Using the Internet To Subvert Democracy

david_adams writes "All the recent talk about various polls and elections being pranked or hijacked, serious and silly alike, prompted me to write an article about the technical realities behind online polling, and the political fallout of ever becoming subject to online voting for serious elections. Even if we were to be able to limit voting to legitimate, legal voters, the realities of social networking and the rise of Internet-based movements would dramatically alter the political landscape if online voting were to become commonplace."

Comments

Dumb article.

[tpgp]

Stupid article - a transparent attempt to get his friend a new bicycle. I strongly urge everyone to go to the Kona website and vote for the Tanuki (if you don't understand why, RTFA).

Oh, and TFA states: That's why no country practices direct democracy. Wrong

Re:Dumb article.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just vote for "King Kilauea" - it needs more votes. =)

Oh, and http://www.konaworld.com/09_contest3.htm just in case you missed it in the previous post

Re:Dumb article.

[NiteMair]

Doesn't your suggestion to vote the opposite essentially represent the exact same behavior?

People should be encouraged to vote their minds, not vote how you think they should vote.

Re:Dumb article.

[DreamsAreOkToo]

I like how it says that internet based movements would alter the political landscape (translation: people would be heard again) but the article is "Using the Internet to Subvert Democracy."

Since when was Democracy redefined to, "What the rich and powerful want?"

Re:Dumb article.

[blitzkrieg3]

Well, if the Kona ends up winning, you are totally proving his point. His point being, for those of you that didn't RTFA, that an online community (such as an "OMG FRIST POAST!!!1!" on slashdot) can easily throw the results of an online poll.

Right now voting stands on 1587 total votes, 44% for the Tanuki and 45% for the Cadabra.

Re:Dumb article.

[tpgp]

Doesn't your suggestion to vote the opposite essentially represent the exact same behavior?

No - it shows how an attempt to subvert a vote like this can itself be subverted in an unexpected manner.

Re:Dumb article.

[emurphy42]

As of this writing, the counts are at 44% for Tanuki, 11% for King Kilauea, 45% for Cadabra.

Re:Dumb article.

[blitzkrieg3]

(translation: Internet people would be heard for the first time)

And considering the types of subcultures the Internet puts out (ahem: 4chan) I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Re:Dumb article.

[Ethanol-fueled]

Inb4 Colbert or Moot. For the lulz.

When life...is just a game, who's to blame?
-- Green Jelly

Re:Dumb article.

[jabithew]

The United States has limited direct democracy in the form of ballot-paper propositions.

Re:Dumb article.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when was Democracy redefined to, "What the rich and powerful want?"

Well, when were labor unions formed?

Re:Dumb article.

[foobsr]

Democracy redefined

Quote: "The citizens of any given polis were an elite group of people — slaves, peasants, women and resident aliens were not part of the body of citizens."

Any attempt of 'change' would indeed disturb the process of finding the roots again.

CC.

Re:Dumb article.

[RiotingPacifist]

while Colbert fans voted fairly, i find it hard to believe there was no mischief behind moot getting 16m votes, it would take take 4chan 100% of there visitors to vote for the last 3 months (5.6 million visitors a month) to get that sort of turnout.

Re:Dumb article.

[phantomfive]

Maybe he wanted Tanuki to win. :)

Re:Dumb article.

[spammeister]

I already have a stinky? Seriously can they come up with dumber names!?!

Re:Dumb article.

[tpgp]

As of this writing, the counts are at 44% for Tanuki, 11% for King Kilauea, 45% for Cadabra.

Now, Kilauea has been eliminated, & Tanuki is 68% vs Cadabra at 32%.

I feel almost guilty for fucking up that dude's plan.

Re:Dumb article.

[rtb61]

What is really odd about your statement, you use sub as in subculture but I think you don't really know what it means, in light of the way you used it. So the new internet democracy, people as individuals have the opportunity to have a voice, and collections of people ie. all of the various subcultures of the overall culture of that particular societal group will be able to share their thoughts within that subculture as well as within society as a whole.

So 4chan, or the Republicans, or the Klu Klux Klan or Bankers or Corporate Executives or Religious Fundamentalists or any of the other subcultures which express views which substantially diverge from the average, more reasonable and moral view of the general populace, will have a voice, however they will not be able to inflate that voice through violence or by paying for a much louder voice and effectively silencing the majority as they have done for the last couple of hundred years.

So the internet age is, the age of "a government of the people, by the people and for the people" and not as a platitude but as a developing reality.

Re:Dumb article.

[robably]

i find it hard to believe there was no mischief behind moot getting 16m votes, it would take take 4chan 100% of there visitors to vote for the last 3 months

It's even better than that, and more impressive - they made the first letter of each of the top 21 names read "marblecake, also the game" link

Re:Dumb article.

[Anonymous Coward]

i find it hard to believe there was no mischief behind moot getting 16m votes

Mischief? 4chan? Pffft. We never go any further than shenanigans, I'll have you know!

At one point moot may have > 300% of the vote, however. Also, marblecake, also the game.

Re:Dumb article.

[drinkypoo]

Yet another shitty website (micropoll) which requires javascript to initiate page loads. Who the fuck is teaching web developers to do this? They must be stopped.

Re:Dumb article.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tanuki : Cadabra = 65% : 35%

Way to go, /b/! (Of course Tanuki is really Pedobear.)

Re:Dumb article.

[Scrameustache]

when was Democracy redefined to, "What the rich and powerful want?"

Early 60's, I believe.

Re:Dumb article.

[maxume]

Nah, the people who first started using democracy applied to themselves and their rich and powerful friends (things like, white men only, land owners only, etc, were quite a bit more prevalent 300 years ago than they were 40 years ago).

Re:Dumb article.

[krou]

Actually, I would say that that has always been the real definition of democracy. The definition of democracy that most people describe is completely different out of necessity, because it's a piece of propaganda that the masses need to believe. The "bewildered herd" needs to be managed, because they're too dumb to know what's good for them. That's been a central theme of elite political theory for a very long time (see, for example, the writings of Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, Reinhold Niebuhr). Even when the US was founded, James Madison was quite clear about what the purpose of the senate should be:

The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa, or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge of the wants or feelings of the day laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe; when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be jsut, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.

Re:Dumb article.

[Jurily]

No - it shows how an attempt to subvert a vote like this can itself be subverted in an unexpected manner.

Which makes the outcome of the vote fair?

Re:Dumb article.

[tpgp]

Which makes the outcome of the vote fair?

No. What on earth made you think it did?

Re:Dumb article.

[phantomcircuit]

Oh hey look now his friend is losing by over a thousand votes... I WONDER how that happened...

*snickers*

Re:Dumb article.

[Jurily]

So 4chan, or the Republicans, or the Klu Klux Klan or Bankers or Corporate Executives or Religious Fundamentalists or any of the other subcultures which express views which substantially diverge from the average, more reasonable and moral view of the general populace, will have a voice, however they will not be able to inflate that voice through violence or by paying for a much louder voice and effectively silencing the majority as they have done for the last couple of hundred years.

So, you think true democracy is "who's hacking the vote better"? Think it over before we elect Pedobear for president.

Btw. The "more reasonable and moral view of the general populace" is not what you think it is. It's the lowest common denominator, not the majority.

Re:Dumb article.

[kaiidth]

Someone must've stuck this on the chans or something; when I loaded this page earlier it was three hundred votes or so. Now it's showing

"Seriously Stumped Name Our New Bike Contest Phase 2

Please select the name you want to win from the following gems to help us come up with a name for our new bike

Tanuki 100%34041
Cadabra 0%110
Total Votes : 34151"

Re:Dumb article.

[jDeepbeep]

TFA states: That's why no country practices direct democracy. Wrong

And here are the Swiss raising their hands to ban nude hiking by germans.

Re:Dumb article.

[sakti]

> Since when was Democracy redefined to, "What the rich and powerful want?"

Since universal suffrage.

Re:Dumb article.

[Jurily]

Which makes the outcome of the vote fair?

No. What on earth made you think it did?

That was exactly my point.

Re:Dumb article.

[Z34107]

I just screenshotted 100% for Tanuki and 0% for Cadabra.

Now to read the article and find out what I voted for. (I just modeled a meatspace election!)

Re:Dumb article.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tanuki
100% 34085
Cadabra
0% 155
Total Votes : 34240

Re:Dumb article.

[RiotingPacifist]

When you can vote as many times as you want, fiddling a system to say something "funny" isn't impressive, it just shows that:
1) they think they are smart because they know how to delete cookies
2) they have far too much time on their hands

If they had done something skillful (like rigging the result through coordination and numbers alone or done it on a system where you can't see the results) then it may have be impressive, however taking advantage of a permissive poll (locking down a poll to one vote per ip isn't hard but would prevent legitimate votes) is not skillful or impressive, its just quite sad.

Re:Dumb article.

[Anonymous Coward]

So 4chan, or the Republicans, or the Klu Klux Klan or Bankers or Corporate Executives or Religious Fundamentalists or any of the other subcultures which express views which substantially diverge from the average, more reasonable and moral view of the general populace, will have a voice, however they will not be able to inflate that voice through violence or by paying for a much louder voice and effectively silencing the majority as they have done for the last couple of hundred years.

Voting online provides physical insulation but does not prevent attack. With physical voting you have the risk that one group might setup outside a polling place and intimidate some voters from going in to cast their vote. With online voting you risk things like one group launching DDOS attacks against blocks of IP addresses in areas that are likely to vote against them. Physical intimidation requires that the bad guys have enough people in position at voting places to be intimidating. Online prevention can be performed from anywhere with a much smaller team of people. The people causing the disruptions don't even have to be in the same country.

Re:Dumb article.

[pwfffff]

The Time article mentioned that they were actively monitoring the poll and did in fact defeat several attempts to game the system. So while you're obviously predisposed towards being unimpressed by this group, realize that there were professionals going against this team of teenagers 'doing it for the lulz'. Of course, they probably managed it by using a botnet they simply paid for, but that's still significantly more impressive than just deleting cookies.

Re:Dumb article.

[vertinox]

Since when was Democracy redefined to, "What the rich and powerful want?"

It was originally defined as such in Greek and Roman times. In that respect, some classes in Roman society actually got more freedom when Roman Emperors disbanded the republic and prevented the patricians (rich guys) from abusing the plebs (poor guys).

And the US founding fathers new this because they knew a democracy by itself doesn't mean the people elected are going to respect everyone rights (like they had with the English parliament).

