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Estonian Internet Voting Called a Success
composer314 writes "The Associated Press is reporting that the small European nation of Estonia has conducted large-scale voting over the Internet. From the article: "Last week, Estonia became the first country in the world to hold an election allowing voters nationwide to cast ballots over the internet. Fewer than 10,000 people, or 1 percent of registered voters, participated online in elections for mayors and city councils across the country, but officials hailed the experiment as a success." The system is built on Linux." I guess it works well when the Internet is considered a human right.
Such a success, we got back twice as many votes as our population! We had no idea it would work so well!
Call me a geographically challenged USA-ian, but I think this must be a hoax.
If you read the Dilbert cartoon, Estonia is the fake country with the bearded people
And if it were real, I'm sure I would have heard of it buy now since all the real countries have obvious names like England, Mexico, Canada, France, etc. etc.
I actually wonder about some of those -stan prefixed former Russian countries...do they exist?
I wonder what would have had to happen for it to be considered a failure.
"Elbonian Internet Voting" the first time you saw it? Just wait till you try to find it on a map!
An unprecedented write-in vote by internet users sends Kevin Mitnick to the Whitehouse.
Were that to happen in the United States we'd get 500 million votes for Senator Linus Torvalds..
It's great that they've been able to use our up and coming Universal Communication Medium to form the government. One step forward... now for other countries to follow their lead.
Perhaps it displayed a snappy song-and-dance number.
"Hey, we're Estonia,
We like macaronia,
And it's time to voooote!"
That would be a success of a kind.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
To cast an online ballot, voters need a special ID card, a $24 device that reads the card and a computer with Internet access. About 80 percent of Estonian voters have the ID cards, which have been used since 2002 for online access to bank accounts and tax records.
/adjusts tin-foil hat
Election committee officials said the ID card system had proved effective and reliable and dismissed any security concerns with using it for the online ballot.
Information is sparse, but does anyone know if votes were linked to who voted for what? And what kind of proof can we find that voting a particular way won't involve retaliation...? I'd like this in the USA, but I'm unsure
Because you still have to validate in PERSON that you are who you say you are. Simply put, our country must make sure no one else votes are your behalf.
Life is not for the lazy.
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
I wonder what would have had to happen for it to be considered a failure.
More people voting then are actually elligble would have been considered a failure. By the losing opponent(s) anyway.
Why on God's Green Earth should anybody care about Estonians voting besides Estonians?
Because voting via the internet is something many Americans are interested in, so they're interested in attempts at making it work.
Slashdot should stick to what it does best tech news a week late.
You mean like they did with this article? Or is internet voting not considered tech news?
I actually wasn't /that/ surprised that Estonia has such an internet-savvy political system. Estonia was one of the first countries to break away from the USSR (along with Latvia and Lithuania) as a result of the "Singing Revolution."
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
Are you, brother, an enlightened European or Canadian? Would that I could join you in the home of the free indeed, where people are reasonable. Unfortunately I am stuck here in the US of A, drooling and pants-shitting and fucktarding.
Oh, by the way, I think you missed something in this sentence, unless you intended it to be meaningless: When the US stops behaving like some pants-shitting infant who drools a lot and actually thinks very visibly mentally challenged rich-men's sons like Dubya, Prince of Fucktards, then the bashing will stop.
What say you, oh enlightened brother?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Are you saying that only 49% of the population COULD have voted at all in the election? If so you're severly misinformed. 1% isn't the total number of people who voted, but the total number of people who voted online.
That is just great!, Now instead of regular Black voting boxes we are going to have wold wide black boxes! Seems like something Florida State might wanna upgrade to!
. . . downplayed reports of a test round of balloting in which tabulations resulted in George W. Bush as the winner of the election for Prime Minister of Estonia.
Voting over the internet, or any kind of distance voting for that matter, violates a very basic premise of the democratic process : that each vote is guaranteed to belong to the one in the name of whom it is cast. There is no guarantee with remote voting that the voter has not sold her vote, or that no pressure has been exercised on her.
Voting should consist in having people go completely alone in isolated booths. A vote on a country's government is not an internet poll.
Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, on hearing of the news about Estonia's good fortune utilizing Linux for their successful voting, purchased the country. The voting is now nullified with the purchase, however all citizens who voted will be given discount coupons on purchases of any Microsoft product.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
I see this and future use of internet voting as steps toward direct democracy. I predict that within this century, some countries will use direct democracy as the legislative body on the local and regional level. Direct Democracy is where citizens can directly propose and vote on legislation, making representatives redundant.
When democracy was first proposed, it was long argued by the elite that peasants were not smart enough to rule themselves; they needed kings to keep society from collapsing. Even the first democracies were collections of wealthy land-owning males -- almost 90% of the population, including women, slaves, and peasants, were not enfranchised into the government. Well, those naysayers were wrong, and commoners are perfectly capable of running representational democracies.
The thing is, representatives are a compromise anyways. In days when farmers worked 14 hour days 6 days a week, no one had the time to travel meet up with everyone else to discuss politics. The American legal system is based on how long it takes a person travelling on horseback to transmit information.
