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Out With E-Voting, In With M-Voting
InternetVoting writes "The ever technology forward nation sometimes known as 'E-stonia' after recently performing the world's first national Internet election are already leaving e-voting behind. Estonia is now considering voting from mobile phones using SIM cards as identification, dubbed 'm-voting.' From the article: 'Mobile ID is more convenient in that one does not have to attach a special ID card reader to one's computer. A cell phone performs the functions of an ID card and card reader at one and the same time.'"
I have 8 sim cards.
Does that mean I get 8 votes?
Call me when you can vote by drinking a certain number of beers, lol.
Haiku for you!
Can you elect me NOW?
I read Usenet for the articles.
SIM cards identify phones uniquely, right? So, what prevents the ruling party from finding out how each person voted?
I'm reminded of voting in the MaxHeadroom world where viewers tune to the channel of their candidate at voting time.
But seriously, this seems like a well intended idea with an amazing amount of problems. The most obvious is that the phone company's computers and networking gear have many places to intercept the record of how you voted.
No vote.
We tried this in the UK, but for some reason the votes were still being counted 3 hours after the results were announced.
liqbase
I say we get rid of representative democracy entirely and replace the legislative branch with regular people. People who aren't paid. Just volunteering because they want to help their country. And make it so that anyone, even corporations, can volunteer. Hell, lobbyists should be welcome. Also pass a law that makes eight years of post secondary education mandatory to be a citizen. This would be much better and is closer to what our founding fathers really wanted. Career politicians like Alexander Hamilton queered up the founding of a good U.S. government.
This voting bullshit for representatives is just a game. In the U.S., we don't even have much difference between parties.
"The ever technology forward nation sometimes known as 'E-stonia' after recently performing the world's first national Internet election are already leaving e-voting behind.
Are? The nation are blah blah blah...? That can't be right.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
The idea that someone could vote from a cellphone really scares me. Part of the process is to make someone go out of their way to do so. At least for myself. Which is why I never vote. Since I don't pay enough attention to politics in general the fact I have to go out of my way stops me from doing so. No it isn't perfect, but I think it helps weed out the chaff.
A major problem with both mVoting and voting over the internet is that the 'secret ballot' is sacrificed. It becomes very easy for this create problems like the US had in the 1800s.
For example, your boss can tell you to vote while he is watching. If you don't vote
the way that he wants he will fire you.
For this reason I am against internet voting and mVoting.
Follow my election reform blog at AllAboutVoting.com
Yeh, their elections are as good as the voting in the Eurovision song contest so I'm not surprised that they'd allow telephone voting.
You still have to have a voter registration database so only one SIM per person can be valid, and it seems like it should be easy to trace a SIM back to a person.
I like the idea, but I think this would make a huge single point for abuse.
The fact that SIM cards would have to be registered with the government carries with it some degree of invasion of privacy. However, as long as the government allows people to own SIM cards that weren't registered with the government as voting-enabled cards.
In the US, we would also have to have a mechanism for people not owning mobile phones to vote (I know it's hard for a /.'er to envision any reason a person would not have one). The trivial way to do this would be to have people who don't own phones be able to go to a voting place and get a assigned a SIM chip, which could either be used as an insert into any phone (hey, can I borrow your phone to vote?) or else could be taken to a polling place and used in a specially equipped voting booth.
The annoying problem I see with this is that it pretty much removes the last traces of privacy for voting. It's actually really useful to democracy that ballots should be secret. This is, unfortunately, already becoming a thing of the past, with the proliferation of absentee ballots that have no longer become the voting method of last resort, but the voting method of (in some cases) first resort. Voting should be private, not public-- not your boss, not your friends, and not the friendly guy who says "I'll give you ten bucks if you vote the way I ask-- none of these should not be able to say, "hey, let me watch while you vote so I can see who you voted for."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
But for those who cannot afford cell phones or cellular service, it kind of leaves them out of the voting process. I'd have a hard time calling a country like that "Democratic" or even a Republic.
