In France, a Showcase of What Can Go Wrong With Online Voting

Bruce66423 submits a report from The Independent, writing that "a French primary election is made the stuff of farce after journalists defeat the 'secure' election system." From the article: An 'online-primary,' claimed as 'fraud-proof' and 'ultra secure,' has turned out to be vulnerable to multiple and fake voting. The four-day election has also the exposed the poisonous divisions created within the centre-right Union Pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) by the law permitting gay marriage which took effect last week. ... What was already shaping up as a tense and close election was thrown into utter confusion at the weekend. Journalists from the news site Metronews proved that it was easy to breach the allegedly strict security of the election and vote several times using different names."

Comments

Heh.

[Black Parrot]

Journalists from the news site Metronews proved that it was easy to breach the allegedly strict security of the election and vote several times using different names.

Adds a new meaning to "vote for me".

Re:Heh.

[Thetundraterror]

Ten million votes later and Hairy Ass Mcgee is in the lead.

Working as planned

[Anonymous Coward]

I like this system. Each vote costs €3 and you can vote as often as you like. In other countries money buys you access, influence and power but we pretend that everyone is equal. France sweeps away the hypocrisy and makes it explicit: mo' money, mo' votes.

Vive La France, Vive La Révolution!

Re:Working as planned

[manu0601]

I like this system. Each vote costs €3 and you can vote as often as you like. In other countries money buys you access, influence and power but we pretend that everyone is equal. France sweeps away the hypocrisy and makes it explicit: mo' money, mo' votes.

This election is not ran by the French Republic, it is ran by one political party in city of Paris, to decide what candidate they will have for next Paris mayor. It does not reflect France position on electronic voting.

Re:Working as planned

[hcs_$reboot]

Moreover, the voting system was not well designed: just by knowing the name, address and birth date of someone (eg someone from another party, not likely to vote during UMP primaries), and paying €3, one could vote several times... Sadly, that botched voting system gives the impression the electronic vote is a lost cause. That reminds me of a Windows to Linux migration in a big administration where the migration and training where so badly implemented that people where reluctant to work on Linux, and the whole gave an impression of a big failure.

Re:Working as planned

[Meeni]

The official republic electronic voting system (reserved for consulate registered voters so far) has never been breached (that is known of). I have some reservations about e-voting (for lack of accountability and falsifiability by the random citizen), but being weak and easy to compromise doesn't seem to be the most important problem for the particular implementation. However, it is hard to use, and I know many voters that gave up voting because it was to difficult to have the voting system to work on their computer.

UMP (which is conservative right party) is reckoned for hiring the worst people to do any sort of techno job and ridicule themselves in dub-songs when trying to be cool on facebook. That would be just another milestone in their long history of hiring the nephew of some big shot, because he "knows computer", for 100k euros of public funds.

Moreover, the paper ballot vote at the last UMP president election also got seriously rigged. There was a 2 month period where the two prominent candidates claimed victory (and it seems that the one that cheated the most is still the ongoing president of the party... ). So in some sense, a weak system is not a bug, for the elections of this party, it's a feature.

Re:Working as planned

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be just another milestone in their long history of hiring the nephew of some big shot, because he "knows computer", for 100k euros of public funds.

Hopefully this time they didn't rely on public funding.

Re:Working as planned

[Anonymous Coward]

it's american democracy: one buck, one vote
 
corrupt to the bone

Re:Working as planned

[devent]

OT: Friendly reminder, please look up the words "where", "were" and "was".
I'm no native English speaker but I think this is what you mean:
> ... where the migration and training _was_ so badly implemented that people _were_ reluctant to work on Linux,

Re:Working as planned

[hcs_$reboot]

Hey! Danke schön! Usually I watch my where / were / was but for some reasons everything went where even where I didn't intend to wear a where for a were.
Thanks mate.

Re:Working as planned

[fgouget]

The official republic electronic voting system (reserved for consulate registered voters so far) has never been breached (that is known of).

First that system belongs to Scytl, a Spanish company so the government has little control over it. Second it has been breached:

• * First it had an SQL Injection vulnerability in the online support page (handled by Atos). The person who reported this wisely did not further exploit it to see which other systems this would give him access to.
• * Then there is this paper shows it's easy to change the Java client so it modifies the user's vote before submitting it. There is also a video and a recipe for exploiting this on a large scale.
• * Finally it has been shown that in the second round it was possible to vote for a candidate that had been eliminated during the first round! While voting for an eliminated candidate is not very useful, it did show up in the election result. Also it may open the door to voting for candidates from every other districts. Unfortunately that voter was again not reckless enough to attempt it and blog about the result.

Some other reminders: voting required using a very specific version of Java that Sun made obsolete just days before the election; on Mac OS X one had to register as an Apple developper to get the right version of Java; the applet would happily send your vote over http rather than https (that's a 'feature'); passwords were sent late or lost with no second chance.

So we have a wide range of mess ups and weaknesses and the only proof we have that the vote was not hacked is that the government says so. You trust the government right? They would not have any incentive to hide embarrassing information, right? And a computer hack always leaves obvious traces that point right at the author, right? If you're not sure about any of these claims then you cannot be sure that vote was not hacked.

Re:Working as planned

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be just another milestone in their long history of hiring the nephew of some big shot, because he "knows computer", for 100k euros of public funds.

The French can't even steal public money correctly. Over here in the States the Conservatives have a pretty good racket going with "contracting out" government services. $100k is nothing. My agency pays dozens of contractors in excess of $300 per hour, full-time, for over a decade to do the same work as actual agency employees who earn about $50 per hour. This is, of course, saving the public money because we all know that private contractors are automatically cheaper just by being private.

Re:Working as planned

[Meeni]

Thanks for the nice additions. It is a shame that you didn't got more mods up.

I did not know of the first exploit. Thanks for lighting it up.

I had read the scribd paper. It is not a problem with the vote but with the security of the user terminal. Obviously all systems are subject to this, even voting on electronic booth at the poll station (where on top of it, officials and their minions have physical access to the device).

The 3rd bug is more a glitch than a real problem, but I get your point that security is not perfect and there are known defects.

Your last point recoup my reservations. Wether the system is secure or not doesn't matter if citizen's cannot check for themselves that it is. Uncertainty can lead to turmoil and civil war, to the extreme. I really do not see a case for mass usage of this technology. I do see it useful in restricted use, for regions where it make sense for geographic reasons (like north america, which is huge, there is no way to install a voting station in all necessary locations to get a realistic expectation that distance is not the main deciding factor of abstention).

Re:Hate group

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate much?

Designed Poorly

[starworks5]

Clearly its not that internet voting cannot work, its that this was implemented poorly, credit cards are easy to get your hands on, what really matters is the vote verification. Nothing prevents a person from stealing vote by mail ballots, and using a fake signature to send in the vote, whether the vote is tallied is another matter.