The idea was to create a representative democracy with limited powers with checks and balances simply so that the rich and wealth wouldn't take advantage of government to enforce their will on others or a nasty poor majority inflicting its views on the minority.

Given to its own, a pure democracy will strip the rights of the minorities simply because it can.

That said... Money and power tends to help in getting elected so it was generally accepted that those in government tended to be people who could afford to campaign.

Re:Dumb article.

[Anonymous Coward]

So the internet age is, the age of "a government of the people, by the people and for the people" and not as a platitude but as a developing reality.

I, for one, welcome our new internet-enabled people overlords.

Re:Dumb article.

[DragonWriter]

Which makes the outcome of the vote fair?

How does it make it any less "fair" than people freely suggesting how other people should vote through media other than the internet? On Slashdot, we ridicule patents whose only claim of novelty is "on the internet", so I'm kind of baffled by the hysteria about "if we allow voting on the internet, people will tell other people how they should vote using the internet."

Because, you know, its hardly as if when we allow voting off the internet, people never suggest to other people how they should vote.

Re:Dumb article.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how it says that internet based movements would alter the political landscape (translation: people would be heard again) but the article is "Using the Internet to Subvert Democracy."

Since when was Democracy redefined to, "What the rich and powerful want?"

The author of the article apparantly is confusing the idea of a Democracy with the idea of a Republic, or a representational democracy.

Everything he is arguing which he says will "subvert" Democracy are the exact reasons why our country (the US) chose to go the route of a Republic. Or in other words, it doesn't subvert anything, that is how democracy works.

Or to put it another way, the reason why we have a Republic & not a Democracy, is that you should never underestimate the absolute stupidity of people in large numbers.

Re:Dumb article.

[He who knows]

So 4chan ... will have a voice, however they will not be able to inflate that voice through violence or by paying for a much louder voice and effectively silencing the majority as they have done for the last couple of hundred years.

I did not know 4chan has been around for the last couple of hundred years.

Re:Dumb article.

[Anonymous Coward]

I concur, plus Tanuki is much cooler name anyway. Like the Tanuki Mario Suit

Re:Dumb article.

[RiotingPacifist]

I'd be interested to see what they had to defeat. Either:
they used a botnet capable of defeating TIME's capatchas. Arguably this is only impressive if they also wrote the botnet, getting a taxi ride isn't even in the same league as building a car.
or,
and IMO this is much more likely, the time poll was poorly secured, single machines could vote repeatedly and 4chan users were sad enough to do so. It is possible that somebody wrote a script that allowed 4chan users to automate this so that the users only had to enter the capatchas and the rest was done for them, but that isn't a great feat either.

While i am predisposed to assume that 4chan has done nothing impressive (due to their prior history of doing nothing impressive and just trolling), it would be interesting to know which one they actually did (although my money is defiantly on the latter).

Re:Dumb article.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how it says that internet based movements would alter the political landscape (translation: people would be heard again) but the article is "Using the Internet to Subvert Democracy."

Since when was Democracy redefined to, "What the rich and powerful want?"

Exactly my thoughts. This article is disgusting and offensive.

Like a change of pace from the regular mindless bipartisan voting would really be a bad thing.

Re:Dumb article.

[tpgp]

That was exactly my point.

To be pedantic - you didn't make a point, you asked a question.

Missing option?

[Tokerat]

CowboyNeal

Re:Missing option?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ron Paul!

(This is referring to how Ron Paul supporters would in the year leading up to the election, for lack of a better term, "flash mob" any online poll that had Ron Paul as a choice and spam votes for Ron Paul. It didn't really matter what the poll was, it could have been "Who would you like to see devoured by a pack of dingos?", as long as Ron Paul was an option they'd be there spamming for him.)

Hard to Follow

[explosivejared]

In one paragraph the article calls the Internet "meritocratic," but still wants to argue that it "subverts" democracy. Maybe, there is no "tyranny of the minority." Just maybe, people look at a lot of institutions as absurd and really would like to see Stephen Colbert in charge of them, and it's just taken the Internet increasing the flow of information for us to realize this.

Re:Hard to Follow

[blitzkrieg3]

Meritocracy is not Democracy.

Do you really think that if the during the 2008 presidential election, Stephen Colbert was on the ballot, he would get something other than a minority of the vote?

Or that 66% of a randomly selected cross section of msnbc viewers would pick Ron Paul as the "most convincing candidate"?

it's just taken the Internet increasing the flow of information for us to realize this.

That is exactly the problem. Online polls are only really representative of people who get news and information from the Internet, which is a minority of people.

Re:Hard to Follow

[alexhard]

Well, a meritocracy is pretty much the exact opposite of a democracy, so I don't see a problem with that.

Re:Hard to Follow

[dzfoo]

Amen!

        People who use the Internet (and in particular, those in the media who think themselves part of the "in crowd") seem to think that they are the majority, and therefore, that trends appearing on the Internet reflect the population of the country--and sometimes of the world--at large. This has become ridiculuous to the point of comparing the rankings of, say, Google search results with the public opinion of a nation, or at times even fact.

        People should understand that, although there are millions of web pages on the Internet and that Google has indexed most, if not all of them; the entire collection of human knowledge is vastly larger than that. In other words, most of this knowledge is not available on the Internet, so you will not be as informed as you think if you depend solely on the Wold Wide Web.

        Likewise, there is a large majority of people in this country and in the world who do not use the Internet, or at least who do not depend on it as its sole source of information.

        This is precisely the reason why, after an insanely popular "protest" seems successful when offering massive outcry on an online forum such as Tweeter or Amazon.com's comments, it always ends up as an insignificant proverbial "drop in the bucket" when it is time to perform real world action. Suddenly they realize that only a very small group is participating on their march/boycott/picket-line.

        The Internet, and the World Wide Web in particular, is the world's largest and most efficient echo chamber.

          -dZ.

Re:Hard to Follow

[vertinox]

In one paragraph the article calls the Internet "meritocratic," but still wants to argue that it "subverts" democracy.

I think its main point (or at least the one I got) is that people who lead internet communities tend to be able to drown out opposition simply by their viewership base and also represses dissent on their own websites.

In a sense, a large internet community can have many voices but the administers of the community (if not inclined to do so) can repress the voices they choose and even though those voices can go to other communities, those who remained are de facto living in a repressed medium.

Like the mod points I could have used... I could in theory with like minded individual repress and censor those voices who would otherwise be heard if there were no moderation.

Since the 1st amendment only applies the government, then administrators and moderators, and large groups who can spam message boards into oblivion can basically do the same thing.

Elections and online voting.

[captnbmoore]

Computers have no practical place in elections unless there is a paper trail to verify the count. They just cause more confusion than hanging chads.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[symbolset]

Until computers are granted suffrage they ought not be trusted to count votes.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

True story: When I was an undergrad I saw a table setup at the quad with a large sign that said "End Woman's Suffrage" I went up to talk to the guys and they literally had an entire clipboard of signatures, primarily from women thinking that "suffrage" was some bad thing akin to suffering. They were sponsored by the psychology department, I don't know what they were trying to prove, but I learned that day how stupid most people are.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[subreality]

Computers have no practical place in elections unless there is a paper trail to verify the count.

To the point: Computers' place in elections should be solely to produce a clean, unambiguously marked, human readable, machine countable paper ballot, and the subsequent counting thereof.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Stormwatch]

I don't know what they were trying to prove, but I learned that day how stupid most people are.

THAT is what they were trying to prove.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Opportunist]

They were trying to prove that people want to be heard, that people want to make a lasting impact in the world. And that people more often than not don't even know what they're for, against or at all.

Go out in the streets with a friend who lugs some large camera around and pose as some sort of "opinion asker" for a local TV station. Ask random strangers whether they have heterosexual friends, or whether they are heterosexual. And be surprised of the answers.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers have no practical place in elections unless there is a paper trail to verify the count. They just cause more confusion than hanging chads.

Now you are talking about electronic voting. Home computers shall never have a place in elections.

They always let your family members (such as abusive father, husband, etc.) and possibly others (blackmailers, party representatives gestapo agents, etc.) to watch who you vote for or even vote on your behalf. Proper voting places with booths and people who make certain that only one person goes there at a time is the only way to secure voting, whether it is by paper or by machines.

Of course these said groups could even then prevent you from getting to vote if you can't fool them about who you would vote but even then it is only half as bad as someone forcing you to vote a party you don't support.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Repossessed]

Why exactly would people be expected to know what women's suffrage means in this day and age? At least in this country, the term hasn't been used in normal conversation for some time, it was part of a political battle that is 80 years gone, and left our vocabulary.

Expecting people to know the meaning of an archaic word with a phonetic relationship to something completely different seems silly.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[tomtomtom]

It is possible to design a (cryptographic) voting protocol with the property that, even if you were to show someone a copy of your actual electronic "ballot paper" (which is encrypted in a certain way so as to maintain a secret ballot), it is impossible to prove whether you voted one way or another.

By then designing the system to allow multiple votes from any one voter and only counting the last valid vote, this makes the only possible method of coercion physically imprisoning the voter during the entire time the polls are open. Since paper ballots are already susceptible to the same attack (albeit this only prevents people from voting at all, rather than forcing them to vote one particular way), this is probably acceptable to most people.

These schemes are designed to preserve the secrecy of individual ballots using a form of distributed decryption between multiple authorities (e.g. you could assign each political party to be an authority), so that at least a majority of the authorities would need to collaborate in order to decrypt any one vote. Systems can also be made robust to "rogue" authorities who don't follow the protocol correctly.

The votes can all be summed while encrypted and then the parties collaborate to decrypt the actual result.

Unfortunately there seem to be no real-world implementations of any of the numerous proposed protocols for proper cryptographic electronic voting, and very few people seem to be interested in implementing one. It's the sort of thing that governments, if they want to go down the route of online (or even electronic) elections, really ought to be sponsoring the implementation of.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Anonymous Coward]

So people don't know what Suffrage is, can't understand what "End womens suffrage!" means, yet signed the "petition" anyway. That's sort of the point...

Re:Elections and online voting.

[foobsr]

the term hasn't been used in normal conversation for some time, it was part of a political battle that is 80 years gone
the meaning of an archaic word

It is about time to write a SF-story about the consequences of a situation when the average memory span is determined by short term memory.

CC.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[rts008]

They were trying to prove that people want to be heard, that people want to make a lasting impact in the world. And that people more often than not don't even know what they're for, against or at all.