Your address is verified when you receive the ballot, you can take your time looking up all the ballot measures in the voter's pamphlet, and it's convenient. It's as secure as an absentee ballot, and if you really wanted security, it's easier to get poll watchers from every campaign to one central location than to every precinct in the state.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
You live in Estonia? No? Then what the hell does your comment have to do with this story?
Yes! Just what we need, voting that is dependent on the level of infrastructure you pay to support, causes brain cancer, lowers your sperm count and your IQ! As if the conspiracy theorists don't have enough to talk about already. So, do people with cheap unreliable cell phones petition to have government provided cell phones in order to ensure the reliability of their voting? Or, how about petitioning that the radio towers in their region aren't reliable so therefore the vote was flawed and biased against them? So, could people who don't think a region would vote the way they do put up radio interference to prevent voting in that area? Closed source voting machines are nothing in comparison to closed hardware voting machines. Or, your five year old gets a-hold of your cell-phone for you and votes for Barney. After hurricanes, would people not be able to vote? People getting a-hold of the numbers around the voting numbers and phishing them. Is it just me, or is this just yet another voting method which is biased to rich, consistent, and forward thinking people? A voting method which kills you in the process, lovely.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
It is really quite ironic that among the people who have most taken the message of the late economist Milton Friedman to heart are the people of Estonia (formerly a totalitarian socialist state) and they are now reaping the benefits of forward thinking and sound economic and government policies. There have been hurdles and difficulties to overcome along the way...yes, but compared to some other European countries, were the flawed remnants of socialist ideas persist like three day old fish, Estonia is moving ahead rapidly while other European nations, particularly France, seem to be stuck in first gear. Estonia is a study in contrasts, between the failure of socialism and the success of the free market and between the freedom of limited government and the oppressive nature of high-tax nanny state socialism. If this type of initiative succeeds then it will further burnish the credentials of Estonia and reaffirm the correctness of the ideas of the late Milton Friedman.
Premium text messages costs apply typically $.99 per vote
Can vote upto 10 times
Premiums may be used to defend your candidate against solicitation charges.
Gonna be tough to read that at the bottom of the cell phone screen but there's always a price to pay...
Freedom used to cost a buck o' five! Ahhh, good ol' inflation. ;)
Problems: Stolen cell phones, Multiple SIM cards, and even LESS of a paper trail than we have now! Verizon and other cellular carriers have been at the whim of the Department of Homeland Security for a few years now, having turned over millions of call records for domestic American citizen calls! Why don't we just do away with elections done by the people altogether and have DHS and the pentagon elect our officials for us! They practically already do... remember the yellow button on the e-voting machines that were made in Venezuela and serviced mid-election by Venezuelan nationals?
Stick to ballot voting! Just make a National Voting Day!
Instead of a representative government, where we periodically vote for representatives and send them to Washington, I suggest a government of the people, by the people, who have cellphones. A government of cell towers situated along superhighways would gather a representative sample of Americans and we can replace our arcane parliamentary procedures with wireless ones, where the power is held by the people, as they drive past particular points on the road.
Think of how convenient that would be. You could vote to condemn a newspaper ad from the comfort of your car as you drive to work. I can't tell you how many times I've needed to do that. Because if I say "zero" it undercuts my argument.
But you ask, how would we ever pay for such a wonderful system? That's easy. Just sell it to a bunch of stupid investors as "web 2.0 style socialization".
This would be a very sophisticated form of government for a large democracy. Smaller ones could use Bluetooth.
how can one be sure WHO actually votes here?
Just voted in Norway. All paper and apparently manual counting. This surprised me since USA have used punch cards for at least a quarter century, and now is mostly electronic.
