Prof. J. Alex Halderman Tells Us Why Internet-Based Voting Is a Bad Idea (Video)

On March 2, 2012, Timothy wrote about University of Michigan Professor J. Alex Halderman and his contention that there is no way to have secure voting over the Internet using current technology. In this video, Alex explains what he meant and tells us about an experiment (that some might call a prank) he and his students did back in 2010, when they (legally) hacked a Washington D.C. online voting pilot project. This is, of course, a "professional driver on closed course; do not attempt" kind of thing. If you mess with voting software without permission, you might suddenly find the FBI coming through your door at 4 a.m., so please don't do it.

Comments

Not a "bad idea"

[Sarten-X]

No, it's a good idea with bad implementations, and little chance of those implementations improving. Using it for an actual election of consequence at this point would be bad. Let's not assume that everything that doesn't work in the foreseeable future is inherently bad, okay?

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the cost of securing such a system (which has to be accessible to the general populace) is very very high compared to the cost of compromising such a system.

Anyway, I dislike any system where it is not mandatory to enforce the privacy of the voter. One of the main reasons we all have to go into a single person booth is to prevent someone who can *tell* how we voted influencing our vote. This could be as nasty as a someone with a crowbar or insidious as the patriarch of the family making his family vote in the same way.

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[lfourrier]

It's a BAD IDEA!

Every vote that doesn't occur in a supervised place can be sold, extorted, etc... That include correspondance voting, of course, but usually for small numbers unlikely to change the result.
The fact that the transmission is not reliable is nothing compared to the whole mess of distance voting.

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[errandum]

The big problem, unlike the story suggests, it's not security. It is the fact that you cannot guarantee that the vote is coming from whoever is registered. Anyone with a login and password can usurp your vote, so you'll never have a doubt free election ever again.

On the other hand, I do believe that you can design a secure system for voting, as long as you can guarantee that the machines were not tampered with.

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[errandum]

On the other hand it seems to be unable to weed out the highly motivated idiots. There are a whole lot of very brilliant people that I actually know that don't vote, simply because their vote does not matter. The blind idiots will outnumber you and decide the course of every single election.

If you stopped to think about it, you'd see it's true. It's the big flaw of the democratic system.

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[oobayly]

Yup, it's definitely a bad idea. It also interferes with my idea of weighted ballots:

A series of (simple unambiguous) questions acompany the ballot.
During counting, the quiz is marked, and that vote is weighted using the result (you get one mark for turning up)

This way you're not disenfranchising anyone as their vote will count. It just means that people who understand what they're voting have a greater say as to what goes on. I'm sick to death of seeing knuckle dragging Neanderthals (who have voted the way their television told them to) have as much say as myself (if I don't understand what the vote is on, I'll make sure I read up on it).

Point in question: The alternative vote refurendum in the UK. The number of people I heard saying they'd vote no for completely false reasons was ridiculous. Fine, if you don't agree. Just make sure you know the facts first.

Online voting would just make it easier to cheat.

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[nedlohs]

"using current technology".

The title can't contain everything, that's why there's also a summary/intro.

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[Hatta]

I suppose you don't remember why poll tests were a bad idea. Why should the vote of a wealthy land owner count more than that of a newly enfranchised former slave?

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[TheLink]

Smart people have thought of how to do it already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s

BUT to me this does not address one of the major requirements for a practical voting system: Convincing enough of the losers that they have lost. If you cannot convince the losers that you have lost you may end up with civil wars or riots. One of the main reasons for having such elections is so that people can choose leaders without having so much violence involved.

With a decent ballot box system with physical counts, you don't need to be a genius to know when you have lost fair and square (at least within acceptable levels of error/malice). They can see the votes being counted in front of their eyes and that they are losing most votes. And that the ballot boxes started empty and never moved from the room from the point the voting started till they ended and were sealed - all in front of observers (including them).

With the physical system cheating is done via postal votes, remote locations with few observers, and/or behind closed doors. If the counting is done secretly behind closed doors, you can be certain that massive scale cheating is going on.

With most forms of electronic voting it is harder to convince people that they have lost fair and square. Most popular forms of electronic voting are like "closed door" counts, and for that reason alone they should not be trusted nor used.

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[FhnuZoag]

I think more importantly, while things could have gone wrong, the difficulties in the lunar landers were not *malicious* in nature. It's easy to make a system 'probably' safe in an environment of random threats, but in an environment that is actually actively hostile, that unlikely event of failure would rapidly become a certainty.