Now with the advent of the internet and other communication technologies, representatives are redundant. We could propose and vote on laws ourselves, over the internet. Problems such as authentication and verification have been solved in various communication systems. As soon as the general public gets the hang of internet discussions, people will see direct democracy as a reasonable alternative to representational democracy. This could happen within a generation or two.
Of course, current politicians will resist direct democracy, because it puts them out of their incredibly powerful positions.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
"It was flawless", the Chief Election Commissioner said, and in apparent attempt to gloat over his critics, who were loudly warning of problems, he added: "And it proves that contrary to what those feeble Doomsayers were saying, we should not fear new technology, we should embrace it because it is new, shiny and made in America!".
In related news, some confusion persists of the proper procedure of swearing the new Estonian President, Barney "The Pink" Dinosaur, and his vice-president Wet Noodle, both of the party "All Your Base Belong To Us". Additional complications for the traditionalists is the suprising new discoverery at the polls that apparently most Estonians turned out to be of the Jedi religion.
Estonia is the country that gave us KaZaa (or at least the programmers who wrote the code).
As for security of on-line elections vs. paper elections--bah!! I've never had to show any form of identification when I've voted (here in the U.S.). Identity verification is done via signature (and how closely do you think each signature is examined?). Besides there's all sorts of monkey business that could go on behind the scenes (just how many elections monitors are there?). What *really* scares me is proprietary electronic voting machines from companies owned by high-profile Republicans.
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
You're thinking of "Elbonia," and that would be "-stan suffixed former Russian countries."
Well, I don't know if the ELECTION was a failure. If you RTFA (/. here, I know), internet voting was ALLOWED, not REQUIRED. It doesn't say what the turnout was for the election as a whole. Anybody know?
Is Estonia an oligarchy? Maybe the "but" should've be a "therefore"...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
At first I thought it said Elbonia successfully had internet voting. I was actually amazed that the pointy-haired boss didn't manage to screw it all up and I eagerly awaited the cartoon panels that detailed Dilbert's success in deploying the systems...
/. post...
Then I re-read the
Oh, Estonia, you mean it happened in the real world? Bah, no big deal.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
A 101% turnout.
Although they don't suggest it, perhaps that 1% have mobility impairments and have never voted before, but now they get a chance. Obviously that's the best case scenario, but it seems a little ridiculous that there haven't been more efforts to expand the possibilities of voting. And scoffing at 1%? How many people do absentee votes in the U.S. (or any democratic country)? I would guess it's not more than 10%. And yet, for many, it's the only way they can vote. And absentee voting has been around for years, so I think 1% is not fantastic, but it's a good start.
Here in America, that'd be a significan percentage of the people who bother to vote at all.
Actually, it'd probably be pretty neat if people could access a website with their cell phones to vote. Send a huge SMS message wave, and see all those kids actually bother to vote.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
From the article, and the summary... "Fewer than 10,000 people, or 1 percent of registered voters, participated *online* in elections for mayors and city councils across the country" (stars added by me)
The vote wasn't exclusively online. Everyone else who voted did it the normal way- this just expands the options for casting your vote.
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
Estonia was part of the Russian empire until 1918, it was independent from 1918 to 1940 when it was forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union, all along it has been an ethnically distinct region. Estonia had only been part of Russia for 200 years prior to 1710 it had been part of either Denmark, Poland or Sweden.
It was never an ethnically Russian area.
tamper with. Corruption is the end of every good governing system.
Quack, quack.
How can this be any better then a paperless voting mashine that has gotten a lot of bad press in here lately? The fact that it is based on linux doesn't help one bit unless people can actually verify what code are running on the servers during the election. Blackbox voting is blackbox voting, no matter what anyone claims is in the box.
Failing to learn from history dooms you to repeat it.
Complications like fraud will be worked out in time. Instead of downplaying internet voting as something that is not possible we should be looking at what's needs to be done to make it happen...pointing out the obvious here on an internet discussion but oh well.
The success of an e-vote is hard to verify, and a poorly designed system - like many of those used in the US - makes it fairly trivial to alter even a presidential election through tampering. With no far reaching conspiracies required either, just a few key municipalities in Ohio would need to manipulated. This would be ridiculously easy for a few corrupt local election officials, who through diebold's interface can alter tallies without an audit log. This is a built in feature for making "corrections" and incorporating things like absentee votes of course. There is so much reward involved that the potential abuse here is astronomical.
Sound ridiculous?
Yeah, I know. So while your at it, please check out this bill and write your representatives about it. Some republicans are already poo-pooing these much needed reforms and they need more momentum.
This linux that they ran it on, does Diebold make that?
Well, those naysayers were wrong, and commoners are perfectly capable of running representational democracies.
I'm not sure how much, if at all, I'm joking when I ask you "And your proof of this is what?"
Did the candidates get to nominate scrutineers to monitor the election process, and what methods were those scrutineers able to employ?
If people are smart enough to be expected to follow the law, they are smart enough to propose and vote on law. People are smart enough to do all of the above. People are smart enough to finance their homes, vehicles, and education; they are smart enough to run their own businesses, and they are smart enough to follow the law in everyday life.
What are you talking about? They're not even smart enough to elect someone coherent.
