Avi Rubin Has Some Optimistic Words About E-Voting

An anonymous reader writes "For more than a decade, Aviel "Avi" Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in the US and an e-voting activist, has been a vocal critic of e-voting systems. In this interview Rubin talks about the recent US presidential primary election cycle and his thoughts on e-voting going into the November US elections."

Comments

The problem with the voting system...

[damburger]

...is the voters.

Modern voters have grown up in a society that is expert at manipulating peoples will. Through control of the education system, advertising and mild censorship in the name of 'decency', most of the people voting today have been molded into being good, compliant voters who will never oppose the status quo.

Most people aren't strong enough to question their programming. Most simply slip into one pigeon hole or another and lap up the media viewpoints assigned to that pigeon hole (all framed so as to allow the basic principles of society to remain unquestioned)

Meanwhile, the environment dies, human beings starve and sicken in ever greater numbers, and carefully nurtured greed is all that consumes western man.

The basic premise

[A beautiful mind]

From TFA:

Can technology companies build systems today that are safe, reliable and secure with the votes cast on them?

Definitely. I've seen designs of voting systems that I'd be happy with. I don't think anything is totally secure. Ultimately, I think the goal is to do the best we can and not be perfect. When you're talking about 100 million votes, all cast pretty much on the same day across the country, there's no dress rehearsal.

I don't understand why is that even educated people miss the point. The whole fucking point of an election is that it has to be transparent and auditable. By transparent and auditable we don't mean to an electrical engineer and a computer scientist, but to a sane adult citizen!

How would you go on about auditing a voting machine, even if the design is open? You'd have to either trust a government or civilian organization to do the auditing or do the auditing yourself, requiring months if not years to verify the design and then verify that the machine you got in the voting district behaves like it is designed to behave! This raises the verifiability bar many orders of magnitude above simple pen and paper.

Remember, during an election, citizens and groups of society are in _conflict_. You can't trust* the government, you can't trust individual groups. What makes or breaks democracy is whether you, as a citizen, can verify independently at least the transparency of your local voting station, because if you can, you can be reasonably certain that other people will do the same in their respective areas and that the general elections are not rigged!

* Remember, democracy has to start somewhere. If you trust the government to conduct the voting process, then you're placing the means of controlling the government's composition in the hand of itself. The risk and temptation is just too high to do that. One thing that should not be government responsibility, but more of a civic duty is voting. In the absense of that, the bare minimum is to let the government conduct the elections, but at least verify it! When the government both runs the elections and through government is the only way to verify the transparency of an election, then that's not democratic anymore.