That's a contradictory set of goals, purposes, and expectations...and nothing new, in fact, desire, or concept....nothing new at all.

Go out in the streets with a friend who lugs some large camera around and pose as some sort of "opinion asker" for a local TV station. Ask random strangers whether they have heterosexual friends, or whether they are heterosexual. And be surprised of the answers.

Don't try this in Boston if your camera has LED's. It could get ugly for you as a "terrorist".(sarcastic joke implied here)

Also, don't be surprised by how many times you get punched in the face and kicked in the 'nads in places like Oklahoma;-)...if you are lucky. (no sarcasm/troll/flamebait intended...too many times I have witnessed some 'crazy shit' here)

On the other hand, you could be given 'free reign' to go/do what you want....YMMV....preliminary research is highly advised.

Choose your venue very carefully. Good luck with this, irregardless...just be careful.(I would advise against this project in central Oklahoma unless you are pandering to the 'religious+++right'!!!!)
I was dumbfounded by the number of 'fellow cow-orkers' that were actually in fscking tears over Obama's winning the election, and the 'fact' that we would all be sold into Islamic slavery when he took office!!! Yes, the majority believed this!?!?!?!

Let them fire me if they can! This was at Oklahoma's "Oklahoma State University", in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
*note: the Administration, Faculty, and Students were/are not the problem, it is/was the 'Staff' personnel, that make up a large, and influential part of the total FUD here.*

Note: You college kids need to get involved, or at least pay attention to both your Student Government organisation, and your Campus/College Newspaper and Radio Station(if applicable).
You are the future, and the 'hope' of the next generation-fail this, and you will be reacting to shit, and delusionally blaming your woes on a third party. (think 'Editorials here...don't be bashful, at worst, your editorial will be turned down, you will not be taken out to be shot...yet.
Take charge, be aggressive, and don't take no for an answer without good cause.
After all, you are the ones that have to face yourselves in the mirror from now on, and justify your views/choices/decisions. It's all golden, if you have done your homework, and are not stupid, and have a 'pair'.

If you have 'done your homework/research', then it's all golden! If not, you are just another idiot...go back home to continue your stupidity, and pass it on.[see:DarwinAwards.com]...we will just add y'all to the statistics in some arbitrary, insignificant heading.
Avoid this!

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is possible to design a (cryptographic) voting protocol with the property that, even if you were to show someone a copy of your actual electronic "ballot paper" (which is encrypted in a certain way so as to maintain a secret ballot), it is impossible to prove whether you voted one way or another.

By then designing the system to allow multiple votes from any one voter and only counting the last valid vote, this makes the only possible method of coercion physically imprisoning the voter during the entire time the polls are open. Since paper ballots are already susceptible to the same attack (albeit this only prevents people from voting at all, rather than forcing them to vote one particular way), this is probably acceptable to most people.

Not really. An family member could tell "Vote like that" and after the vote is done take away your codes/chip card/whatever is needed for you to vote. Or alternatively a family member could take those things and vote with them just before the polls close and that would would be only one counted by you.

And well, paper ballots aren't suspectible to the same attack. As you stated it yourself, it only prevents you from voting at all but you can't be forced to vote against your will. This is a lot smaller evil. Even then you could (knowing the situation with such family members, etc.) claim to be voting for the one they will vote but really vote for the party you prefer and they would never know. This is not possible to ensure if people vote from homes.

With the increase of immigration from cultures in which men of the family do all the decisions this is a growing problem. It doesn't necessarily need to mean that the man would physically threaten the woman the whole time but it could be that man says who they should vote and the woman is expected to obey or she'll be in big trouble.

These schemes are designed to preserve the secrecy of individual ballots using a form of distributed decryption between multiple authorities (e.g. you could assign each political party to be an authority), so that at least a majority of the authorities would need to collaborate in order to decrypt any one vote. Systems can also be made robust to "rogue" authorities who don't follow the protocol correctly.

Majority of all the parties? Here in Finland there are a lot of small but official parties (most of which have little to none seats in the parliament). I don't like the idea that a dozen smaller parties which total 10% of the vote could together choose to decrypt votes. Or majority based on seats in the parliament? IE. if let's say Nazi party gets 55% of the seats, they can decrypt the votes and find out who didn't vote for them?

Re:Elections and online voting.

[camken]

Until computers are granted suffrage they ought not be trusted to count votes.

no offense to symbolset, but seriously.. this really isn't (or at least shouldn't be) a funny statement.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Nursie]

Um, what?

Suffrage is not an archaic word and everyone, I mean everyone, should have learned about the suffragettes and the struggle to get women the vote. It just proves people are idiots, sorry.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Nursie]

So you want a ballot paper that nobody can read apart from the authorities doing the counting?

Interesting, but pointless. If you can't read it to verify your vote then there's no point having it, you may as well leave it at the place of voting. If you can read it then you can be coerced.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Adam Corolla, a talk show, did the same thing.
  All the women signed up to end woman's suffrage. that is why america has the govt it has-- people who vote are idiots; thus the govt are full of them as well.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[symbolset]

Nor was it intended to be. Ah, the whims of moderators.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Anonymous Coward]

banks do a great job online.

Seriously, any bank could run an entire election online, fair, papertrail, repeatable, with phone numbers and emails and ssn's for accountability.

Don't you agree with at least the sucess of the banks at making online banking safe and trusted?

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Attila Dimedici]

Just as importantly, making voting easier does not improve the quality of the results of the election. The easier it is to vote the more people who are uninformed will vote. The harder it is to vote, the more likely that the voters will understand the issues being voted on.
I believe that voting should require some effort on the part of the voter (I oppose "motor-voter" registration). However, this effort should be the same regardless of income, race, social class, etc.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[tomtomtom]

No, the point is that the authorities can't (in practice) read the individual votes, only the sum of all the votes. This works because:

1. using certain encryption schemes, it is possible to calculate an encryption of the sum of the encrypted votes without knowing the decryption key;
2. it is further possible to set up an encryption system where no one party knows the decryption key but a number of parties (the authorities in this case) can cooperate to decrypt a message; and
3. the authorities can (collectively) be trusted enough to cooperate to decrypt the total, but not to cooperate to decrypt any individual vote; and

See, for example, this paper.

Other solutions to the problem involve authorities cooperating to ensure that votes are anonymous but they don't seem as elegant to my mind.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Nursie]

I still don't see what the point is of having a ballot paper in those circumstances. I don't see why encryption is even necessary in a voting machine situation. I have yet to hear a single good reason for anything more complex than -

Push button next to name
Screen asks you if "Mr. XXXX YYYY" was really your choice.
If no, go back, if yes, print receipt.
Screen asks you if receipt matches choice
If no, go back, if yes machine drops receipt in bucket and adds one to tally.

Now, online voting is a different matter but that's so fraught with danger of attack that the whole idea is stupid, IMHO.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Pervaricator General]

What's ridiculous? That women's suffrage took so long to enact, or that people aren't taught about that struggle?

Re:Elections and online voting.

[pwfffff]

Sorry but I stopped reading after the tenth parenthetical.
Note: There's not a sentence limit here ... (you can use as many as you want) *NOTE* Meth is bad for you OK?!!!?!?!!11eleven

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Kagura]

If the petition were titled "End Women's Right to Vote", it would have gotten a lot fewer signatures. The meaning of "suffrage" is the issue.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Reeses]

Isaac Asimov wrote one a number of years ago. It's called Nightfall. Enjoy.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

National bank website security is awful. Google is your friend.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[McNihil]

I believe your sigma-field is not complete...

How many of the undersigned truly did want to end women right to vote?

How many of the participants read "End female suffering" ? (Many people do not read the entire word if they think what it is... and they see what they want to see and do things without double checking.)

this just to name a few glaringly obvious cases.

So the test albeit interesting does nothing... things like this should definitely be left to proper statisticians and not to psychology... wrong conclusions will almost always be made otherwise.

What about this one... "End computer hacking now!" it should be more clear why it is a very flawed proposition :-D

But IANA* ~CS

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Repossessed]

Most people were, at least around here, but the textbooks don't use the word suffrage, they just talk about women's right to vote.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[DragonWriter]

Why exactly would people be expected to know what women's suffrage means in this day and age? At least in this country, the term hasn't been used in normal conversation for some time, it was part of a political battle that is 80 years gone, and left our vocabulary.

Its not jargon, both words in the phrase "women's suffrage" are used in their normal sense, so the fact that "women's suffrage" isn't an active issue shouldn't make the meaning of the phrase obscure. However, the fact that the average person's vocabulary now is much smaller than it was in even the 1950s might have something to do with why many people don't understand what "women's suffrage" means.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Blakey Rat]

Whatever the justification for not knowing the meaning of the word "sufferage", the *point* is that people are signing a petition for something they know nothing about. Same thing as the pranks you see every so often when people ask to sign a petition banning the chemical di-hydrogen monoxide.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[PitaBred]

This is the post-Bush era... maybe we should petition to get "suffrage" removed from the language because it's confusing. Change it to "voterizing" or something like that.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[tomtomtom]

The point of those sorts of methods is to use them in online voting type schemes - there are mechanisms you can use to drastically reduce the avenues for attack and I find it disappointing that whenever some government proposes using online voting for "proper" elections in some way or other, they seem to think that the way forward is to use a web form with usernames and passwords.

For "traditional" elections, you don't need a machine at all - pencil and paper works perfectly well and isn't prone to all the issues around voting machines. You could use machine counting if you wanted (and make people to fill in a full square like on optically marked exam papers) but even that's unneccessary - paying enough people to physically count the votes every 4 or 5 years isn't very expensive.

Frankly, the biggest risk in most "real-world" voting systems is at the point of voter registration - registering dead, non-existent or non-eligible people to vote is the most obvious and cheapest angle of attack whatever the counting mechanism. And those are a much harder set of problems to solve because both false negatives and false positives are extremely damaging to the system.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Perf]

Schoolhouse Rocks!

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut. In which everyone is artificially handicapped to the lowest common denominator. One character has a handicapping device that hits him with a massive burst of sound every few minutes to scramble his thoughts. It leaves him forgetting entirely about events of great personal importance to him that he's watched live on television a few minutes earlier. His wife is lucky enough to have a naturally substandard brain and to simply forget about the events all by herself (or repress them, at least).

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck with this, irregardless..

Irregardless is not a word. Use irrespective or regardless, but please stop lumping the two together.

