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US's First Internet Votes To Be Cast This Friday
longacre writes "If you thought online voting in America was a distant pipe dream (nightmare?), think again: the nation's first Internet-based voting system goes online this Friday, just days after the release of the Damning Report On Sequoia E-Voting Machine Security we discussed yesterday. In the first real world run of the Okaloosa Distance Ballot Piloting (ODBP) test program, election officials from Okaloosa County, Florida have set up kiosks in Germany, the UK and Japan where 600-700 absentee voters — mostly military personnel — are expected to cast ballots. Security experts still have many questions, of course, particularly on the potential for interception of voting data while it travels across oceans (via 'secure VPN'), the security of the kiosks ('hardened laptops' with no hard drives and other sensitive components disabled) and the security of the three data centers (one of which is itself housed overseas, in Barcelona, Spain), not to mention the fact that Florida doesn't exactly have a stellar record when it comes to vote counting. Florida's Dept. of State also has a fairly detailed outline of ODBP's components and processes [PDF]."
It's been two election cycles, everyone still thinks Florida is the only state with voting problems. Get over it.
... they'll claim it's a crack even if they were legit. (Does the system accept write-ins?)
Now if they get 500+ votes for Mitnick...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How can internet voting be both guaranteed "secret" - as in "can't tie the user to the choice of candidate", and at the same time ensure that individuals (never mind bots) aren't casting more than one vote?
How do we know that Internet voting hasn't already occurred, if we can't see Diebold's source code?
electronic voting is not bad because of either real or imagined security issues. That is totally irrelevant.
Electronic voting is bad because the procedure can not be verified by any layman. That should be the first requirement for any voting procedure.
Paper ballot procedures are easy to verify and anybody can do it. Simply keep an eye on the ballot box from the initial sealing of the box until the actual voting.
With electronic voting that is not possible. A paper trail comes close, but voters can screw that up by not putting there tag in the box, or any other random piece of paper in its place.
Bottom line: voting is about TRUST in the procedure first, the actual results second.
Sorry, they've already registered 200 votes for some nigerian guy and another 150 for penis enhancements.
... than the alternative
How long before some one hacks them to write in Rick Astley?
Skilled in differentiating ravens from a writing desks.
If banks can securely (with ~ 99.999% security) transfer thousands of dollars online, then the technology exists to securely permit voting online.
Anything that speeds up voting encourages greater participation. Our present voting system originated in the dark ages. The fastest communication was by horse, it took several days for a horse to get from one side of the USA to the other, or about 2 months by boat to get from UK to Australia.
If the internet had existed in the time of the founding fathers, I feel sure they would have used it to give the people greater oversight of the legislative process.
var myVoteInstance = new votingObject();
var publicMediaInstance = new publicMediaObject();
while (publicMediaInstance.areTheyWhining() == true)
{
myVoteInstance.vote(youknowwho);
}
So I guess now it's a tube dream.
Or possibly a series of tube dreams.
1. Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
2. This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls.
3. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
I am officially gone from
US's First Internet Votes To Be Cast This Friday...
George W. Bush to be declared winner Saturday.
Absentee ballots via the US mail work just fine... This is just smoke an mirrors to make people think there has been progress in fixing the American balloting system..
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
I agree it's possible to separate a user's choice from their identity and still provide an audit trail, but wouldn't any encryption scheme require that the 'user' provide some sort of identity - be it a public key, id #, etc.? Even if that identity was in no way tied to a particular vote, it is still considered a civil rights violation in many states to require id cards/drivers license/etc. In my state, you give your name, which is crossed out in a big book- and efforts to do otherwise have been called "racist" and "voter intimidation". In other words, you get to log in by providing any username and no password. Without reliably establishing identity, you can't verify that a person hasn't voted twice.
we have had paper trail voting every year the last hundred years. i costs very little, all votes are counted by 02.00 AM, with the last voter leaving the voting booths around 18. A second count is then done (by different people) which is done by lunchtime the next day.
all papers are stored forever in a deep mountain storage facility. we have all our votes stored over the last 100 years. if you would like to go count, say 1974's votes, just go ahead.
~80% of our population goes voting. (US today is 40% i believe)
i live in sweden.
Don't forget that after one can vote from home, or better yet, cellphone, votes can be sold MUCH easier. I don't think blackmail is out of question either.