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[0123456]

I think more importantly, while things could have gone wrong, the difficulties in the lunar landers were not *malicious* in nature.

Indeed. There were some horrible bugs in the AGC software which were only found in space, but they didn't matter that much because no-one was actively trying to attack the system so they could be worked around.

For example, if I remember correctly on Apollo 7 someone accidentally ran the pre-launch attitude alignment program in orbit, so the AGC thought it was back on the launch pad and they had to reset it to the correct configuration. Simple fix: don't let it run after launch in the next release, but potentially lethal if it happened at the wrong time in the flight (like, say, the middle of re-entry).

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[Attila Dimedici]

Put a 512bit key, one for each person in America and hand them out with a USB reader, one per household.

So, all I have to do to vote as you is get my hands on your key? Maybe by forcing you to turn it over to me as a condition of employment (unstated of course). Or even simpler I buy them off of people who can't be bothered to vote.

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[RCL]

Wrong. You _could_ vote on issues you want to vote on, ald let professional politicians vote on stuff you dont care or dont know about.

Now there's a question how your vote would compare to professional politician's one. If they are of equal "parity", then professional politicians' decision will be easily overridden by population of a small village, if not - how exactly do they compare?

but direct democracy is only going to result in widespread populism.

How is it different than representative democracy? It isnt.

In representative democracy, it is still possible to make unpopular decisions. And this is sometimes needed (e.g. if there was a direct democracy inside my body, I would never go to gym - the fat would have voted that decision down and won by its sheer weight :-) ).

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[Attila Dimedici]

Nothing, but currently if you buy votes there is some difficulty in confirming that the person you are paying voted the way you paid them to. Of course the way around that is to have them vote absentee, which probably has a lot to do with why certain organizations and politicians are constantly pushing to make it easier to vote absentee (I will leave it up to you to read the news and figure out which party has an interest in enabling voter fraud and a disinterest in any law which might make it more difficult).

Re:Not a "bad idea"

[fgouget]

But WHY would it be so expensive? See here is what I've never gotten

It's not expensive like a luxury car is expensive. It's expensive because despite decades of research verifiable anonymous electronic voting, and even more so internet voting, is an unsolved problem.

and maybe I'm missing something but we've had smart cards for a pretty damned long time, so why not use them? Put a 512bit key, one for each person in America and hand them out with a USB reader, one per household.

What could go wrong you ask?

First distributing hundreds of millions of keys is no small undertaking. The government would have to keep a database of the public keys assigned to every voter. It would have to handle lost keys: invalidate them and reassign a new one. If it's a per-state affair then they would have to handle people moving out of state, and back in, etc.

The government would obviously use your public key so they can decode and tally your encrypted vote. That also means the government computer would know exactly how you voted (and have cryptographic proof of it). At that point you have absolutely no proof that they wouldn't store that information elsewhere. It also means anyone hacking the system like these researchers did would also know how you voted (and could resell that information or your public key).

With the kind of access these researchers had, another attack would be to decode your ballot and discard it before it's even been tallied if you voted the wrong way.

Someone could impersonate you and claim to have lost their voting key. Your key would then be invalidated thus making you unable to vote. But with access to the server another attack would be to change your public key in the government database. You would then be unable to vote until the database has been restored from backup (likely after the election). A variant would allow them to replace your ballot with a new one signed by the corresponding private key. Given that you would not be allowed to verify your vote anyway (to prevent the sale of votes), you would have no way to know this happened and no chance to complain. Even if you did you would have no proof of the hack.

If someone gets hold of the smart card, USB key or CD containing your private key, then they would be able to vote in your place. They could also simply steal or confiscate it to prevent you from voting.

Heck, you present generating secure keys as if it was something trivial. But even that can easily go wrong: you suggest a 512 bit key but a 768 bit RSA key has already been broken, just see the Debian SSL/SSH key debacle, the recent discovery that about 2 out of 1000 RSA keys is a dud. Then there's all the encryption systems that have been cracked over the years like WEP, CSS, etc. What makes you think the encryption used for your vote will fare any better. And more to the point, how will a layman be able to verify by himself that it will?

Another bad solution to an imaginary problem...

