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Canada Considering Online Voting In Elections
ehud42 writes "Slashdot readers generally agree that voting machines such as those from Diebold are a bad idea. Well, what about online voting? That is what the Vancouver Sun is reporting. Given that voter turnout in our most recent election was the worst on record, Elections Canada is kicking around the idea of allowing voters to register online, update registration information online, and maybe even vote online."
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DO NOT WANT
4chan would rig it and have 7 billion people write in pedobear. Then they would convince a member to have his name legally registered as such and get plastic surgery to become a bear. Child porn, warez, and weird porn would be not only legalized, but taught in school and subsidized. Sad part is I think my oh so humorous prediction would be fairly accurate.
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Voting must be anonymous and private. If you allow online voting, then nothing prevents someone from standing over your shoulder and paying you $50 to vote the way he wants. Yes, absentee ballots have the same problem, which is why I think Oregon's all-mail voting system is terribly dangerous. This vulnerability isn't theoretical: the scenario I describe actually happened throughout the 19th century and led to some very crooked elections. It's why we switched to a secret ballot in the 1880s. Let's not forget our history here.
In any election that lets people vote from anywhere, votes can be coerced with a gun, and people can show their actual vote to whatever corrupt mafioso wants to force their vote. These things are not possible (or at least they're more difficult) if the only places to vote are properly run, properly secure polling places.
Allowing people to vote online isn't going to solve the turnout problem as long as we have a federal election every couple of years. Canada has had something like four federal elections in the last five years, which is pretty ridiculous. The voters are tired of it, and they're demonstrating that by not bothering to vote. I'm not saying this is the best way to demonstrate disgust, but the ability to vote online isn't going to fix the real problem.
1) easier for the apathetic (and likely uninformed) to vote?
2) easier to hack an election?
No good reason. It's just a stupid idea all around.
here you go:
http://homepage.mac.com/rcareaga/diebold/big_die/diebold_1.jpg
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Do not want.
Diebold concerns aside, online voting can be so severely tampered with that it's not even funny.
Concerns of forced voting come first to mind, i.e. someone coercing you into voting a certain way. But a lot of things can go wrong, specific to computer networking and technology itself:
* A Trojan horse can be planted on a system and activated soon after the voting period starts, calling the election servers and registering a vote on the owner's behalf. This would be subject to reverse-engineering the election process as it goes through on a real host with Wireshark, but feasible with good auto-update code on the Trojan horse.
* An intermediary host meddling with data. This can be a router, WiFi hotspot with hacked firmware, or even an ISP. Mitigated with the use of HTTPS, but users must not bypass warnings of bad certificates!
* (If the election is validated by name) Brute-forcing names and hoping to hit a Canadian citizen's name.
* (If the election is validated by GeoIP) Using a Canadian host as a proxy.
* Other countries' nationals could rig the election (see the comment below about 4chan rigging the election) if validation is not performed or performed incorrectly.
So, yeah. It might work. But it has to be foolproof as much as possible. Maybe send each citizen a card with an online access code? But the non-technological means of tampering with a person's vote will still apply, i.e. coercing them by one way or another, or even the lure of financial gain: "here, pay you 20 bucks to vote for Mr. X"... which is a way for the system to become corrupted.
So again: Do not want.
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1894028,00.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How is coercion easy for walk in voting when no one but the person voting can definitely know who the person voted for?
When voting online, someone could be standing over your shoulder making sure you are voting for who they want you to vote for.
For all this whining about Diebold, most people don't have a problem using Diebold's ATMs for banking.
You know immediately if your banking transaction worked. You know at the end of the month if it worked for someone else, and there are bank guarantees. (Why did you think all the ATMs have cams?)
All they can steal with from your bank is some of your money. Not your country.
If you seriously believe you have offered a good analogy I submit you are clueless about the problem at issue.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
This post contains one blatant falsehood and one technically true but extraordinarily misleading fact. The election was called because Parliament(not the government) was dissolved by the Governor General. However, all elections in Canada are called after Parliament is dissolved by the GG, so that was nothing new. The GG had zero choice in the matter anyway, as the GG is required by constitutional convention to follow the "advice" of the Prime Minister of Canada. It was the PM and the governing Conservatives who really called the election -- the GG dissolving Parliament is only a formality. To blame it on the opposition is ridiculous and has no basis whatsoever in fact.
Considering that the story is about Canadian elections, who gives a fuck what the American public thinks?
Right, you didn't read the headline, never mind the summary, and god forbid reading the article.
The ATM company and the voting machine company are effectively different companies. Diebold, which makes ATMs, bought a company called Global Election Systems in 2001. GES is the company that makes voting machines. Although GES is now owned by Diebold, it remains a separate division, with its own management and engineers. The technology is GES technology. It is true that if Diebold wanted to badly enough they could impose changes on the voting machine division, but it can be hard even for an honest company to bring itself to crack down on a sleazy subsidiary, very likely at the cost of damaging the market for the subsidiary and increasing the likelihood of lawsuits.
The silliness of the electronic voting machine -- and, also, online voting -- is that these contraptions are intended to (1) protect a voter from his own stupidity and (2) protect a voter from his own laziness. Frankly, why should we care if a voter is too stupid or too lazy to vote?
This entire electronic voting craze began after some voters in Florida could not follow simple instructions (on the voting ballot) in the American presidential election of 2000. Because they lacked the intelligence to follow simple instructions, they created ballots that were ambiguous.
These instructions are not rocket science. They are written so that a child in 8th grade can understand them. If a voter lacks even the intelligence to follow simple instructions, he likely lacks the intelligence to comprehend foreign policy and domestic policy. The loss of his vote is not a loss to democracy. An uninformed vote by an idiot would actually damage our democracy.
The other issue is the lazy voter. This online voting proposal mentioned by the "Vancouver Sun" is supposed to cater to him. Well, if a voter is too lazy to vote, then he is likely too lazy to make an effort to understand foreign policy and domestic policy. The loss of his vote is not a loss to democracy.
The bottom line is that paper ballots work just fine. We should continue to use them. Forget the electronic voting machines and online voting. They are far less safe and less reliable than mere paper ballots.
Let's keep the paper ballots.
But the problem may be manageable in countries that are sufficiently rich and have sufficiently strong democratic traditions.
I disagree. In practice the elections in Canada would not really be adversely affected by online voting provided reasonable precautions were in place now. But sooner or later we'll have our own Ahmadinejad ... or Bush v Gore ... and it'll explode in our faces.
Voting and elections in general are the fundamental expression of democracy, they should always be run low-tech, readily available to the public for scrutiny by the parties, and manual recount.
Remember, an election is essentially a peaceful overthrowing of the government, and the installation of a replacement. The governments role in the process should really be to facilitate the public conducting the election as at arms length as is practical.
This analogy is incorrect for the same reason that the analogy between online banking and voting is invalid. With banking, both you and your bank maintain a separate record of transactions, and you can be certain at the end of the month whether the bank has the same record of transactions as you. This is because the bank (and the tax department) actually maintain a link between you and your account. However, a voting system simply cannot maintain a link between the voter and vote cast. Therefore, there's no way for a voter to be sure that their vote was counted, unless they fundamentally trust the system as a whole. The only way for people to trust the system is for it to be transparent, and online voting is about the least transparent system I can think of. There are too many things in the technology stack between your screen and the server for you to be sure that the vote is recorded the way you think it is.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain