Pentagon Cancels Internet Voting System

Ben B writes "The Pentagon won't use an Internet voting system for overseas U.S. citizens this fall because of concerns about its security, an official said Thursday. The official, who requested anonymity, said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made the decision to scrap the system because Pentagon officials were not certain they could 'assure the legitimacy of votes that would be cast.' Computer security experts who last month reviewed the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, had urged the Pentagon to scrap the system, saying it was too vulnerable."

Comments

I really have to question

[barenaked]

I question the whole premise of using the internet in the voting process. The flaws are unsolvable because they are fundamental to the architecture of the internet. Using a voting system based upon the internet poses a serious and unacceptable risk for election fraud. It is simply not secure enough for something as serious as the election of a government official. The report recommends that the Serve project be shut down and nothing like it be tried until "both the internet and the world's home computer infrastructure have been fundamentally redesigned, or some other unforeseen security breakthroughs appear." With which I wholeheartedly agree

Re:I really have to question

[Rotten168]

Well, the Pentagon considered the implication that worldwide "hackers" could alter the outcome of the election. And seeing as how popular GWB is worldwide, their decision was wise.

Re:I really have to question

[Billy the Mountain]

I disagree. You can solve all manner of these types of problems using certificates with high encryption strength.

BTM

Re:I really have to question

[El]

Unless you assume that the machine doing the encryption has already been compromised.

Re:I really have to question

[osewa77]

High security can always be layered on top of the 'unreliable' internet as it is; the problem is that the stock software has so many easily exploited loopholes (trojans? keyword capture? windows exploits?) that it would introduce messy, situations, which would not help the current government's bid for the next elections (better safe than sorry?)

Re:I really have to question

[gewalker]

In Florida they had a big fiasco. They tried to fix it by recounting the PAPER ballots repeatedly. This did not make anyone too happy either. George W. won all of the recounts, including ones done by the independent press, but lots of people still argue a fix was on, Bush stole the election, etc. -- Note:, I'm not arguing that Bush did or did not steal the election, or if he would be the first that had if he did -- I'm focusing on the controversy surrounding it to the day.

How in the world would the U.S. react if you could reasonably argue that the system could have been hacked, etc. -- Strikes me that this would be a very chaotic result.

The Internet based system does not and probably cannot have a useful audit trail that is equivalent to the paper ballots.
Foreign nationals are certainly limited in their voting flexibility and I think the Pentagon was trying to incorporate them betting in the voting process. Is there not a reasonable compromise that would meets the needs of voters and voting integrity?

Re:I really have to question

[Carnildo]

I think they should just do away with anonymous ballots.

as if there is any real need for this anymore. i've never understood why people want to still keep this secret.

In Soviet Russia, they shot people who voted against the wishes of the Party.

Re:I really have to question

[sholden]

People vote differently in secret ballots than they do in public ballots. That's a pretty significant reason to keep them.

Secret ballots prevent many problems associated with elections (breaking the legs of those who don't vote how you told them, for example). Of course with non-compulsary voting you can perform similar attacks anyway - prevent a bunch of people who will cast more votes for your opposition than for you from voting at all.

The UK has a system in which votes are tagged with unique identifiers that match a voter to a ballot - but the link is locked away somewhere "safe" and legally can't be accessed except on a court order and are destroyed after a year. That provides most of the benefits of a secret ballot, but still allows the votes to be checked if the election is suspect. See here for a short blurb on the system.

Now whether than system is good or bad is another matter, but it shows you can have some of the benefits of a secret ballot and also the main benefit of a non-secret ballot.

Re:I really have to question

[TyrranzzX]

Use a p2p system, there's no centralized point under control by anyone. Just one secure, open source model that gets implemented and is hard to hack. Plus, with paper ballots, and that kind of a system where the votes are tallied by thousands of voting machines, anyone can check the votes in their area without a problem. Use good encryption, trustable maintainers and goverment certification, and you've got a strong basis for something most techies would trust.

Re:I really have to question

[MuParadigm]

"...George W. won all of the recounts, including ones done by the independent press..."

Actually, not to get into the argument of whether there was a fix or not, but the independent press tally came up with different winners, depending on how the vote was counted.

Ironically, using the counting method that the Democrats recommended would have resulted in a Bush victory, and using the counting method advocated by the Republicans would have resulted in a Gore victory.

But then the Supreme Court stepped in at the Republicans request, called off the recounts, and gave the victory to Bush. So the proper counting method for the recounts became a moot issue.

Re:I really have to question

[LnxAddct]

As El so elegantly stated, Unless you assume that the machine doing the encryption has already been compromised.

The problem is if I root your computer and thn you register to vote, I simply block your vote from leaving your computer, fabricate my own packets and send them along. you'll never know because voting methods require that they can't be traced back to you. If someone can prove that you voted for a certain candidate then people will start being paid to vote for certain candidates As long as you can't attatch a vote to a person then paying someone to vote for you is fundamentally flawed in that you can't prove anything they did.In an age where hackers store their movies and mp3s on government computers and an age where people will open up any email that says it was specially encoded in a binary format as an attatchment, I don't think its a wise idea for anyone to trust anyone that their vote was legitimate if it was sent through the internet.It doesn't matter if the network is decentralized (the internet is decentralized by the way), if I own your computer then I control what you do with it, simple as that.
Regards,
Steve

Re:I really have to question

[Anonymous Cowtard]

But then the Supreme Court stepped in at the Republicans request

Yeah... after the Democrats took it to the courts to begin with.

Neither party's hands are clean in the whole fiasco.

