Kaspersky Says Lack of Digital Voting Will Be Democracy's Downfall

hapworth writes "Eugene Kaspersky, founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, has warned that one of the greatest cyber threats facing the world is the lack of effective online voting systems, claiming that unless young people can vote online they won't bother at all and the whole democratic system will collapse. Not everyone is buying that theory, however (and there's reason to suspect Kaspersky has a vested interest in online voting, which may need his firm's cybersecurity products). As producer James Lambie writes, 'Ultimately, the digital native's disenchantment with voting is based less on a lack of suitable technology and more on disillusionment with the craven and anemic political choices they are presented with.'"

Comments

Honestly..

[Anrego]

Good!

I’ve always hated this push to get people to go out and vote. That’s not what’s important. The message that should be going out is to educate yourself enough to make an actual decision, THEN vote! Going into a booth (or online) and selecting a random choice because MTV told you it’s your duty to vote is only going to make things worse.

If someone won’t vote unless they can do it in less than 10 seconds... their opinion is probably worth very little, and would rather not have it diluting the already thin pool.

Re:Honestly..

[Sir_Sri]

True, but you shouldn't introduce artificial barriers to voting. The US for example has gotten rid of tests to qualify for voting precisely because it disenfranchised certain voters.

Besides, the electorate at large can't really make educated decisions about policy. They try, but ultimately the best you can do is set the tone for the type of politician you want to represent you, not have a perfect mesh of policy ideas.

When people are young they tend to be fixated on certain issues, pot legalization, the environment, cost of education that sort of thing. Not that those issues aren't important, but they don't exist in a vacuum, and as you get older and spend more time being aware of the broader scope of government (as an insurance system, as a source of stable investment through bonds, as a regulator of various things and so on) you realize more about how you need to vote as a broader ideological vote than a specific issue vote, and you get more worried about not the other guy, or the one who will hit 3 of the 5 things you like rather than the one who will only do 2 of the 5 kind of thing.

But in the end, the vast majority of the electorate wouldn't recognize a liquidity trap even if they were in one, and aren't capable of understanding how to vote about the issue because of that. Governments are necessarily large complex operations, and you end up trading off wacky things like individual health care mandates against military bases in swing districts or missile defence for aid against assad in syria. The public as a whole are never really going to grasp tradeoffs like that, and certainly not 4 or 5 years worth of potential future tradeoffs at a time.

Re:Enact mandatory voting

[Anrego]

Ugh.

I'd rather a small turnout of people making an actual decision.

Voting isn't what's important. Having an opinion is. 100% voter turnout isn't worth much if 70% of that turnout picked randomly.

Unless they figure a good way to validate that someone is making a serious choice (and force them to do so), all this does is dilute the already very thin pool of educated voters.

Re:Ho ho ho, that's rich.

[Pi1grim]

Estonia is a shining example of that. They have implemented online voting with smartcards and system is even more tamper-proof, than pen-and-paper voting, as a person can re-vote any number of times he/she wants to and only the last one will count.

Can we say "HELL NO"?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is from a company that is Russian, and by coincidence discovers the US might be at fault for Flame just as there is a tug-of-war between ICANN and a Russian/Chinese backed UN body for control of the Internet.

If anyone has any clue at all, electronic voting is just ripe for being hacked. Look at what the Black Box voting site reported, from monkeys hacking voting booths, to standard keys that fit any RV fitting the locks on the voting computer. Without a solid paper component, it is a heck of a lot easier to forge results in a way that is completely detectable. At least with hanging chads, someone somewhere had to hold up pieces of paper and say they were not usable. Just being electronic means that a country's elections can be completely compromised by a foreign body.

Hmm... I'm sure there are plenty of countries who don't like the US who would love to influence elections. Making voting electronic just means the hack will be untraceable. I'm sure advocating E-voting would help lots in this department.

Hell with e-voting. We need paper trails, as what was shown with the voting machine stories.

What's that buzzing noise I hear?

[macraig]

This sounds suspiciously like preliminary marketing buzz for a new Kaspersky Labs software venture: create perception of a problem so they can then leap in and solve it. As irredeemably cynical as I am about human motives, behavior, and so-called intelligence, even I don't believe that a lack of e-voting will be a significant deterrent to people voting. The proximal cause of most people not voting, as demonstrated time and time again, is disillusionment with the whole process and the mediocre - at best - results... "why bother when my vote doesn't count and I have no idea who the 'better man' actually is?"

Re:Ho ho ho, that's rich.

[cpu6502]

>>>as a person can re-vote any number of times he/she wants to and only the last one will count.

This is what we should have for our House of Representatives. We will keep the same politicians, in order to have their meetings and craft the bills, but when it comes to the final passage, it will be decided by the People online. That way stupid stuff like TARP will not pass (almost 80% of Americans were against it). The Senate would still function normally, with politicians voting "aye" or "nay", so as to block any bad bills the People's House might pass.