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?"

Comments

Take off your Tin Foil Hat and give it a rest

[cyberlotnet]

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..

computerised voting

[Interfacer]

"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.

Arizona

[micromoog]

Arizona (USA) made this claim almost three years ago.

Re:Zero - knowledge

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Well heck, even with the voting machines, they tell you you are voter #x, and only go to machine #y. The polling folks periodically check the counters on the machine.

Take that system, bottle it, and you have just what you need for a network based voting system. You need a counter Y, and a head count of how many people cast the vote X. If X > Y you have a problem. Y can be less than X because some folks don't vote for every slot in the election.

Now the problem is such: you need to compartmentalize the counts into managable chunks. What is great about the present system is how you can only physically screw up a few thousand votes at a time. My idea: keep the present voting districts that we have presently, and keep the counters an logs seperate for each district.

Such a system, with a sufficient enough airgap between the finally tally and the auditing logs, could be done rather cheaply.

Fraud and Convenience . . .

[Dausha]

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.