Re:I really have to question

[MikeXpop]

Ever watch the old Dilbert cartoons that used to be on UPN? There was an episode called "Ethics" where Dilbert was assigned the task of building the internet voting system, and how he dealt with the thought of creating a back door for himself or not. In the end, he decided not to, but some h4x0rs got in anyway and added the candidate "Harry McButtcrack" (or some similar name, I forget) as a joke. The american public voted for him.

But hey, it could have been worse. They could have voted for Bush.

Re:I really have to question

[MillionthMonkey]

You can solve all manner of these types of problems using certificates with high encryption strength.

No you can't. People concentrate on encryption strength as if that's everything. It's like the height of a wall. Doubling it doesn't help if people can walk around the wall. The key length is only one of many vulnerabilities in a system. Think of all the computer security breaches you've heard about. How many happened because an attacker succeeded in brute forcing a key? As opposed to, say, using an easily guessed default password? Unless you're using DES, or crappy exportable encryption, brute forced keyspaces are probably not how you will go down.

What you have here is something that is pretending to be a solution to a problem that is pretending to be a solution in search of a problem. There are really two problems here- the one you are addressing (short key length), and a more fundamental one, which is that there is no reason for we the voting public to be hearing the words "Internet" and "voting" in the same sentence at all, nor is there any reason why we should have to assume a collective responsibility for safeguarding our own votes in this election process when we weren't even the ones who had anything to gain from endangering the democratic process in the first place.

Re:I really have to question

[Free_Meson]

But then the Supreme Court stepped in at the Republicans request

Yeah... after the Democrats took it to the courts to begin with.

Neither party's hands are clean in the whole fiasco.

I hope you aren't saying that it was somehow wrong to take that election to court. That's the reason we have courts -- when everything else breaks down, they are the final arbiters of right and wrong. They are the referees that determine which rules are just and how they should be interpreted and enforced. You can't have a truly democratic system without a powerful court because those abused by the tyranny of the majority have no recourse. As for the case of Gore v. Bush, it looks like the court failed. It didn't fail because Bush won (though I would have prefered Gore), it failed because in a situation that needed a conclusive end it rendered the worst possible verdict for the sanctity of democracy in the United States. They said that a recount should happen, but becuase of an artificial deadline ~50 days before the winner would take office and less than a day after the decision, a full recount requiring less than a week would just be too inconvenient to endure. The case should have been about how to count the votes, with the democrats arguing one way and the republicans arguing another. Instead, the republican council argued that there should be no recount at all... As a litigation tactic, this was good -- if you won the first count, argue against any subsequent recounts. As it concerns the country, though, this was a horrible argument, and a less radical court would have seen the importance of deciding the election with a universal standard of fairness rather than doing what it did. The Gore v. Bush decision may have been the single worst supreme court decision since the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, but at least in Scott the court had a sound legal principle to support its decision.

Anyway, I can't believe you're claiming the democrats should somehow be blamed or tarnished for seeking a recount in an election where equal protection had obviously been violated. The fact that such a request even made it into a court should tell you that the republican party, at least at the time, cared more about being in power than it cared about the democratic nature of the united states or its constitution.

Re:I really have to question

[MuParadigm]

"I hope you aren't saying that it was somehow wrong to take that election to court. That's the reason we have courts -- when everything else breaks down, they are the final arbiters of right and wrong."

Well, there is a Constitutional process documented, yes, right there in the Constitution, that throws the election into the House and Senate in the event of a contested slate of electoral votes from any particular state.

If your going by the Constitution, the recount should have proceeded and, since whichever side lost probably would have taken it to Congress, Congress should have decided.

That, of course, would have ended up a huge political mess, since, as VP, Gore would have had the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, and the Senate was split 50-50 at the time.

There is an argument that letting the Supreme Court decide prevented a greater crisis in Congress, and nationally. But there really was no Constitutional support for it.

So, yes, I am saying it was somehow wrong for that election to end in the Supreme Court. However, I'm not sure that the prescibed Constitutional procedure would have been any better. Taking it to the Supremes *may* have been the least wrong of all possible wrongs.

Re:I really have to question

[Zeinfeld]

I disagree. You can solve all manner of these types of problems using certificates with high encryption strength.

But not the confidence problem.

The problem with SERVE is that it got caught in the crossfire from the Diebold issue. It is an easier target in some ways because people are used to ATMs, they are less used to the Internet.

There is a big difference in the two problems, with Internet voting it is much easier to perform one off frauds that afftect single votes. You can trojan a machine if you know a voter is going to use it. It is actually very hard to preform a fraud on a wide enough scale to affect the outcome to any significant extent. It is also relatively easy to create log files etc since there can be redundant machines auditing the IP stream.

The Diebold issue is the reverse. It is quite hard to compromise a system, but if you can compromise the system you can control the vote absolutely.

The other factor that comes into the Diebold story is the incompetent coding, the lack of security knowledge and the refusal to seek any.

Re:I really have to question

[Free_Meson]

If your going by the Constitution, the recount should have proceeded and, since whichever side lost probably would have taken it to Congress, Congress should have decided.

Could you show me where in the constitution it says that a contested slate of electoral votes would allow the issue to devolve to the senate (linked below). Once the Court made its ruling on how and when the votes were to be counted, there would be no grounds or avenue for subsequent appeal. It's the supreme court, and the name means just that. In the event that no decision was reached on the votes then, yes, the vote would have gone to congress, but not in the way that you describe. Each state has 1 vote and Bush won more total states, so he would have won that election (unless you want to make the case that senators and representatives from a state that voted for bush would have cast their vote for Gore and lost any chance of being reelected)... We only have a democracy when we follow the proscribed rules, and while it may be convenient to avoid the rules at times, doing so makes the united states a dictatorship.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constituti on.overview.html

Re:I really have to question

[Bob Uhl]

That's the reason we have courts--when everything else breaks down, they are the final arbiters of right and wrong.