As for what they were trying to 'prove', the poster says quite frankly that it was an experiment by the psychology department. (Someone apparently needs to tell them that this is a Sociology experiment, not a psychological one.)

But really it's just a mimic of a joke that Penn&Teller did some time back. They went to some sort of pro-female rights convention and did this.

Their point was to prove that people, especially the reactionary political groups that get worked into a rabid froth over whatever, are generally ill-informed. And that most of the signatures on the petitions which are presented to lawmakers were gathered from uninformed or outright stupid people, usually through the use of fancy language and fear tactics.

Or to sum it up in one sentence: People are generally stupid, and the ones who are the most vocal are often the ones who are least qualified to speak.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[ConceptJunkie]

What's ridiculous is that compared to a hundred years ago, the use of language is deteriorating rapidly. At the rate we are going in another century we'll be using Orwell's Newspeak (as the political correctness types would like) or just grunting at each other (if the education types are allowed to keep running the schools). Either way, as the populace gets more and more ignorant our leaders will continue to become worse and worse.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[foobsr]

Nightfall

THNX, though I read this one (albeit not in English) which has a broader scope regarding short term memory.

It seems that Vonnegut (other reply) fits better to what I imagined, probably I shall give it a try.

CC.

Re:Elections and online voting.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're confusing reality with an old episode of The Man Show, or someone was just re-enacting the joke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Show

Robustness

[noz]

Changing democratic preferences is not a subversion of democracy. Many would argue it would make for a more robust democracy.

Re:Robustness

[vandan]

Agreed. The original story makes it sound like a deviation from the current would be bad. I think pretty much anything would be better. In particular, more actual substance ... more discussion ... more grouping of people of similar interests. This isn't "subversion". It's just discussion. God forbid people actually have a fucking clue what they're voting on before the fact ...

Re:Robustness

[Prune]

Fred Doucet, a long-time friend and aide to former prime minister Brian Mulroney, likely doesn't recall three mysterious letters he wrote about Airbus plane deliveries to Air Canada because they were "mundane notes," Mr

Re:Robustness

[taucross]

It's not subversion, but one could still consider it forked.

Re:Robustness

[subreality]

Agreed, but the tone of the article is that the change is "we're letting all the riff-raff in". Mostly that's hot air, because it's conflating elections where actual humans are allowed to vote only once with unauthenticated web polls.

I think there are two important metrics at play here: #1, what percentage of eligible voters will vote; #2, how well informed they are on the issues, on average.

#1 clearly goes up with internet voting, or any other method that makes it easy for the sick, elderly, remote, lazy, wage-slaves, intimidated, or whatever to vote.

At first blush, you'd expect #2 to be much lower in this crowd. Whether that's a good criteria for excluding their votes is certainly debatable, but misses what's likely a bigger issue: Will the people who would have voted anyway, vote SMARTER if they can consult Wikipedia, Rock the Vote, Vote Smart, their buddies on IM, or whatever source they trust to help form an opinion, and they're not in a rush to get out of the hot polling place and let the next guy in?

My money's on #2 going up.

Unfortunately, it's at the expense of subverting paper trails, guaranteed booth privacy, identity authentication, and a whole host of other problems that, in my opinion, probably aren't worth it.

Re:Robustness

[Animaether]

I'm all for what you suggest - that people have a clue what they're voting on before the fact. In NL there's various 'vote guides' that ask you a bunch of questions and at the end you see what political party your view is most aligned with, then 2nd choice, etc. with links to their full agendas, ideals, etc. so you can do some more checking of your own. That's great!

Go outside of that, though, and you have mob rule, groupthink, etc. What was that twitter thing again, #amazonfail?

People -enjoy- assuming the worst about anything, well outside of reason, they thrive on conspiracy theories, etc.

Most of those people will readily cast aside such 'vote guides' in favor of some anonymous troll on a popular social networking site claiming some candidate eats babies for breakfast.

These are the people we want as a major factor in driving political process? I find that every bit as scary as Oprah all but asking people to vote for the presidential candidate she likes best and the Oprahlites doing so like the sheep they are.

We don't exactly have much choice in who get to vote or where they get their information, and that's a good thing - but I do wish that 'we' could better educate those who do vote and teach them that random unfounded information from their peers is every bit as worthless as political parties' own propaganda.

Re:Robustness

[vertinox]

This isn't "subversion". It's just discussion. God forbid people actually have a fucking clue what they're voting on before the fact ...

I think the problem is that the administrators and moderator of the sites can subvert the process. Yes, you can go somewhere else if they ban you, but if the community is large enough, a small set of persons can control the projected opinion of many.

I mean, how would you know if kdawson is giving out mod points to creationists? I highly doubt it, but you would never know with private sites.

A true democratic internet would have it so the 1st amendment applies to everyone and not just the government. But I don't know how practical it is to outlaw administration and moderation.

Maybe the rule is that if you talk about politics then you can't moderate dissenting opinions, but then you would get DOS'd by opposing view points sites who you can ban.

There is no good answer, but the author is right that since internet communities are privately owned that they generally lean towards the political viewpoint of their administrators and community leaders or their followers.

Polls != Democracy

[QuantumG]

Democracy is the force of the majority over the minority. It doesn't matter if you have elections or not.. that's just a formality.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."

~ Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States

Re:Polls != Democracy

[damona]

Democracy is the force of the majority over the minority. It doesn't matter if you have elections or not.. that's just a formality.

That's just a facet of first-past-the-post democracies.

There are actually democracies where it's virtually impossible to get a majority.

Americans...

Re:Polls != Democracy

[Maelwryth]

MMP and is currently in use by Bolivia, Germany, Italy, Lesotho, New Zealand, Romania, South Africa, United Kingdom, and Venezuela in one form or another.

Can't really talk about the other countries, but in New Zealand the biggest downfall seems to happen when the major parties are closely matched and have to form coalitions with the minors for trade offs. This appears to be both a benefit and a disadvantage, depending on who you agree on at the time. :)

Re:Polls != Democracy

[martin-boundary]

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."

He's right, democracy stinks. That's why many people past and present prefer the alternative of ruling the mob, where one percent of the people take away the rights of the other ninety-nine.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[adavies42]

from heinlein:

Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again too. Who decides?

Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[twostix]

Unfortunately all advanced forms of government seem to devolve into to populist democracies, probably then onto dictatorship but we're not quite far enough along the timeline to see yet.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[VShael]

A quote that's often led to the comparison that democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for lunch.

The more accurate comparison would be two poor men and a rich man, deciding who foots the bill.

The 51% of Jefferson's quote, or the majority in its trite examples, are not the wolves. They are the sheep. In a country like America, it is the poor, (the not-wealthy) who will always be in the majority. That's the nature of capitalism.

So it's not about 51% taking away the rights of 49%. It's about the 75% say, making sure that the 25% don't get mega rich at the expense of others. Or even that the 5% of the people can't own 50% of the wealth. That sort of thing.

There's a reason that James Madison objected to democracy on the grounds that it would "undermine the responsibility of government to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."

Democracy is your friend, America. You just don't know it.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

There are actually democracies where it's virtually impossible to get a majority.

Americans...

How would one get anything done in such a system? I suppose one could form "coalitions" with other parties but that could make for some downright strange bedfellows.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[DNS-and-BIND]

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
-- Benjamin Franklin

Re:Polls != Democracy

[supercrisp]

As a native of the rural South, I'd also like to point out that this majority votes time and again for Republicans who decrease taxes on the wealthy along with services to the poor, like education funding. It's called the "Southern Strategy," brought to you by Lee Atwater. It works because that majority of "just folks" tends also to be bigoted and susceptible to race-baiting and gay-baiting, probably because of the crummy education they got, along with the crummy, reactionary religion they're taught. If you don't buy my argument, go read up on how the Fugitive Slave Law and various other slavery-related travesties got passed.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[Petrushka]

There are actually democracies where it's virtually impossible to get a majority.

How would one get anything done in such a system?

That's the point.

Weak government is good government.

(And, yes, I realise the irony of my sig in this context.)

Re:Polls != Democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

You've just answered your own question and plenty of democracies do exactly that.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

~Sir Winston Churchill

Re:Polls != Democracy

[IndustrialComplex]

So it's not about 51% taking away the rights of 49%. It's about the 75% say, making sure that the 25% don't get mega rich at the expense of others. Or even that the 5% of the people can't own 50% of the wealth. That sort of thing.

That sort of thing. Like the 75% deciding that they don't like what the 25% is doing?

The problem with your arguement, is that the 75% vs the 25% isn't limited to wealth. It can be all things, race, religion, political views. Anything.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just this kind of "us vs. them" thinking that enables the two-party duopoly (Democrats and Republicans in the US) to stay in power by their "good cop/bad cop" routines. Each claims to champion one group (rich on the right, poor on the left) to protect it from the assumed "threat" posed by the other group. Let's play that over again too.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

25% getting mega rich with the help of government is NOT the nature of Capitalism. It is the nature of Mercantilism.

Democracy IS 51% taking away the rights of 49%. Republican Democracy protects the minority, if there are term limits and proper checks on power.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[DragonWriter]

There are actually democracies where it's virtually impossible to get a majority.

More precisely, there are democracies where it is virtually impossible for one party to get a majority, which means that majority coalitions are formed on a more transitory, ad hoc basis.

This creates the illusion to Americans of "less-stable" governments, as the ending of a coalition is characterized as a government "falling", but it actually tends to create more stable governments in that there is, on average, less change between successive governments/administrations than in the US system.

Its also notable that popular satisfaction with the government tends to be notably higher in such governments that achieve majorities through ad hoc coalitions than in the US and similar governments which tend toward two-party duopoly with alternating partisan majorities.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[AnotherScratchMonkey]

That's only a problem if you want to get things done that significant minorities object to. Democratic government should limit its action to those things where strong consensus is present. If there's no consensus, then stay the hell out of it.

Re:Polls != Democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Boring!!! If you're going to quote Heinlein (actually the character Lazarus Long) give an attribution.

Wha...?

[Michael Nathan]

An online poll Stephen Colbert didn't win?! I demand a recount!

Ladies and gentlemen, the future:

[Michael Nathan]

4chan + democracy = tyranny of dumbasses

Re:Ladies and gentlemen, the future:

[Opportunist]

They already made a movie of it.