Also, once daddy has made up his mind who the family is voting for, he can observe his family-members vote for the 'right' candidate.
It is still necessary to go to give your vote in a voting booth and for the sake of democracy, I suggest that voting should remain as easy and uncomplicated as it is. This is one of the only things I pride myself on being conservative of.
It isn't really the costs of the voting at issue here. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, overseas ballots somehow got held up in the mail and even though the postmark was before the deadline, the state already tabulated the votes and didn't want to count the late arriving ones. Most of the over seas ballots are military personnel and for whatever reason, if it is no fault of their own, anyone potentially in harms way should have their votes counted.
So no, the cost isn't as important as counting the votes of the military and civilians in the immediate areas of the military personnel. In the 2000 elections, it actually took a lawsuit to get the voted counted. In 2004, they brought up the results of the 2000 lawsuits to for the count. This wasn't isolated to Florida either and the mail wasn't all held up in the same places. It had more to do with the increased volume of mail then any conspiracy but the result was people who probably should have their vote counted the most (it could literally be life and death for them), ended up almost not having it counted at all. This is an attempt to avoid that situation.
They probably has poll workers or a senior officer in charge who gives the person access to it based on their military ID and checks their name off a list so they can only use it once.
Without thinking too deeply about it, it seems like even internet voting could make use of paper ballots. The thing to remember is that the best way we've come up with to design an in-person voting machine is to use the computer to make it easy and clear which candidate the user is voting for. But print a paper ballot with those (and just those) selections so that the user can visually verify that the ballot matches their choices with no ambiguity.
So to do the same with internet voting would require a printer, a camera and at a minimum a clock for each 'internet voting machine.' The user fills out the electronic ballot and then remote end prints the paper ballot in full view of the camera with a clock also in frame with the ballot so that the user can verify the paper ballot reflects their choices. If all is good, the user clicks 'submit' and watches the paper ballot go into the ballot box, if he clicks 'cancel' it goes into the trash and the user goes back to filling out the ballot.
Now the reason for the clock being on camera too is to raise the bar for replay and impersonation attacks. It certainly isn't fool-proof, but no system of anonymous voting has ever been fool-proof. The goal is simply to make voting fraud en-masse prohibitively expensive. We will always have onsie-twosie fraud, but in the big picture that kind of fraud doesn't usually matter.
I would point out that at least one of the systems mentioned on that page has been defeated by Andrew Appel (see here) the author of the top-linked Sequoia study.
And, ultimately, as much fun as these systems are they often ignore the far more real problem of vote observation and intimidation. This isn't an indictment of the algorithms per-se but the reason that we have a closed voting booth is that voting in the open lends itself to voter indimidation (i.e. show me you vote the right way or I'll fire/kill/pay you) which has been a real problem in the U.S. Granted this problem also exists with absentee ballots and "everyone vote absentee" methods like Oregon's Vote By Mail, but in the rush to develop auditable systems this often gets ignored.
Additionally, at least the end-to-end systems that I have viewed suffer from the problem of auditability, no means to confirm the end message with the local understanding, and a problem that the connected server can itself be compromised meaning that wired in votes can be miscounted with no means to audit them.
Anything that speeds up voting encourages greater participation.
How long does it take the average voter to cast his or her vote, in your guesstimate? How long has it taken you? From my vague memory, it takes me transportation [2 x 2km by bike] plus five to ten minutes. If you mean to talk about tallying speeds, you're saying that some people go "I could vote, but because I'm going to have the result in $n days instead of... still getting the result in $n days, I'm not going to".
I don't know much about voter registration in the US [in Denmark, you get a card mailed to you that you hand in at the voting hall in exchange for an empty ballot], but I suspect that this is the real culprit. I remember John Taylor Gatto (.com) say in one of his talks that he sent some of his students (\in K-12) out on the streets handing out voter registration forms. People came running and screaming for them.
I think the danish system works very well. Voter turnout is still too low in my opinion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout says it's 87%), but at least the bar is fairly low; if people abstain due to apathy or a busy schedule, that's not really something you can fix by forcing them to turn up [and cast a blank vote].
But I agree with your view; actually, an overarching one: making voting easier makes more people do it.
If the internet had existed in the time of the founding fathers, I feel sure they would have used it to give the people greater oversight of the legislative process.
s/legislative process/all of government/. All power must be kept in check.