No, that's why we have the military--they're the final arbiter when everything else breaks down. Fortunately, it has only once gotten to that point, and hopefully it never will again. The courts are the last peaceful recourse, but there are others available.

Re:I really have to question

[MuParadigm]

Umm, yeah, if that were the case, then Gore would have won hands down. There's no doubt that he won the popular vote in 2K.

But, you know, here in the US, we use an electoral system that grants presidential votes depending on how the majority voted in each given state.

Interestingly enough, the electoral system was developed as a compromise to allow slave states a greater say in choosing the president.

No doubt, you've heard of the 3/5 compromise. The one that declared slaves, in particular black men, as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of calculating census populations for electoral votes?

Yeah, I know it's offensive, and I'm likely to get modded as flamebait for even bringing it up. But the problem is that the whole electoral college system is a holdover from that kind of thinking.

That is to say, that at the time of the writing of the Constitution, Southern states were unlikely to ratify the Constitution because they had far fewer actual voters than the Northern states. The 3/5 compromise was a method used to grant more leverage to the implicity white Southern voters in elections, and the electoral college was a further compromise to maximize that leverage.

So, yes, the historical antecedents that created the current system for choosing a president are completely *fucked*. And, consequently, the electoral college system should have been killed off during reconstruction after the Civil War. Which would have left us with the "One person, one vote" system you have so glibly advocate.

Problem is, that would have been, "One *man*, one vote" at the time, since women weren't granted the right to vote until the 20th Century.

Second problem is, the most populous states clearly outweigh the least in terms of potential voters, simply because they have more people. The Constitution is clearly concerned with balancing the desires of the majority with the needs of the minority. Perhaps "clearly" is a bit of a misnomer there. It's not particular evident in the Constitution itself, unless you read between the lines and add in the Bill of Rights.

But, it *is* evident in the Federalist Papers, which were written to explain the intent of the Constitution, and as propaganda to get state Congresses to ratify it.

Taking into account the motives and ideals expressed within the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers, we're left with the clear idea that the founders did not want a *strict* majority rule. They *preferred* it, but they wanted some leeway for the minority to be heard and respected. This minority includes: small states.

So: How to preserve that voice for small states? Rather than addressing the question at the end of the Civil War, as should have been done, most Congressmem decided that sticking with the electoral college provided the safest way of doing so. It didn't require any changes, and no one was coming up with a better solution. Nor was it evident at the time that a better solution was required.

This is why, even though I live in New York City, the vote of someone living in Wyoming state counts literally *ten* times as much as my vote in a presidential election.

Am I pissed about it? Damn straight I am.

You see, I really do believe that smaller states should have a forum in which their voices can be heard equally with the larger states, and that their votes will count as much. But I think the Senate takes care of that imbalance: 2 votes, 2 Senators for each state, no matter the population.

The electoral college *should* be abandoned. Not because of the "one person, one vote" principal, but because the electoral college has its roots in justifying and accomadating *slavery*, and because the other problem it was designed to address, imbalance in the representation of small states against populous states, is already adequately addressed by equal representation for each state in the Senate.

Re:I really have to question

[MarkedMan]

The reason the recount was so confused in Florida was the lack of rules for the recount. The Florida legislature never took the time or effort required to lay out what counted and what didn't. Specifically, they did not include the common mandate "The intent of the voter should take precedence over all other issues."

This mandate is spelled out clearly in most states (ironically, including Texas) and makes perfect sense. For a real world example, a ballot is issued with the holes misaligned. Just looking at the ballot, it would be difficult to tell which candidate someone voted for. But since votes should count (what a concept!) the effort would be made to see what the effect of the misalingnment was and to give credit to those candidates the voter actually pulled the lever for. Obvious, right? Makes perfect sense?

What happened in Florida was that the Republicans argued that since this mandate wasn't included in Florida law, it didn't have to be honored. In the infamous hanging chad firestorm they said that a paper punch which didn't quite fall off should not be counted. So although the voter had obviously punched out the hole, their vote was invalid and shouldn't counted because they hadn't noticed the punch was still hanging by a thread.

The most crucial areas for this strategy were those that contained a large population of the elderly. They tended to vote for Gore, and they tended to suffer from arthritis, making it hard to manipulate the small stylus. The Republicans saw their chance to stop those votes from counting and took it. They then ran a smear campaign about how these old, infirm, probably senile, fogies couldn't even understand how the voting system worked, so how the heck would we even know who they intended to vote for?

And that's the modern Republican party in a nutshell.

Re:I really have to question

[Catbeller]

You do realize that, while governor of Texas, Bush signed a law mandating recounts in close elections?

And you do realize that the Republicans were planning on suing for recount after recount if the original count had gone against Bush, even if it meant keeping it in the courts for months? Were they getting ready to whine?

What happened was a neocon takeover of the election process, no more no less. If the election had gone against Bush, recounts would have been sacred. Since it went to Bush, they demanded all recounts stopped.

And you do realize that Bush had demanded at least one, maybe two, recounts in other states at the time the Florida recount was being hijacked? Recounts were fine in OTHER states. Just not Florida.

And there was no problem in counting the votes. A major privately funded recount was conducted during the late part of '01; the results were misreported and supressed by the very news organizations that sponsored it. Because of 9-11, they thought it unwise to baldly state that Gore won, if all votes, including "overcounts" (people who both punched and wrote in Gore's name) were counted.

By all standards but one, Gore won.

Bush issued the ultimate takeback when Scalia and the other neocons stopped the recount. He had lost.

That's nice. Does it finally kill the idea?