Luddite alert

[Sepiraph]

Stop pretending that online voting will not become the norm in the very near future. The fact that some previous implemented systems are inaccurate and insecure doesn't mean that ALL future systems are. I have yet to see a satisfactory e-voting system where they incorporating existing security technologies like encryption for eavesdropping, digital certificate/signature for identification, OTP like RSA for authentication. Combined all these security measure would be a good starting point, in the future potential technologies like quantum cryptography may even offer much higher security.

And if you somehow think paper trail is somewhat more secure, you are just delusional. Unfortunately, the current implementation of the internet is just not very secure. So ultimately, it is all about how secure the process and implementation are, and not whether the medium is on a piece of paper or through the internet.

Re:Luddite alert

[maharb]

Even if you could transport that vote 100% of the time securely and accurately you still have a huge problem. The problem with any system where you can vote in plain sight of other people will lead to all sorts of complications. Mainly the creation of a new market, the votes market. People will probably buy votes. Even if its not enough to change an election it is still going to be considered far more important to ensure this isn't happening than to let people vote from home.

So maybe we can transport a vote safely, but without some way to make sure that a vote is a 'real' vote and not a product of bribery or criminal behavior is still in question.

Re:Luddite alert

[Kral_Blbec]

We are still working on ways to get grandmas email connection secure. I think trusting a national election to the internet is still quite a ways away.

Re:Luddite alert

[laughingcoyote]

So ultimately, it is all about how secure the process and implementation are, and not whether the medium is on a piece of paper or through the internet.

I program computers for a living. They are an excellent tool for a lot of things. Totally electronic voting (whether at a polling place or over the Internet) is not a good use for that tool.

Here is a user interface. Push some buttons on it. It is going to send some data somewhere. Did it send the data you thought it would? Did it send it at all? If so, was it properly received at the other end? How would you know? Even if the UI tells you so, it could be saying so incorrectly, by either accident or malice.

Here is a piece of paper with readable language on it. Are the dots in the columns where you wanted your votes to be cast? You can answer that.

Here is a data file with a million entries in it. 35% of those entries are for value A. Change that to 60% with little to no evidence anything was changed. A well-designed script can do that in a blink.

Here are one million pieces of paper, 35% of which are (marked in ink or with punches) for value A. Change that to 60% with little to no evidence any changes were made. Now you've got a laborious and intensive process ahead of you, that aside from the fact that the papers are watched and you are very likely to leave evidence of tampering.

Recognizing a technology's legitimate limitations does not a Luddite make. The Internet is great for informal polls. It is not a good tool for serious ones such as an election where the results must be accurate and verifiable.

Re:Luddite alert

[Opportunist]

Computer based voting can never be secured to the same point as paper based voting. For a very simple reason: Trust. You would have to trust someone.

Paper has one key feature that a computer can never reach: Anyone literate can use it and verify it. You can read, or at least tell left from right and someone tells you left is Party A and right is Party B, you can recount. Also, should someone try to mess with the ballot, anyone with normal working senses can be a bystander to ensure this won't happen. You can see that someone opens the ballot, a simple (but very, very special) paper slip glued to the lock (aka a seal) can already show whether someone tampered with it.

With computers, you first of all have to trust the maker of the election hardware and software, or at least you have to trust all the auditors, first that they did their job right and second that they're not "in" with the makers. You, Joe Average, cannot test the reliability of the setup. You're no computer expert. And if you are, and even if you're giving the chance to audit the software, you know that you simply cannot ensure to 100% that every single vote will be counted the way it is supposed to be. With paper, no problem. Take the votes and start counting. Anyone can do it.

Tamper proof... is it? I can't tell if the ballot has been opened, I cannot tell whether someone will see who voted which way. Can you? Can Joe?

No matter how you twist and turn it, computer elections cannot be made reliable to the same extent we have today with paper ballots.

Re:Luddite alert

[twostix]

You think that any government sponsored vote tallying system will ever use such complex and costly things as quantum encryption?

RSA has been around for how long again? Do any of them use it...No.

*Hint* No government in the world is going to develop or pay hundred of millions of dollars for an ultra secure hollywood movie style electronic systems that will be used for one day every four years. Especially when there's a perfectly good, proven and cheap way of doing it that's worked over and over for the last few hundred years.

They'll do exactly what they have been doing, half assing it to satisfy people like you, the technology for technologys sake crowd. And then when it all fails scrap it and go back to the cheap, easy and proven method.

It is you who is delusional; delusional of where government departments priorities lay. Certainly not in maintaining the type of multi-million dollar secure networks that you want which will be used once every four years and spend the other 3 years and 11 months costing money and manpower.

Your bizarre expression of paper not being more secure is rather bizarre too, given it's 300+ year proven track record, I and ten thousand others can stand and watch paper votes being counted. Hell I can volunteer to count them myself. How is that possible with a computer? And What if there's a sun spot, or defective memory stick or a million other problems and a single bit that flips and causes 500 to become 5000? That's enough to win an election. Will these electronic systems need to be that hardened as well? How much will that cost? Would they have to redo the election?

Probably easier and safer to stick with the tried and true method I'd say.

Re:Luddite alert

[Yvanhoe]

I am a singularist, I am a far cry from being a luddite. I think electronic voting is the worse idea that democratic leaders accepted recently. Why ? Currently, it is a mathematical problem that *may* be solved one day but that currently isn't, to design a cryptographic system that allows :
* Anonymousness of votes
* Verifiability of votes
* Verifiability of results/counting
* Not to rely on a trusted third party

Currently, paper ballots allow all of these and no cryptographic system works with all these features. All of these features are absolutely necessary. There are historical and even recent cases where only one was missing and the democracy failed.

Re:Luddite alert

[dbcad7]

There isn't anything really stopping what your suggesting with the current system, other than verifying that the bought vote was cast the way the buyer wanted.

The whole vote buying scenario is filled with problems.. both for seller and buyer.. so many problems that idea doesn't seem practical. First the buyer trying to find sellers (and vice versa) without getting caught.. Then you have the whole problem of establishing a price that the seller is willing to accept based upon the risk.. And then there is the matter of payment.. I think the whole thing would be so risky and expensive as to have such limited participation to be meaningless.

Re:Luddite alert

[Richard_at_work]

The financial institutions seemed to have cracked it with regard to verifiable, traceable, tamper-proof data exchange - why aren't VISA or MasterCard getting in on the act?

Re:Luddite alert

[dbcad7]

One more thing to illustrate my point... If someone tries to sell me illegal drugs I can say no, and let them go on their merry way.. same thing if they are trying to sell me what I suspect is stolen property (within reason), or a variety of many other petty crimes that some lowlifes might try and get me involved in, I'd pretty much walk away.. However I can assure you that if someone tried to buy my vote, I'd turn their ass in in a heartbeat.. and I be disgusted with anyone who told me that they did such a thing as selling their vote and probably turn them in too.

I have a feeling that there are so many people who would do the same thing, that I have little worry that vote selling would be a problem.. now there might be a problem of what to do with all the people who get caught.. but I think it would work itself out.. You know, creating jobs vacated by the people caught, and new jobs for prison guards.

Re:Luddite alert

[dzfoo]

Right. That's precisely why credit and debit cards are infallible and secure, and why we never hear about identity theft or fraud.

          -dZ.

Re:Luddite alert

[Richard_at_work]

But do you ever hear about the clearing houses losing data etc? The issues you describe are not failures of the system, but failures outside of the system that use the system in the same way as normal events.

If you ever look into fraud cases, its obvious that banks can track financial transactions throughout the system, they can't simply disappear until they are taken out of the system.

Re:Luddite alert

[Anonymous Coward]

I can create a voting machine which I can trust. I can not create a voting machine which YOU can trust. You see, the problem isn't to write software which works correctly. That's easy. The problem is to make a system which is verifiable by laymen (so that everybody can trust it), but still keeps votes secret. Hand-counted paper ballots are an amazingly simple system which satisfies all requirements of a proper voting system. Consensus among programmers is that computers can not satisfy all requirements. Voting machines are made by people who knowingly disregard one or more of the requirements.

Re:Luddite alert

[TapeCutter]

"I program computers for a living."

CS degree, 20yrs commercial experience - IMHO the parent is one of the best posts I have read on electronic voting.

Re:Luddite alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Buying votes doesn't have to happen in an explicit way. How would you vote if you knew that your employer is a fanatic supporter of party A and would not consider you for a promotion if he knew that you voted for party B? There are lots of dependencies in the real world and secret votes are meant to give dependent people freedom from coercion of any kind.

Not being able to verify that the "bought" vote was cast the way the buyer wanted is exactly what stops vote buying. Secret, unprovable votes are one of the key requirements of a proper democratic voting system.

Re:Luddite alert

[drinkypoo]

There are two simple responses which I feel invalidate your analysis. Point the first: I can log into my bank and transfer funds, nobody thinks I should be unable to do this because I might enter the wrong number. Why should I be held responsible for my own banking activity, but not my own voting activity? Point the second: Since we apparently can't recount the paper ballots anyway, who fucking cares? Voting is masturbation so long as the majority believes that there are only two parties and that voting for anyone else is a waste of time. We need substantial percentages of the population to vote for third parties before anything can possibly change. Voting for one of the two major parties has so far been a massive FAIL, but people keep doing it...

Re:Luddite alert

[drinkypoo]

Computer based voting can never be secured to the same point as paper based voting. For a very simple reason: Trust.

The last time somebody tried to actually recount ballots in a presidential election, the recount was halted under completely bullshit premises. The only thing that I trust is that the election will be stolen no matter what means we use to tally votes. We might as well just work by a "Show of hands" system if we're not going to elect by the will of the people.

Re:Luddite alert

[Richard_at_work]

And yet the banks and financial institutions can create an ATM that everyone trusts? See my point?

Re:Luddite alert

[Krneki]

All you need to do is to print some sort of vote confirmation with an unique number.

If you suspect any alteration in what you have voted you can check at any time if your vote was correct.

E-voting is the future, but we must make sure everything is secure, anonymous and correct.

Re:Luddite alert

[Anonymous Coward]

ATMs have different requirements which make it feasible to construct such a system. The bank knows who you are. You identify yourself and all transactions are logged against your name. You get statements which list all alleged transactions and if there is something wrong with them, depending on the country you live in, the bank (or the bank's insurance) covers the losses unless the bank can prove that it was your fault (negligence).

A voting system can not give you a statement which you could use to verify that your vote was counted correctly, as that would enable you to prove how you voted.