The kinds of skills that get you by in life aren't necessarily the kinds of skills that help out in running a government. The average citizen is no more likely to do a good job running the government than the government is running the job of the average citizen. Figuring out the tax code is a nightmare for the average person. What would make them qualified to decide if the estate tax should be compounded per bracket or not? Or if ranchers in north dakota should recieve a 5% tax break but a lower monthly subsidy? Or if the joint chiefs of staff should make new threat assessments and readyness plans every 12 months or 36 months. Or argue out the minutiae of whether education funding should get $13.3 billion for Title I Grants to Local Educational Agencies and $1.3 billion in Vocational and Technical training, or $13.4 billion in Title I Grants and $1.2 billion in vocational training.
If we had a direct democracy, people would turn to talking heads to decide how to vote. People would look to people they considered "specialists." People like Oprah Winfrey, Margret Cho, and Jack Thompson. And the idea promoted by the silliest celebrity of the moment would win. And ultimately, nobody would have time to read the bills and vote anyway. Hell, the senators we've elected don't have time to read the bills and vote, and they have a lot more help than we do.
I love democracy, and I believe that the will of the people should be the guiding hand that points the direction of the nation. That having been said, people have lives. They don't have time, education, or inclination enough to be involved in every single decision their city, state, and country makes any more than their city, state, and country has the time to send an inspector to sit over their shoulder and make sure they are doing their work right. The will of everyone should set the direction of government, but certain people devoted to the government full-time are needed to make things work.
The ______ Agenda
Our geographically-challenged AC has left the building in fits of laughter. Generated interesting info on Estonia tho; they're in the EU, like me, and I didn't know anything about them.
Estonia: origin of Hotmail, Kazaa and Skype.
The Roman Empire. 800 years. The Egyptian pharoahs .. Millennia. Call me when we break 500.
.. a compucracy? or an algorocracy.. where sophisticated algorithms running on blazing fast massively parallel quantum processors determine the ideal laws and social characterisics (scary!) for sustaining a happy society. Someone make a movie. Oh yeah, the Matrix.
And no, just because a system replaces a previous one, it doesnt prove that it's superior. It could just be bad luck, the weather, or mass hysterisis. How many coup d'etats and dictatorhips have taken over democracies in the last century in developing countries? Sure democracy worked in Europe. But corrupt politicians in newly democratic countries in Africa, Asia, and South America sold the people on "socialism" so that they can have centralized rule, resulting in millions of people dead of disease and starvation over the last 60 years.
The grandparent post used the word "perfectly capable", perfection should be held to a high standard. Maybe democracy will be replaced by computers
(Btw, I obviously do believe in democracy though in spite of what I said and the lack of "proof").
Does anyone have any info on how the verified the identity of the voter? How did they ensure the client was who he says he was?
I'm not being critical of them at all, I'm just curious how they ensured there was no fraud, either by people lying or by MITM attacks.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I wonder what would have had to happen for it to be considered a failure.
A failure would be if a percentage of their elderly voted for Pat Buchanan.
...or a dot-com?
Despite the concerns with fraud I think a system like Estonias could be much safer than regular voting. By requiring the use of smart cards and computer readers they avoid much of the problems that people worry about with internet voting. With a good challenge response protocol and a secure smart-card design the system could really verify that whoever was voting did posess the smart card. Of course smart cards can be stolen but if you include a password or other personal question you can make that difficult.
Of course the system is still far from perfect. One lacks the accountability of having paper ballots. However, this can be addressed by using various forms of holomorphic encryption which allow voting systems which can only be faked by the collaboration of very large numbers of individuals. Groups big enough that they could fake a normal election as well.
I think the more interesting question is whether it is good to make voting really easy. Most people naively assume that democracy is better when more people vote. This is not obviously true. By making voting slightly difficult you make sure a vote not only reflects a preference but a preference of a certain minimal strength.
Consider for instance a country where 100% of people vote 49% of voters are strongly liberal 51% are strongly conservative. In such a country the conservative politician has no incentive to take a moderate approach and can be elected by just appealing to the 51% who might vote for him. In this country that 49% of the population has NO INPUT on the presidents policy.
On the other hand suppose that a country has the same political breakdown but usually only 50% of people bother to vote. Now if that same conservative politician takes extreme positions which piss off the liberals he might drive ther turnout rate up and actually lose the race. Counterintuitively lower voter participation could actually make for a more responsive democratic process.
It seems there are certain advantages to making voting minimally difficult. Easy enough that everyone can do it but just hard enough that those who don't really care don't bother. So do we really want internet voting?
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
"The Associated Press is reporting that the small European nation of Estonia has conducted large-scale voting over the internet." Isn't it incorrect to use "Estonia" and "large-scale" in the same sentence? I'm sure this would work REALLY uber-well in the poor neighborhoods of the US that have the problems with long lines at polling places. Internet voting should also work great to keep folks in all the tiny outlying villages in the interior of Africa from having to walk three days to get to polling places. Now if these folks would only stop wasting their money on frivolous items like food medicine and instead buy modern computers capable of running XP and IE, we'd be set! Until they do that, they must not really want to vote, anyway.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
But 58% is unusually high, as the article says. But OK, fine, so 58% absentee voters in the county with the 2nd largest absentee voting in the country. What's the average for the state? What's the national absentee rate?