[ObviousGuy]

It's bad enough that the internet was going to be used to count votes outside the country. How much worse would it be with all those illegals voting online here inside the U.S. borders?

Why trust internet banking then?

[MrRTFM]

If this 'internet' is so insecure , why are the big corps. trusting it to transfer billions of dollars around.

I must be missing something - this is technically feasible, they are just doing it the wrong way.

Re:Why trust internet banking then?

[Rufus88]

Because they have a way of verifying after the fact that their transactions occurred as they should, in case they suspect fraud. With internet voting, you can't. In fact, regardless of the voting mechanism, it's important that you not be able to verify that your individual vote was recorded properly, because that would imply being able to prove who you voted for, which would permit vote-selling and make people susceptable to vote-extortion.

Re:Why trust internet banking then?

[stratjakt]

Banks are insured. Elections aren't.

Re:Why trust internet banking then?

[zeugma-amp]

Yes. You are missing something. The fundamental problem with internet voting is that it needs to be able to assure three things:

First, that the person voting is eligible to vote. This is not too hard to do. We know how to verify identity, though there are a few issues with this that are not present in a financial relationship.

Second, that the person's vote is anonymous. Anonymous voting is trivially implmented. There is a problem when you combine the above verification requirement with the need to keep a given person's vote secret.

Third, that the election be auditable. THere was yeling and finger-pointing in the last American presidential election. Could you imagine what it would be like if votes just suddenly marterialized out of the ether with no way to audit them?

Combine all three of the above requirements and you have a very tough problem at hand. We don't want to be able to have some political hack analyze the raw vote data and b able to say "Joe Blow voted for candidate X, as this could, for various reasons result in repercussions of one kind or another on Joe, thus allowing others to intimidate his vote.

This is one reason why I really dislike mail-in ballots. Mail ballots allow an agent of Party y to hand an absentee ballot to Joe, make sure he marks for the 'correct' candidate, and then mail it in, assured of the vote rendered. It is a also a sitation custom made for fraud on a massive scale. With in-person voting, party X can pay Joe $5 dollars to vote, but when Joe deposits the ballot in the box, there is no way to guarantee that Joe voted "correctly".

Now, there some bright fellows have proposed cryptographic protocols that solve the problems mentioned above. Unfortunately, you are dealing with an electorate too stupid to figure out how to punch holes in a ballot reliably. The Protocols for secure, anonymous internet voting are far too complex to ever be used in the real world.

Re:Why trust internet banking then?

[demachina]

Because you dont have to maintain anonymity in those transfers, in fact, exactly the opposite you identify both parties with rigor. In voting you have to verify the identity of the voter with some certainty, but then switch to a mode where the actual vote they cast can not be associated with the specific voter. Very hard to do on the Internet. You also still have to make sure the integrity of this anonymous vote is retained and can be recounted. It is an ideal application for pieces of paper and a box.

In money transfers the books have to balance after the transfer is done and both parties will know what the result should be. In voting you don't know what the result is supposed to be, and the people controlling the system usually have a strong incentive to alter the outcome in there favor, and they will if its possible to do so. If you try to alter the results with a money transfers someone would instantly spot an attempt at theft unless their accounting is crap or someone goes to great lengths to obfuscate the theft.

Pure electronic voting is just a fundementally bad idea for anything where the outcome matters. You always want a voter to use paper, put in a box under the eyes of representatives of the interested parties, and maintain the security of those boxes at all times. We are blessed with all this electronic B.S. only because of the kneejerk reaction to the disaster in Florida and Congress throwing billions of dollars at the problem like they usually do. The end results was a swarm of sharks who wanted to either:

A. Get rich quickl
B. Find new and creative ways to rig elections

Proven machines where you fill in the bubbles on a sheet of paper and run it through an optical scanner would do this job ten times better than any of these all electronic touch screens or online voting or punch cards. Its no accident lots of affluent communities were using this kind of voting machine in 2000 to make sure their votes counted, and places with lots of poor people the establishment wants to disenfrancise tend to have unreliable voting systems like punch cards.

Re:Why trust internet banking then?

[Kris_J]

Second, that the person's vote is anonymous. Anonymous voting is trivially implmented. There is a problem when you combine the above verification requirement with the need to keep a given person's vote secret.

Let's lose this then. Personally, I believe that I should be able to ask the system afterwards what it believed my vote was. Obviously this is impossible if it's been anonymized.

Mind you, I also believe Internet voting should be used to allow people to vote on the issues throughout the year, assign proxy votes and basically allow democracy to be dynamic -- rather than this thing we have currently where you're stuck with some arsehole for four years and have no way to affect decisions on issues you actually care about.

Re:Why trust internet banking then?

[MrRTFM]

Current paper voting could easily be tracked - you go up and get your name ticked off a role, and if they wanted, I'm sure they could hand me a marked ballot paper, or something. It is simply a matter of trust.

With the internet voting system there is that same critical step - after it verifies you and it assigns you that highly encrypted 'pass for one vote', you then trust the system to keep your details private (maybe with a 2nd key that only you know).

It's the same thing - you have to trust the system for *any* type of voting to work.

Can't this be fixed?

[El]

Couldn't they just require every voter to encrypt and sign their vote with a unique PGP key? Or are they assuming voters are too stupid to do this?

Re:Can't this be fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't they just require every voter to encrypt and sign their vote with a unique PGP key?

OMG! You solved the problem! And in one sentence too! Could you tackle spam next? Thanks.

Re:Can't this be fixed?

[grasshoppa]

Or are they assuming voters are too stupid to do this?

Christ, wouldn't you? Your average user has problems when they get those nasty letters from MAILER-DAEMON, and some ( my mother ) even get offended that they use such a vile name ( deamon ).

So no, we are not ready, technically or socially, for internet voting.

