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In Theory And Practice, Why Internet-Based Voting Is a Bad Idea
A few countries, like Estonia, have gone for internet-based voting in national elections in a big way, and many others (like Ireland and Canada) have experimented with it. For Americans, with a presidential election approaching later this year, it's a timely issue: already, some states have come to allow at least certain forms of voting by internet. Proponents say online elections have compelling upsides, chief among them ease of participation. People who might not otherwise vote — in particular military personnel stationed abroad, but many others besides — are more and more reached by internet access. Online voting offers a way to keep the electoral process open to them. With online voting, too, there's no worry about conventional absentee ballots being lost or delayed in the postal system, either before reaching the voter or on the way back to be counted. The downsides, though, are daunting. According to RSA panelists David Jefferson and J. Alex Halderman, in fact, they're overwhelming. Speaking Thursday afternoon, the two laid out their case against e-voting.
(Read more for more, and look for a video interview with Halderman soon).
Jefferson and Halderman have impressive credentials as analysts and critics of internet voting. Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is chairman of the board of the Verified Voting Foundation, an NGO focused on promoting election integrity, and coauthor of a report that spurred the Department of Defense to withdraw for further consideration its then-plan for online voting, called SERVE, in 2004. Halderman takes a different, hands-on approach, demonstrating (along with his grad students at the University of Michigan) just how polling-station election machines and online voting system can be compromised. "I've probably hacked into and otherwise found vulnerabilities in more polling places than anyone else," he says.
Jefferson and Halderman are careful to define the key element of elections they're trying to expose as unfixably broken: namely, the delivery of completed ballots over the internet, whether that means a web app, email or some other conduit, without a voter-verified paper audit trail. Some kinds of election technology can move from the voting booth to the online world with less risk to the integrity of the election itself — for instance, distribution of blank ballots, or even online voter registration. "This isn't about keeping score of primaries, or gathering information about candidates, but actually voting," said Jefferson. The risk of hacked elections isn't just the possibility of political rivals trying to out-do each other, he said; ultimately, vulnerable election systems compromise national security and ballot secrecy. Even a few hundred votes may suffice to swing a House or Senate race, and that can have cascading consequences for control of elected bodies themselves. "Wherever there's a concentration of votes sufficient to swing a major election, there's a national security concern."
Why assume that election systems can be manipulated? And since paper ballots are not immune to questionable or downright fraudulent counts, why call out the electronic version in particular? In part, he says, because the structure of an electronic voting system is inherently complex, and because it's difficult if not impossible to roll back results if a compromise is suspected. Unlike paper ballots (and in the absence of a paper audit trail backing an electronic voting system), online vote gathering offers no good way to re-count. Jefferson laid out four major and overlapping areas of likely attacks on internet voting systems, any one of which could taint the results of an election.
First, individual voting jurisdictions are vulnerable to attack. (In the U.S., for federal elections, that essentially means counties, totaling more than 7000.) Even in local races, there can be billions of dollars at stake in high-population counties like Cook County or L.A. County. Vendors, both their networks and their source code, are also at risk. Assuming that even best efforts can keep the source code behind the handful of election-system vendors safe is a sucker's bet, Jefferson says. Even large companies with enormous security resources have been hacked, with source code a prime target, as happened to Google and 25 other firms in 2010 in a breach attributed to Chinese operatives. "Who knows if those [online voting software] vendors have already been penetrated? You wouldn't have any idea," said Jefferson.
Even if both local voting authorities and e-voting software vendors were themselves able to deflect all attacks, voters using an online voting system on their home or office PCs would still be at the mercy of the weakest link of the chain — the security of the machines available to them. Targeted malware could be used to present a different set of on-screen options to a voter than it actually sends back to the election counters. Because one of the protections of a secret ballot is to make available to voters proof that they voted but not how they voted, individuals who intended to selected candidate A would have no reason to know their vote was cast for candidate B instead. Malware could also simply vote without user interaction. It may not be election related, but a large fraction of PCs are already infected with some kind of malware, showing how big a problem this could be.
Finally, pure network attacks (or even errors) could disrupt the integrity of an election; exactly that kind of attack brought much of Estonia's online traffic to a halt in May 2007; lucky for Estonians that was not during an election, because Estonia is one of the few countries that has fully adopted online voting. Perhaps more chilling is the brief re-routing in April 2010 of 15 percent of the world's internet traffic through China.
