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DC Suspends Tests of Online Voting System
Fortran IV writes "Back in June, Washington, DC signed up with the The Open Source Digital Foundation to set up an internet voting system for DC residents overseas. The plan was to have the system operational by the November general election. Last week the DC Board of Elections and Ethics opened the system for testing and attracted the attention of students at the University of Michigan, with comical results. The DC Board has postponed implementation of the system for 'more robust testing.'" Update: 10/06 02:42 GMT by T : University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman provides an explanation of exactly how the folks at Michigan exploited the DC system.
One of the articles mentioned that some browsers submitted blank forms because they don't support inline PDF forms. Who, exactly, thought that using PDF was a good idea? The whole point of the web is that it provides layout standards. Why even bother using a web browser if you're just going to try to hack around it by using a completely different content format, PDF, shoved in using browser plug-ins. It might has well have been Flash. Use the web or do not. There is no halfway.
And of course, their servers were obviously insecure, as evidenced by someone managing to alter content on the servers.
What does all this tell us? Well, it tells us that:
Not that this shouldn't have been anything less than obvious to anyone with even a basic understanding of computer security.... Real secure networks built on top of HTTP use client applications that verify signatures on the content that the servers provide, ensuring that it is legitimate before acting on it. This also, of course, requires that people obtain the client software in a secure fashion, which is a problem in and of itself, in much the same way that obtaining the client on-the-fly from a web server is a problem, and for precisely the same reason.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Current history disproves this your statement. We cannot yet make online voting work and yet we function pretty well in the "digital age".
But a paper vote can be audited by the original voter.
And electronic vote can be manipulated just long enough to pass through the counting register, and when it gets back to the original voter it can look exactly like it did before it was manipulated.
Has anybody the comments section in the Washington Post website? It is disgusting to see how much hatred and ignorance is going on there. I hope they're not a representative sample of the USian population.
Meanwhile, in Brasil, we just had a presidential and local election. About 100 million people voting, in an all-electronic process. There were no reports of fraud whatsoever, and the election results were available just 2 hours after the polling stations closed.
Can't the US do better? Your voting system is just laughable.
entropy happens
Voting machines should definitely be electronic.
Why? What exactly do electronic voting machines give you that, say, an optical scan paper ballot doesn't? Electronic voting has more often than not been a solution in search of a problem.
I am officially gone from
Trivial? Yeah right. And you wonder why other moderators are rating you flamebait.
Online voting is not trivial for one reason. Security from vote tampering.
If you can get 300 million people to vote online, without vote tampering up to and including hacking 'your' system, then you're a hero.
But you're not.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I can check my bank accounts online.
I can pay my bills online.
I can order almost anything imaginable online.
I can participate in auctions online.
I can date online.
I can gamble online.
I can see my credit reports online.
I can file my taxes online.
Why is voting so different?
A lot of them miss out another important requirement for elections and voting systems, at least in actual democracies.
;) ). So that puts a limit to the cheating - so when enough voters get pissed off enough with you, despite your efforts you can still lose the elections - there are just so many postal votes to go around.
:).
;)), and they can't seem to be able to do it right at home... With Diebolded elections and all that.
Requirement #0: Convincing enough of the losers that they've lost.
Doesn't matter if your fancy system is actually secure and proven. If the losers think they lost because "too much magic" happened, you could have riots on the streets or even civil war.
While paper votes have problems, they are easier to explain to voters. And if you do them right, the losers tend to agree with the results- they might dispute with a few problem constituencies, but you won't get massive riots.
You get riots when you do them wrong e.g. having one party do the counting in secret. And riots might even be justified or at least understandable since since having just one party count paper votes secretly is rather fishy.
In my country I think they rig it with postal votes. The counting is done in front of various observers from different political parties and a few 3rd parties even.
So where they can rig it is with postal votes, or in places which are more obscure - nobody bothers to show up to watch the counts, ballot boxes etc (but those places often don't make much of a difference
Whereas most electronic voting systems tend to do their counts in a way that cannot be observed by others. There's too much magic
And all for what? Make things faster? You want to do it right, take the time and money to do it right. What's so hard about scaling? Your education system should be good enough so that you have enough volunteer counters who can actually count.
I find it funny that the US spends billions to supposedly hold elections in Iraq (regime change right?