[Theophany]

Why is Internet-based voting required anyway? Surely this is a great idea to get those basement dwellers out of the house at least once every four years. There are already systems in place to allow those confined to their homes due to medical circumstances to participate in their democracy. Whether it's done tomorrow or in 30 years time, people will still find ways to break the system. Net result? A colossal waste of money over something that is already in place and works as well as can be expected.

Re:Another bad solution to an imaginary problem...

[betterunixthanunix]

In the USA, we are lucky if a simple majority of people vote at all. Internet based voting might help with that, since it takes some of the effort out of voting.

Re:Another bad solution to an imaginary problem...

[vlm]

In the USA, we are lucky if a simple majority of people vote at all. Internet based voting might help with that, since it takes some of the effort out of voting.

Actually that's a bug not a feature. Billions of dollars spent on election advertising (by people expecting to be rewarded after the election) and half the population is resistant enough (or intelligent enough) to not bother voting. I can't imagine the politicals being happy about those people being enfranchised, why instead of simple minded TV commercials they'd actually have to win them over using logic, or purchase their votes with programs, or ... How exactly do you control people without simpleminded emotional arguments anyway?

No the real feature is the death of democracy and replacement with feudalism. A "Large Enough" fraction of the population will be doing this online voting under the close eye of their supervisor at work, or their church pastor, or their professor at school, or maybe the landlord's office, or probation officer's office, or their spouse... It's kind of a stealth poll tax such that "the more important people" will be enforcing who votes for who.

Sure, it is true, that technically you can vote for anyone you want, with this new internet voting... all you need is no job or independently wealthy, atheist, non-student, property owner (as opposed to renter), clean criminal justice record, and be an orphan with no immediate family or friends. Everyone else has to vote for who the local alpha male says to vote for.

I can't say as its really going to change anything, because both parties are two sides of the same coin with different marketing messages.

Re:Another bad solution to an imaginary problem...

[vlm]

The effort in voting is not getting off the couch and hauling you fat, lazy ass to a polling station. Rather it is in educating yourself on issues, forming your own opinions on those issues, examining the candidates opinions of those issues, and then communicating with those candidates both by voting for your preferences and by maintaining a dialog with those actually elected to office.

You've gotta be kidding. Its all about who looks better on TV, who is a better public speaker, who tells better lies, which 1%er passes himself off more like a 99%er, which candidate is compatible with my personal selection of imaginary man in the sky, and by far the most significant reason is to vote for the party your male ancestors supported, or depending on family dynamic and youthful rebelliousness, vote for the party your male ancestors did not support.

The other part is 90% of the population blindly follows either party right into hell, only the votes and beliefs of about 10% "swing voters" matter. So you've gotta be crazy enough to get the 45% of your party to nominate you (Palin, Santorum, heck practically every R after Reagan in my opinion) yet be normal enough to get the sane 10% swing voters fooled into voting for you. So its a multiple personality contest, the winner is the one who acts the nuttiest of the nuts to the 45% while simultaneously appearing normal to the 10%. That's about it.

Finally there's a large fraction of the sway voters who simply vote pocketbook... Am I happy today (got some from the wife, sports team won last night, etc) well then the incumbent wins. Am I unhappy today (wife made me sleep on couch, sports team lost last night, etc) well then the challenger wins. Probably 9% of the swing voters vote this way. Smart idea for the R to oppose contraception, no pill = no sex = unhappy 9% swing voters = incumbent fail

Re:Another bad solution to an imaginary problem...

[Dan East]

I would assume that if a person can take a few minutes out of one day a year to travel to a voting station and place a vote, that they will at least have some idea of what is on the ballet and what they are voting for. If a person can vote online without having to even bother going to the effort to leave their house, then I think there's a good chance more "random" voting will occur, or at least votes placed with even less consideration of the issues or actual candidate.

I'm not saying that sort of totally uninformed voting isn't going on already, but that it would get even worse.

Re:Another bad solution to an imaginary problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

I said the effort in voting is in educating yourself on issues, forming your own opinions on those issues, examining the candidates opinions of those issues, and then communicating with those candidates both by voting for your preferences and by maintaining a dialog with those actually elected to office.

I did not say that people do this, or in fact, put any effort into voting. I believe most people put no effort into voting.

I also believe that Internet voting will help nothing.

Re:Another bad solution to an imaginary problem...