Insecurity on the internet is itself a long-standing problem, so why the fuss? Unlike financial crime, such as credit card fraud, election fraud is hard to detect, and even harder to correct for, in large part because ballot secrecy is key to fair elections.
Voting is different. "Superficially, you'd think the transactions are very similar [to financial transactions], but underneath, all the issues are completely different. The privacy requirements are completely different, for example," says Jefferson. To prevent coerced voting, or simple vote selling, "You're allowed to tell anyone how you voted all you want, but you're not allowed to have proof of how you voted." Rolling back results to investigate suspected breaches is impossible, Jefferson says, without exposing the actual votes of individuals, at the very least to election officials.
Investigating financial crime online is the opposite; there, figuring out exactly who did what and when is the whole point, and the evidence is easy to find: if banking credentials are stolen, he said, "some account will go to zero." But in the case of elections, it's more likely that "the wrong people take office, and life goes on, and it's just never discovered."
And while no election fraud has yet been attributed to it, the trend is growing to institute the version of online voting that Jefferson calls "the worst idea ever" — voting by email. 33 states have modded their voting systems to accept in some cases PDFs of scanned ballots through ordinary e-mail to be entered by election workers. The numbers may be small (typically, this form of voting is limited to overseas voters, and in some cases voters are asked to acknowledge that their vote cannot be kept secret), but this allowance means that "e-mail voting is very widespread in the United States."
While Jefferson works through Verified Voting to influence policy makers to lay out the case against online voting, J. Alex Halderman, in his role as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, turns theory into reality: he and his students break election systems (devices as well as software) in the U.S. and abroad to show just how easily a malicious attacker could do the same. He offered as an example of several of the ways electronic voting can fail his successful attack on an internet voting plan (see this earlier Slashdot story) that was to have been implemented in 2010 in the District of Columbia. The District had, with Federal grant money, designed an online voting system and already put it nearly into production, and had mailed PINs and voter ID numbers to voters in anticipation.
To D.C.'s credit, Halderman says, the election officials at least asked first for advice from security experts around the country, and invited them to test it in advance of using the system in an actual election, though mere days before the system was to have gone live. "It's not every day you're invited to hack into government computers without the threat of jail hanging over your head," says Halderman, who was attracted to the challenge of investigating the system itself, as well as curiosity about how the D.C. officials would respond to a system compromise.
Though Halderman says the Ruby on Rails-based system was written in "generally clean code," his team discovered a shell injection vulnerability which gave them access to the D.C. system (see his full paper as a PDF for the details), and immediately set about playing.
Web apps tend to be brittle, says Halderman, and D.C.'s was no exception. "App frameworks are written in ways that allow small mistakes to have big consequences," especially when vulnerabilities are often widely disseminated soon after discovery, and not always by white hat hackers like him.
"The first thing we did was steal all the important stuff," he says — credentials, keys, and more. Simply snooping on the data wasn't enough to fully demonstrate the problems in the system, though; the team replaced the information on all of the ballots as well, replacing the actual candidates with ones of their choice, offering up options like Hall 9000, and Bender for school board, and forced client machines to play the University of Michigan's fight song, before erasing the logs that would have allowed their intrusion to be properly analyzed by the system's administrators.
Their attack also led them to gain full access to a terminal server on the same network, and after they'd hacked into this ("using the default password from the owner's manual," Halderman notes) they noticed there was evidence in the logs of other attacks. In particular, some of the attacks appearing to originate in Iran and in China. While Halderman doubts these represent an attack specifically on the DC system voting system, the evidence of such attacks is "an illustration of how vulnerable things are."
Halderman acknowledges that voting in person, especially by electronic means, is far from foolproof, but he joins Jefferson in saying that online voting is categorically worse, and suggests that everyone who takes an interest in security or the mechanics of democratic elections raise the issues of privacy and security. His conclusion and advice for election officials in the U.S.: Voting online is a bad idea, and it simply can't be fixed in the foreseeable future. All the security problems of e-voting machines at polling stations apply directly to internet voting, too, which means that anyone on Earth can attack an online election.
"If my vote is insecure, everyone else who lives under that same government is harmed by that."
(Read more for more, and look for a video interview with Halderman soon).