A related important aspect is that I only need to be able to verify my own banking transactions, but for an election to be trustworthy, I have to be sure that all votes are counted correctly.

Re:Luddite alert

[weicco]

There are two simple responses which I feel invalidate your analysis.

No, they don't and they are totally incorrect. Let's see... And oh yes, I live in Finland so this goes probably differently whereever you live.

Why should I be held responsible for my own banking activity, but not my own voting activity?

We have laws which explicitly prevents that. A person or company cannot gain unearned richess from such a mistake. So you can call your bank and say "I accidentally transferred all my savings to wrong account" and bank calls whoever got your money and asks if he/she/it could transfer them back. If recipient does not comply with your/bank's request you can take it to court and eventually you get your money back.

In election there is no such possibility. Someone could come to your house, keep a shotgun pointed to your head and ask politely you to give your vote to candidate X. You cast your vote (or loose your head) and that's it. And this enables you to sell your vote, which is explicitly forbidden by the law. Selling is possible in normal paper-voting but there is no evidence you to proof that you actually cast your vote in the way the buyer wanted so I really doubt that you wont get any money either.

Since we apparently can't recount the paper ballots anyway

You can't but all the political parties can put their presentative to oversee the counting process. And counting is done twice by different groups of people. Even after that recount is possible by court order. Every step is closely watched by parties to prevent any foul play. It really can't get any secure from that.

Re:Luddite alert

[JD770]

It seems to me that paper-voting corruption happens either prior to entering the voting booth (ie registering the dead) or by paper ballots that are either "lost" or "discovered" after the polls close and before counts or re-counts. There's no need to alter the actual ballots cast. Consider ACORN, corpses voting in Chicago, the unmitigated polling disgrace for the MN senator's seat, etc. Heck, the race between Franken and Coleman was so fouled-up in the count *and* re-count(s) that it probably should have been a complete do-over to sort it out fairly. For now, the re-counting shenanigans on both sides appears headed for court approval. Don't even get me started with Gore/Bush and Florida...

It comes down to a choice between two fallible processes. Which one can be corrupted less?

I do think it's a bit humorous that in spite of the technology available to us, we still have (arguably significant) "voting irregularities" -- while other countries seems to manage as well (or perhaps better) with the low-tech of purple fingers. Sometimes we need to be reminded of the K.I.S.S. principle.

I refuse to believe that a highly secure, trustworthy and reliable system can not be developed with the talent available within the U.S. Secure the system down to one-person/one-vote first. Address coercion seperately. For that matter, I feel that how voters are influenced, lobbied, begged and/or coerced prior to casting their vote is a "people" problem, not a technology problem.

However, I also believe that the type of politicians we seem to be perpetually stuck with will *never* allow a highly secure, trustworthy and reliable system to be implemented because they rather rely on the ability to "massage the numbers" either overtly (as in MN & FL) or covertly (as in Chicago's voting zombies).

Warts and all, I'd still choose the U.S. over any other country. Opinions will likely vary...

Re:Luddite alert

[Anonymous Coward]

So when the votes are rounded up from where you cast your vote and transported to where they are counted. In no circumstance can the few people responsible for the transport tamper with them?

Here (Belgium) voting is mandatory and so it's known how many votes should be in one 'box'. Switching the real box with your own is probably not impossible. (The votes are even anonymous so
verifying that the new box is the old box is basicly impossible without a revote, which in the few days time passed will probably already lead to different results anyway)

Computer based voting can not be secured for the reason that you would need to trust someone? How about the entire world, no one thought about an open source solution here?

In again Belgium, we have electronic ID cards, yes I know, the horror, their are card readers which can verify your identity online for you. Using an open source online platform, that has DB1: persons who already voted, and DB2 the votes; you can gaurantee 1 vote per person.

Ok, there may be vulerabilities in this theory so far, but I'm sure they can all be solved. (Some webcams on the servers in question etc...)

Re:Luddite alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Trusted computing exists. I think Microsoft invented it.

Re:Luddite alert

[drinkypoo]

Why should I be held responsible for my own banking activity, but not my own voting activity?

We have laws which explicitly prevents that. A person or company cannot gain unearned richess from such a mistake.

Is your lack of imagination perpetual, or is it a temporary condition resulting from twisted knickers? HINT: People can transfer funds between their own accounts.

In election there is no such possibility. Someone could come to your house, keep a shotgun pointed to your head and ask politely you to give your vote to candidate X. You cast your vote (or loose your head) and that's it. And this enables you to sell your vote, which is explicitly forbidden by the law. Selling is possible in normal paper-voting but there is no evidence you to proof that you actually cast your vote in the way the buyer wanted so I really doubt that you wont get any money either.

Stupid example because: You need too many people to execute such a scheme.

Even after that recount is possible by court order.

That is an incredibly stupid thing to say given that the Supreme Court was used to prevent a completely legitimate recount. In practice, a recount is just not going to happen unless the election results have been gamed by some other means than affecting any actual count.

Re:Luddite alert

[Jason Levine]

To be completely fair, even with existing election machines you need trust. Where I vote, we use the old Push Lever style voting machines. I need to trust that it won't discard my vote (either via malice or accident) if I vote for Candidate A versus Candidate B. Computers could be used for voting in a way that is more trust-worthy than the current voting machines that I use. The computer could print a filled out ballot that says in human and machine readable language that I voted for Candidate A. Another computer could count the ballots. If a recount was needed or if fraud was alleged, a portion of ballots could be machine and human counted. If the two counting methods didn't match up enough, you would know that something was fishy. The key here is the ability to verify your trust in the machine by doing human counting. Pure machine counting (like in the Diebold machines that don't have paper trails) should not be trusted because there is no way to verify the results.

Re:Luddite alert

[Cro Magnon]

I trust my ATM because I can check it later to see if it really did what I asked it to. I get a paper reciept and even a monthy paper statement for verification. Voting machines can't do that and maintain anonimity for the voter.

Re:Luddite alert

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no way to keep the ballots secure when they've left the public environment of the polling place, where the ballot box is supervised by people of all parties and interested individuals. The ballot box must be empty when it is sealed under the supervision of these people. It must be continuously supervised until it is opened again at the end of election day. The ballots must be counted in public. The results of all polling places are combined at a higher level and the people at each contributing polling place verify that the respective partial result is counted correctly.

The key to the trustworthiness of it all is that it is an entirely PUBLIC process, except for the act of filling out the ballot (and there is no risk of manipulation in that step).

If there is anything which can make a recount seem necessary after the chain of publicly observable events has been broken, the system is inadequate. When there is a problem with the count, you recount right then and there until all observers agree that the count is correct. It's the only reasonable option.

Re:Luddite alert

[Richard_at_work]

Yes they can - all you need to do is provide the end user with a unique hash token consisting of:

1, The date time the vote was placed
2, The vote placed
3, A randomly generated uniqueness

And then provide the voting population the ability to query the entire data set after the event - there is no reason why that data needs to remain secret as there is no correlation with peoples identities saved against the entry - that correlation walks away from the booth with the person after they vote, on the audit slip that gets printed.

Re:Luddite alert

[Anonymous Coward]

If the person is in possession of the audit slip, that person can prove the way they voted (which is unacceptable). If the person is only shown a reference number, that person can not prove that the vote was counted (in)correctly. If votes are published with date and time, that would allow observers to know how a particular person voted. If not, the machine could give the reference number of another matching vote and record a different vote with a number that is never presented or handed out to a voter. If no record is given to the voter, this cannot be proven. If a record is given to the voter (which is in itself a requirements violation), proving this kind of fraud would still require lots of voters to get together to compare reference numbers. Just checking that your vote was counted correctly is insufficient.

This really isn't the place to discuss every electronic voting scheme flaw. All the simple schemes have been examined to hell and back. They are all inadequate, unless you are willing to compromise on elementary requirements. Given that we have a simple scheme which does not require any compromises, anybody who claims to have found a replacement must prove that it actually works at least as well as manually counted paper ballots in every way.

Re:Luddite alert

[Anonymous Coward]

have u not heard of mission critical systems? then again.. may be u wrk at ms

Re:Luddite alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Is your lack of imagination perpetual, or is it a temporary condition resulting from twisted knickers? HINT: People can transfer funds between their own accounts.

You didn't read what the GP wrote.

Stupid example because: You need too many people to execute such a scheme.

The GP gave an example that required one person with a shotgun to subvert the vote. How is that too many people?

That is an incredibly stupid thing to say given that the Supreme Court was used to prevent a completely legitimate recount.

That you in the USA have a corrupted voting system and a biased court system does not mean that it is impossible to recount paper ballots. In other countries, paper ballots are recounted often. In Canada, the law demands a recount if the initial count is close, and I do not know of a single federal or provincial election in my lifetime where there weren't some recounts.

Just because USians refuse to recount paper ballots, doesn't mean that paper ballot can't be recounted.

Re:Luddite alert

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time somebody tried to actually recount ballots in a presidential election, the recount was halted under completely bullshit premises.

You made this complaint before. Just because USians refuse to recount paper ballots does not mean that paper ballots can't be recounted.

Re:Luddite alert

[maharb]

Under the current system in the US you vote in a booth where no one can see your vote. Thus it is impossible to confirm the vote you made was the one someone bribed/forced you to take. In other words someone could pay me $100 to vote for X and I can walk into the booth, vote for Y and tell that person I voted for X. So it is 'possible' but for the person buying the vote it is a lose-lose situation.

I neglected to mention this in my OP but this problem isn't so much about X candidate buying the election but more about how it undermines the system. Its not so far fetched to say that a husband might ask a wife to vote a certain way. Under the current system she can say she voted for who he said to but then go vote differently. Same with many other relationships such as parent child and even friends.

When your vote is no longer closed to the public it becomes risky to vote how you want.

ps. I am not saying there is no solution to this problem but as far as I know there is no solution.

Re:Luddite alert

[Rich0]

"Attention all employees - you are hereby given a one hour break to go and vote. Just be sure to bring back your voter receipt ID numbers so that we can verify that you were voting and not just goofing off during your paid time off. Anybody who fails to return with one will be fired. Oh, vote your conscience but I think Candidate X would be great for our industry." -- Public address announcement at local factory.

"Ok, Fred, can you go through and see who all those workers voted for and be sure to sack anybody who voted for Candidate Y!" -- Less public conversation with plant foreman.

A voter-verifiable receipt is not a very good idea. I agree that voters should be able to leave a booth assured that their vote will be counted, but they should not have proof of how they voted or whether they voted.