Re:Can't this be fixed?

[El]

Actually, I do have a partial solution to spam, but in involves changing the email protocol to require the SENDER to store the email, rather than the receiver. The current protocol was devised in uucp days, when it was common to store-and-forward email over several dial-up hops to it's destination. These days, everybody that has an email server also has a web server. If you sent only a URL and (optional) encryption/access key via the old protcol, then retrieved the rest of the message from the URL, this would elimate spoofing and put more of the burden on the sender and less on the receiver. It would also be more efficient -- currently, if I send the exact same message to 100 people, it uses up 100 times the size of the message in disk space on the receiver's servers. But if was stored on the sender's server, it could use the same copy for everybody! Yes, there is some additional overhead to track whether specific addressees have downloaded the message and determine when to delete it, but I think with some work it could be turned into a useful system -- certainly an improvement over the current system.

Re:Can't this be fixed?

[Shut the fuck up!]

Hmm, I have a partial solution for spam too. However, it relies heavily on the invention of teleportation and time travel. I am sort of waiting on that before putting much more work into it.

Re:Can't this be fixed?

[El]

Yes, but then you know which ISP to complain to (or which server to DoS), don't you? Also, that identical copy is going to get added to Spam filters pretty quickly; spammers now try to send DIFFERENT emails to every recipient to get around spam filters. And, if the URL in invalid (e.g. because the server has been shut down due to complaints) then your email reader can discard the header for you, and you never have to even know it was there.

Aww

[goon america]

But my "Internet Vote Accelerator" spyware would've made me trillions richer!

From a non-expert perspective

[The I Shing]

I'm not a security expert, but voting on the internet strikes me as being about as secure as locking up your bicycle with twist-ties.

I'm glad they've dropped this idea.

Re:From a non-expert perspective

[t0qer]

I'm not a security expert, but voting on the internet strikes me as being about as secure as locking up your bicycle with twist-ties.

I've been in twist ties handcuffs before and I can assure you they are VERY SECURE.

Re:From a non-expert perspective

[indianajones428]

I've been in twist ties handcuffs before and I can assure you they are VERY SECURE.


I hope you're confusing twist ties with zip ties.

This issue doesn't apper to be closed after all

[Flexagon]

This more complete article has a quote that suggests this issue really isn't closed after all:

Wolfowitz's memo, written to David Chu, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, allows the Pentagon to continue work already in progress to look into "other technical applications for voting on the Internet or electronically," the defense official said.

"The door is still open to other methods. It's just that the SERVE we have decided not to use," he said.

Admit it

[ObviousGuy]

Aren't you just the tiniest bit curious to see how cool a Sharpton presidency would be?

Just imagine all the quotes he'll leave for posterior.

Big problem

[Mieckowski]

The projects home page states that it "will let eligible U.S. citizens vote from any Windows-based computer with Internet access" WHAT? Making it harder for linux users to vote? (and as a result having less of them represented) Supporting Microsoft?

I don't see how this got so far already.

E-voting sucks. What we have today sucks more

[fnord123]

I look forward to the day that electronic voting comes in as long as it provides a some means of of doing verification, because I do not trust my goverment (that includes both the Demopublicans and the Republicrats) enough to trust their vote counting today even without electronic voting coming into it.

Today I drop my ballot in the mailbox (I live in a mail-in ballot state) and just have to trust everything is on the up and up from there.

What I would like instead is to have every voter to get a receipt when they vote, that uniquely identifies their precinct and vote, and shows a unique number for that vote/voter combo. Something like:

Vote #: 54353654354 Precinct: 58 Voted for: Mickey Mouse (or whoever)

Then I'd like those all those numbers published somewhere after every election so that anybody can download it. Note that my vote is still anonymous, nobody knows who vote 54353654354 is because of the nature of one way functions.

Any voter could go look at the published list to see that their vote was counted correctly. If it was counted incorrectly (I.e. the count showed my vote to be for Dopey instead of Mickey Mouse), then I could step forward with my biometric data to prove it. If enough people step forward, the election was clearly bogus and needs to be redone.

Any voter could download the entire list and count the votes for themselves, at least minimizing the chances of large #s of votes appearing out of thin air in any particular precinct, and making counting of votes very clear and open to all to verify.

Is it foolproof? Nope, but it is a lot more transparent process than we have today, where I have no visibility whatsoever into my vote being counted, what the real totals where, etc.

Re:E-voting sucks. What we have today sucks more

[Shut the fuck up!]

Today I have to sign my ballot

You sign the actual ballot? Or a security envelope? In Washington, you sign a security envelope that contains your ballot. Once the signature is verified and the ballot is removed, there is no way to tie the ballot to the person unless the person opening it made some sort of record of it and/or your votes. That of course would require a conspiricy of epic proportions, no?

Re:E-voting sucks. What we have today sucks more

[demachina]

This is NOT a viable approach nor is it anonymous. If you give each person a receipt and a number associating them with their vote, then someone who is either buying votes or intimidating voters can demand to see your receipt and verify how you voted.

Nice try but its not acceptable.

Re:E-voting sucks. What we have today sucks more

[xenocytekron]

Whats to stop people who voted for, say, a third party candidate like the green party to say their vote was "mistaken" if a republican candidate wins, so said perso could change their vote to the democratic party? Besides that, a very interesting idea.

about time

[dkode]

well i never thought I would see this happen.

Considering all the snafu surrounding the Diebold screwups, I think it's a good thing that the pentagon is finally listening to common sense instead of possibly covering up another voting screwup.

I'm from florida and the whole previous presidential election never sat well with me because of the morons we have down in south florida and the fact that we never really knew the truth about the actual voting results.