Jefferson and Halderman have impressive credentials as analysts and critics of internet voting. Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is chairman of the board of the Verified Voting Foundation, an NGO focused on promoting election integrity, and coauthor of a report that spurred the Department of Defense to withdraw for further consideration its then-plan for online voting, called SERVE, in 2004. Halderman takes a different, hands-on approach, demonstrating (along with his grad students at the University of Michigan) just how polling-station election machines and online voting system can be compromised. "I've probably hacked into and otherwise found vulnerabilities in more polling places than anyone else," he says.
Jefferson and Halderman are careful to define the key element of elections they're trying to expose as unfixably broken: namely, the delivery of completed ballots over the internet, whether that means a web app, email or some other conduit, without a voter-verified paper audit trail. Some kinds of election technology can move from the voting booth to the online world with less risk to the integrity of the election itself — for instance, distribution of blank ballots, or even online voter registration. "This isn't about keeping score of primaries, or gathering information about candidates, but actually voting," said Jefferson. The risk of hacked elections isn't just the possibility of political rivals trying to out-do each other, he said; ultimately, vulnerable election systems compromise national security and ballot secrecy. Even a few hundred votes may suffice to swing a House or Senate race, and that can have cascading consequences for control of elected bodies themselves. "Wherever there's a concentration of votes sufficient to swing a major election, there's a national security concern."
Why assume that election systems can be manipulated? And since paper ballots are not immune to questionable or downright fraudulent counts, why call out the electronic version in particular? In part, he says, because the structure of an electronic voting system is inherently complex, and because it's difficult if not impossible to roll back results if a compromise is suspected. Unlike paper ballots (and in the absence of a paper audit trail backing an electronic voting system), online vote gathering offers no good way to re-count. Jefferson laid out four major and overlapping areas of likely attacks on internet voting systems, any one of which could taint the results of an election.
First, individual voting jurisdictions are vulnerable to attack. (In the U.S., for federal elections, that essentially means counties, totaling more than 7000.) Even in local races, there can be billions of dollars at stake in high-population counties like Cook County or L.A. County. Vendors, both their networks and their source code, are also at risk. Assuming that even best efforts can keep the source code behind the handful of election-system vendors safe is a sucker's bet, Jefferson says. Even large companies with enormous security resources have been hacked, with source code a prime target, as happened to Google and 25 other firms in 2010 in a breach attributed to Chinese operatives. "Who knows if those [online voting software] vendors have already been penetrated? You wouldn't have any idea," said Jefferson.
Even if both local voting authorities and e-voting software vendors were themselves able to deflect all attacks, voters using an online voting system on their home or office PCs would still be at the mercy of the weakest link of the chain — the security of the machines available to them. Targeted malware could be used to present a different set of on-screen options to a voter than it actually sends back to the election counters. Because one of the protections of a secret ballot is to make available to voters proof that they voted but not how they voted, individuals who intended to selected candidate A would have no reason to know their vote was cast for candidate B instead. Malware could also simply vote without user interaction. It may not be election related, but a large fraction of PCs are already infected with some kind of malware, showing how big a problem this could be.
Finally, pure network attacks (or even errors) could disrupt the integrity of an election; exactly that kind of attack brought much of Estonia's online traffic to a halt in May 2007; lucky for Estonians that was not during an election, because Estonia is one of the few countries that has fully adopted online voting. Perhaps more chilling is the brief re-routing in April 2010 of 15 percent of the world's internet traffic through China.
Insecurity on the internet is itself a long-standing problem, so why the fuss? Unlike financial crime, such as credit card fraud, election fraud is hard to detect, and even harder to correct for, in large part because ballot secrecy is key to fair elections.
Voting is different. "Superficially, you'd think the transactions are very similar [to financial transactions], but underneath, all the issues are completely different. The privacy requirements are completely different, for example," says Jefferson. To prevent coerced voting, or simple vote selling, "You're allowed to tell anyone how you voted all you want, but you're not allowed to have proof of how you voted." Rolling back results to investigate suspected breaches is impossible, Jefferson says, without exposing the actual votes of individuals, at the very least to election officials.
Investigating financial crime online is the opposite; there, figuring out exactly who did what and when is the whole point, and the evidence is easy to find: if banking credentials are stolen, he said, "some account will go to zero." But in the case of elections, it's more likely that "the wrong people take office, and life goes on, and it's just never discovered."
