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UK Voters Want To Vote Online
InternetVoting writes "A recent UK research survey by NTL:Telewest Business found that nearly half of the younger respondents would be more likely to vote online. This year the UK government has authorized 13 local election pilots including Internet voting. ntl:Telewest Business estimates 10 million UK households have broadband and 4,789 local libraries offer public access. In the US political parties are beginning to test the Internet voting waters with the Michigan Democratic Party to offer Internet voting in their 2008 Presidential Caucus. There were some notable differences in generational interest: 'The YouGov poll of almost 2,300 people, carried out on behalf of NTL:Telewest's business unit, found that younger voters were even more positive about the idea of alternatives to the trusty ballot box. 57 per cent of 18-34 year olds liked the idea of evoting, but only a third of the over 55s were as keen.' Given security and privacy concerns in the states, how likely is this to appeal to US voters? "
I've never had to walk more than 200m to get to vote - maybe if you can't be bothered to make that effort then your vote shouldn't count...
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Should be like you driving test. If you want it , turn up and fucking do it. The world is not there for your wishful may or may not convenience.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
There is no satisfactory way around this basic fact.
Conduct elections online, and you open the process up to massive abuse where anonymity effectively become nullified.
For audits and recounts, computer forensics aren't nearly up to the abilities of traditional forensics. Physical ballots are why the Florida 2000 problems were so readily apparent.
Having computers print out physical (human-readable) ballots is fine. But trying to make an electronic "ballot" work anonymously is sheer stupidity.
One of the major reasons for a confidential voting process taking place in the voting booth is that it is difficult to intimidate the voter or make vote buying effective. As soon as the vote takes place elsewhere all kinds of influences become possible and almost impossible to detect or prevent.
Its bad enough with the online banking exploits out there, and those are kept in-check because there's no anonymity and both the bankers and the customers can check their statements and trace all activities back to their account numbers.
I'll say it again: Computer voting is Stupid By Design.
The reason you don't want everyone else to know how other people voted is that knowing for sure how someone voted can lead to intimidation, bribery, and the like. Having an open ballot discourages sincere voting by subjecting people to even more peer pressure. As cliché as it might seem, peer pressure really would have a large effect in a thing such as this. Past peer pressure, there is always intimidation. Vote the wrong way and you'll pay. Ya dig?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I see every day trojans that are able to manipulate your online banking, altering the amount transfered and the target account, all the while making it impossible for the user to even notice it if he doesn't know where to look (i.e. in the inner workings of his system).
How much more interesting would it be to change his vote cast to a party you deem more desirable than the one that he actually wanted to pick?
Democracy is too valuable a thing to hand it to a machine. Money, fine. Business, ok. But not politics.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Now we will be able to shop, gamble and decide the fate of our own countries education and healthcare systems from the comfort of our fat sweaty arses.. Let me know when i can download fresh air and i'll never have to leave my house ever again.
God Be Gone
Just because somebody says they're more likely to vote online doesn't mean they want online voting.
It just means they admit there are times they might vote online when they wouldn't bother to go to the polls. It doesn't mean they think that online voting is better, or as good.
I've missed a couple elections over the last two decades. They were local elections for offices where I didn't think there was much difference between the candidates, and I was scheduled for business travel. It wasn't worth it to reschedule my trip or get an abstentee ballot. If we voted on line, I'd have voted remotely and I suppose I wouldn't have missed any elections.
So technically, this article would count me as ready to "embrace" online voting, even though I'd fight the idea tooth an nail if it ever came up. If it was the only way to vote, I'd vote that way. I might, over the course of my life, vote in a half dozen elections that I would otherwise have skipped because they weren't important for me. However, I'd never trust any election result again, including the ones that are important to me.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It would show in the statistics that the majority doesn't think any of the candidates are fit for the office.
Presidental elections are mandatory here, and by custom the first thing the new president does is declare a general amnesty for all those who didn't come to vote. It would be a farce anyway.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What WOULD be absolutely stunning would be to release a trojan that changes any vote cast on an infected machine to become a, say, green party vote or some other that "nobody" votes for.
I predict a landslide.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I thought about this whole purchasing votes idea. I tried to imagine that I was one of the people who sold their vote. Let's say I sold it to Bush in '04. For example sake let's say now in '07 I really regret selling my vote to him because I think he's screwed up really badly. Maybe this next election I won't sell my vote, and in fact will go vote for who I think is the best. This is probably better than the original situation, in which I never would've voted at all.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
With what has happened in the USA, are they absolutely nuts?!!! There is no way to verify the vote if that is on line. I am canadian and I read that Ontario is floating a trial balloon about having an online vote. Electronicly assisted elections are just a way to yell, "STEAL ME!".
E-voting is the worst idea that ever had an e- in front of it. Just don't do it. If it were up to me, I would make voting even more manual and paper based. Do all the totaling manually with a pencil and let me check your work. Absolutely THE WRONG application of technology.
Now I know that there will be lots of geeks immediately thinking of technical feasibility and a system architecture seems to want to start drawing itself in my head too. But this is just one thing you never want to make "more efficient".