Re:Luddite alert

[Rich0]

Here is a piece of paper with readable language on it. Are the dots in the columns where you wanted your votes to be cast? You can answer that.

Not really. Is a tiny dot in the column a vote or a mistake? How about a mark in three columns, two of which look like they might have been erased? How about three erased marks of which one was re-marked? How about two dots in one line and no dots in the next in which the voter cast votes for a single party - can we just assume they voted straight party and put their mark in the wrong line for the one position? If a ballot contains invalid votes does that disqualify only part of the ballot or the whole thing?

Paper voting has lots of problems. They only matter in close elections, but you'll never get two recounts to agree to a single vote in a large district.

I favor a hybrid approach. Use a computer to generate the ballot since a computer can validate the input and print an unambiguous ballot that is clearly readable. The voting machine might even subject the ballot to an extra-sensitive optical scanner to validate that the printout was clear. Then the voter looks at the ballot, confirms that they are satisfied with it, and then they drop it into a ballot box.

Use the GUI for what it is good at - validating the ballot and interactively working with the user to capture their true preferences. Use paper for what it is good at - making a hard-to-modify record of the event where a voter has some assurance that due to process control that the vote will eventually be counted.

Re:Luddite alert

[Anonymous Coward]

This is only a valid argument if you assume that an online vote would be counted in a somewhat similar fashion to a paper ballot: secretly. But once you realize that the internet actually makes it possible for everybody to check the count, I'd say it's pretty easy to make an online voting system that's almost impossible to tamper with to any significant extent.

So here's the idea: say I vote for candidate Bernard Smith. The voting machine prints out a receipt where four things are written: the time, the precinct, the name of the candidate I voted for and a unique 10-digit ID.

And then when the vote ends (or it could happen live!) a list of every single vote is published: a list of all (time, precinct, id, candidate) tuples. Then you go to some watchdog website (which would download the list of votes as soon as it is available and save it, as anybody in the world could), you type up the ID you were given when you voted and you verify that the vote associated to this information was counted the way you intended and has the right time/precinct/etc. Or you can download the list and grep it yourself, or you can use a phone service or whatever else made available to you.

Simple, easy, you don't need a paper trail or fancy stuff like encryption and you can verify with *100% certainty* that *your* vote was properly counted, which as far as I know isn't even possible right now. Given the list, counting votes is a one liner in bash. Every citizen is given a certain amount of time to report errors and whenever errors are reported somewhere, citizens in that region are urged to verify that their vote was counted properly. Mass fraud would be almost unfeasible. You have to use the list everybody has, so you'd need to change it before it is published. But that is almost impossible: you'd have to precisely sample people who aren't going to check that their vote was counted properly - and how the heck do you tell? A single error found can cascade into everybody around checking their own vote out of paranoia.

A further advantage of this method is that any computer works, no special software or hardware is needed. Given a way to authenticate yourself online (you don't want people to steal your identity and cast a vote in your stead after all), you could do it from your home computer without fear of fraud.

The key here is: an electronic trail is worse than a paper trail if there's only one of each. But an electronic trail is way better than a paper trail when everybody has a copy of it. *That* is how you leverage online voting.

Re:Luddite alert

[laughingcoyote]

I've no objections whatsoever to having the computer generate the paper ballots, and I think you're correct that this could in fact reduce the error rate in paper voting. But the end result should be something tangible, such as the piece of paper, that the voter can verify is correct (and in the event it is not, go to an election judge, say "This printout of my votes is wrong", and have the judge destroy the ballot and start them over.) My objection would be to having the votes electronically stored and counted, as this is far too subject to error and manipulation, and error or malice could have a much larger effect than a ballot or two getting dropped or miscounted.

Re:Luddite alert

[Anonymous Coward]

This scheme has already been proposed in this thread. A response is here. Additionally, online voting schemes which involve voting from home instead of voting at a public polling place cannot ensure secrecy. That is unacceptable.

Re:Luddite alert

[randyleepublic]

EGGS-FUGGING-ZACTLY!!! It's the expectation vs. results problem. In financial software one has multiple entries for each transaction. I buy something for $5, I expect to see my bank account reduced by that amount. It's reduced by $5, great! It's reduced by $5000, and we have a identified a problem, and thus are well on the way to a solution.

Elections, on the other hand, do not have two entries. There is no expectation to be fulfilled. Merely a one way transaction. That is why EDP is the worst possible tool for this job.

Re:Luddite alert

[Opportunist]

Ok, I didn't know you use voting machines. That's just as bad, whether the machine is electronic or mechanic doesn't really matter.

We don't. We're using a pen, a sheet of paper with the relevant information and choices and an envelope. Plus a box to toss the whole deal (without the pen, which will be reused by the next voter) into.

Our system demands that anyone who wants can come and watch the elections. You can go to the voting room and spend all day there, you have access to everything to ensure you can verify that no manipulation took place. Parties routinely send "voting helpers" there, originally to make sure the other side doesn't cheat, in the meantime it's more a chance to be present for the voter to see that they're present, and also because you need people to haul stuff around. But it also still serves its original purpose: It creates trust in the process. All parties are there. Are ALL going to cheat, in favor of one? Unlikely.

We still manage to get all votes counted within 24 hours. So what's the deal? Why the heck would I want voting machines? To be as quick and unchallengable when counting votes like Florida was in 2000?

Re:Luddite alert

[Krneki]

You can already do the same now.

Stay in front of the vote office and pay 5E for anyone willing to vote for who you want.

You can make sure they voted for the right person by making a video call and show what you have selected using the camera on the phone.

So the CIA would have to hire more "normal" people

[Anonymous Coward]

Like "Joe the Plumber"? And spend less grooming the next generation of news reporters?

Oh noes, the paradigm shift and what not.. I'll be in my tinfoil hat, thankyouverymuch.

Kind of redundant, isn't it?

[mosb1000]

Isn't subverting democracy kind of like framing OJ Simpson? Sure, people do it, but does it really matter?

Increase voter participation...

[rts008]

If we had a web-enabled voting and polling system that was workable and secure, these 'polls' would be as relevant as the Semaphore, Telegraph, and Pony Express is today competing with the internet. Oh, yeah, with smoke signals for a 'back-up system. Printing presses for extra points.

Multi voting

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you clear your cookie cache between votes, you can vote as many times as you want. I just voted twice for a name that was not the name being plugged by the article.

May be a good thing

[squoozer]

A few years of turmoil may be a good thing as it would hopefully teach the people the value of good leadership over what most "democracies" currently have which is wishy-washy in-it-for-themselves brain-dead corrupt morons running the place.

What I think we really need is the next generation of rule beyond democracy. I don't know exactly what form it would take but just like democracy brought about a separation of the legislature and the judiciary we should probably now work towards a separation of the needs of the people and the needs of the state. perhaps into two separate governments.

Think about it for a moment: the wants of business and the wants of the people are often at odds with each other. At the moment business almost always wins because it has the money so the people get trampled. The peoples-government could be run on a set of guiding principals based on freedom and responsibility and would make laws that affect the person. The businesses-government would have the task of making the country rich through trade and commerce, it would make laws that affect how businesses work.

Perhaps the idea won't fly but it certainly makes for an interesting idea I think.

Re:May be a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

A few years of turmoil may be a good thing as it would hopefully teach the people the value of good leadership over what most "democracies" currently have which is wishy-washy in-it-for-themselves brain-dead corrupt morons running the place.

Just like when Napolean Bonapart was embraced by the populace after the turmoil of the French Revolution? Honestly though, that's a relatively good outcome to government-change-through-social-turmoil. They could've have ended-up with a mediocre Austrian painter in charge.

Pro tip: It's only in the Civilization series of games that you get to control what type of government emerges out of anarchy.

An easier way to make democracy more effective

[SystemicPlural]

Describing this for the UK but it can be adapted for anywhere.
After the election which took place as normal. Every member of parliament gets a vote that is proportionate to the number of constituents that are eligible to vote.
Everyone who is eligible to vote can change who represents them to any of the sitting MPs, once every 3 moths or so. This takes a vote away from their MP and gives it to the MP they want to have it. (Suggest that libraries are used for this purpose).

This process has the following effects.
1. It does not disenfranchise those who don't want to do more than they already do.
2. It maintains an element of local representation.
3. It makes MPs do what they say they will do, because if they don't people will stop supporting them a lot more quickly.
4. It allows for a far greater degree of representation. Out of the several hundred sitting MPs it is likely that at least one will closely represent your views.

Re:An easier way to make democracy more effective

[Petrushka]

Some interesting ideas there. But if you're going to change things that radically anyway, what's the virtue of keeping the MPs? (I can imagine a couple of rationales, but I doubt they're the same ones you'd pick.)

Everyone who is eligible to vote can change who represents them to any of the sitting MPs, once every 3 moths or so. This takes a vote away from their MP and gives it to the MP they want to have it. (Suggest that libraries are used for this purpose).

My gut reaction is that that sounds like a good recipe for ensuring the rapid closing of all libraries, as their funding mysteriously vanishes.

Re:An easier way to make democracy more effective

[meringuoid]

After the election which took place as normal. Every member of parliament gets a vote that is proportionate to the number of constituents that are eligible to vote. Everyone who is eligible to vote can change who represents them to any of the sitting MPs, once every 3 moths or so. This takes a vote away from their MP and gives it to the MP they want to have it. (Suggest that libraries are used for this purpose).

Then you end up with two or three popular celebrity MPs having all the votes, and 600 backbenchers with no influence whatever. That's even worse than the position we're in now: autocratic though the Prime Minister might be, and thoroughly whipped though his party may be, he's still vulnerable to a backbench rebellion if he tries something particularly stupid. This way, if one MP ever finds himself in control of a simple majority of the nation's votes, he's the dictator.

Re:An easier way to make democracy more effective

[SystemicPlural]

That is the position I started from.
But does everyone really need or want to be involved in the nitty gritty details of creating new laws.
The problem with the current system is that MPs are not held accountable. However I think that having specialists who study the implications of new laws is a good thing.

Re:An easier way to make democracy more effective

[Anonymous Coward]

you end up with two or three popular celebrity MPs having all the votes

Those MPs would have become popular because the "voters" agreed with what the MPs have done. If the MPs have the majority of the parliamentary votes because they have done what the majority of "voters" wanted, how is this not democracy?