And while no election fraud has yet been attributed to it, the trend is growing to institute the version of online voting that Jefferson calls "the worst idea ever" — voting by email. 33 states have modded their voting systems to accept in some cases PDFs of scanned ballots through ordinary e-mail to be entered by election workers. The numbers may be small (typically, this form of voting is limited to overseas voters, and in some cases voters are asked to acknowledge that their vote cannot be kept secret), but this allowance means that "e-mail voting is very widespread in the United States."
While Jefferson works through Verified Voting to influence policy makers to lay out the case against online voting, J. Alex Halderman, in his role as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, turns theory into reality: he and his students break election systems (devices as well as software) in the U.S. and abroad to show just how easily a malicious attacker could do the same. He offered as an example of several of the ways electronic voting can fail his successful attack on an internet voting plan (see this earlier Slashdot story) that was to have been implemented in 2010 in the District of Columbia. The District had, with Federal grant money, designed an online voting system and already put it nearly into production, and had mailed PINs and voter ID numbers to voters in anticipation.
To D.C.'s credit, Halderman says, the election officials at least asked first for advice from security experts around the country, and invited them to test it in advance of using the system in an actual election, though mere days before the system was to have gone live. "It's not every day you're invited to hack into government computers without the threat of jail hanging over your head," says Halderman, who was attracted to the challenge of investigating the system itself, as well as curiosity about how the D.C. officials would respond to a system compromise.
Though Halderman says the Ruby on Rails-based system was written in "generally clean code," his team discovered a shell injection vulnerability which gave them access to the D.C. system (see his full paper as a PDF for the details), and immediately set about playing.
Web apps tend to be brittle, says Halderman, and D.C.'s was no exception. "App frameworks are written in ways that allow small mistakes to have big consequences," especially when vulnerabilities are often widely disseminated soon after discovery, and not always by white hat hackers like him.
"The first thing we did was steal all the important stuff," he says — credentials, keys, and more. Simply snooping on the data wasn't enough to fully demonstrate the problems in the system, though; the team replaced the information on all of the ballots as well, replacing the actual candidates with ones of their choice, offering up options like Hall 9000, and Bender for school board, and forced client machines to play the University of Michigan's fight song, before erasing the logs that would have allowed their intrusion to be properly analyzed by the system's administrators.
Their attack also led them to gain full access to a terminal server on the same network, and after they'd hacked into this ("using the default password from the owner's manual," Halderman notes) they noticed there was evidence in the logs of other attacks. In particular, some of the attacks appearing to originate in Iran and in China. While Halderman doubts these represent an attack specifically on the DC system voting system, the evidence of such attacks is "an illustration of how vulnerable things are."
Halderman acknowledges that voting in person, especially by electronic means, is far from foolproof, but he joins Jefferson in saying that online voting is categorically worse, and suggests that everyone who takes an interest in security or the mechanics of democratic elections raise the issues of privacy and security. His conclusion and advice for election officials in the U.S.: Voting online is a bad idea, and it simply can't be fixed in the foreseeable future. All the security problems of e-voting machines at polling stations apply directly to internet voting, too, which means that anyone on Earth can attack an online election.
"If my vote is insecure, everyone else who lives under that same government is harmed by that."
ugh... blackroll
Mark Anthony Collins
It is pretty obvious that electronic voting requires both anonymity (to remove fear of retributions) and accountability (to remove fraud).
About the only way to do that is to issue each person to have a pass-phrase coupled pair of electronic "vote cards" that is non-identifying. It would require the present of both cards and the pass-phrase to vote. If you lost one card, you can use the other (plus the pass phrase) to invalidate the lost card (and any recently casted votes.) If you lost both cards, you are SOL. No vote for you.
So, you just can't have a reliable electronic voting system.
You can't have both privacy and accountability over the Internet. You need accountability to ensure that votes are counted correctly and that nobody votes more than once. You need privacy because people have to be able to feel safe voting against individuals or groups who have the means to assert unlawful control over a particular jurisdiction. I can't see how you could ensure both privacy and accountability through purely electronic means.