My point still stands about the accessibility of absentee ballot, and the further accesssibility for some for internet ballot.
---and even if they do have some idea today, they won't when they crank up the numbers.
With electronic voting, the ballots are invisible. Nobody can be assured their ballot tallied is the same as their ballot cast. Period, end of story.
If they tag the votes to the voters, they could audit to double check things, but that's a big problem too. You can't have a free will if those in charge know what your choices were. That's why we don't have votes tied to voters here. Our founders knew better.
Without being able to personally identify the votes cast to the voters, they cannot be assured the system actually honored the voters intent. Open Source, closed source does not matter.
It's the form the vote is recorded in that matters. Nobody can see electrons and other subtle physical things used to record machine useable voting records and that's the problem because it forces the people to vote by proxy. Where there is a proxy, manupulation of the process is going to happen. That's just how we are.
If the votes are stored on physical media, then the results of the election can be known and trusted. Also, the act of indicating your voter intent and making the record is one an the same. --No proxy in most cases, save those goofy machines with punches. The voter knows the record they placed on the ballot and can walk away knowing their vote is correct.
When it comes time for counting, machines can read the human made records and humans can watch that happen. Other humans can check the records and audit the machines. If it's all nuts, lots of humans can watch each other count all the ballots...
As for this direct democracy crap, it's just a smoke screen. Oooh our leaders won't want to hear what we have to say. Bull shit. The electronic machines mean they don't actually have to, not the other way around!
What better way to devalue the democratic process. Make it easy and quick. Fewer expectations that way, and it's supposedly cheaper too!
Want an informed and active population that actually self-governs? Put the process in their hands, not some corporation or other exclusive club. There are always plenty of people able to help run the election, we don't need the machines and never will.
These poor fuckers are going to watch their democracy evaporate one machine at a time. Watch that nation and see if it runs significantly different in the near term. When the people are no longer a check on their own government, things will change for the worse.
Look at the USA for clear evidence of that.
30 percent of our national vote was cast with invisible ballots. We have no fucking idea who won '04, only who says they won.
Blogging because I can...
Because we all know how much everyone pays attention to politics.
Now you want people who stay at home all the time surfing the net and watching daytime TV to make all the decisions.
Listen to your average talk radio caller (from BOTH sides), that would be the person sitting 24/7 infront of there computer pressing the [VOTE] button for every mundane issue that came through.
If you don't belive me, take a look at some of the fscking idiotic, or even cruel, decisions the ancient Athenian assembly (whose members were decided by lot) made.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Estonia is reporting massive duplicated voting systems. The Prime Minister of Estonia was not available for comment because he was eating steaming hot corn meal porridge with a famous American Film Star....
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What about Talvezestan, Aquistan, Aquinostan, Tampocostan, and Nosesiestan. The countries where the lost people live. At least, Aquistan is where the lost people live, I guess.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
I'm pretty sure they'd consider it a failure if it got a 2000% turnout.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Estonia is sometimes compared to slowness.... so how slow was the voting process?
-Palal
Exactly. The absolute last people who should be writing law are lawyers. Not only will they put all kinds of obscure jargon (allegedly to clarify things) but it is also an extreme conflict of interest. Lawyers make their money by serving as advocates on different sides of disputes over various laws.* They have a vested interest in increasing both the number and complexity of laws, thus justifying their existance as advocates. They have no particular interest however in writing good law. only the quantity and complexity is important.
.. oh crap.
*also consulting as to the implications of law, but that's really just an extension of the advocate role.
Putting lawyers in charge of writing law is like like letting politicians dictate campaign finance rules and
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It's called PKI. From what little the article said, it sounds like they used it.
But the real problem is not the connection, it's the disconnection. The government can claim they don't make a record of who voted how, but there's no way for the voter to check. Also, there is a way for the voter to be sure the vote is recorded, but no way to be sure that a vote recorded is a vote counted.
With paper ballots, the only way to connect a voter with a ballot would be leftover fingerprints, or (becoming viable now, perhaps) wireless monitoring by someone who can see who enters the booth when. By providing separable anonymous stubs, there is also a way to be reasonably sure that every vote gets counted.
Oh, and every time the latest, best hashing algorithm gets defeated, you have to give the voters new ID cards.
How does _any_ encryption allow the average voter to monitor the voting process?
The average voter can see the anonymous ballot go into the box with a lot of other ballots. The average voter can see the anonymous stub go in the other box when such stubs are used (and they ought to be required everywhere). The average voter can look around and observe whether there is anyone looking over his or her shoulder at the voting booth.
The simple act of pushing the votes onto a wire or into a database before the vote has been detached from the voter and judged completely undermines the ability of the average voter to observe the voting process for either accuracy or anonymity. No amount of encryption or other mathematical games can fix that.
Perhaps your next argument is that only geeks with the mathematical skills to understand holomorphic encryption (and the network and radio monitoring equipment to watch the polling station) should be allowed to vote? Would that make it difficult enough?
So what ? If you use your algorithm carefully and with long key, this should be so rare that cards would have to be replaced due to wear&tear if not something else, so this shouldn't be a problem.