Now if you used multi-factor verification, along with biometrics (webcam photo) and IP logging, you would be able to sample and defeat fake votes.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Coeurderoy]

The only way Internet voting can work is if you launch a brand of transparent urns called "internet" and use them for manual voting. No amount of biometrics will ensure that a vote is not a "family vote". And that is before you factor in the fraud issues.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Sique]

Internet Voting can not work for a simple reason. Internet Voting has to both ensure that each person which votes is clearly identified to make sure the person is eligible to voting and at the same time can not be identified to make sure the voting is secret, at the same time clearly identify the vote to make sure it is counted only once and at the same time not making the individual vote identifyable to keep the voting secret.

Paper-and-pen voting solves this problem by first identifying the person, handing the person a non-identifyable sheet of paper, the ballot, let the person vote in secret and then keep the vote in a closed box until the counting. (And the problems surrounding pen-and-paper-voting like ballot stuffing can be managed by making everything of the voting box except the actual voting public.)

Re:Designed Poorly

[linnumees]

Yes it can.

Estonia has a smardcard-based ID card that can be used for authentication and digital signatures (two different keys). The latter is legally as good as your handwritten one which means you can build all sorts of services on top of that, elections are just one of them. The vote is encrypted with the public key of the current election, signed with the ID card and sent to a central server. Later, the double votes are removed according to the list of people who voted on the election day (so if you were forced to vote for someone and your ID card taken away, you can just grab your passport and go vote again using the "old" method), votes are separated from the signed container, moved to a physically different machine, decrypted and counted. Anyone can go and see how all the process is done.

See http://www.vvk.ee/voting-methods-in-estonia/engindex/reports-about-internet-voting-in-estonia/ for details.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Yoda222]

I force you to vote for what I want in front of me on internet using your ID card and I threat you that if I see you going at the voting place the day of the election I put your sex tape on the internet, or I kill you, or anything between these two options.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

This problem can be solved with Internet Voting too. Blind Signatures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature) or Homomorphic Encryption (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption) are two crypto primitives useable for this job.

If anything holds back proper Internet Voting right now, it's issues like ensuring it works with compromised computers (because you can't assume a home computer will be clean), or that a person will not lose its right to vote if a crash happens at the wrong time (maliciously or not)

Re:Designed Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

looks like a smart and effective system, though unfortunately that would get no traction in america. its considered by some to be "discrimination" to require a form of official identification. on the other side of the aisle you have hoards of internet whiners posting "papers please" as their primary argument against an ID system.

Re:Designed Poorly

[F.Ultra]

Is that really how mail votes are handled in your country? In Sweden the mail votes are handled exactly like on election day, the same checks etc so it's not possible to just fake a signature.

Re:Designed Poorly

[F.Ultra]

You don't even have to watch to see if he goes to the voting place, all you have to do is to confiscate his passport on the voting day, you can even return it to him the next day.

Re:Designed Poorly

[foniksonik]

Simple. Dedicated signed app that uses its own VPN connection.

Done and done. The Internet isn't the web ya know.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Sique]

Blind signatures don't solve the problem of proving your own ballot was counted correctly.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

So how's that worse than traditional voting? You'll vote for the Libertarian party next time or I'll slaughter your family and burn down your house, no matter the voting method and mechanism.

Apart from such silly examples, the Estonian system sounds pretty awesome to me!

Re:Designed Poorly

[Helix_Sky]

Traditional voting is done in secret. There is no one standing behind you to see what you voted. So all you have to do is say "Yea, I voted for " and no one knows the difference. That is why the most coercive stories you heard about the US presidential election were bosses threatening to close down a business or fire people if Obama won.

The big advantage of the current system is that there are independent observers that can ensure that you are not being coerced at the time you make your vote.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to go through the trouble of looking over their shoulder while online-voting, obtaining and withholding their passport on voting day, plus having their sextape around, it surely isn't beyond you to ask them to provide a timestamped (watch, cam metadata) video of the voting pass with the "correct" information filed in an inserted into the ballot? After all, the booths are usually enclosed and shielded from view.

Sure, you can ask the same (screencast or video record) of someone voting online, but unless you're actually in such a case (which isn't much different from the traditional coercion as described above), just tell your threatening boss that you voted what he wants, regardless of what you actually did. If need be, faking a screenshot is trivial.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

... then again, I can imagine "voting house parties" coming up, where the boss or simply peer pressure can heavily influence the vote.
Make those illegal under conspiracy laws, so the boss will think twice about making a mandatory "party" for any significant number of people, as there needs to be only one snitch.

Sure, it's new/different and as such prone to introducing it's own weaknesses, but I don't see a killer argument against online voting, and the added ease of participation, efficiency and accuracy (when disregarding fraud, it's _much_ more accurate) may very well outweigh the negative special cases we're coming up with.
Needs to be implemented correctly, and not as in TFA, of course. I'll look a bit more into that Estonian system.

Re:Designed Poorly

[TrollstonButterbeans]

So, uh, is this like how on Star Trek TNG that Geordi LaForge could auto-magically solve any problem by reversing the polarity or a reverse tachyon pulse.

Or maybe someone can find a smurf that farts IBM's good ole' pixie dust?

And both of those examples are far more realistic that yours. Don't fault me, I'm just the messenger. You're the one that posted what you did and that means it is subject to peer review, unfortunately no pixie-dust farting smurf was available so my critique will have to suffice. But this is slashdot and perhaps one of those will yet show ....

Re:Designed Poorly

[Helix_Sky]

I agree that this can happen but to be able to change an election you'd typically have to change thousands of votes. That kind of coordination would be hard to hide and is the reason why all the GOP hair pulling about possible current voter fraud is stupid.

As a safety measure you set up two tiers of priority voting kiosks. The first tier kiosks would be in public places but provide privacy so that no one can see your vote. The second higher tier kiosks would be in official government locations and would require you to present your id to a person first before using the kiosk. The first tier kiosks would be less secure but more numerous, while the second would provide the same level of protection as currently voting in person. The highest tier vote, with online being tier 0, takes precedence over all other votes no matter when they are given.

You have the whole system available at least a week before the election. If your online vote is coerced then you have a week to use any of the kiosks to record your true vote. While it is possible that someone could watch you an entire week to make sure you didn't change your vote, it is not something that could be done on a large scale.

The kiosks would also take your picture to prevent someone from using a stolen card.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

*its own weaknesses, my OCD can now rest...

Also, this may or may not increase vote coordination in couples. It makes a difference if you're going to lie to your significant other about who you voted for. Does anyone have statistics on that? Because I imagine the vast majority of couples voting differently are being honest about it to each other, so they could do it online at home as well.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know about these guys? They had no problem standing behind you to see what you voted in the eighties. Good luck trying not to be coerced.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Meeni]

What the French republic implementation does (not the bogus system described in this article, that pertains to a particular party internal votes only) seems to enable verifiable anonymous votes.