S.E.R.V.E

[skzbass]

SERVE another acronym brount to us by the people who concocted such obcenities as: US VISIT and US PATRIOT ACT. Who is this wonderful group you ask? why the Federal Acronym Reasearch Team (who mysteriously doesn't go by their acronym)

Good call

[savagedome]

Internet voting presents far too many opportunities for hackers or even terrorists to interfere with fair and accurate voting, potentially in ways impossible to detect

Not just hackers/terrorists but I am sure some tech savvy candidate might even go the length and 'hire' someone to do it for him/her. That would give a whole new meaning to the term *booth capturing*.

I am glad Pentagon got it right before getting the system in place. Voting is not like the weather forecast. There is an 80% chance that we counted the votes right. No. We want to know the right tally. I can wait for the paper trail to be counted instead of electronic voting giving me the result instantly without 100% reliability.

Re:Good call

[ChaoticLimbs]

If the democrats held all three branches of government they would logically be receiving the lion's share of lobbyists' money.

Secret ballots?

[Mieckowski]

If any computer can be used to vote, how are the ballots kept secret? If someone's vote is observed (and they might be pressured into this by husband/wife/friend etc...) I can easily see people avoiding voting for controversial canidates, or somebody who their friends oppose.

Re:Secret ballots?

[Kenja]

" If someone's vote is observed (and they might be pressured into this by husband/wife/friend etc...) I can easily see people avoiding voting for controversial canidates, or somebody who their friends oppose."

See, thats why the porn star didn't win the California election.

Thank G

[shubert1966]

What the heck is with all Internet-this and internet-that. Why don't they just deploy closed LANs pre-configured with nothing more to configure that attaching cables and plugging them in.

There is little to be gained by it anyway. Apathetic and lethargic Americans will still come up with some excuse not to vote.

The money could better be spent berating these pinheads, or funding voter vans, or introducing legislation to take away privelliges from non-voters.

I think most of us feel that online CC transactions are usually safe, but we take the chance because most of the time we don't get burned (save eBay). Our CCs usually have a loss-limit protection of $50.00. My vote is more precious than $50.00.

Besides, if it was Internet-wired some politician would enact some crap legislation for last-minute pop-up adds that looked like OS dialog-boxes, thereby tricking hasty and myopic people into voting for the wrong candidate.

Good call

[spun]

Not everyone in the US government is a nimrod or a thief. There are plenty of shady goings on, but no over-arching nefarious conspiracies. Certainly, it looks bad when most electronic voting companies donate to Republicans, get contracts from same, and then leave holes in their software, but I think the conspiracy ends at graft and cronyism, not deliberate vote fraud. The companies donate to the Republicans knowing they will get lucrative contracts. The security issues are a seperate problem.

Electronic voting at polling places could be implemented securely, but it would be VERY difficult to make a secure voting system that meets all of our (US) requirements and runs over the Internet.

The pentagon counts votes??? You must be kiding.

[Ulbrekt]

I'm from Sweden and the idea to let the armed forces have anything to do with overseeing voting seems both ridiculous and dangerous. Thats how it used to work in Spain, Portugal and Greece (not to mention eastern Europe) not so long ago.

For once...

[blueZhift]

...military intelligence is not an oxymoron!

good riddance

[vijayiyer]

Now if only we can get rid of the idea of spending taxpayer money domestically for fancy touch screens and computers, and return to good old foolproof (well, except maybe for the most foolish) making holes in paper or pulling a lever, we'll be all set, and maybe we can trust the voting system. Oh wait - you don't need to prove who you are when you register to vote. Never mind.

Interested in putting together a panel in NYC

[Sam Nitzberg]

There are going to be more stories and issues related to Internet voting - here, in the US, and abroad, ranging from small club functions being voted on, through governmental matters from local - to - larger levels...

My concern is that any system be appropriately thought out, formally and precisely defined, using rigidly designed systems (not necessarily off-the-shelf), made to precisely and verifiably conduct voting tansactions, without being able to disclose, leak, or bleed any information that is not supposed to escape the system.

The Johns Hopkins study is an excellent reference and resource on the issues that have to be addressed.

I am personally interested in setting up a panel in New York in Mid-July (not much - just about an hour), but at an interesting venue. I am not offering funding, but there could be some visibility.

I would welcome hearing from anyone who is doing interesting work in this area - in the US or overseas, that would be interested in participating on such a panel, to include related topics on technology-and-democracy.

Sam Nitzberg
sam@iamsam.com
http://www.iamsam.com

Electronic Voting? Easy

[max born]

How do banks manage with ATM cards and pin numbers?

Not secure?

Ever tried to hack into a bank?

Re:Electronic Voting? Easy

[stratjakt]

bank of americas entire ATM network was comprimized by SQL slammer.

Ever notice those stickers on banks saying "Insured by FDIC"? Ever see on on your ballot?

Banks can plan for a potential hack, elections are more of a one shot deal.

Internet does have a limited use

[PineHall]

I believe that the internet could be used to send the results from overseas military voting places. It would have to be encrypted and verifiable that no tapering took place, and there would be paper audit trail at the voting site that could be sent later. This would get the results in quicker.

Old ways

[t0ny]

I guess they will just have to go back to the old method of giving your absentee ballot to your local alderman.

IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet voting system cancels YOU!

Online isn't necessary. It's already happening.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

It's bad enough that the internet was going to be used to count votes outside the country. How much worse would it be with all those illegals voting online here inside the U.S. borders?

They do that already.

With motor-voter you can crank out as many registrations as you want. (There's an illegal immigrant on my street who brags about how he goes from precinct to precinct on election day and shows off his >20 registrations. His reaction to questions about whether this is right: "They don't care. If they cared they'd do something to check.")