And BTW, a lot of cheating and errors with the old way, so maybe we should not demand perfection for the electronic systems.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
People's Fascist Party leader Lek Bolokov won Estonia's national elections on Monday with an unexpected %451 percent of the total vote. When the leader of the 4 member fringe party was asked if he was surprised to have won the national election Bolokov replied with a cryptic "In Soviet Russia government brick YOU".
So if I wanted to vote for Estonia's Res Publica party I would just txt I VT 4 RPub PLZ FTW to 18 00 U2 CAN VOTE?
hEY, CAN i BORROW YOUR vOTE,.. ER UM i MEaN PHONE.. I need to call my mom.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
voting with pen and paper is thouroughly tested.
computers either sacrifice the secret (digitally signed ballots) or make manipulation easier (anonymous ballots).
when nearly every hacker you meet is against something like this, you should know how things should go. politicians who propose this stuff are corrupt.
Clearly, to implement this you'd have to register your SIM card in your phone. I presume that this would be a verifiable process.
And in a country (USA) where 1/2 the federal representatives bitch about a person having to produce a picture ID to be able to vote...not gonna happen.
I say we shoot first and ask questions later.
Wait...I thought this was an RIAA post...
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
DDoSed the entire country of Estonia because they moved a stupid World War II era statue (ehem, i mean dearly important statue, dear any Russian hackers reading this comment), what Estonia is going to get from this scheme is Lenin being elected their next president, coming in second place will be Ivan Drago from Rocky IV, and coming in third place will be Boris Badenov from Rocky and Bullwinkle
voting should be on paper. even mechanical voting is too susceptible to tampering. electronic voting? cell phone voting? are you kidding? yes, simple paper ballots can be messed with too, but anything more technological than simple paper ballots merely introduces more attack vectors... orders of magnitude more attack vectors the more unnecessarily technofetishized you get, such as with electronic voting
democracy is too important and voting is really striaghtforward. there is no need to make it more complicated than scribble a mark on a piece of paper and dropping it in a box, especially when you risk the generla public losing confidence in their own government. all countries, no matter how technophilic and rich, should vote with paper ballots
stupid, bad idea Estonia
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Does it ever bother anyone that in Canada and the US Presidents and PM's tend to be lawyers? Have you noticed a lot of the house, senate, etc.. are also lawyers? Notice as well that so many laws come out that benefit no one except lawyers? Maybe we should try biasing society away from electing people who a vested interest in making things complicated. Maybe we should try voting in ore Science related professionals and engineers. Look at other major nations, China's run by a PHD engineer, Russia is run by a former Spy/Assassin and India's run by a PHD economist. I guess technically Putin is a law scholar but he's a law school grad who could kill you with his bare hands, dispose of the body, and then have lunch.
And the US has? Dubya...
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Phone companies are such honorable organizations, we should have no second thoughts on this
"We're going to give all our votes to some guy you've never met, who will count them with nobody else watching, and whose answers we will trust completely. You'll never see the original votes again, but if you want a recount he'll be happy to tell you the same numbers twice."
"What! That's outrageous! Why the possibilities for corruption are so..."
"The guy will use a computer."
"Oh, well, that's okay then."
An even bigger concern than our voting choices becoming public is the vulnerability of the personal data used to identify us in that voting process becoming 'hackable'. It's also worrisome that such data would be gathered by a company that won-out in the government contract bidding process, a process which looks pretty scary to those outside the DC insider/lobbyist beltway.
Tierzero provides MPLS, DS1, DS3, VoIP and VPN in Southern California
A *real* reason to hack your iPhone!
hawk
Then we gun-owning landline owners will start the revolution.
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Blevins, who trademarked "pops-right" and invented the "presto-pop" prepackaged ready-to-pop popcorn/oil/aluminum popping pan, for decades ran the "popcorn poll" on presidential races.
Moviegoers could request their popcorn in a Democrat or Republican styled box. Starting with Truman/Dewey upset election and running for 20 years he successfully predicted the outcome of six consecutive presidential races.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
No, not really.
At least in Canada they vote with paper and pencil.