You receive credentials in a split fashion. Half comes in the mailbox as paper. The second half is sent to a personal device (email is possible, but sms is preferred). If you want to prevent somebody to vote for you, just have your credentials sent to your personal phone, even if the family head receives the mail credentials, he cannot use them.

Second, the voting receipt is a sha key. Should there be a need for recounting, or should a citizen verify his vote, the sha key can be used. However, just having the sha key doesn't tell anybody what the vote was (without authority compliance, which is improbable to say the least, the procedure involves showing up IN PERSON with the sha printout, to verify your own vote). Votes are stored on the server anonymized, the sha key codes the voter identity, actually.

It is not immune to tempering (physical access to the computers always eliminate any expectation of security, just like physical access to paper ballots would result in the same uncertainty), but it is not -that- weak, and can be recounted if needed (by asking citizens to give back their sha keys, one can verify if all ballots have been counted, since the sha key is a proof of having voted, if the corresponding ballot is not found, there is a proof of tempering the results).
 

Re:Designed Poorly

[Meeni]

Addition:
* physical coercion is possible to force somebody to vote. It is always a possibility as soon as voting happens outside of a controlled ballot room. So even split credential is not a definitive solution to the issue of forced/bought votes.

I fail to see the benefit for the general voting body. IT makes sense only for citizens that cannot otherwise access a physical ballot due to distance (think deployed military personnel, nationals leaving in foreign countries, etc).

Re:Designed Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

And both utterly fail at "verifiable to the ordinary person". It is completely trivial to come up with a system that to 99% of the people will look like your "secure" system but is neither confidential nor safe against manipulation. As a voting system, that makes them a complete joke and I simple can't understand why people can be such idiots to not see what ridiculous failures their electronic voting schemes are.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it can.

No, it can't.

I'll force you, under threat of taking your life as well as the life of every family members of yours, to vote a certain way. Since I can watch you doing it, I can ensure that you vote the way I want. I can also ensure that you don't go re-vote later.

With a traditional system I can only force you to not vote at all. I can NOT force you to cast a specific vote.

In short: FAIL.

Any threat-resistant voting system MUST ensure the impossibility of forcing anyone to cast a specific vote. Good luck finding one that works remotely, i.e over Teh Internetz. In the absence of such threats, the problem is straightforward. In reality, it isn't. I wish the people designing and/or clamoring for these technological hacks would realize this. But no... Too much money to be had, I suppose.

Re:Designed Poorly

[Menestrel]

Anyone can go and see how all the process is done.

Nobody can see the ballot being deposited and stored.

To assure transparency, you would have to make all the process public, including the installation and configuration of the servers involved.
Plus, you should educate each citizen enough that he or she can be convinced that the voting process is safe and fair. And I said convinced, as in : "I know it works", not persuaded as in : "I'm sure some people know it works and everybody seems to agree, so I'm OK with that".

Re:Designed Poorly

[fgouget]

votes are separated from the signed container, moved to a physically different machine, decrypted and counted.

Let me correct that: "the government tells you that votes are separated from the signed container, moved to a physically different machine, decrypted and counted. Now, tell me, who has the most to lose in an election? Is it not those in power who just happen to be the ones organising the election?

Anyone can go and see how all the process is done.

And what can you see? A bunch of computers humming away? How do you know they are counting votes and not mining bitcoins?

Re:Designed Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

Your employer or whoever is coercing you will simply ask you to also cast your "true vote" and take a picture of that as evidence.
Also, you can never be sure that someone out there isn't voting in your name using the less secure system. The only way to make sure would be to personally cast your vote in the highest tier system.

Re:Designed Poorly

[linnumees]

Yes, the installation and configuration of the servers is also public.

Educating the citizens is somewhat a problem, yes, because of the FUD campaign of the opposition. They like to compare it to the electronic voting machines, which isn't even related to this.

UMP centre-right!?

[loufoque]

Maybe centre-right by American standards, but more like borderline far-right by French ones.

Re:UMP centre-right!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or completely batshit extremists. They are even worse than the "Front National" which is where the racists are usually found.

Re:UMP centre-right!?

[Anonymous Coward]

... or German standards... or basically any other country's standards.

By the way: Does anyone know any country that's more right-leaning (-tipping-over) than the USA right now? Just out of curiosity... I don't know of such a country...

Re:UMP centre-right!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahha, looks like somebodies daddy assfucked him too hard today.

Little bitch, go home.

Re:UMP centre-right!?

[Nidi62]

By the way: Does anyone know any country that's more right-leaning (-tipping-over) than the USA right now? Just out of curiosity... I don't know of such a country...

Iran, Saudi Arabia, uh....the Vatican? (it is technically a sovereign state after all)

Re:UMP centre-right!?

[hcs_$reboot]

There is one big difference between US and French parties: in France, not even once the president ever pronounce the word "god"...

Re:UMP centre-right!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Germany, France, Switzerland, Norway, and Greece have named nationalist parties that are utterly horrifying to Americans.

Remember, racist Americans hate "illegals", standard Europeans hate "foreigners" who have been living in their countries for decades.

Re:UMP centre-right!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, he can: as long as it's to reassure that the State does nothing to promote a religion over another, and that the State is, indeed completely secular. But it's pretty much ingrained in our culture, so there's seldom, if any, need to remind anyone of that.

The actual difference with US parties/state administration is that, in France, when we say separate Church and State, we actually do it.

(Admittedly, in the beginnings we separated heads and bodies, but at least we claimed it was for the good of the Republic, and not for the good of the victim's soul.)

Re:UMP centre-right!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense, more like Democrat by US standards. Between the UMP and PS there isn't much too choose. Both state capitalist neo-fascist (aka Gaullist) parties.

Re:UMP centre-right!?

[abies]

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Americas are 'foreigners' who have been living in their country for few generations? I suppose that there might be still few bad feelings amongs _native_ population about 'newcomers'. Difference is that in NA it was done properly, by decimating native population and making sure they won't outvote anybody.
In Europe, you still have situations from NA from few hundred years ago - 'standard European' being Native American. We just haven't been yet culled by foreigners. They don't have technology differential enjoyed by settlers in NA back then, so they have do it with population pressure rather than brute force.

Oxymoron?

[jasnw]

Is "safe online (PUT YOUR SERVICE HERE)" as much an oxymoron as the much-malinged "military intellegence" back in the '60s? I see lots of stories about both sides of online voting, but I've not seen an answer to the basic question of "is it possible to have a safe hack-proof online voting system." I don't mean an assessment of whether Siebold or any of the other idiots in this market have fool-proof systems, but whether or not voting can be done safely online even if Brother Stallman designed it. My own feeling is that it's like putting something critical such as access to power grids online - not a good idea unless there's no other way to get what you need. I don't really see what's so hard about schlepping down to your local school and voting once a year or so. If that's too hard for you, don't bother voting because the hard work of making an informed choice is likely beyond your capabilities as well. (Does not apply to people who can't get to a voting booth for several of many good reasons, and mail-in ballots has worked for these people for decades.)