Simple example: I could easily commit fraud by submitting a vote for my wife if I knew she hadn't voted yet. Complex example: I could hack the voter database with ten minutes until the polls close... find out everybody who hadn't already voted... and use a botnet to cast their votes a particular way. Slightly less Complex example: I could use a botnet to cast everybody's vote a particular way within the first 17 seconds of the polls opening -- Election Over... Landslide Victory for Kodos!
Voting is already easy, just check some boxes on the form the mail you and stick it back in the mail box. If you cant handle that, perhaps you shouldn't be voting?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Over the last few decades, American states have tried one thing after another to "make voting easier" in an attempt to increase participation (and, usually, to sway elections by increasing the number of voters aligned with one major party or the other). Two of the most significant have been the passage of "motor voter" laws (you can register to vote when you get or renew your driver's license) and "vote by mail". However none of these have really worked. People (like me) who are inclined to vote will do so, whether by mail or by traveling to an assigned polling place. The majority of American voters, though, simply don't seem engaged in the process.
I'd be all for e-voting with the right technology (secure and economical), but it's just about convenience for me. But I'll vote in any case - I have no illusions it'd increase participation.
#DeleteChrome
1. Identify areas where [opposing party] voters are likely to outnumber [supported party] voters.
2. DDoS routers / MITM block voting site for those areas.
3. Power.
No, I didn't miss a step.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The are no downsides to voting online. There is no one that would try to tamper the online voting without making it obvious it is a fraud. I mean Russia would have an interest to it, but they have better chance of buying off the main parties to actually putting their candidates in power.
People's home computers are an awfully weak link in the chain. TFA mentions it, but I think it bears repeating: an embarrassing number of US home computers are infected with some sort of malware. I've read estimates as high as 60% of all computers.
I won't trust most strange computers enough to log into my Gmail account (even using two-factor authentication), unless they live under the control of either me or a very short list of other people I know and trust to keep a clean system. So obviously there's not a chance in hell I'd trust those malware lockers with the keys to our government.
Porquoi?
No, the problem (among many, many others, though I think this is the biggest) is that there's no way to provide a secret, anonymous ballot. With online voting, parties could reward those voting for them, or bosses could require that their employees vote for the "company party". Verification of a user's vote is as easy as making them log in and vote in your presence, on your computer. Hell, a company could just require that you hand over your login and vote for you. Outside of physical presence, how do you suggest these problems be worked around?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
It's not hackers is the people makeing the voteing systems that are in the best place to fix them.
--If only we had some kind of central computer for voting... Something like... MULTIVAC ?
/ Asimov fan
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
2.) The problem is not stopping cheating, but detecting it.
3) Which clearly illustrates the problem with using internet voting.
The most interesting thing about internet/computer technology is the huge decrease in the number of humans necessary to do work. An executive with good words skills doesn't need a secretary pool.
Similarly the real problem with the internet/computer based voting is that now a small group of hackers can cause MAJOR election fraud with a far fewer number of conspirators. The traces are much harder to find, or worse, to prove.
It is not the ease of cheating that is the problem, but instead the difficulty of detecting it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
All practical methods for voting are vulnerable to fraud. Some methods, like paper ballots, provide better resistance to systemic fraud, others provide better resistance to small-scale fraud. Systemic fraud is the greater risk, by a huge margin. Vote by mail is vulnerable to manipulation on a household level, but is very hard to systemically defraud. For example, a household tyrant might steel the vote of other household members and intimidate them into silence, but this same villain would have a hard time stealing the votes of neighboring households. With electronic voting, whomever hires the best hackers can steal the election.
I've done most of my voting in the US State of Oregon. In Oregon all voting is done by mail. All registered voters receive a ballot with an anonymity envelope. You fill out the ballot, put your ballot in the anonymity envelope, put that in the envelope with your name on it, sign the outer ballot, and send it off in the mail. All the paper ballots are there for future physical counting, and you can check whether your vote was received. There is no election day voting, except to drop your last-minute ballot off at the Post Office before polls close. Voting is done by mail days or weeks in advance. Vote-by-mail is a secure, effective, and practical voting method, and is virtually immune to the sorts of systemic fraud that plague electronic voting.
I encourage other Slashdot readers to support vote by mail in their locale.
