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Canada To Adopt On-Line Voting?
belmolis writes "Here in Canada we have an old-fashioned paper ballot voting system that by all accounts works very well. We get results quickly and without fraud. Nonetheless, Elections Canada wants to test on-line voting. From the article: 'The head of the agency in charge of federal elections says it's time to modernize Canada's elections, including testing online voting and ending a ban on publishing early election results.' Is it worth trying to fix a system that isn't broken?"
Online voting will be conducted through Warcraft's Arathi Basin battleground. Users must authenticate through battle.net and choose horde or alliance. Whichever team holds the Blacksmith point will be able to vote once per minute until 9 PM. Live results will be posted in Ironforge and Orgrimmar as voting happens.
Please note there is a limit of 3.78x10^19 voters allowed in each instance.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Is it worth trying to fix a system that isn't broken?"
If it means less transparency for the system, then I say yes, lets fix the system. Because more transparency generally means that corporations make less money, and the less money corporations make the less well off society is in general.
Malicious code is the least of the problems with online voting.
It becomes almost trivial to buy/extort votes.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Surely you mean nack?
Hell, didn't anyone learn anything from online banking? It can NOT be made secure. Why? Inherently. Because you would have to trust a machine that is not under your control, as the voting agency: The user's computer. And there is no way to verify that his vote is actually his decision. And I'm not even talking about the guy with the gun pointing at his head telling him how to vote.
Here's a scenario that happened in reality a while ago with online banking. Anyone with half a brain should be easily able to tell how to apply it to online voting. We might have to get someone to explain it to a politician, though.
A piece of malware existed (and still exists), that was developed as a reply to the one time pad banks handed out. Since intercepting and using the user's credentials was useless in such an environment, what they did was to manipulate the user's browser to make the user do the malicious transaction himself. What happened was, essentially, this: The malware manipulated (through a BHO) the input and the reply from the bank. The user entered, e.g. that he wanted to transmit 100 bucks to pay his electricity bill. The malware sent that he wants to send 1000 bucks to a mule. The bank replied that those 1000 bucks will be sent to the mule, which the browser displayed as 100 bucks to electronic provider, asking for the OTP-key. The user, thinking he's paying his bill (and everything he saw reflected this) entered the key.
There is NO way the bank (or, in turn, the election committee) could somehow see that the input was manipulated. And in this case, at least it could be seen on the bank statement. How do you expect to at least NOTICE that your vote was altered in a secret ballot?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I cannot see how on-line voting can possibly stand up against the demand for a secret ballot.
If everyone is allowed to vote in their own home then there is no way to guaranty that the ballot is secret. How can you make sure that no one is shoulder-surfing? Or worse, shoulder-surfing with a big stick? With home (on-line) voting bribing and/or threatening voters becomes trivial and we don't want that!
On-line voting sounds like fun, but it doesn't work.
Malicious code is the least of the problems with online voting.
Even though there are more obvious problems, I believe that the freedom to study and test the system is essential to any democratic voting system.
It does not work for us, it was challenged in the Supreme Court, but the Justices did not rise to the height of the problem. They ruled that since to their knowledge there had been no actual election fraud, "theoretical" problems like software to modify the actual vote sent (which was created as a proof-of-concept) and spoof the one reported to you did not warrant new elections nor any updates to the system. There was also a discrepancy in vote allocation between votes cast by paper and cast over the Internet. That, however, might be explained with more tech-savvy people in the winners' camp. I am not saying it cannot be done, but Estonia should not be used as an example on how to do it.
Why should people in BC have more information to vote with than those in the Atlantic provinces? No. No ballot box should be opened until all the polling locations have closed.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The short answer is no. E-Voting is a stupid idea. All electronic forms of voting are more open to error than traditional methods, not to mention manipulation. When it comes to elections I don't care how long it takes to count the votes. Even if it took a week, who cares? It's not like the new government will step in any faster.
When it comes to my elections what I care about is accuracy, reliability, verifiability. The paper method works because everything is done by hand, so there a no/few glitches. It reliable because, well paper is ancient. And finally it is verifiable because there exists a paper trail, which allows recount if there is a dispute.
The system we have right now has worked for a very long time, and it has worked quite well. We don't need anything new or fancy. I like new fancy stuff for somethings, that why I use Debian Testing on my desktop. But when I depend on something to work reliably I use Debian Stable, it may be outdated, but it has been thoroughly tested and has proven its trustworthiness.
In Canada ballot counting is done under the supervision of representatives from all of the candidates, The ballots themselves are also kept for possible later re-counting if there is any question at all about the validity of the results.
That is a far cry from an online system where that would be almost impossible.
Well, no. It's pretty trivial to design a paper ballot system so that it's both fast to count and easy to monitor.