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to understand, the powers that be WANT to have a hackable voting system. They oppose any measure that tries to make the voting fair, or remove dead people off the rolls. And don't even try to ask people to verify who they are when voting, as that would cut down on fraud, which is the opposite of what they want.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Ardyvee]

I would like to believe it is possible to create a online voting system as safe as the physical one. I'm not saying hack-proof, because humans are in the equation and we know how they are prone to always screw things up... But as safe as the physical it should be possible. I would add, then, to you question: is it possible to make such safe system easy/simple to use in a sensible time-span?

I do, however, agree on your feeling that perhaps even if we could, it would be better if we did not. Just as I don't think allowing anybody to control the power grid online (accessing some read-only information may be okay).

Ultimately, though, online voting could bring more voting because: a) it's "easier" (no need to move to designated voting place); b) faster to count (since, you know, it's already being dealt with in a computer, so it should be trivial to just decision#++;). You could have even more people voting on even more decisions, which should translate into better decisions/decisions that represent what the community wants. Sure, it could be done with non-online methods, but it would not be as practical.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

Online voting is inherently unsafe even if it can be proven that each person can cast one (and only one) vote. Without online voting, people go to the voting booth and put their votes in, either electronically or on ballot. No one can see who votes for whom. With online voting, your vote can be forced by others in authority. Your church, your parent, your , even your local criminal organization. Since an authority figure can oversee and insist on you voting in a way they prefer, without in-place measures protecting that vote and ensuring its confidentiality, an online vote can never be made safe.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a problem of being too hard for the people -- governments spend a lot of money on renting all those locations and hiring the people to handle the counting. Clean that up, and you can have elections without the high price tags every time.

Initial setup for online voting would be very expensive, but after that it would save a lot each election (If things were working properly)

Re:Oxymoron?

[IanCal]

It isn't possible, because you can no longer have any reasonable guarantee that there was no coercion. You need to control the location the vote is cast.

Re:Oxymoron?

[WWJohnBrowningDo]

Wouldn't a duress code solve the coercion problem?

Re:Oxymoron?

[Coeurderoy]

Let's assume the infrastructure for online voting is "perfect", open source, reviewed code, yada yada ... Now how do you garanty that there will be no interference from familly members, particularly from conservative families... How do you fight vote buying when it is easy to put a screen copy tool at work to ensure "correct" voting... How do you fight disenfranchising when a well aimed pickaxe can cut off a couple of high rises long enough to lower their vote and short enough to make it difficult for the oposition to protest. And then assuming that you succeeded in getting an open source solution (any other solution is just a way to give the vote to the software editor, of course the current electronic vote solutions do exactly that) how do you protect tampering at the data transmission point, since you do not need, and actually cannot really use teams of supervisers from oponing parties, it is enough to corrupt a small group of officials so that they ignore the real vote and send what ever is convenient... The core issue of "modern voting" is that most important votes end up being between two very close candidates, and in most cases the differences between the number of voters is smaller than the margin of errors in the pre-election pools. Additionally we let the cost of election run amock so unless the "winner" is proven to actually eat little babies for breakfast, even if nobody in his or her right mind can believe that the vote is "correct" redoing the whole shebang seems too expensive. So "online voting" cannot work, moreover it "solves" a problem that does not exist, if not enough people can be bothered to show up to do a manual count, you got a problem that no voting technology can ever solve, and if they do come, then you do not need electronic voting systems.

Re:Oxymoron?

[IanCal]

Sounds quite complicated.
It'd need to be unique to each person, and have been delivered to them without anyone else seeing (you don't want the person you're afraid of knowing you're signalling duress). Then, given that someone is likely to turn up at the house (voter fraud is very serious, I'd expect the police to be involved) you could be found out.
If it's a workplace thing, do you want to risk getting fired?
The problem is you need to this to be indistinguishable from a normal vote to any observer, and however you do this cannot be intercepted or detected.

Re:Oxymoron?

[ArcherB]

It isn't possible, because you can no longer have any reasonable guarantee that there was no coercion. You need to control the location the vote is cast.

Shouldn't that disqualify absentee voting? Frankly, I see no difference between Internet voting and voting by mail when it comes to security. The best way to eliminate voter fraud is to have all votes be in person with ID checked and visible mark (purple finger, for example) that can be used to identify who has already voted and can not be removed within the time frame that the polls are open. The only excuse for voting remotely should be if the voter is physically unable to make it to the polls, and even then, physical confirmation must be made of the handicap in question and the vote should be cast with a verified poll worker present.

Re:Oxymoron?

[IanCal]

Frankly, I see no difference between Internet voting and voting by mail when it comes to security.

Scale. Voting by mail is done in fairly small numbers and importantly is not the standard. You have to go through extra hoops to do it. As it's implemented, it certainly has the problems of coercion, but is probably better than stopping those people voting at all.

Internet voting, however, would be something I'd see as standard. Not a special case for those who can't make it to the polls, but for everyone. And that's where it starts to worry me.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Replying as AC because I'm also moderating)

Even if the system is, in fact "perfect" - and even if you could somehow avoid the possibility of coercion - you've still got a HUGE problem: how do you convince the general public that the system IS actually secure? Most people aren't nearly technically savvy enough to figure it out for themselves, or even to really understand the difference between "secure crypto" and "insecure crypto" even if you carefully explain it to them. And telling them that it's all OK because a bunch of hackers designed and/or reviewed the system isn't going to cut it, no matter how much of a good idea that might be in theory or even in practice.

The fact is, if a non-trivial group of people think the system was hacked, you've got a credibility problem REGARDLESS of whether or not it was hacked. Unfortunately there are distressingly large numbers of people willing - even eager! - to believe all sorts of wacky conspiracy-theory shit (google "chemtrails"). With a traditional in-person paper system you can at least demonstrate that massive fraud is impractical. With an online system there's simply NO WAY to convince people that massive fraud DIDN'T occur.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not possible because using a single-use ID# (say, the hash of the voter's info + random salt) means that if I grab their voter ID# out of their mailbox (and copy it or steal it) and use it first then you can't prove who cast the vote (or rather that the registered voter didn't cast that vote).

- An IP address isn't a person, so that won't confirm who voted.
- You can't use the address of the IP because there's nothing to prevent a legitimate voter from voting using any computer.
- You can't stop bots that try a shit load of ID#s from different IPs (just old voters with bad eyes and poor keyboard skills).
- You can't stop multiple votes from the same IP (could be a house, an office building, an internet cafe, a voting center or even a cell carrier's shared IP crap-magic).
- Many more things than my feeble brain can conjure.

There are ways to address most situations for most weaknesses, but you can't seal it up tight.