Why? Because YOU CANNOT TRUST GOVERNMENT. You simply cannot. The framers of the US constitution understood that concept very well (really the anti-federalists more so but whatever). We have documentation that is quite explicit on this point. It's not being patriotic to hand your power over to a faceless system that will naturally want to preserve itself; that's being idiotic. Liberty is something that needs to be guarded and protected very diligently because there will always be someone willing to take away if you let them and once that happens you may never get it back. The right and the left in the US never address the fact the the 2nd Amendment to the US Consistution (well regulated militia, bear arms) was not put there so citizens could protect themselves from break-ins, thieves or highwaymen. It is so they can protect themselves from the government.
Just leave this one alone. We can have all the conveniences in the world thanks to technology, but people will just have to deal with the tremendous inconvenience of getting off their asses and going out and manually voting sometimes.
Online voting would be great! But only if it was administered by a neutral third party. Like Switzerland. Or better yet, a Swiss bank.
IF they instituted online voting they could have drop down boxes for each candidate with summaries of opinions and hyperlinks to voting records, speeches... Hell, they could even link in the publically disclosed lists of contributors. I believe most voters don't have the time or inclination to do this sort of research on their own, but might be more inclined if the info was more easily accesible.
The current mechanism of voting in the UK is:
1. You walk into a small booth, about the size of a telephone box. It's completely open on one side, but the other sides consist of a sheet of board about 7' high.
2. You draw a cross next to the name of the person you want to vote for.
3. You fold your ballot paper once and place it in a locked metal box in the middle of the room.
It would be trivially easy to print out information similar to what you describe and pin it up inside the booth. I suspect the reason why they don't is because if the slightest piece of information that gets put up is wrong, or perhaps somehow unfair to a specific party, then the wronged party would have kittens.
This isn't a problem which can be solved by adding "... on the Internet!" to the voting procedure. About the most detail they'd be likely to provide would be a link to the party website.
who said the paper ballot system isn't broken? In the U.S. there are plenty of dead people that vote every year. There are plenty of counting issues, and more to the point, polling station shenanigans to prohibit or inhibit whole groups of people from being able to vote easily. This has been the way since very early on in U.S. history, if not before that.
It's not broken, but there are degrees of brokenness.
The big advantage with paper ballots is that it's very hard to make a substantial change to the outcome without it being pretty damn obvious to even the most lacksidaisical of officials. The same is simply not true of the "magic black box" which the computerised voting systems in common use are.
The fundamental issue that I've never seen addressed concerns the security of the voter himself. Everyone is focused on encryption and security of the vote once it's been placed, but what I never see any discussion of is the following:
One major reason to have polling places is to attempt to guarantee a situation where a voter can go into a little room and cast his ballot without any threat and with deniability. There's nobody in the booth with him ensuring that he's voted the way he's been told or paid to vote.
Allowing people to vote from wherever they want MAY still grant anonymity, but we'll never be sure of the circumstances behind the vote. There could be a man with a gun or a checkbook watching the ballot being cast.
Even if all of the engineering and political challenges are overcome, this sort of voting has more fundamental issues that may not be solvable.
Voting from home is voting from an uncontrolled enviroment, where someone can watch what I type or what I have on the screen and I can't see how this problem can be solved by any technical means.
Let's say I want to force/pay 1000 people to vote for me. With online voting I can setup a private "voting office" and watch carefully if they really vote for me.
Or my boss can force me to vote for his favorite candidate for example. Someone can tell his whole family to vote what he wants to.
This is not possible with the current voting system, where I vote alone, in a secured area.
Online voting will make possible not only for the government or some powerfull people to track a vote, but for everyone who has some influence on the voter.
It's a cliche, but you know the expression about "one bad apple". Perhaps you think I have a somewhat cynical and downbeat view of humanity; well, I probably do, but that's not the problem here. Put simply, there only need to be a relatively small percentage of corrupt, selfish people (basically those with psychopathic or simply selfish behaviour) to subvert and exploit any system which relies on an overly idealistic view of humanity. The "bad apples".
Until the human race fundamentally changes, these people will always be with us, and I certainly don't intend letting them destroy things.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I think you are right.
Here in France we are in presidential elections right now. Politics used to say that French were not interested in politics because we had a very low participation rate in 2002, that voting was to hard, that people weren't educated enough to understand how important it was to go voting. Never, ever, they wondered if it could be because French felt that political parties had no interesting propositions to make. This year, nothing changed in the way of voting, but we broke participation records. Only thing that changed : some candidates are 20 years younger than those in 2002. They bring more interesting ideas.
When people vote has a chance to change something, they'll go voting. Period.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
This is a bad idea, for many reasons.
For every reason that people oppose electronic voting, this is much worse. The machines aren't even visible to the voter, there is no paper trail at all. It's a black box, but there isn't even a box visible to the voter. You have no idea if your vote was counted correctly.
Securing the system will be very hard, with tons of people trying to hack it, and being able to do so anonymously and from anywhere in the world.
People will have to get some kind of password to vote, and will have to register, and at least the former can't be done on the internet. This eliminates the purpose of online voting. I guess you could send everyone a password, though.
It will open new doors for corruption. There will be no secret ballot at all, and selling your vote will be incredibly easy. As will voter coercion.
And last, it has no great benefit. If someone is too lazy and/or apathetic to go to the polls to vote, they don't need to be voting.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.