I think it's helpful within the scope of communicating the votes, but does nothing to verify accuracy of voter intent.
So the voter picks 'bob' for president. How does the voter know their vote for 'bob' was added to the final tally for 'bob'?
Don't get me wrong, I like this system better than I do the mess currently being used in the US, but is still has the issue of voting by proxy.
If there is a problem (and there will be problems), the voter intent is not actually recorded. The mouse click, touch screen impulse, etc... is interpeted by the machine and that interpetation is then sent on for the tally.
That breaks the chain of trust between the voter and the vote cast.
With a physical record, the act of actually making the record of the vote and the intent are one and the same. (Unless one is using one of those goofy mechanical machines.)
That's where the problem lies.
This system is very good at communication, probably is redundant where records are stored and counted, but lacks the trust necessary for the voter to reaffirm their vote cast reflects their intent.
What if someone wants a recount? Do we simply retally the existing electronic records, which may or may not be corrupt? How trustworthy is that really?
Also, this system denies the general public the oversight they are entitled to as a part of the democratic process. Nobody can see the votes move toward the final tally. Nobody can verify the count in progress.
Though the voting system is open, which I commend them for doing, how does the average voter understand what code is running on their machine exactly? Again, binaries can be verified, but are they actually doing that? (Strongly doubt it as this brings the cost up considerably.)
If you want to understand the will of the people, you have to get the people involved. This system does not do that and that's a problem in and of itself.
Groups of people, involved in their civic process, provide necessary oversight, lacking from complex technologies.
The ballot remains invisible and cannot be overseen except via proxy.
This forces the voter to trust a third party in order to vote. Where that chain of trust is broken, problems can and will occur, thus making the election untrustworthy.
Again, it's a far better system than the US is using, but it's still a vote by proxy. Untrustworthy.
Blogging because I can...
They were elections for places in local governments, so you can't say a certain individual has won. However, in the capital Tallinn the Centrist Party (Keskerakond) won it thanks to votes of non-citizens and >60 year old votes and is trying to form a coalition to ensure their power, but is failing because of unethical methods used during elections (dirty politics). Anyhow, this situation is going to be fun-fun for the next some years :)
Estonian E-Voting System - General Description, http://www.vvk.ee/elektr/docs/Yldkirjeldus-eng.pdf
Estonian National Electoral Committee, http://www.vvk.ee/engindex.html
Fire away some questions, one per message please - and i'll try to answer them as my time permits.
Basically, this voting system is far worse than your Diebold voting machines.
Problems include:
1) no way to verify the result for ordinary citizen.
2) consider a well-written Windows voting virus : )
3) vote coercion - there are rumours/ tales of
big russian-speaking factorys (in NE of Estonia) collected ID-cards
and PINs from all the workers at election day.
If you did not hand over your ID-card, you got fired.
He acknowledged that Estonia's system was the most secure to date but said no system was "good enough for a politically binding election."
Oh, and this is really less secure than the punch card ballots that are still used all over the place. I think we need to put this in perspective. Could this be hacked? Yes. But, it seems to me that it will be much safer/accurate than our current system.
No Sigs!
How many people do absentee votes in the U.S. (or any democratic country)?
The entire state of Oregon votes via mail. Washington State was second with a very high mail voting turnout.
A few other states, linked above, also allow "no excuse" absentee voting. Thanks to Oregon, which has shown high voter participating and no discernible fraud, the expectation is that states will gradually all go to voting via mail. (very, very, very gradually. Right now states seem to be on a fraud hunting kick, but can't seem to find it.)
dude, you need help, the sooner the better.
I really have no idea where you got the comparison of "slowness" from. Could you at least attempt to provide an example? It seems a rather odd comment to make on a country that used the internet for national elections, while some nations still whinge about hanging-chads.
How does the voter see the electronic ballot and the government see the same electronic ballot without giving the software the chance to fink the voter to some nameless official on a vendetta?
If it's not the same, how does the voter know his vote really counted?
How does the voter get any assurance that the government tally matches the collected votes?
You can build, I suppose, a public key document that would reveal the vote and not the voter, except to the person who owns the key for the vote, but if you have n votes, how can any observer prove that the other n-1 are not faked?
One time passwords as serial numbers on the ballot? Then you have the same problem again, how does the government prove the OTP is valid without reading it? And even if that can actually be solved, how does the average voter assure him or herself that the government's software is actually always jumping through all the hoops just to protect the voter's privacy when there are nameless officials with potential motivation to not bother?
Any way of solving one of the problems opens a hole somewhere else.
If _who_ uses their algorithm carefully?
Remember, we are talking about end-users who are average voters, not geeks.
Agreed that PKI does not cut it.
I think the reason the system has become disconnected from the people is that the media has been happy to step in between, but that's a different thread.
Very good explanation in PDF, thank you.
...and all I can say that I'm proud as IT specialist, and also as someone who has to work/live and communicate with them as brother country. I'm from Latvia and there have been times and notions (and some of them still appears) that we don't care about each other as nations. It is not so, I think. Yeah, Latvians usually make silly jokes about slowness and stupidness of Estonians, however, in true life, Estonia is quite ahead in many fields like country (so our reaction is simple, pure jelousy.). But in very level this humor is very unoffensive.
