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Two Faces of Electronic Voting

Posted by Hemos on from the the-changing-times dept.

IEEEmember writes "The Swiss are claiming the world's first binding Internet vote in a national referendum. Voters were given lottery style scratch-off cards that allowed them to vote either by Internet, snail mail or in person. Internet votes can be cast from any computer accessing the elections site securely over the web. Electronic voting has been implemented to combat declining participation in elections. Stories from The Age, swissinfo and CBS available at Google News. The IEEE is calling attention to the current process for establishing standards for electronic voting. Project 1583 - Voting Equipment Standard and Project 1622 - Electronic Data Interchange are being developed by Standards Coordinating Committee 38 rather than being relegated to a single society to ensure the broad range of electronic voting issues can be addressed adequately. These standards are being written for use in the U.S. however some parties have shown an interest in extending them to other countries."

3 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Verification by sofakingon · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Two Words: Paper Trail.

    There must be a verifiable, permanent, physical record in any election to ensure that any and all democratic elections are not tampered with.

    1. Re:Verification by Jerf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      However people who spout this act like you can't tamper with physical records. You can.

      No, people who "spout" this think that it is much harder to systematically tamper with physical records than electronic records, and that this fact shows no signs of becoming less true any time soon.

      Moreover, auditable electronic voting combines many of the nice parts of electronic voting with all of the nice parts of physical voting.

      I think us "physically auditable voting"-type folks understand what is going on; it is exactly that understanding that has us calling for the hybrid, best-of-both-worlds solution, instead of the "God only knows what happened for sure" world of electronic-only voting.

  2. Electronic vote hacking is NOT the only danger! by JimMarch(equalccw) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    San Francisco recently had a scandal in which city employees were herded through the absentee voting system and browbeaten by supervisors who watched over their shoulder to make sure they "voted properly".

    To solve this problem and numerous others, the idea of private voting at local polling places where this sort of thing can be monitored developed. When done right, polling-place voting leads to the LOWEST level of overall fraud.

    Right now, Black Box Voting and other advocacy/reform groups are talking about using absentee voting to create a paper trail when polling places lack them. BUT we know about this issue! Our stance is a condemnation of the worst of the elecronic voting systems, NOT a condemnation of polling place voting.

    Internet voting is worse than absentee, for several reasons:

    1) A small script could record exactly how you voted, allowing you to sell your vote. Concerns over mechanical voting systems in New York and other urban areas led to an experiment with "paper reciepts" about 70 - 80 years ago and it turned into a vote-buying bonanza for crooked unions. (That's why Voter Verified Paper Trail plans today involve leaving the paper in a secure ballot box at the polling place.)

    2) There's still a sizeable non-Internet-connected population out there, esp. at retirement homes and blue-collar unions. "Free Internet Voting Terminals!" at union halls and nursing homes would be a hotbed of "browbeat fraud" similar to the San Francisco case above...in the case of unions, people who didn't vote at the union hall (where the networked PCs are monitored with a remote view application) would be exposed to considerable pressure for not voting "the right way".

    -----------

    Note that these issues are present EVEN IF THE SYSTEM IS TECHNOLOGICALLY PERFECT(!), written in Open Source with strong crypto by /.ers.

    Upshot: Internet Voting cannot be made to work right, due to "human hacking" even if "computer hacking" is somehow made impossible (which is pretty damn doubtful).

    Jim March
    Member, Board of Directors, Black Box Voting (www.blackboxvoting.org)