Don't expect any respect for law from people who grew up in a country where the government is totally corrupt (let alone the subset that then broke OUR laws to even BE here, rather than going through proper channels.) It's not their fault they grew up in that environment. But now that their opinions are formed you'll need to do more than set an example, if you want to get their attention and change their behavior. And you're not going to do that while it's ILLEGAL to review their elegibility, or even check their ID.

(Now think about how the "drug war" and the 55 MPH speed limit have similarly affected the Boomer generation's respect for law and established institutions.)

Think it's hard? Think they do any checking? Heck. *I*ve been double-registered twice in the last few years. (Changed my party affiliation - which is done on the same form - and had my name typoed and the form misprocessed as a new registration. I STILL get double jury-duty notices from the last instance.)

To motor-voter add no-excuse absentee ballots. Now anyone can:
- pick up a stack of forms in any government office,
- crank out fake voters as fast as he can fill them out and drop them in a mailbox,
- file for absentee voting as fast as he can check a box on the registration notice postcards and drop THOSE in a mailbox, and
- never have to show his face at a polling place.

There was one address in Berkeley that had over 4,000 absentee ballots in a recent election. (Tried to claim that they were a mail drop for some street people. 4,000 of em? Yeah, right!)

Then there are the ballot boxes that are found floating in the San Francisco Bay when there's an election in San Francisco.

And cheating on mechanical and electronic vote-counting, without audit trails, is nothing new. You've all heard about Diebold's touchscreens. But the vote counting a few decades back was done on minicomputers, by proprietary software, where you could pause the program and tweak a register from the front panel switches (and election officials were sometimes seen to do that).

Even mechanical voting machines had opportunities for cheating: It was common to find little stickers in the bottom with "0000" on them - the trace of a voting scam. The wheels would be set to a non-zero value and covered with a sticker. Lock the machine, let the official certify it's zeroed, put it into service. One vote for the stickered candidates knocks the stickers off.

Internet voting isn't necessary for election corruption. It just simplifies automating it.

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

I already voted 96,000 times...for NOTHING?!?

Re:The pentagon counts votes??? You must be kiding

[caudron]

the idea to let the armed forces have anything to do with overseeing voting seems both ridiculous and dangerous.

The Pentagon has an interest in this because these votes are the overseas ballots for the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces. The Pentagon's job is to make sure there is a reasonable way for their people to get a say in the government back home. They are not involved in the vote tally itself. This is just the Pentagon saying that this method is not acceptable to them. A legitimate and sane response, given the known security risks.

Trusted Computing can help

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an analysis on the Unlimited Freedom blog of how Trusted Computing (aka TCPA/Palladium) could solve the problems with Internet voting. The idea is that the voting application could be protected from tampering from other software or the user himself. The secure I/O and sealed storage help as well. Once Trusted Computing technology is widespread then it may be time to take another look at voting on the net.

Re:Trusted Computing can help

[demachina]

...and it would also make it extremely easy for Big Brother to know exactly how you vote and to schedule you for your appointment at the Ministry of Love... all with utmost in security and efficiency.

I'm with Cringely on this one

[vonPoonBurGer]

I'm sure many of you have seen this before, but in case you haven't, I like Cringely's take on how to fix the voting system. Then again, since I'm a Canadian, my opinion is not without bias. But it certainly is nice to know who your new Prime Minister is the same day the ballots were cast! And hardly a computer involved, imagine that...

Run the numbers on why it needs to be anonymous

[foniksonik]

Back in the day people were ignorant and there were far fewer voters to persuade in order to determing an election by a) buying votes or b) forcibly compelling them.

In the present day there are millions of voters and we have very good methods of criminal science and investigation to deter lawbreakers. (Now this may not be relevant to regional elections as the number of voters as well as imperative to dissuade criminal activities are lessened.)

SO if someone did want to buy off an election how much would they have to spend to get even 2% of the vote? The CIA factboook says there are a little over 290 million people in the USA, around 60% of whom are of voting age... minus inelligibles, lets say 45% just to be safe, that's a little over 130 million people, lets say that 10% actually vote.. 13 million. 2% of that is 260,000 people for a presidential election. I don't know anyone who'd sell their vote for $10 but just for the hell of it... that would cost 2.6 million dollars to buy 2% of current voters. Now if you brought in all the non-voting but elligibles... the chances are greater that more people would sell their votes but the percent of total voters would change accordingly, meaning that the more voters there are, the less an individual vote counts, so it would take even more money to buy 2%.

Granted that 2.6 million isn't a lot compared to how much the candidates or their parties spend already... but it is illegal, so they would have to somehow pay off that number of people for that large sum of money AND hide it all from the government, the people, the media, etc.

This assumes that people would be willing to commit fraud a federal crime for $10 and risk going to federal prison for any number of years (I don't know the penalties).

As far as extortion goes, extortion is a crime. How many lackeys are really willing to put pressure on people for this? Knowing that they personally can't possibly convince enough people to make a difference.

The question is... do we really need an anonymous vote in the present day? SO what if your friend give you a hard time, you probably already tell them who you voted for anyways and already suffer the ridicule or whatever. We have anti-descrimination laws already on the books that could be extended to cover this as far as your job or any other official relationship is concerned.

Why not have your vote tied to you? The biggest drawback I can see is that you'll open yourself up to election related spam and direct mail campaigns every 4 years.

I'd like to hear about other real concerns and why we still need anonmous voting. bring it.

Re:Is that the real reason...

[rickbender1940]

Interesting to see how much effort they make in getting overseas soldiers vote, who are much more likely to vote for Bush

I have an even bigger question...