The more devices that you let connect to your voting network the more points of failure you have for service and for security.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

governments spend a lot of money on renting all those locations and hiring the people to handle the counting.

That is the price of democracy. If the cost is the issue, why not impose a small "fee" (aka tax their asses) on every party that runs. Say, 1% or 2% of their total contributions should do it.

Re:Oxymoron?

[turbidostato]

"governments spend a lot of money on renting all those locations and hiring the people to handle the counting. "

Don't mistake USA with "governments": other countries manage to not pay a rent (i.e.: using public schools or other public buildings) nor hires (levvy, just like being part of a jury), so there it goes your argument.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it, why do the police have to be called the moment someone enters a vote with a duress signal? It's not a fucking bat-signal. The voter was being coerced, used the duress password to fake a vote, situation diffused, end of story. If the voter files a complaint, or does it repeatedly during every election ok investigate, but otherwise sounds to me you're trying to come up with some absurd argument against online voting because you've run out of proper arguments.

Re:Oxymoron?

[ShanghaiBill]

other countries manage to not pay a rent (i.e.: using public schools or other public buildings)

It is the same in America. Votes are cast in schools, fire stations, libraries, or other public locations. I have never heard of any polling place being rented. I have worked as a polling place volunteer, and I was not paid.

Re:Oxymoron?

[F.Ultra]

Also depends upon how the mail voting is implemented, over here (Sweden) you don't just mail in your vote. You still have to go to specific voting places (if you are abroad you have to go to the Embassy) and there the voting is set up exactly like it's done on election day in the normal voting place.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Cacadril]

There is a countermeasure to coercion. Allow people to vote as many times as they like; only the last vote counts. If you are forced to vote for Eve, you vote again later in the afternoon, for Alice.

Your boss would have to keep you locked in until the poll closes to prevent you from overriding the forced vote with a later vote. It would be hard to do that with enough people to change the election outcome, without it becoming very evident.

Add another provision: When you vote electronically, the computer shows you ten pictures and you have to select one. When you vote next time, you are shown ten pictures including the one one you selected. You have to select the same picture as last time to override the previous vote. The system does not tell you if you picked the right picture. If your boss forces you to vote five minutes before the poll closes, you select a different picture, and that vote is not valid. Your boss may force you to select a particular picture, but his chances of picking the right one will be just 10%. He could force you to vote ten times, but there could be timeout rules to make that hard.

Add a third provision: You may also vote in person at any police station, school, or any one of a number of places, and not just on election day, similar to absentee votes. A vote in person overrides votes over the Internet even if the Internet vote was issued later. If you suspect that you may be forced to vote for Eve just before the poll closes, vote in person early.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

why not impose a small "fee" (aka tax their asses) on every party that runs.

Ensuring that only the rich can run for any office (including minor local offices). Since secure voting is a basic need of a healthy democracy, it makes sense to tax everyone equally, not just the people who run for office.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Altrag]

Need two things:
- Verification that you are who you say you are.
- Verification that you haven't voted before.

The second part is easy. Distribute a pre-generated code to each eligible and registered voter (this already happens in my country -- we get voter cards a week or two before the election, though they're more of a reminder than anything important -- you can vote without them as long as you provide some other proof of residence.) Generating a 128bit (or longer) code randomly for each citizen is dead simple and impractically difficult to break in a short amount of time (especially with some anti-cracking measures in place like giving you a 10min cooldown if a single IP fails more than 3 times in a row or something.)

The first part is the hard part. In a regular polling station, the primary thing stopping me from selling my vote is that you have to trust I'm going to mark the one you paid me to mark. With the online system though I could just sell you my code and then you mark it yourself. This doesn't work in a regular polling station because the polling officers will be checking (photo) ID which is not an option online.

Of course a hybrid approach (electronic voting stations) is entirely possible -- that is, a regular polling station except with computer terminals instead of paper ballots.

Of course with any technological solution (online or not) you have to be able to trust the people who built the system to not have political motivations of their own (or at least be sufficiently moral to not compromise the system.) Which eliminates almost every company and government body large enough to actually implement such a system unfortunately.

Re:Oxymoron?

[MacDork]

Let's assume the infrastructure for online voting is "perfect", open source, reviewed code, yada yada ...

Now how do you garanty that there will be no interference from familly members, particularly from conservative families...

You're setting the bar higher for online voting than the current system. How do you gaurantee no interference from family members now? I know you don't vote the right way. I'm not driving you to the polling station. I'll lock you in your room and monitor you until the election is over.

How do you fight vote buying when it is easy to put a screen copy tool at work to ensure "correct" voting...

It's just as easy to modify the html in a page so it only looks like you voted a certain way. There's also photoshop. What fool is going to pay for a vote with a screenshot as proof? I can sell my vote to every interested party by that logic.

How do you fight disenfranchising when a well aimed pickaxe can cut off a couple of high rises long enough to lower their vote and short enough to make it difficult for the oposition to protest.

That's not even realistic. Some places in the states already allow voting as early as 50 days before the election. What are you gonna do, take out my internet, at home and work, for two months... with a pick axe? Good luck knocking out my 4G.

And then assuming that you succeeded in getting an open source solution (any other solution is just a way to give the vote to the software editor, of course the current electronic vote solutions do exactly that) how do you protect tampering at the data transmission point, since you do not need, and actually cannot really use teams of supervisers from oponing parties, it is enough to corrupt a small group of officials so that they ignore the real vote and send what ever is convenient...

lrn2crypto

The core issue of "modern voting" is that most important votes end up being between two very close candidates, and in most cases the differences between the number of voters is smaller than the margin of errors in the pre-election pools. Additionally we let the cost of election run amock so unless the "winner" is proven to actually eat little babies for breakfast, even if nobody in his or her right mind can believe that the vote is "correct" redoing the whole shebang seems too expensive.

The whole point of online voting is to make it fast and cheap.

So "online voting" cannot work, moreover it "solves" a problem that does not exist, if not enough people can be bothered to show up to do a manual count, you got a problem that no voting technology can ever solve, and if they do come, then you do not need electronic voting systems.

There are challenges, but nothing you mentioned says "impossible" to me.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Luke has no name]

You and Coeurderoy both have narrow views of voting. Yours is that voting would/should only be done once a year or once every two years. Imagine the hypothetical secure, open "perfect" voting system that has all the authentication/authorization requirements, yadda yadda. We could have referendums once a week! Gallup and the others would be out of a job, because people could officially state their opinion in a way that could sway public policy. The White House petitions that are such a joke could have millions of votes a week on hot-topics, putting more pressure on the administration to enact the will of the people (so long as that will doesn't disobey Constitution or law).

  Coeurderoy, on the other hand, assumes that the perfect system would have to be used at home. Perhaps we would have permanent "reserve" voting areas specifically set up to provide access when residential areas have power/Internet issues. Or we could have multi-day voting, or postpone votes when too many peoples' ability is blocked. It's just like thunderstorms/flooding is nowadays... there are contingencies.