And they have this newfangled thing called a budget surplus.
So, it doesn't bother me.
Besides, look at the last non-lawyer we "elected" in the US: he has an MBA and his initial are GWB.
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The problem with evoting is that computer systems are, as any /.r knows, an easy lay. Anyone here going to say that he or she can design a completely secure voting system, post it on here, and not find it cracked by next login?
The privacy concerns are trivial compared to concerns about the manipulation of data.
Yeah ok, I voted through my cellphone for deregulation of the cellphone markets - let's make them put their money where their mouth is. And I lost. I must be in the minority!
God bless Democracy. May it rest in peace.
How the heck do they verify that people don't vote twice, then? or vote in a different district or something like that?
I mean, even here in Mexico your voter card (which has become the de-facto id for everything here), has your picture, signature and thumbprint. And when you go to vote they check you against the federal registry book for that district, which has all the info on your voter card, including your picture so they can make sure it is really you.
No sig for the moment.
I'm serious. We know from experiments in Estonia and Switzerland and elsewhere that e-voting is convenient. M-voting will probably be even more so.
We also know that there are fundamental, perhaps irremediable problems with voting electronically and remotely. In particular:
Is democracy like shopping on Amazon, to be judged by its convenience and efficiency? Or is it something more important, and precious, than that?
I think that if people take democracy seriously, they should slow down and ask these questions a bit more. If it means a few more years of voting the boring manual way, perhaps that will be for good reasons.
Video shows Estonian election officials beating two voters until they choose the right canditade; with all their eight SIM cards. Convincing these voters took just 26 minutes. Estonian style electronic voting is usually performed from the hospital beds.
Wellcome to E-estonia, also what a nice place it is to spend your holidays
... will their name go from E-stonia to M-stonia as well?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Electronic voting is fun!
Yeah, too bad they use the budget surplus to pay down the national debt. I mean, we'd much rather pay for years of interest on these loans, just so we can have a little extra money right now.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Good enough for American Idol, good enough for democracy. What could go wrong?
If you think I'm trusting my vote to the likes of Sprint, Verizon or AT&T you're nuts. I might consider it after all the people responsible for the NSA wiretapping fiasco have been put away for a reasonable number of years. Right now, though, I wouldn't trust any major communications carrier with my vote. Nope. Uh uh. No sir.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Everyone registered to vote gets a voter registration card. In our current system, this is just another piece of paper most of us stuff into our wallets. It has no purpose other than it's own existence. Why not slap a smart-chip on that card and create a voting machine that reads the smart-chips? Every registered voter would have an individualized, one-time-use smart card that can be used to tabulate the vote, then deactivate the chip. No more senior citizens sitting at folding tables asking us to sign a book, no more miscounts in the hands of error-prone humans, and perhaps most importantly, no more use for the completely unnecessary "Electoral College". All the votes of the people, accurately tabulated, can determine the winners and losers. I know the opposition to such a plan will raise the issue of Big Brother and the National ID movement, and I don't necessarily disagree with those points. They are valid and need to be addressed in conjunction with the creation of such a system. In the end, no solution is going to make everybody happy, but for Christs sake, we GOTTA be able to bring the voting and election process into this century. As long as we continue to fumble around with multiple voting machine vendors, with varying capabilities and vulnerabilities for the sake of saving political face, we'll continue to wear a big black eye in the international community, and our Democracy will continue to suffer embarrassments (i.e. our current "President").
Internet and mobile phone voting in the EU, where the data retention directive will soon be implemented in every member state allowing unprecedented charting and tracing of everyone's internet and phone communications? No thank you. I'll step behind the curtain in the ballot office, put my vote in the anonymous envelope and watch the people behind the desk drop it in the box, just like in all previous elections.
Any election method where the vote can't be guaranteed to be secret (because you are allowed to vote somewhere where someone can force you to let him watch you do it) or anonymous (because mobile phones and internet connections can not be trusted) is open to abuse.