Open the voting place to public. Bring in the ballot box, open it, show that there's nothing inside, and seal it. Commence the voting. After voting ends, count the votes right there, in the voting place, in full view of everyone who wishes to watch - and, since this is the New Tens, also videotape it and upload the tape as well as the numbers. Next, tell the numbers to the regional center, which adds all the subtotals to get its own, again in full view of everyone and with the numbers uploaded on the Internet. Continue with as many layers of the hierarchy as needed, and you should get the final results overnight, and there is no part of this process which couldn't be watched over by anyone who wants.
Contrast this with computers, where it's just plain impossible to know what they're doing unless you already trust them, there are numerous examples of bugs going unnoticed in security-critical code for years, and actual real-life voting machines making complete mockery of security. Not to mention there's a huge incentive to hack them.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
There were primaries in Argentina last week, and I checked the count telegrams (one per booth) that someone from the gov', incredibly and marvelously, published to the public. It was a complete disaster, around 60% of the ones I checked have numbers that didn't match. Errors ranged from 1% to 12% of the total people who used that booth. I hadn't expected humans to be so failure-prone/corruptible.
The main argument against e-voting is the trust ladder. Conversations are usually like this: How can you trust X (e.g. the code is the same in all booths)? Because of Y. But how do you trust Y? Because of Z. And how..., endlessly. Now, instead, I'll just respond with "How can you trust people to count correctly?" or, better yet, "How can you trust people??". That's also the problem of having validation through both electronic and human means: there will be a *lot* of differences, who are you going to trust, the machine or the human? As soon as you pick a favorite, the other one is unnecessary. Clue: you can't trust people over machines on counting.
To go electronic or mixed, we just need full transparency and verification. Access to the source code for everyone. A VM to test the source code for ourselves. The SHA-1 of everything. During the election, the motherboard must be in an acrylic case. The ROMs/PICs must have a display that shows the SHA-1 of the current binary content. The candidates must be randomly distributed. Related to that, the vote and the issuer must be unmarried. Post-election verification of the vote. These are a few things that makes the process transparent. They'll leave out all the corporations, and it's a good thing: we wouldn't want to privatize an activity so vital for democracies.
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
That is presuming that a legitimate person is trying to access the legitimate site and perform the voting in a straightforward manner with good intent only voting once per election. There are so many other factors involved where identity can't be proven or other aspects that to me it boggles the mind that anybody would even consider on-line voting for anything critical.
Not if you're allowed to vote as many times as you like, but it only counts the last one. You can vote with someone watching, for the candidate that they want, take their money, and then vote again for the other candidate.
The real problem is the lack of transparency. In a democratic system, anyone should be able to verify the security and integrity of the electoral apparatus. With an online voting system, I doubt even 10% of the Slashdot audience could do it, let alone the general population. If you're trusting a magic black box to count your votes, then you may as well trust it to cast the votes in the first place.
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I just wrote a long-ass comment explaining how the Canadian General Elections are monitored by candidates representatives, but the cert for yro.slashdot.org changed and I lost my work.
No, a digital system does NOT have potential to be more secure than the current system for General Elections in Canada. There is no counting office. Ballots are counted on the spot.
Canada does not use fancy mechanical systems with chads. Voters are provided with pencils and put marks in a circle. It's simple and effective, and Canada gets voting results far faster than the US (and before you cite population size differences, the Elections Canada model would take the same amount of time even if you had 10x as many ridings). It's one single system and organization that handles federal voting for the entire country.
The key metric in the credibility of an electoral system is what is the maximum amount of fraud that can be committed with a small number of people. The paper ballot system is a remarkable piece of engineering when you stop and think about it: you have to be physically present to vote and the physical ballot is accounted for at all times, making ballot stuffing difficult to pull off on a large scale by a small number of people. The observation and counting of votes is distributed, likewise limiting the scope of an fraud.
In any electronic system, the vote moves through countless devices that could be corrupted internally or externally. Any attempt to identify fraud using statistical deviation from polling numbers now trusts the pollsters (whose numbers were wildly skewed in the final days of the last election) as much as the actual vote.
In any centralized counting system, is going to be IT team that the nation has to have absolute trust in: their intregrity, their flawless execution and their ability to detect any tampering.
Note that tampering not only covers changing the results and ballot stuffing, but also removing the veil of annonymity. In an increasingly polarized environment, being flagged in party's database as an enemy voter could easily come to affect how your career prospects in government and how you are treated by a beaurocracy
Finally, its not enough that the election is not tampered with, it needs to be provably tamper-free. It's not enough for the chief electoral officer to be satisfied with the results, the public needs to be confident that for systematic tampering to have occurred that it required a conspiracy too large to realisticly remain secret.