In summary, I agree that a secure online perfect voting system is a long way away, if it's ever going to exist. Where we disagree: I believe that if it DID exist, it would be immensely beneficial.

Re:Oxymoron?

[stoborrobots]

Over here, "postal voting" (mailing your vote in) is different from "absentee voting" (voting at a different voting centre outside your electorate, on election day), or "early voting" (voting at special voting centres, before election day).

For postal voting, you receive a ballot form and some special envelopes in the mail shortly before the election, and you fill them in and send them back within a few days of the election.

For absentee voting or early voting, you attend a centre which is set up like a normal voting place.

Re:Oxymoron?

[TrollstonButterbeans]

I would like to believe you didn't originate that convoluted stinkball of crap and instead read it in a D&D or Pokemon rulebook. If you made it up yourself, may you never reproduce, although I am thinking this concern is not a problem. What hole do barnacle-headed nimrods with canasta-like rules for voting come from?

Re:Oxymoron?

[IanCal]

I didn't say it'd scramble the fighter jets, but if someone enters a "I"M BEING COERCED INTO VOTING FOR SOMEONE" signal, that's pretty serious. If I entered it, I'd expect someone to follow up on it (not send around a S.W.A.T team, but have someone follow up over the next week).

This is a side issue though, as there's already the problem of how someone actually enters this duress signal. How is this done without anyone but the person entering it knowing it's the duress signal?

but otherwise sounds to me you're trying to come up with some absurd argument against online voting because you've run out of proper arguments.

I'm describing just one problem in a theoretically perfectly secure online voting system. In fact, the problem with the duress signal is the delivery of it to a person without anyone else knowing. I was describing a problem even if *that* system was also perfect. Overall, I don't see the point in online voting. Going to a nearby school/church/town hall and ticking a box on a bit of paper behind a curtain is simple, cheap and pretty hard to fuck up. It solves many of the problems with coercion (the wonderful technology of an opaque curtain), fraud is harder because there are physical items to fake/destroy with people around.

Re:Oxymoron?

[The Wild Norseman]

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fraud.html

Here's a TED talk I've posted here before regarding a system that's verifiable, secure, and private.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

Handicap? What if you just happen to not be in town on the day of the election? That seems to be a pretty good "excuse" for voting remotely. I think you are right on the security angle though, mail voting isn't secure and has been abused here in the UK on several occasions.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

While you can currently *prevent* a vote (probably illegal), you cannot monitor and compel a vote. There's no lurking over your shoulder: you can vote Alice and then tell Daddy you voted Bob just like a good boy.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

And to the ordinary person indistinguishable from a system that has none of these properties, right?

Re:Oxymoron?

[fgouget]

Now how do you garanty that there will be no interference from familly members, particularly from conservative families...

You're setting the bar higher for online voting than the current system. How do you guarantee no interference from family members now? I know you don't vote the right way. I'm not driving you to the polling station. I'll lock you in your room and monitor you until the election is over.

That results in a family member not voting, whereas Internet voting allows you to force that member to vote against his camp. It also means locking up that member for the whole election day whereas Internet voting usually does not allow you to change your vote so you don't need to lock him up after you've coerced him to vote.

lrn2crypto

You'll have to be clearer about that one.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Eunuchswear]

Need two things:
- Verification that you are who you say you are.
- Verification that you haven't voted before.

As many have pointed out:
- It must be impossible for anyone else to know how you voted.

That is what makes all "tele-voting" (including postal voting) unsafe.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Eunuchswear]

Provide a written answer. I have fucking videos of pompous gits.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

More accurately: Scaleability.
With postal voting, sure you can coerce / intercept. But (basically) you'd have to be "distributed" (e.g. to look over everyone's shoulder).
With electronic voting, one glitch at the right point will be rolled out to all machines: one person controls all machines.
With internet voting, you don't even need to be involved in the early production to sneak in such glitches.

In other words: One mailman can make a few post-sacks with votes disappear.
One hacker can make all post-sacks with votes disappear.

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, i've watched the TED-talk.
He suggests a system where you vote on paper, but votes are counted by machine.
The ballots have the candidate-list in random order and a unique QR-Code containing some crypto-stuff.
Before leaving the cabin you tear off the candidate-list and shred it (secrecy of vote).
The rest of the ballot is scanned and counted (how?).
The ballot-scans are published (verifiability that own vote got count).
The published scans can be recounted by anyone (how?).

tldr:
Unfortunately he forgot to mention how vote-counting works with his system.
(I suppose the crypto-stuff in the QR-Code is somehow involved.)

Re:Oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

He suggests a system where you vote on paper, but votes are counted by machine.
The ballots have the candidate-list in random order and a unique QR-Code containing some crypto-stuff.
Before leaving the cabin you tear off the candidate-list and shred it (secrecy of vote).
The rest of the ballot is scanned and counted (how?).
The ballot-scans are published (verifiability that own vote got count).
The published scans can be recounted by anyone (how?).

tldr:
Unfortunately he forgot to mention how vote-counting works with his system.
(I suppose the crypto-stuff in the QR-Code is somehow involved.)

Re:Oxymoron?

[F.Ultra]

Just checked to be sure and we do have postal voting but it's only for people who are outside of the country on the election day and there's a very strict procedure; for example you must send it via a foreign postal service, the procedure must be witnessed by two people above 18 years of age that verifies that the procedure was followed and so on.

Re:Oxymoron?

[MacDork]

Now how do you garanty that there will be no interference from familly members, particularly from conservative families...

You're setting the bar higher for online voting than the current system. How do you guarantee no interference from family members now? I know you don't vote the right way. I'm not driving you to the polling station. I'll lock you in your room and monitor you until the election is over.

That results in a family member not voting, whereas Internet voting allows you to force that member to vote against his camp. It also means locking up that member for the whole election day whereas Internet voting usually does not allow you to change your vote so you don't need to lock him up after you've coerced him to vote.

I'm taking you to the polling station. You're gonna get one ballot and an ink pen. When you are done marking your selections, you take a picture of it with your smartphone OR ELSE.

Yeah, you're right. Nobody could possibly be coerced now. They have a curtain after all.

Re:Oxymoron?

[fgouget]

I'm taking you to the polling station. You're gonna get one ballot and an ink pen. When you are done marking your selections, you take a picture of it with your smartphone OR ELSE.

Yeah, you're right. Nobody could possibly be coerced now. They have a curtain after all.

Mark the ballot as expected and take a picture. Then add another mark that makes it invalid. As I said, votes against your camp: 0.

Re:Oxymoron?

[MacDork]

I'm taking you to the polling station. You're gonna get one ballot and an ink pen. When you are done marking your selections, you take a picture of it with your smartphone OR ELSE.

Yeah, you're right. Nobody could possibly be coerced now. They have a curtain after all.