[gmuslera]

> half the population is resistant enough (or intelligent enough)
or dumb enough. Even expressing (i.e. with some sort of "none of the above") that none of the options is good for you is a powerful message if in large enough numbers. Is not an "is ok what chooses everyone else", nor "anyway will win candidate x, no matter what i vote". Is not the same a president backed by 51% of the population of a country than one backed by the 26% because only 50% of potential voters cared about it (and in those people could have something rigging the sample, like some interest, or pressure, or getting some benefit, or, well, not being resistant/intelligent enough to empty political speech)

Re:Another bad solution to an imaginary problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

We should enact Compulsory voting like many other countries have. Show up or face a fine, and repeated offenses without a good excuse equate to jail time.

Before someone brings up the whole "freedom" thing, keep in mind that a lot of states (if not the entire country) have a lot of other compulsory things that are viewed as unsavory by some people, such as Selective Service, paying into Social Security, and mandatory car insurance. (I'm not saying that's a justification, but it sort of kills the whole "against freedom" argument IMO.)

I live in a country with compulsory voting & being an anarchist I never vote; however I agree with the parent: compulsory voting gives meaning to not voting. It makes clear that voting is giving away your personal descision power to somebody who openly craves for power.

Re:Another bad solution to an imaginary problem...

[DarwinSurvivor]

I can't believe people still keep bringing this up. It's amazing that some people ACTUALLY believe that forcing completely politically uninformed people to pick a name on a list will make democracy better. Compulsory Voting only works if you can also somehow force everyone to educate themselves about the choices and GIVE A DAMN about who they pick. Otherwise 90% of the "forced" voters are just going to pick a random name or nullify their vote (your countries elections are non-traceable RIGHT?). And you better hope your country doesn't always have the candidates in the same order, cause a large majority of the "forced" voters that don't nullify their vote will just pick the first one on the list, wait and see how THAT screws with the percentages!

Re:Another bad solution to an imaginary problem...

[roothog]

The majority of people in the US don't vote because they don't feel that any of the candidates have their interests in mind and because they feel that no matter who they vote for, they're going to be screwed over anyway. The inconvenience of having to walk/drive to the polling place isn't the issue, and solving that isn't likely to dramatically improve voter turnout.

TLDW;

[vlm]

Too Long Didn't Watch; I don't watch video in general. People who can't express themselves in words certainly can't express themselves in video either.

I would assume a much simpler and cheaper and safer way to corrupt internet voting is to internet vote under the watchful eye of your supervisor at work, or the watchful eye of your head of household at home, or maybe your local church could provide internet access to vote, or ... You could work around that bug by bringing internet access to the local elementary school gymnasium (they've probably already got wifi like our schools), placing some superannuated citizens in charge of what to them is incomprehendible technology (in other words anything newer than IBM unit record apparatus from pre-1930), maybe replacing those complicated internet kiosks with a simple paper form and pencils and an instantly reading/verifying optical scanner.. oh wait thats exactly what we have now where I live. Hmm. Sounds like a big waste of money for everyone except the people getting the money... who happen to be campaign donors.. Oh, I see whats happening here.

Idea..

[backslashdot]

Is it really a bad idea? This is just the opinion of some researchers, so why don't we vote on it online and see?

Yes, a bad idea

[dkleinsc]

I'd argue that it's a fundamentally bad idea, for reasons which have absolutely nothing to do with technology.

It's very simple: If you go to a polling place, you are in a situation where you can be observed by poll workers, who will notice things like somebody standing over your shoulder with either a gun or $10 to get you to vote the way that somebody wants you to. Whereas if you can vote anywhere, it's quite possible for an organization to do those sorts of things.

The same arguments also apply to voting by mail, or over the phone, or absentee ballots. For instance, it was not uncommon for political parties to stop by my grandmother's nursing home to help the residents vote, helpfully filling it out for the voter (including checking the boxes for their preferred candidates).

Re:Yes, a bad idea

[AdrianKemp]

I was going to suggest the less sinister issue with it, although along the same vein.

If all you have to do is log in and vote from your computer, a small "incentive" could seriously increase the voter turn out. Of course I'm referring to the incentive being provided by a company/party.

Right now, laziness is keeping the vast majority of uninformed dolts away from the ballot boxes. Utter hatred is keeping some informed ones home too but that's a different issue.

Re:Yes, a bad idea

[AdrianKemp]

He's talking about someone *standing over their shoulder*

How is that a technical problem?

How about having them log in and then voting for them? How is that a technical problem?