Estonia have streamed a quite of investment in IT and Internet. So, actually, such things like this one comes for them naturally. It is sad sometimes, because our country also how many smart geeks - but we are so ambitional by each of ourselves that we can't agree on even basic things.
Estonians just sticked with target - create modern, powerful (in smart way), technically superior country - and there are already half-way to it (I think). Of course, close friendship with Finns helped them along the way.
And yes, I wish them luck.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
What's done to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks?
Note that from a libertarian perspective having just any "democracy" is not enough, and at the same time may be too much. Democracy can be tyranny of the majority. The power that a democracy may wield must be limited.
Regardless of democracy, and according to libertarian ideals, everybody should have sovereignty over his personal matters. You should have sovereignty over your body (drugs, abortion), your possessions, your income (taxes are dubious), and your free contracts with sellers, buyers, employers and employees (no regulation of businesses).
If you agree with me, that the current democracy uses two much tyrannial majority powers in a socialist and collectivist fashion, you don't want to make that power more agile and dangerous with "direct" democracy. And the less power that is left at the public democracy, the less need there is for any direct democracy.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
As such, the system is decent. What remains a problem is that the specification is not legally binding. All the law says is "there can be electronic voting" in a few hundred words, but despite the process having been designed with security in mind, the law doesn't enforce how the electronic voting should take place exactly. For all intents and purposes, the government could just say, "hey let's just streamline the voting a bit and cut of those security checks there and here" and yield a 200% turnout or whatever, because the law doesn't specify how the voting should work.
Isn't it the same Estonia which praises and builds memorials for Waffen-SS legionaires? And where russian minority (20%) is considered as non-citizens and cannot vote?
Democratic elections my ass.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
Great. So now a local mob can impose "private" home-based voting on a city block... or upon an entire village. "Private" with a mob member checking that it is going "well" at each "private" home. And bosses and CEO and other people in charge can organize "voting places" at specific locations, to "help" all those people that need no longer go to actual booths with actual representatives of the candidates to check on the privacy of the voting. Electronic voting? Big yes, as long as there is a paper trail to produce the final, official result (and the printed paper is presented to the voter behind a glass, and approved by pressing a button). Non-presencial voting? Big yes, for methods such as postal voting, that are hard to defraud in significant numbers, and would cause suspicion if they were to happen on a grand scale. Big no, for Internet-based, "everyone should do it" voting.
Erm.. one of the fastest growing economies in the region, one of the highest mobile penetrations in the world (95%), the introducer of proportional income tax in Europe, etc etc, where did the slowness come from?
AhForgetIt tendency rated 39%
1. Wtf? What property? What ruling?
2. Dude. For your information, USA does NOT have a state language. Never had from the beginning. "Linguistical imperialism" in Estonia, ROFL. We're lucky to HAVE our own language still, not for any failure on Russia's part for trying, during several Slavification waves during the last century.
3. Baltics considering themselves Scandinavian übermensch? What where when who? So many nations have driven over Estonia during the last 1000 years, the blood is mixed to a T. What are you smoking? You claim to be Hungarian, but you are spouting more nonsense than Zhirinovsky.
It's also funny how bullshit comments are usually left by anonymous cowards.
AhForgetIt tendency rated 39%
In the UK, every ballot paper is traceable back to the individual who cast the vote. Not often realised, but if you look, every ballot has a unique number associated with a voter, which the staff at the polling station enter on it before it is used.... How sure are you that it is always anonymous everywhere else?
I did read it and some of my concerns still stand.
Notably, the voting record created by the voter is preserved through counting --as a ballot so to speak. --Nice.. It's actually quite similar in basic structure to our vote by mail system here in Oregon.
The system does not allow for voter verification, but does allow for post election audits with preserved voting records.
Honestly, this is probably the best system I have seen. I've been following e-voting in the US for a while. It's a fricking mess. This actually is going to work fairly well. I'm extremely happy they support the concept of the ballot as they do.
My primary beef still stands however, and that is the chain of trust between voter intent and the record of the vote is broken when electronic (or many mechanical) means is used to cast the vote. It's a vote by proxy. Pretty damn good proxy, but still vote by proxy.
Where that proxy exists, there are going to be problems.
Again, it's very solid. Compared to the early crude crap used here in the US that's not even networked really, it's golden.
If I were forced to use a system, I would favor this one over others.
One thing that was not clear was the personally identifiable nature of the votes. They are keyed to people, but encrypted. (Nice) What checks are there on post election decryption and archival storage of ballots?
Where this issue is concerned, the vote by mail system involves opening the outer envelope, after the vote has been verified legal, and adding the raw ballots together prior to counting. Post election, the ballots are available for examination, recounts, etc... but no vote can then be identified to belong to a person, save for expensive foresnic techniques.
It's well distributed, like vote by mail is as well. Thats a clear improvment over the usual polling place issues. Votes distributed over time and space provide a nice check on fraud and force those who would be elected to consider their message over a longer time than just before election day.
I've written here that electronic voting cannot be trusted without personally identifiable votes. That appears to hold true for this system as well.