Mark the ballot as expected and take a picture. Then add another mark that makes it invalid. As I said, votes against your camp: 0.

Exif tells me you spent several extra seconds after you took the picture in the booth. That tells me you were making additional marks on your ballot. I'm beating you within an inch of your life for this infraction.... See how clever you are? You just earned yourself a beating. Now that you have missing teeth and broken ribs, that vote seems pretty insignificant doesn't it? I bet you won't do THAT again.

Besides, your current system allows the same process of forced voting which you describe via absentee ballots. I still believe you are simply setting the bar much higher for online voting than it is set in the current system.

Re:Hate group

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently your knowledge of history doesn't extend farther back than, say 1990?

Napoleon Bonaparte was a hell of a lot worse than Sarkozy, but you believe whatever lunatic notion you want.

Missing case

[gmuslera]

That journalists find and publish it is something that went right. The worst that could happen (or is happening actually) is that noone makes public their findings, or they are forbidden/punished by law if they try to see or warn if there any "weak" point. And of course, the people behind the election, both politicians and company.

Broken by Design

[Anonymous Coward]

> Metronews said that one of its journalists had managed to vote five times, paying with the same credit card, using names, including that of Nicolas Sarkozy.
> The discovery generated an explosion of name-calling within the party and calls by Mr Bournazel for the primary to be abandoned. After a three-hour crisis meeting on Saturday, the Paris federation of the UMP decided to press ahead

Dont need to read more than that. The PTBs dont care if the election is rigged or not. Likely broken by design.

Re:Broken by Design

[o'reor]

Yup. Either broken by design, or designed by people who didn't actually care about the result. Those guys neither have a culture of democracy, nor a culture of computer security. It boggles my mind that they've been 10 years in power until 2012...

The lesson that will be learned

[frovingslosh]

It is a crime to vote multiple times. That crime will not be prosecuted. It is a much bigger crime to expose that the system is corrupt and open to fraud. That crime will be prosecuted.

Re:The lesson that will be learned

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Is it a crime in this case? It varies by jurisdiction, of course; but party primaries are often technically just of the same legal standing as somebody's Friday poker club voting about something. They are, of course, magnified by history and institutional inertia; but the elections by which parties decide on their own candidates for office and elections where voters decide on candidates to actually put in office are quite different things.

Re:Hate group

[Anonymous Coward]

Also their appeal commission for electoral matters is named C.O.N.A.R.E which translates pretty much to "asshole" in french.

That name became popular after their tried electing a leader for their party last year, the two sides stuffed ballots, they couldn't find any kind of agreement so far and they now have officially two different leaders and two dozens simultaneous "general secretary" title holders.

The only political form of opposition they actually opposed since the new president got elected was on the topic of gay marriage by showing everyone the immense depth of their evilness, trying to provoke insurrection, throwing racist and homophobic insults and repeating nonsense.

Finally about 3 out of 4 people at the head of this party is either being prosecuted or has already be condemned for various offenses such as buying people's votes, stealing public money, having dead people vote.

Lately Nicolas sarkozy and Eric Woert (previous minister of economy) are being tried for, oh greatness, abusing an old senile lady, the richest in France, the owner of the cosmetics brand Loreal. Suitcases full of euros for financing Sarkozy's campaign.

Another one still Sarkozy but with Claude Guéant (previous minister of intrior), inculpated for receiving money from Muhamar Khadaffi. Possibly up to 50 million dollars.

The minister of interior just before that was Brice Hortefeux and this nice dude with the looks of a wafen SS was condemned for "racist insults" towards militants of hist own party, the mighty UMP.

The present auto proclaimed leader of the UMP is JeanFrancois Copé. His little personal problem is he has been photographed in the house of a convicted weapon dealer, the same person who he signed fiscal exemptions for million euros when he was minister of economy.

And the list goes on and on and on...

Those people, they are rot. They represent everything that is bad in hour country. This is why we can't have nice things.

What does it say about the people who buy these?

[whoever57]

The people who make the decisions to buy electronic voting systems --are they particularly susceptible to snake-oil salesmen? Surely there is ample evidence that a truly secure on-line voting system is about as likely a unicorn registering to vote, but somehow, the buyers of the system think that they can buy what no-one else can buy?

To register their vote on-line, Parisians were supposed to make a credit-card payment of â3 and give the name and address of someone on the cityâ(TM)s electoral roll.

So you have to pay to vote? In other words, it is really just a party ballot, not a real election, that's why the journalists were able to test it and publicize the failure.

Storm in a teacup

[AdamInParadise]

A few facts :

• It's only a primary for the Paris mayoral election next year, i.e. not a national election.
• The journalists shown that it was really to vote as someone else if you knew a couple of easily and legally obtained piece of information about them i.e. no hacking involved. However, so far there's no indications that fraud is actually taking place.
• The same party is having a primary in Lyon as well, but they are using a traditional paper ballot, and so far it seems to be going pretty well.

OK, so electronic ballots are proved to be less "secure" than paper ballots, again. The UMP is proved to be technologically illiterate, again. Yawn.

Re:Storm in a teacup

[eulernet]

OK, so electronic ballots are proved to be less "secure" than paper ballots, again.

Hum, do you remember the election for the leader of UMP between Fillon and Copé ?
The vote was done with paper ballots, but there have been massive frauds anyway, since Copé stole the election.
The fraud was so massive that Fillon rightfully complained, but since we are talking about politics, they settled "peacefully".

What this proves is that UMP leaders abuse the voting system.

Re:Storm in a teacup

[Anonymous Coward]

Copé said himself on Twitter that UMP is "learning Democracy", as an excuse for the mess. If they're only learning it now, it explains a lot... :D

Re:Storm in a teacup

[Yoda222]

I doubt that UMP is learning democracy. I don't doubt they don't know democracy, my concerns are about the learning part.

Re:Storm in a teacup

[fgouget]

Hum, do you remember the election for the leader of UMP between Fillon and Copé ? The vote was done with paper ballots, but there have been massive frauds anyway, since Copé stole the election.

First that fraud was done in the result collating stage which is independent from the technology used at the booth. I'll grant you that with Internet voting you only have a single "urn" and thus no collating taking place. But as seen here that does not help prevent fraud at all.

Second, each voting booth published its own results at the end of the paper vote counting process. So detecting the fraud was just a matter of independently collating the results. So this fraud was easy to detect. Internet fraud however is likely to be undetectable.

The more cynical would say that, having learnt to their expense that hacking a paper-based election without getting caught is hard, the fraudsters are now trying their hand with a new system in a 'small' election so as to be ready when they have to replay that Fillon-Copé election in a few months.

supposed to make a credit-card payment of €3

[gl4ss]

it sounds like a voting fit for a reality show.
"To register their vote on-line, Parisians were supposed to make a credit-card payment of €3 and give the name and address of someone on the city’s electoral roll."

sounds to me it's just a scam to get 3 euros out of people.