Well, what they do in Sweden for voting is still old-school paper ballots... in fact, to a former North American it is almost a bit scary as the political parties are allowed to hang around the polling stations handing out polling slips... yes, you use a specific polling slip for the party you want to vote for, and the well-organized and well-funded parties will sometimes send out the voting slips ahead of time! What they also have in Sweden is a national ID system - everyone has an ID number that is used for everything - taxes, healthcare, picking up packages from the post office - everything! And tied to that system are the major bank systems, many of which us a Bank-ID token which you load on your computer to allow online tax submissions, health insurance claims, parental leave (hello 480 days paid leave!), etc. The online part of the ID validation is based on either a single-use scratch bankcard or a keypad that you insert your bankcard into, which you enter a validation code, your PIN, and then it returns a validation code. So, my guess is that switching to e-voting in Sweden would be a breeze, and the security would definitely be strong. Now that I think about it, no idea really why there is no e-voting here yet - heck, you can file your taxes by SMS here!
sig? what sig? i didn't see any sig...
In my view an important property of any ballot is that the great majority of people must be able to understand the whole process. That's the only way for people to have confidence that there's a reasonable chance of detecting and preventing rigging. It also rules out pretty well any form of electronic voting. Internet security involves very serious maths that very few people can handle.
Around here we still write numbers in squares on pieces of paper and drop them in the ballot box. It works. The cost is tiny compared to the cost of government. I just can't see the advantages of more automation being worth the risk.
People might think it weird that an IT guy would have this luddite view but I think, on the contrary, I'm better placed than most to know what could go wrong.
You fundamentally misunderstand the issues.
> The difficulties of coding a secure voting system are no more difficult than those of coding a secure debit or credit card payment transaction, and subject to EXACTLY the same risks.
No... individual financial transactions can be verified by both parties after the fact (on your transaction record). Individual voting results cannot be verified by either [to prevent coercion, vote-selling, and reprisals]. Instead, aggregate voting results must be verifiable without tying them to an individual voter. It is a completely different problem.
> The bigger issue is that every single electronic voting platform I've heard of to date has been a closed-source solution, uninspected, unverified, and unaudited. With a proper open source solution that could be inspected and vetted by the hundreds of thousands of programmers out there who'd be interested in finding flaws, I've no doubt a proper solution could be implemented.
Open source platforms are meaningless in voting because you cannot prove that the machine is running the software that you that claim it is. Vet the software all that you want. It doesnt prevent a vendor from silently installing a different version into a virtual machine.
I prefer to vote projects than parties. The political/judicial/exec system is a huge Ponzi scheme, where the taxpayer has to pay and the politicians and friends collect the monies.
Push a button, and the recount is done.
That's the point; it's not really a "recount" by any meaningful definition of the word.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I agree that this is a hard problem and that there are many exposed 'weak links.'
But I don't think it is insolvable.
If someone were to offer $1 million to the best proposed solution, and a handful of $100,000 runner up prizes, the zillion smart people who read /. and are underemployed would come up with some great solutions.
There are some tricks that can be borrowed from current election checking. For example, look carefully at all of the user statistics -- compare to prior elections, registration stats, time of day, IP addresses, user PK certificates, comparison to other, "similar," voting domains, etc. This type of non-privacy-invading audit is good at identifying problems down to about 1% - 3% of the voting population. A hacker, trying something for the first time, has a good chance of getting located this way.
Another trick is sample audits -- a bit like "exit polls," where a fraction of voters are asked how the voted. This can be viewed as privacy invasion, but it happens all the time, now, so there is really no policy change. Again, this can find anomalies down to about 3%.
Another trick is post-election audits of PK certificates. Better late than never.
Another tool is to carefully monitor internet traffic to look for anomalies, particularly DOS attempts.
Another tool is to provide "hardened" computers that voters can use, at places smilar to today's polling locations -- senior centers, gov't offices. These machines have had some type of security audit. And yes -- this approach has its own risks, I know. I would suggest mixing this approach with user's own computers.
I know people want to use web browsers, but I would not do that. Voters have to download a totally dedicated app (see open source, below), and each app has PK signature.
Another trick is give some users hardware keys, like paypal and RSA use. Even if only 1% of voters have a hardware key this provides a very high degree of polling information and that can spot fraud down to a small fraction of a percent.
And finally, all software should be open source. Period. As pointed out repeatedly, relying on secrecy is pretty much a guarantee of breech.