So it's not as bad as I made out at first, but it's still a vote by proxy. That's just not ok, IMHO.
Blogging because I can...
"I ANY country citizenship is not given BEFORE you have learned the LANGUAGE of that country. [...] Well, guess what, there you need to speak native language too :)"
s /estonia/es-op-en.pdf was drafted by the EU before Estonia was accepted as a EU member. It does express some concerns for the Russian minority and other issues, with fairly good explanations. Here is an excerpt (basically about a human rights issue):
Not correct. You don't actually need to know the Swedish language to become a citizen of the country. In fact, in many -- if not most -- countries babies born there will automatically gain full citizenship regardless of parent's nationalities or language. Even though the children themselves cannot speak any language at all by the time.
This document http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/dwn/opinion
The Estonian authorities should consider means to enable stateless children born in Estonia to be naturalised more easily, particularly with a view to the impending entry into effect of the European Convention on nationality agreed within the Council of Europe.
Estonian citizenship seems to be a highly controversial issue which provokes heated debates -- which is quite understandable, given the country's history. The grandparent made many thoughtless and highly questionable remarks. In spite of that, I believe he does have a point. The issue here, as I see it, is that a substantial part of the Russian population living in Estonia have been born and raised in the country, although they only speak Russian. Many of them are old and quite unable to master a second language. Some people (among them EU officials) believe that this in itself is reason enough to receive a citizenship.
I keep wondering why México still bothers with Spanish. After all, they're all supposed to study English from the first grade or so. And what's this national language shit with the Netherlands and Belgium? Everybody speaks English there.
And I also keep wondering how Putin's propaganda lackeys end up on Slashdot. Either they or simply highly misinformed creeps with too much time on their hands and their heart aching for the 150 millions of Russians whom the 1 million Estonians are obviously so badly abusing.
By the way, where do all those numbers and percentages come from?
By the way, where do all those numbers and percentages come from?
/ en.html the Russian language amounts to 29.7%. This is still quite big. The argument was basically that a large enough population speaking a second language should be a reason to make it official. Some might agree with that, and some may disagree. Simply calling someone Putin's propaganda lackey won't change that fact or convince anyone.
:)
I agree, 80 percent seems a bit high. According to this site: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos
Now, I wouldn't jump to the conclusions about racism or a large economical impact. For me, this is a matter of being a part of the society. In my opinion, people who've lived in a country for a certain amount of time should be able to communicate with the officials even though they don't understand the language. Children should also be given education and healthcare using their native language (with the support of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child).
Today, a EU citizen moving to another EU country should be able to communicate with the country's officials in order to keep the labour market unrestricted. The Russian minority don't seem to have this right even though they appear to have it in the neighboring Finland. I myself live in Sweden where we don't even have an official language. When a foreign language becomes popular enough, the officials simply translate various Swedish forms into the new language and hire a new translator. When somebody have lived long enough in the country (a few years), he or she is entitled to participate in local elections -- which I think is rather important. In spite of that, the small Swedish language is very much alive and the streets have not been taken over by 150 million of Russians / Turks / Jews / whatever. Well, maybe except for the Old City in Stockholm
Why do you think Russia is pressing so much for the status of the Russian language in Latvia and Estonia? (They obviously don't have a case in Lithuania, although the Lithuanians are way more proficient in Russian... Whoever knows why.) Because they see a loophole through which they can push the Russian language into the position of being one of the official languages of the EU. It is not a coincidence that all of a sudden there's been a "people's movement" to give the Latgal language an official status in Latvia. That would make the Latvian language effectively a minority in Latvia, thus elevating Russian into the most favoured position. That cannot be done in Estonia (no dialects so big), so the Kremlin looks for other methods. You think the Kremlin really gives a damn about the Russians living abroad? If yes, why are they so silent about, say, Central Asia? Because there's no agenda there. I could cite pieces of news from Central Asia that are way out there even according to Russian media's standards, yet they go uncommented. The people are a propaganda tool, always have been.
But I leave it at that.
You call the Swedish language small, yet you fail to consider the context. You have 9 million Swedes jabbering away and neither Finland nor Norway have ever posed any relevant threat. Hell, you have a hard time even finding a job as a janitor in Sweden if you don't speak Swedish. This comes as a report from a friend in Falun. Maybe you don't even understand the problem at its core, for it's easy for a Swede to think that eventually every newcomer picks up Swedish and there'll be a happy family. There's also the 5+ million strong Finland in the way to skew the perspective. It may well be that your geographical situation is so good you don't even need a state language to protect your native tongue. A look at a map, however, assures you that it is definitely not true here. A history lesson would reinforce the point. Yes, yes, bygones, you might say, only they aren't, for we get now the same rhetorics that we got at the end of the seventies.
Of course, there's always the question as to why there even should be so many languages, and a language with "only" 1 million speakers is surely a nuisance to everybody adjacent. Why even protect a small Fenno-Ugrian tongue while so many of its kind are becoming extinct in Siberia on a yearly basis? Well, to that question you'll have to find your own answers. I, for one, think that language is always closely tied to culture and if a language dies, well, here goes the culture. We'll all be worse off if we choose to cultivate a monoculture. Sure, there'll be less reason to travel around if everywhere is the same, you'll save lots on transportation costs, but do you really want that?