If those popular MPs do something the "voters" don't like, the "voters" will change their "votes" and the popular MPs will no longer be the most popular MPs and will no longer have all the influence. Again, how is this not democracy?

In principle, this (or something quite similar) would be an excellent form of democracy. The problem would of course be an exacerbation of that in any democracy: how to prevent the tyranny of the majority.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the internet is the anonymity that persuade people to do these destructive prank things, but there are room for good and bad. It is a double edge sword, personally I am more on the pessimistic side as the internet tend to bring out the worse and harshest in individuals, also the most idiotic. For more good to come out out of it, education and responsibility still have to precede the internet, and the lack of it is the real threat of democracy today.

Internet?

[supernova_hq]

...the rise of movements would dramatically alter the political landscape if voting were to become commonplace.

There, fixed that for you.

Subvert 'Democracy'?-HahHahHaHooHeeeHah!

[rts008]

"All the recent talk about various polls and elections being pranked or hijacked, serious and silly alike, prompted me to write an article about the technical realities behind online polling, and the political fallout of ever becoming subject to online voting for serious elections. Even if we were to be able to limit voting to legitimate, legal voters, the realities of social networking and the rise of Internet-based movements would dramatically alter the political landscape if online voting were to become commonplace.

"[all emphasis mine]

Yes!1 Yes!1 Abso-fscking-lutely!1!
Let's put EVERY-FSCKING-THING that determines/influences our political process online!...ASAP!
The only realistic questions become then are:

1. "Should we concentrate on learning Russian, Chinese, or both?" (least pessimistic scenario)
2. Will 'Twitter' take over Congress, and sentient life?(do not confuse the two to your detriment)
3. ???
4.Profit!!!**

What could possibly go wrong???? (Hint: I am learning Russian)

** Can I still post on /. if I voted for CowboyNeal?

Technical analysis of online voting

[mbarkhau]

Working on the Metagovernment project, I made this technical analysis of online voting:

We emphasise making decisions by coming to consensus and synthesising proposals rather than deciding through a majority vote. This may be impractical and idealistic if put to the extreme. It has been shown practical in small scale open source projects. Even if it isn't possible to reach consensus for every decision, the fact you are forced to decide on something with a vote raises a flag that something is wrong and that there is the possibility of discrimination against a minority.

In any voting scheme there are some criteria to be considered. I've taken the voting principles used in Germany as a basis (Grundgesetz Artikel 38 Â 1).

Voting must be open, direct, free, equal and secret.

Open means anybody must be allowed to vote. Direct means that the decision isn't made through intermediaries. Free means that no pressure may be exerted on the voter to vote against there will. Equal means that every vote has equal weight. Secret means that nobody should be able to determine how an individual voted.

For each of these there are some considerations for online voting.

Open: Using computers to vote may be discriminatory against those who aren't comfortable with them. On the other hand it may increase participation, by making voting easier for those that are comfortable and for people with disabilities.

An exception to this principle is made for people under 18. The intent is for the electorate to have a certain degree of experience. The system would be much more open though, if anybody could participate based solely on merit.

Direct: Representative democracies are by definition indirect, so you could argue, that in spirit Artikel 38 is being violated with the current system. I think it was mainly introduced as a reaction to the electoral collage in the US. Online governance has great potential to do this principle justice.

Free: I can't think of any system that can guarantee this other than a voting booth in a public venue. By voting on the Internet from any computer the risk is introduced of a third party having control over that resource and forcing the voter to vote a certain way.

I think this problem is inherent an haven't been able to come up with a solution in the few years I've been thinking about these systems. I can only find a partial justification that in a civilised society this should be a statistically insignificant problem.

Equal: No difference as far as I can see.

Secret: I could talk for hours about this but the best solution I've seen so far tries to limit the number of parties you have to trust to as few as possible. And even that system relies on Public-key cryptography, which due to a lack of understanding and thereby transparency may not be trusted by every voter, even if they trust the one party they are sending their votes to.


Considering all the problems with online voting, my conclusion is that we should reconsider voting not as a binding for decisions, but as an indicator for the direction the community wants to take, so that gradually consensus can be reached.

The entire thread can be found here: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.politics.activism.metagovernment/1048/focus=1056

Have you paid attention to the last few US

[Shivetya]

elections? Because Wall Street has their man in the White House right now. Show me another transfer of public wealth to private hands as what has occurred under Obama's watch? Either Geitner and Summers are masterfully playing Obama or he is paying Wall Street back for filling his campaign coffers. For a party of the people it is amazing that it seems to only be the party of the rich people once in office.

Sure they offer token dollars to us in the form of stimulus or whatever term they label it with but it is nothing compared to the money being spent to prop up hedge funds. Where is the accountability for Wall Street? Look at how the current Administration would make the car companies jump through hoops but has practically no real controls placed on Wall Street; if you haven't noticed all those cries of Barney Frank went suddenly silent.

Re:Have you paid attention to the last few US

[Kelbear]

"paying Wall Street back for filling his campaign coffers"

Obama campaign funds:
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/summary.php?id=N00009638

"Time" must have been in on it

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of cake, see those numbers under "Total Votes"? Monotonously decreasing until #22 where it suddenly pops up to over 9 million for a popular boxer they had to vote down millions of times (the graphs suggest that he might have had his own votebots, just not as powerful ones). Even people that use GETs for a poll can't pretend they didn't notice those numbers before publishing the results.

Federalist #10

[supercrisp]

Federalist #10 explores how true democracy would be susceptible to faction: http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm. The "founding fathers" were very concerned about how easily swayed the common people are; in fact "mob" comes from "mobile vulgaris," the movable herd. I think Nietzsche's considerations on class resentment apply here too. Think about the true but disturbing populist movements like the French Revolution, the Stalinist and Maoist revolutions and so on. They're nasty things. Populism can become ugly quickly.

Re:Federalist #10

[hedwards]

As opposed to the system we have. You can knock populism all you want, but under the system that's been in place in the US the benefits of productivity have almost entirely gone to the rich elite while those at the bottom suffer from lack of opportunity.

You can say what you will about populism, but it's less dangerous than the alternatives.

I think it's interesting how it's ok to be really angry when workers want to organize or get some benefit out of increased work, but when the elite's want more it's entirely different.

Face it, supply side economics is at this point pining for the fjords.

Re:Federalist #10

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] French Revolution, the Stalinist and Maoist revolutions and so on. [...]

You meant `Bolshevik', right? Not only because Stalin never started a revolution, but also because he supported the fucking ineffective Kerensky government (Lenin's articles weren't even published by that asshole.) When the tides seemed to turn in favour of Lenin that opportunistic bastard changed his views and supported Lenin.
Oh, and the later reign of terror pretty much originated with the civil war after the October Revolution in 1917; if the western governments hadn't supported the White terror, there wouldn't have been any need to introduce the Red terror and thus giving the government a really nice GovernmentTerrorismArchitecture(TM).

And something like that gets to +4 Insightful.

This is an example

[dargaud]

Everybody knows that democracy is 3 wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, but I'm surprised at how inept the discussion has been so far. Here's a good example at how a democratic system can be subverted, and there's not much you can do about dedicated opponents in similar cases. But it has little to do with the internet.

End Women's Suffrage -- on YouTube

[supercrisp]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUP9Jm9SqvY

hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for someone from Diebold to go to prison...

And the slashmob without long-term memory just skips to talking about Democracy again?

What a damned bunch of sheeple we are xD

2 main points

[Anonymous Coward]

1. In the digital world you can not at the same time have traceability and anonymity of votes.
2. People must care about the issue more than keeping their bottom in the couch, much more than to click on a button.

In Estonia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Estonia, where internet access is a birthright, voting online is only natural.

Everyone who uses the national ID smartcard to indentify themselves is able to download the whole sourcecode & mechanism for the voting and counting process.

Then again, everything else that is not online is pretty much corrupt..

Internet... subvert democracy?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Internet, safeguard of free speech, tool of the common man against oppression.
Democracy, safeguard of freedom in general, tool of the common man against oppression.

Internet... subvert democracy? *head asplode*

plutocracies allow it

[Anonymous Coward]

go look up what a plutocracy is , THE USA is no longer a republic, that entails democracy that isnt bribed off by the ruling corporations.

ohhh noes.... newspapers then radio now internet..

[darqit]

Okay let's start at the beginning.

New forms of communication have always had an impact on the general population. This includes how their ideals, desires and preferences are shaped. So the political preference of people is subject to change according to the the times. New technologies which facilitate the rapid transfer of any kind of information is sure to have an impact. Does the the term populism ring a bell?

Now for the comments.

Democracy is not solely the first-past-the-post-model. There are many different ways of implementing a democracy. The term represents an idealistic approach to governing a country. the various ways it actually takes form are not represented under the definition democracy. So read up !!! I don't feel like giving a lecture.

Now for my personal preference. I don't particularly like democracy. But in this space and time it is certainly the best mainstream option we have. Furthermore I dare all the "hypocritics" to give a solution instead of bashing. And I don't want to see some technocratic/meritocratic solutions popup where distribution of primary good is equal/"everybody has to be rewarded depending their contribution". Because that is not feasible/ gives an option or describes an system of governing. Also a strong leader which has a firm grasp on the countries affairs and only has the best intentions. This does not constitute a system but an exceptional situation. Lastly any solution which in effect is a form of democracy will be tossed out as the comments suggest democracy is the root of all evil.

So bring it.

smokescreen

[spiralofhope]

Who gives a shit about this smokescreen. The real issue is an actual political and voting system that isn't rigged by two parties.

Simple

[gnesterenko]

Online voting, but in regular voting locations. How to do it? Simple - well not so much so, but considering the importance, I wouldn't mind my taxes going to pay for something like this. Anyway, create a closed network, completely separate from the internet. Have voting machines run together on this nationwide network. Only polling machines and electoral officials should have access to this network. Any machines on the network can never be connected to the internet. Done. One man, one vote. Time to retire the whole electoral vote system. Good for 18th century. Terrible for today. "The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

SOCIAL NETWORKING VOTING IS FAKE

[Latinhypercube]

I have a suspicion that a lot of the bot networks are being paid by western sponsors to vote up myspace / facebook / digg pages etc... As well as provide false hit counts for paid banners etc. Hence providing unique IP addresses for each hit.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

should the internet traffic be monitored to prevent childporn/terrorism/boogeymen ?

87% Yay!
13% Nay!

Measure passed.

ss

[s63]

realestatesky.net realestatesky.net/vb