I am not offering a solution here. I am merely pointing out that there are methods and tools that can be used as a starting point for a real solution.
Don't say a problem is insolvable until you have tried seriously to solve it.
And finally, no voting system is 100.000% perfect. Get over it. For example, no system prevents buying votes. No system prevents voters from lying. Build the best system you can.
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
You aren't understanding the point of a recount.
The idea is that you can re-analyze the data (ie: people's votes) more rigorously, so you are 100% sure that the guy elected is the guy most people voted for. That can't happen with electronic data because the data is the count, and no recount will change the result. If, for example, the printer screwed up and put candidate a (call him Stalin), on the line the scanners counted for candidate b (call him Hitler), the recount will prove that, and Stalin will be elected instead of Hitler.
If the same thing happens with a non-paper ballot of any kind the recount is worthless because there's no way to find out that the election machine was displaying votes for Stalin and counting them for Hitler.
Internet voting compounds the problem by adding a bunch of totally non-secured terminals, where you could easily install malware that counted every vote as a vote for Hitler.
I spent over ten years working the polls on election day. Generally speaking, it's a long, slow, boring job, but somebody has to do it. However, I always hoped for a small turnout, not a large one because that increased the odds that the people voting knew something about the issues.
You see, the informed voters will turn out for every election because they actually care about the issues. When you have a large turnout, it's because large numbers of ignorant people have been excited by a sound-bite, a slogan or a last-minute piece of mud-slinging and turned out to vote their emotions, even if, as sometimes happens, it's against their own long-term interests. I'm opposed to anything that makes voting easier than it already is, simply because it makes impulse voting more of a factor. Do you really want elections won by the candidate who came up with the most attention grabbing, last minute soundbite? I certainly don't!
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I don't know how it's done in Arizona, but in California, you're allowed to have somebody help you fill out the ballot if you're unable to do it yourself. If nothing else, one of the precinct workers will assist you. Of course, most blind people probably have permanent absentee ballot status and take care of it on their own, but there's already a way to let them vote at the polls if needed.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
In Michigan the way the handicapped vote is simple: they bring a friend they trust who verifies their ballot is right. It's technically not a secret ballot, but so far it's worked fine.
As for multiple languages, I think you don't understand the law very well. Russians, Poles, Germans, and French people do not have any legal right to demand ballots in their native tongues. Only Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Alaskan Natives do; and they only get them in jurisdictions where they make up a large portion of the population (10,000 people or 5% of the population, whichever is lower). New York State, for example, has Counties that print ballots in Spanish, Korean and Chinese. I wouldn't be surprised if there're more languages in Arizona, for the simple reason that AZ has a lot of Indian reservations which have populations speaking a Native American language.
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There's a running joke with World of Warcraft accounts, where a reasonably sophisticated group of mostly Chinese hackers constantly tries to log in as you. There's been phishing emails (please fill out this survey / you've won a free in-game whatever / your account is in danger of being disabled if you don't confirm you are you), there's phishing whispers in game (player to player direct communication), there's phishing shouts in trade chat (a channel visible to a very large percent of a server at any given time). They post bogus links on forums. Once you follow a link, it's all about exploiting your browser or just fooling you to typing stuff in. You can have an 'authenticator', one of those pseudo-random d00ders that gives you a number, so that stops you from being vulnerable to direct keylogging, unless there is an active agent waiting for that very moment (which has ALSO happened).
This is for WOW GOLD. Imagine what it will be like if it is for THE FATE OF NATIONS.
In addition to all the crap listed above, the amount of manipulation a logged in hacker has to do to gain anything out of your WoW account is actually substantial. It is not substantial to have a tiny thing listed that changes your vote from Bob to Alice, while still telling you that you voted for Bob. Whatever you add to work around this is also trivial to get around for your hacker. Do you send a confirmation email? He sends a fake one, after redirecting yours. Whatever you come up with, there's a a way around it, because YOUR CLIENT IS HACKED and THAT WILL HAPPEN. WoW players are at least reasonably nerdy, but in my guild I've seen a masters in EE get hacked (he trusted a binary, don't say you never have), and I've seen a very consistently clever man with get hacked (he doesn't know how exactly, but it's probably when he accessed from a hotel or something). Let me be brief: the dumbest American gets a damned vote, and it is HIS RIGHT that it get cast correctly, and he- or his army of other mouth breathers that access his machine, such as his also dumb wife and kids, will definitely click on whatever rabbit with the pancakes to ensure his machine is thoroughly 0wzzrd months ahead of time, and he'll think he voted for Bob, and he'll cast a vote for Alice, and then democracy breaks even more than it already is.
