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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
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
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
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.
Having served in the military, I can say I've never heard of anything of the sort. Even if the Federal government would allow military personnel to participate in an Internet vote, you'll still have to get all those States to agree as well, since each is entitled to deterimine voting laws for their own state (Title 3 USC, I believe).
As for costing millions to support few, that is the norm in government programs.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
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
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.
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.
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....
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.
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
... And that's how CowboyNeal got elected president of Geneva.
/syle
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.
>>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.
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;
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)
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.
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.
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 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*.
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)
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).
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".