Re:Yes, a bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

If all you have to do is log in and vote from your computer, a small "incentive" could seriously increase the voter turn out.

I don't see how that's really all that much different from mail-in and absentee ballots.

Right now, laziness is keeping the vast majority of uninformed dolts away from the ballot boxes

No it's not. The vast majority of uninformed dolts let a few informed political insiders pick which candidate to vote for, and then they happily go along with it as this method allows them to remain completely ignorant. We call it the Party System, and if you vote based solely on what your Party chooses then yes I'm talking directly to you.

Apathy and minor crimes which have been given Felony status are what is keeping most non-voters away from the polls.

Re:Yes, a bad idea

[nedlohs]

That already applies to postal voting, and so as a replacement for postal voting isn't an issue.

Re:Yes, a bad idea

[DrXym]

Physical voting isn't enough however. There were widespread allegations of vote rigging in the Russian elections for example with election officers tampering with the number of counted votes. If the whole system is corrupt then it will obtain the result it wants regardless of how the vote is conducted.

Re:Yes, a bad idea

[yakovlev]

Absolutely. This was my first thought.

It's actually quite sinister when you consider that you can combine this with a Super PAC.

A Super PAC is an organization that can get unlimited amounts of money from corporations and has zero legal accountability to the candidate. This means it's perfectly possible for a Super PAC to offer to pay anyone $20 to vote (implied "for their candidate") then include some kind of browser plug-in that actually checks that the voter voted. If it's determined that this is illegal then the Super PAC goes down, but the candidate is squeaky clean. I'm sure they'd portray this as the internet equivalent of driving you to the polling place, though it's obviously much worse.

$20 per person x 300 million people = about 6 billion dollars to pay every man woman and child $20 to vote. It's probably a billion or two cheaper than that when you consider that children can't vote. This means it is well within the abilities of a well-funded Super PAC to offer $20 per vote (technically not necessarily for their candidate) to anyone who will take it.

All I've tried to describe above would likely be considered legal. If they wanted to step a little outside legal, the plug-in could "helpfully" fill out the vote form for the candidates they wanted you to vote for. A little less sinister would be to add a "default vote" or "Vote with Super PAC for Hope!" button to the ballot shown to the voter. Even if they said they would still pay you, some people would vote as directed for fear they would lose the money, and many would vote as directed because clicking the button or just pressing "VOTE" on the form as presented was easier than thinking about the issues. They could go even less sinister than that and just reorder the candidate listings on the ballot, such that their candidates were always on top.

Re:Way too early

[betterunixthanunix]

While I'm on this subject, who came up with the idea of sending 25 armed agents and a small tank to get some geek out of their basement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWAT#History

Heck, for some of these guys you could just write a note, 'report to jail tomorrow and drop your computer off on the way there' and they would do it.

Paramilitary police is not about arresting people, it is about keeping the population terrified of the government. The point is to show people that the government can send a tactical team into any home at any time, so that people will be afraid to take a stand against the government.

Two words: PAPER BALLOTS

[ArcSecond]

I like them. I trust them. They are their own record. And, if you like, you can spoil them.

In Canada, we have our ballots counted within hours of the polls closing. And you can go back and re-count them if necessary.

Keep it simple!

Re:Two words: PAPER BALLOTS

[kikito]

One word:

Russia.

Weakest link

[digitalaudiorock]

I've always thought the whole issue is pretty clear. Internet voting can never be any more secure than it's weakest link...the end users browser/computer/device. In other words it can never be secure. As far as I'm concerned it's a total non-starter for this reason.

Paper voting is not safe

[Sqreater]

The assumption is always that paper ballot voting is secure. Electronic fraud is somehow more important than paper ballot fraud. President Kennedy wasn't even a legitimate President according to some due to paper ballot fraud and they have a good case. See the "Controversies" section of the Wikipedia article on the 1960 election: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1960. No, the whole controversy over the safety of voting is just a reason not to do what is required by a belief in Democracy and what is absolutely necessary in a period of time which illustrates the obsolescence of the old system. The Macroparasites have taken control of our system of government and true electronic democracy is the only way we will get power back into our hands. As for the safety of electronic voting, let me say this: It is safe to do internet banking; it is safe to transfer trillions of dollars of assets around the world daily; but it is somehow not safe to cast a single vote electronically . I don't believe that is the truth. And those who argue against electronic Democracy are merely the familiars of the Macroparasites.