Pardon me, Finland was not occupied by Russia. We fought on two occasions against the Soviets. We were never occupied though we finally surrended the war and gave parts of Eastern Finland to the Soviet government.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
This discussion about voting rights is rapidly becoming offtopic. I'll try to clarify what I meant anyway.
I'm not arguing about Putin misusing the situation in pursuit of his political agenda. Of course he does! This doesn't change the fact of a restrictive language policy, criticized not only by Russia but also by the EU commission.
You have 9 million Swedes jabbering away and neither Finland nor Norway have ever posed any relevant threat.
I'm definitely not saying that the Baltic languages don't deserve to exist or that they shouldn't be protected. I'm just having a hard time to imagine a language as a valid threat. You seem to think of it as a threat to the Latvian/Estonian culture -- but like it or not, the Baltic states do share historical and cultural heritage with Russia and many other countries. I don't really beleive this is something that can culturally make Estonia or Latvia a Russian province again. If the Soviet Union didn't succeed, who will? Heck, Sweden did the same thing in the 17th-18th centuries, trying to eradicate the languages and the different cultures of the Baltic region. It obviously didn't work. Many small countries (such as Switzerland) have two official languages -- and they still have a unique culture. Or look at Ireland, a country which by many has been considered English for 200 years until it broke free and developed a very strong new cultural self image. The English language is still official there -- but who cares!
As for Sweden, over 1 million people out of 9 have been born outside the country. Most of them have Swedish only as a second language. Many never actually learn Swedish. It's a bit of a problem, but nobody is denying them basic education in their native languages and they are able to vote and communicate with authorities and healthcare. For me and many others those are human rights. It doesn't mean you shouldn't protect a small language -- on the countrary, it should be encouraged. But those who don't master it shouldn't be denied access to the basic services of the society.
The Swedish language and culture themselves are constantly changing, shaped by the influence of the people living in the country. This is generally a good thing. Today, we are living under strong English influence. Before that it was French and German. The language and the culture of today is indeed very different from what it was a 100 years ago. This is quite normal and nothing to be afraid of. We hardly have any Viking words left -- but we do have a unique culture!
Actually, that 1% is normal as the number of people having the equipment and necessary certificaions activated vor voting online is so small (and the necessary equipment was all sold out by the voting day(s)). So we can safely say that more than 25% (actually rather 50%) of people who had necessary equipment (or easy and reliable access to it) voted electronically. And that is a very good ratio.
and that is neither an insult or a compliment.
Ordinary voting judges can count ballots and stubs if the ballots and stubs are paper. If they are electronic, it takes at least a geek with moderate skill to check the counting program and the count.
Checking the program requires analyzing the source, including every library linked, and then making sure every byte of the object matches the source. And when the analyst is done, the best we can assert is that, if there is a pattern-matching trap in the counting program, it was constructed by someone with more skill than the analyst (assuming the analyst is not in on the game).
Watching the count of paper ballots requires only ordinary people of ordinary skill (who can stay awake). (Chads are evidence that paper ballots can suffer from design defects, but the effects are somewhat more random.)
You can't rely on a statistical test of the count, because statistic quality assurance relies on randomness. Deliberately faked results are not random, and can be made dependent on precinct, on time of day, on all sorts of obfuscation techniques.
I guess you'd need at least three different sets of programs, each written a different group, preferably of different party affiliation, to get anywhere close to being able to monitor the count. Does that save time and money over paper ballots? Is it going to be more reliable? Can Republicans program? How about Democrats? How about fundamentalist political supporters of the religion of the far rock? (Random political organization of known bias, there.) What happens when the biased political organization that can't program (or fudges their results) brings suit against the ones which are accurate?
Every step of the process has the same defects -- the balloting, the judging, the collection at precints (Failing to collect at precincts just weakens the system.), the delivery to the local authorities, the counting by the local authorities (and the checking the count of ballots against the count of stubs), the storage of ballots, everything. Physical paper requires human action, but can be performed, and _monitored_ by humans of ordinary skill. Each political party can send monitors to observe every step, and those moniters don't have to be highly trained. (Just courteours at some basic level.)
Monitoring electronic balloting requires somewhat extraordinary skill. Some aspects of the monitoring may even require hardware that ordinary people don't have. (Want something to do a radio sweep of the ballot place all during ballots?)
I know computer technology is attractive. It can be applied, actually, but the paper trail must remain. (And the ballots themselves should be as simple as possible, to reduce opportunity for hidden radio transmitters.)
I've watched judges righting down serial numbers in the margins of the sign-in books in US elections. I don't remember if I realized at the time I was supposed to tell them not to do that.
The serial numbers, when used, are supposed to be for matching the stub to the ballot, so that the ballot and the stub can be delivered by independent paths. But the serial numbers are _not_ supposed to be tracked, and are even supposed to be in somewhat random order so that election judges can't just remember that Joe Brown voted the 57th ballot and then count up on the serial numbers later. If the numbers are tracked, then you are right. Anonimity has been breached.
Getting the administration process correct on paper ballots does take a little more than ordinary skill, but it is visible, and the ordinary person has a hope of understanding it.