[midifarm]

What in the HELL is the Pentagon doing deciding ANYTHING about our voting process? As far as I know the Pentagon is a division of the Department of Defense. What is the military doing making decisions for or about anything that a CITIZEN does? Beware folks, the "Wolf" is loose!

Peace

Liability

[AvengerXP]

It's all about whos responsible if it fails in some way. No one can come and take you away if you're in Australia let's say and you cheat on the American vote. You can't use the Internet to vote plain and simple because there is no liability to do so.

To have a succesfull electronic means of voting, you'd have to have some kind of Intranet. Then you'd be able to make legitimate accusations against people. My work can fire me for misusing the internet but what i do at home is pretty much the hell i want to be. It's pretty easy to track the blame to me at work but think about how you'd have to track people through the globe, it's impossible.

Internet voting is dead even before being born.

Simple - sell all the votes

[NotQuiteReal]

Simple:

1) Constitutional amendment banning all taxes.
2) Fund all Govt programs via voting fees.
3) Each vote costs one dollar [serial number verification posted]
4) buy as many votes as you like, but only in your district.

Basically you vote for representatives to spend the money they have. Not the system now, where you vote for representatives to spend money they don't have and take from wherever they can.

I could be wrong, but I still think it would be hard to "buy" enough representatives to, say "drop all pollution laws" or whatever you think "rich evil corporations" would buy votes for. At the same time, I imagine it would greatly limit the "feature creep" of benefits that government has become. If "people" really want all this stuff why do I (and others who are net payers) feel so screwed at our (high) tax situation?

I could blather on... this is a ridculous idea, but logically, what is so wrong about the idea that those who are paying for govt programs shouldn't have a bit more say in what they will be?

The opposite point of view is that 6 guys in a dark alley "out vote" you when they say you need to pay "taxes" to support their next McDonald's run...

More likely...

[MintSlice]

While the Pentagon claims it "won't use an Internet voting system for overseas U.S. citizens this fall because of concerns about its security", its more like they don't want US citizen's who haven't been brain-washed by the US media expressing their informed opinions in the voting both.

Who knows what someone who has been exposed to non-US media might think about any given topic? There's no way any right thinking politician would try to guess the voting habits of the well informed. ;-]

Re:More likely...

[zhar]

All our soldiers that are U.S. citizens (at least in my unit) are required to vote. If an absentee/overseas ballot is not turned in by every soldier, the LT's and company commanders catch hell.

Why don't they use the PKI Keys on DOD ID cards

[quan74]

I presume that the pentagon was researching this to allow soldiers, DOD civilians, and contractors who are overseas to vote. All US soldiers, DOD Civilians, and DOD Contractors now have an ID card that contains a smart chip with a PKI key on it. You're telling me that the Pentagon could not come up with a secure, anonymous, yet auditable method of voting using that?? What a shame. I guess the DOD needs more geeks, or maybe just some geeks with real skills and not an MBA.

Not the voter anonymity problem

[Gorimek]

One fundamental flaw with Internet voting is that there is no way to verify that the voter does not have a gun held to his head while voting, or is subject to some other pressure.

Only by having the voter go in alone in a booth to vote out of sight of everyone else can that be assured.

Re:Not the voter anonymity problem

[Gorimek]

That's a problem in that case.

In my native Sweden absentee voting has to be done either in a post office or a foreign embassy or consulate. In either case there is a an enclosed private area to do your vote in, and an employee that makes sure anonymity procedures are followed.

I've lived in the US for 9 years, and it's fairly shocking how sloppy the voting system is here. It's not really hard to design a fool proof system, if you actually try. It costs a little more money, but come on, it is the entire power foundation for the society. So I have to wonder how much of the sloppiness is there by design. After all the people in power got there through the current system...

In the News: 7 Florida Judges crack Voting Server

[hol]

After ruling readable punch card ballots illegal and ruling in favor of Blacks with Misdemeanor convictions can't vote in spite of what the election law and constitution say, the Judges announced today that "all your votes are belong to us" - presumably Dubya agreed.

Uh... I think my US Visa just got cancelled ...
NO CARRIER

I want to implement online voting for our party

[Quizo69]

I've begun a political party here in Australia:

www.neteffect.org.au

with the intent of using the internet to allow members to vote on policy formation etc.

I want to do this using open source software, whether we build it ourselves or not. Surely there exists a group of programmers out there who together can craft such a system?

I think it could be one of the most important examples of how open source benefits the greater good if we could pull it off, and the flow on effects could be enormous since it would be open for anyone to use across the globe. I'm more than willing to make our political party site the home of it if you are interested.

Come on Slashdot, if we as a group of geeks can't solve this problem, what hope is there that anyone else will?

You are welcome to post in our forum about such a system, and download our Constitution which lays out the rules we plan for online voting, so please have a look at what we're hoping to accomplish and see if it can indeed be done successfully.

Re:Unbelievable

[dave420-2]

Well, the current administration can't even get electronic voting to work using custom hardware, let alone using a public infrastructure. The original post isn't as absurd as you say. He's not blaming the internet's lack of intrinsic security on the bush administration, just their lack of commitment to secure (or even truthful) voting.

Re:Online isn't necessary. It's already happening.

[MarkedMan]

You said:
With motor-voter you can crank out as many registrations as you want. (There's an illegal immigrant on my street who brags about how he goes from precinct to precinct on election day and shows off his >20 registrations. His reaction to questions about whether this is right: "They don't care. If they cared they'd do something to check.")

This sounds like some Rush Limbaugh FOAF. It doesn't make sense. An illegal immigrant got twenty licenses? From your state DMV? With 20 different addresses? Paid all the license fees 20 times? And each time he took the trouble to register to vote? Man, that's a guy who really wants to screw up the system!

Sorry, it just doesn't pass the BS test.