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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]."
How do we know that Internet voting hasn't already occurred, if we can't see Diebold's source code?
Using encryption, exactly what you asked for can be done.
I suggest you start your reading by looking at blind signatures.
Of course, it won't be implemented correctly, but e-voting is mathematically possible.
More specifically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems
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.
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.
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