Re:Paper voting is not safe

[madro]

Internet (ok, electronic) banking has different, independent stakeholders verifying the validity of transactions with armies of accountants armed with IS systems that have been around for decades.

Electronic democracy does not.

Re:Paper voting is not safe

[The_Noid]

You completely miss the single most important aspect of a voting system that makes it fundamentally different from a banking system:
It must be impossible for anyone to see or prove what vote a voter has cast.

If that single requirement is not met, then the whole system, regardless of how secure it is in all other aspects, is useless.

A banking system does not have that requirement, since your bank is allowed to know who you transferred money to and from whom you got money.

Internet voting and more in Estonia explained

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet voting and more in Estonia explained here.

Re:Way too early

[vlm]

Don't forget profit and courtroom drama.

Profit is obvious. Courtroom drama is the perp must be guilty because the cops felt like sending 25 cops in riot gear and smashed all the house windows... If the cops just called his lawyer and asked him to talk, he must not be an absolutely guilty supercriminal.

Had a SWAT callout 5 houses to the west of mine some months ago... parole violator got drunk (thats a no no for a multi-time DUI guy) went to friends house, passed out alcohol intoxication. Friend owns a deer hunting rifle and was dumb enough to tell the cops looking for the drunk about it, so we get full swat team callout, smash all the windows and stick cameras in, including one of those tossed ball camera things. Streets blocked off, TV news told BS story about man barricaded in house with gun so we've got newsies crawiling everywhere. The cops got to do the judge jury executioner thing by tasing an semi-conscious drunk guy. This is all OK because "we're tough on crime in this rich suburban city". Lots of people made a lot of money, and the parole violator is back in a for profit prison again, the families (especially children like mine) were terrified, so its all good all around. Seriously SWAT doesn't mean anything anymore.

Nonsense

[Identita]

Online voting can and will become the norm in the future. Like anything else we do in our lives, implementation is key and the only thing between success and failure. Perhaps the good professor should look at this: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/provincialelection/article/1059558--internet-voting-in-advance-polls-a-great-success-in-markham-report-finds

Uh... this is DC.

[Entropius]

So, I live in DC.

The result quoted in the summary, that DC didn't manage to pull off a secure electronic vote, shouldn't be interpreted as a condemnation of e-voting, for the simple reason that this city couldn't manage to find the exit to a paper bag with a map and GPS. The incompetence around here is hilarious: there's a reason everyone working for the government lives in either Maryland or northern Virginia, since being in DC itself just means you get to hear sirens 24/7.

Everyone's heard of Marion Barry, the crack-smoking mayor? Turns out they elected him mayor again right away when he got out of prison. He mismanaged the city finances so badly that Bill Clinton cut him off from a lot of his authority, and he flounced* from the mayorship -- and got elected to the City Council. Since then he's gone eight years without paying income taxes, driven drunk, and embezzled money. Now he wants to run for mayor again.

The guy is a complete scumbag. The Washington Post said "To understand Washington, you have to understand Marion Barry."

*Flounce: To leave after a post (on the internet) where you proclaim yourself a martyr, with great drama

Voting is flawed

[Gideon Wells]

Even the current system isn't correct. The Republican Party holds voting accuracy as near sacred as part of their party talking points. Take a look at how they handled a primary season where they should have absolute control over the rules:
* Iowa went from Romney to Santorum, though a statistical tie, because someone mistyped a 2 as 22: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/01/18/rick-santorum-might-have-actually-won-the-iowa-caucuses
* Maine almost didn't even count a whole county: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/maines-miscount-one-county-might-be-included-after-saturday/
* Nobody can seem to make up their minds on what to do about Florida. It is supposed to be, normally, a winner take all state. It moved its primary up and got sanctioned by the party by having its delegates cut in-half. Also, it may or may not be proportional. We'll find out in August: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/26/2610390/fight-looms-over-fla-delegates.html
* Missouri has two elections this year. The first doesn't county, but everyone is assuming it will. The one that was held already was state mandated, but the state Republicans, not wanting to lose half their delegates, have decided that one won't count. They'll have a second one that will really count. Note : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/07/missouri-primary-2012-explained_n_1257817.html
* She was allowed to vote once it was all sorted out, but an 84-year-old was initially told she was dead when she appeared at the polls: http://boston.cbslocal.com/2012/03/07/84-year-old-fall-river-woman-tries-to-vote-told-shes-dead/

My apologies to any Republicans I offended with these results. I only used these examples as they are near immediate in time scale.