The important thing is that all persons eligible to vote are able to vote once, that nobody who is ineligible gets any vote, and that all properly cast votes are counted accurately. If you need voting to be "convenient" before you exercise your franchise, then it would be better for everybody if you did not vote, because you probably were unwilling to exert any more effort to learn the issues than you were willing to exert to cast your vote. Every step to make voting easier for lazy people only opens systems up to greater opportunities for voter fraud.
These systems concentrate on the ability to conduct a ballot.
But the secrecy of the ballot is equally important. It is not just a side-issue. Even postal voting defies the right to secret ballot. How do you ensure the right to secrecy from your family or peer group, or undue pressure therefrom, if the place of voting is not controlled?
I may be a Luddite but such fundamentals are best left un-technoligised. Go back to paper ballots.
8 sims connected to 8 different identities? no? hmm, how many votes... how many votes. I'm guessing one here. Remember that this is a democratic election, not some half-thought-through garage setup.
M-voting and E-voting aren't that different after all.
In case of E-voting, user identification is done using a smart card (to digitally sign your vote. And no, the procedures make sure no one can see how you voted.) With the so-called "m-voting", the crypto chip is simply in the mobile's SIM card, to eliminate the need for a smart card reader.
Here's a small (and somewhat disturbing) animation about how mobile-id works: http://www.id.ee/public/Mobiil_ID_multikas/ (in Estonian, but the visuals might still make sense)
Most people commenting here concentrate on security of such a system. That is not the major issue..
The real danger of such system is that masses of idiots owning cellphones who otherwise would not bother to visit voting booth would be allowed to vote on impulse, coerced by some clever ad, other person or whatever makes them move, without giving the matter any real thought. Results would be expectable and disastrous.
The need to drive to balloting point or at least to get the national ID card and install some software for e-voting ensures that most voters care about country enough to do these things. Also it gives them time to reflect on their reasoning en route, perhaps arriving on a more rational decision in time.
Availability of easy anytime-anywhere voting for general public will make any manipulative politician wet his pants in orgastic delight. Possibilities of direct and indirect mass influencing would be endless.
We very nearly ended up with a medical basket case as President last time. Give idiots a way to vote and it will be a landslide next time. Wonders of modern medicine will probably keep him alive long enough.
zurgutt, estonia
That state is an openly nazi regime that restricts suffrage based on ethnicity.
The voting itself is completely flawed; anonymity with e- and m- voting is neither anonymous, nor verifiably tallied.
Essentially, it's a fascist regime, ripe for being overthrown.
Eventually all personal net/technology devices will be bio/nano connected to individuals, hopefully the individual will be better able to control personal information for protection and vet-verified elections, but (I suspect) the CSA big-bubba plutocrats will do their best to keep control of their serfs globally. The US, EU, Russia, China, Japan ... CSA plutocrats may even start a world war to make sure serf control is maintained.
... (even god) are self-induced hallucinations."
... (even god)
!HAVEFUN! "Reality, Freedom, Democracy
We humans hallucinate a personal pseudo-reality, but Freedom, Democracy
are megalomaniac plutocrats' tools to manipulate the hallucinations of many folks into
suicidal and murderous sociopaths. All glory is fleeting, all reality is myth, except
most sexual fantasy does appear to be possible, indicate a plausible reality, and
frequently opportunistic mistakes or failures. IOW: if you think something is real;
Well then, sexually test the thing or you will never find and satisfaction. Also, if
you are not of the CSA plutocrats, then forget about health, education, and happiness.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Wow, now elections can be rigged faster than ever!
No paper means no audit trail!
This sounds like a despot's dream. The systems receiving the data are "unseen". The path the vote takes to them is uncontrolled. The user of the phone is unverified. On top of all that, you've formally tied your Cell Phone to your National ID making you one of the most easily traced animals on the planet.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Yeah, too bad they use the budget surplus to pay down the national debt.
Um, that's a good thing.
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