recognise this and were prepeared to die for it.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
My privacy requirement dictate that government never know where I live (that includes telephone numbers, etc.) or hold/place anything on my body or in my/their possession that uniquely identify me (including my DNA).
As a result, it will be impossible for government to verify my identity at the time that voting is to take place.
This is the fundamental reason that Democracy is not what most people think it is.
Whenever the topic of internet-based voting comes up, there's always a lot of fuss over security; what people seem to miss is that security isn't the problem: secrecy is.
Folks, you don't want an individual vote to be checkable. If there is any way for me to prove conclusively---to the gov't or anyone else---how I voted, then there is likewise a way for someone to pay me or force me to vote a certain way! Mandatory secrecy is crucial. Whether curtains are involved or not, poll volunteers are supposed to be careful not to let people show their votes (accidentally or intentionally) to anyone else.
This doesn't exclude using computer terminals at the polling station to actually improve the voting user interface, which I wholly support. But making people physically go to the polling place is the only way I know of to guarantee secrecy, so I'm very much against internet voting.
``This, too, shall pass.'' ---Eastern proverb
I live in switzerland and while Switzerland is arguably the worlds most democratic country in that any person can start an initiative to change a law if he can gather enough signatures for it, there is a chronic problem of low voter turnout. Voting over the internet could get younger people and others who normally couldn't be bothered to vote.
(Yes, absentee ballots have the exact same problem, which is an argument that one should only be given such a ballot if you are genuinely absent. And if we reschedule all of our elections to once per year, it will limit the number of people who need to vote absentee and make it easier for each person try to avoid being absent on the voting day.)
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Each of these cults correspond to one of the two antagonists in the age of
Reformation. In the realm of the Apple Macintosh, as in Catholic Europe,
worshipers peer devoutly into screens filled with "icons." All is sound and
imagery and Appledom. Even words look like decorative filigrees in exotic
typefaces. The greatest icon of all, the inviolable Apple itself, stands in
the dominate position at the upper-left corner of the screen. A central
corporate headquarters decrees the form of all rites and practices.
Infalliable doctrine issues from one executive officer whose selection occurs
in a sealed boardroom. Should anyone in his curia question his powers, the
offender is excommunicated into outer darkness. The expelled heretic founds
a new company, mutters obscurely of the coming age and the next computer,
then disappears into silence, taking his stockholders with him. The mother
company forbids financial competition as sternly as it stifles ideological
competition; if you want to use computer programs that conform to Apple's
orthodoxy, you must buy a computer made and sold by Apple itself.
-- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...