If they give you online voting, your vote is literally meaningless.
And this is before all the voter fraud that gets EASIER but happens already.
And this isn't the Demopublicans or the Republicrats ensuring their tool gets in office, this could be foreign interests taking over.
Online voting is the worst thing for Democracy, worse even than a dictator covered in blood with heads on spikes.
No-one mentions this, and it always annoys me. Aside from the software failings, there's an obvious systematic one caused by internet voting at home.
Elections should be secret to avoid the sale or compulsion of votes. So you go to a secured place and vote in a booth so that no-one can tell how you voted (and try not to think too hard about those tracking numbers on your slips, but hey). You cannot leave an identifying mark on your ballot - sign a ballot, for instance, and it is invalid and not counted.
Vote at home, or postally, or by proxy, and secrecy is lost. You can sell your proxy to someone. You can have someone watch you while you vote. This may not matter to you, but hypothetically (and there have been cases of this) if you live in a less-than-free country your employer or your commanding officer might check your ballot to ensure you voted patriotically.
*This* should be sufficient reason to insist on voting at a controlled location. If you worry about people being simply too idle to vote - or prevented from attending - then you should go the way of Belgium or Australia, where you must turn out and vote on pain of being fined, even if you then choose to spoil your ballot. But you should never neglect the principle of secrecy in the name of expediency.
Because.. you don't get a different answer every time?
Pretty much, yeah. Specifically, if you got a wrong vote count the first time, you will get the same (still wrong) vote count the next time.
Suppose you go to an ATM to check your account balance, and it says you have a thousand bucks less in your account than your financial records say you should, so you go to the bank and ask them to check your account for any unauthorized transactions. Now suppose the teller just pulls up your account on screen, glances at the account balance, and says, "Looks like the ATM's right." Would you consider that a satisfactory resolution to the problem?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Let's assume we create the perfect, impossible to hack and manipulate voting machine, completely open, auditable and whatnot to address all those issues. Still one thing remains: It requires special skill to audit the process.
Today, it's fairly easy to debunk someone calling fraud. Here's the paper ballots, count your heart out. Count again and again, it takes a fairly low skill level to do that. You need to be able to identify the intent of the voter (i.e. play "where is the X") and you need to be able to count. Even reading and writing is not a required skill. I'm fairly confident the average 3 year old could accomplish that feat, at least to some degree. And if all he does is make ticks and then compare the amount of ticks made.
To audit a voting machine, you need a fairly specialized and quite high level of skill. This cannot be done by your average 3 year old, hell, it cannot be done by the average adult. A tiny, insignificant portion of the population is able to do that. You'd have to trust those people if they say that the voting machine isn't cheating.
But why should you?
I fear a loss of trust in the democratic process. Even ignoring conspiracy theories where all the security experts are out to bring down humanity by collectively manipulating the machines and keeping it under wraps, it is not possible anymore to eliminate without a doubt any allegations of rigging elections.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is not that any single problem is impossible, but that certain problems are fundamentally at odds with one another such that solving certain pairs of problems are either impossible or nearly so.
Your solution lacks verifiability. Because the server does not verify that your vote was accepted, there is no way to determine whether your vote counted. This makes it a fundamentally unacceptable solution.
It is fundamentally impossible for an election system to be simultaneously verifiable and secret (impossible to prove how you voted) unless you either have physical security (a private voting booth) or allow voters to change their votes (making it impossible to prove that a given vote was the last one you cast). However, making it possible to change votes makes it necessary to store the voter's identity in the database, which in turn breaks the anonymity requirement. You end up chasing your tail, with the fix for each problem breaking something else.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I would NEVER be in favor of online voting. It's too easy to hack the system, no matter how much security you put in place. Yes, paper ballots can be forged, but, there is a PAPER TRAIL. I do not like the argument that "it allows for greater participation" because it makes it easier to vote. Listen Jack...voting is a precious RIGHT. Get up off your lazy bum a** and vote.