The current voting system is full of flaws. It has been full of flaws. It will likely remain full of flaws. No need to worry about hackers mucking up an election when a typo can swing an election, and never have gotten caught if someone didn't post an image to FaceBook. So I don't see on-line voting as some type of corrupting influence on a pristine system.

The problem I see here is in the oversight. Considering it took two days for Washington D.C. to notice, I would say the real problem was not so much that the system got hacked, but D.C. didn't care enough about the election to monitor it as it was going on. The same lackluster oversight could still swing *cough*Iowa*cough* a close election.

Another bad idea: video as a SlashDot post

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Another bad idea: video as a SlashDot post. Seriously - we're too busy to watch this. Get it down to a paragraph we can scan while we're waiting for something to connect, something to compile or a minion to find an answer for us and maybe.

What's the problem?

[spaceyhackerlady]

What problem are they attempting to solve?

The whole idea of having traceable pieces of paper, physical manifestations of the intentions of actual voters, has served us well. Anybody can see it. Anybody can understand how it works. Anybody can observe the process in action. These are good things.

The only issue I have is proportional representation, or the lack thereof. We've had a couple of referenda on the subject here in B.C., both of which have been defeated by massive FUD campaigns.

...laura

Fraud Already happening in Canada

[EmperorOfCanada]

Right now in Canada there is a big "Robocall" scandal where one party automatically called tens of thousands of people affiliated to other parties to tell them that their polling station had moved. The people would either say, "Too far" or not find the non-existent poll and not vote. This proves that there are Canadians who are motivated, funded, and capable to mess with an election using electronic means. What the hell chance do any electronic voting systems have?

Here in Halifax the morons have voting over the phone and are thinking about online municipal voting. They say it increases "Voter participation" basically they are sick of people not giving a crap about their self importance and think that throwing democracy in the toilet is the way to go.

This has political ramifications beyond the obvious, the bad people will always win, scenario. Even if the system was theoretically 100% secure I would never trust any party elected electronically. Thus my confidence in their right to be in power would be zero. What impact would this have on people abiding by laws, paying taxes, and other civic relationships. Take Greece as an example of where this has broken down. People there don't pay taxes because nobody else pays taxes. If you are fool enough to want to pay taxes you will find yourself sucked dry because the system is so screwed up that it has now adapted to the fact that people will cheat 100% of the time.

On top of all that the government insists on keeping these proprietary systems as secret as possible. Every single time the systems have been handed to security researchers they have torn them to shreds.

The only electronic voting that I would like to see is a polling system where you go in, pick your stuff and the computer prints out the results on a ballot you put into the machine. You can then look over your ballot and see that all is good. Worse case if there is a power outage or whatnot you could fill the ballot in by hand. Then you put the ballot into a ballot box which is the primary record of the election. This way the computer is more auditing the election. You would get instant poll results subject to verification by counting. I have worked at a polling station and it is often the first time for everyone so I can see a situation where people might mess up. The computer would not override them but if the computer strongly disagreed (ballot box stuffing) then everything would now be carefully scrutinized. Also the benefits to an electronic voting system of this nature is that it allows for complicated ballots to be filled out correctly. No hanging chads.

The list of major hacks on major companies is just too long. Most companies hope for the best with security and more design for the eventuality that they will be hacked and thus look to quickly mitigate the damage through good backups and whatnot. It turned out that Nortel's computer system was completely pwned for over 10 years. If Google has been hacked by the Chinese then no company in the world can claim to have a secure voting system, full stop.

One last problem is that if one party wins an election through fraud, proving that they are evil, they will now be able to structure the system so that they always win from then on. Thus good government is dead the instant a party wins through electronic fraud as the only party who could beat them would have to be more evil.

Re:But...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

"Traditional" voting is as insecure as e-voting, if not more.

Riiight, because it's just as easy to make thousands of ballots disappear, or insert thousands of fake ballots into the count, or have an army of election judges deliberately miscount at the precinct level ... as it is to write a script exploiting a software backdoor. No difference at all.

Do you know why people use computers to accomplish tasks that used to be done on paper? Because it's faster, easier, and cheaper.

All it takes is money.

I think here you're talking about how people choose to vote, not whether their votes are accurately counted. These are not the same issue.