1) have an election about an extremely heated issue to some groups.
2) provide them a means to vote multiple times by paying 3 euros per vote
3) get money from said groups.

it doesn't look to me like they're going to refund that money.

because eh, the whole concept of how it's done goes against ultra secure and quite frankly against any principles that goes with modern voting. the whole concept is anything but secure or fair. it doesn't matter how good the code behind the service is even.

couple of good ground rules:
a) voting is a right - it is to be provided gratis for every adult.
b) check identity somehow(pay id cards from social security or whatever).
c) default enforced(unless disabled etc) voting method should not be a process that is observable to people even if a voter "wants" it to be.
d) if you need to limit amount of candidates have them collect supporters lists(this is usually easily done for people serious about being a candidate, since the limit should be relatively low). these lists can be forged and people can sign the list for multiple candidates, but that only gets them to be a candidate.

Re:Hate group

[Coeurderoy]

I really do not like Nicolas Sarkozy and his politics, but calling him "the worst criminal ..." is the kind of hyperbole that discredit the rest of your message.

bad example

[frovingslosh]

Here in North Carolina, even without on-line voting, we have several unicorns and many people over 150 years of age who vote by Absentee ballot. Most of them seem to be Democrats.

What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[Darkness404]

Before rushing to adopt online voting, we really need to ask ourselves, what exactly is wrong with just voting normally that voting online solves.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[fredprado]

There is nothing wrong with voting normally as there is nothing wrong with travelling from east to west cost by foot. It is just a lot slower than the alternative and requires considerably more work.

The right question to make is not this one, though. It is: "Is there a way to achieve both anonymity and security"? The answer is unfortunately no. That is true for normal, paper voting as well, by the way.

The main difference is that electronic voting, and in special online voting, is easier to be tampered with in large scale, and paper voting is easier to be tampered with in smaller scale.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing.

However, /in theory/ voting online can bring about orders of magnitude reduction in cost and organisation required for an election, which means voting online could be done more often and more quickly.

Representative democracy has been shown on many occasions to be vulnerable to corruption (hope you'll not ask for citations here) that I for one strongly want the ability for the people to demand "let us vote directly on this"

Note that I'm changing the subject here slightly - online voting for representative democracy is no better than paper ballots; but it is the necessary first step.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Before rushing to adopt online voting, we really need to ask ourselves, what exactly is wrong with just voting normally that voting online solves.

What is wrong with normal voting? Here are juts a few things off the top of my head,

1. It is much more difficult to buy votes
2. It is very difficult to intimidate voters
3. Paper trail add verifiable
4. Corrupt polling station official generally can only affect one polling station
5. Mass vote rigging difficult to achieve
6. No single entity makes lots of money off of an election
7. It is far less convenient to sell your vote, and the buyer can't verify how you voted.

So, if you wish to rig an election or make lots of money off of one, then you certainly do not like current voting methods in most nations around the world.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[mjwalshe]

Seems to work well enough in the UK

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in America, where the average citizen weighs in excess of 250 pounds (I refuse to make the effort to go to Google and convert that into kilograms), it really is a problem. See, it requires a certain level of physical fitness to get up out of the couch (or lazy boy), walk over to wherever your keys are, walk to your car, start the car, look at a map to figure out where you need to go, go back inside, grill a steak, fry some freedom fries, cook some bacon, warm up some cheddar, put it all together into a meal, eat it, clean up, get back in your car, start your car, spend 15 minutes trying to remember why you got in your car in the first place, go to the polling location in your car, get out of your car, walk to the polling location, use muscles in your arm to operate the lever (and show your ID in locations where they try to discriminate against people that want to fraudulently vote), and then do ALL OF THAT ALL OVER AGAIN just to get back home.

That's too much fucking work.

It's easier to just put your keyboard on your belly, click on a few things, and vote. I wish I had a toilet inside my chair so I wouldn't even have to get up to take a dump, and maybe something kinda like a urinal on the side so if I drink too much (or I'm sick from a disease), I can vomit and shit in my chair without having to make any real effort. As for peeing, I would just use a catheter and route the tube into the toilet bowl. My mom can change it for me every couple of days.

Oh, and don't forget to vote for Obama in 2016. I heard a rumor that a certain 22nd amendment to the constitution was going to be seeing some drastic changes soon.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in a land-locked country, you insensitive clod.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[Anonymous Coward]

It reduces the equipment costs by an order or two of magnitude since only standard computers would be required to make a 'voting booth'.

In addition, it would boost voter participation by making it convenient via one's home computer or phone.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[timeOday]

what exactly is wrong with just voting normally that voting online solves.

How soon we forget. Remember when we waited for the result for months, and then got a Supreme Court coin-toss, because marking and counting paper ballots is error-prone - some can be interpreted either way.

To this add long wait times at the polls, which effectively requires some people to pay a high price (waiting for hours) to vote, skewing the outcome.

Granted, it has not been demonstrated that computerized voting can solve these problems without creating bigger ones. But the status quo is certainly not ideal.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[Anonymous Coward]

The verifiability of current systems is pretty low. You can't tell if your vote is included in the total. Thats a problem.

The other problem is making sure each qualified voter gets at most 1 vote.

Now, obviously, if the electronic online election does not solve the first issue (verifiability) completely, that is just dumb, since solving that for online elections is easy, even for secret ballot, and thus the online elections should benefit over the more traditional ones in this respect.

Solving the other issue, while keeping secret ballot is a bit harder, especially in the face of low turnouts (if you steal the vote of someone who does not then try and vote, it can go unnoticed). Their system is apparently crap in this respect, and thus it is worse than more traditional systems.

How to do it right:
1: using existing systems for guaranteeing one vote each (mailing out ballots, voting booths, whatever) distribute credentials with which each voter can authenticate to associate a public key with whir voter registration. Display this table (voter+public key) publicly and early so people can argue about its correctness well before the election.

2: Distribute a "Election Description" document, containing all the relevant server addresses, election public keys, ballot items, deadlines etc. Put up the hash on the news, gov site, UN election auditors. whatever, so users/voters can verify that their voting software got the right file.

3: Voters can generate their ballot (including a field for a random value so all ballot can be unique). Blind it for blind signing purposes (such as RSA blind signature) and send it in a request to sign, signed with the voters private key (matching their public one). The signing server must respond with the blinded ballot signed, or with a copy of a previous such request signed with the voters key (proof the voter already had a ballot signed, and thus their request is invalid).

4: signed ballot is unblinded, and submitted through TOR. A delay before submission can optionally be employed to help resist defeating the private ballot via timing attack. Server must respond with a copy of the submission signed with the election key (this is proof your vote should be counted)

5: all ballot are displayed in a public table, signed by the election key. If you ballot is missing, and you have its submission signed, hand it over to the press (its not identifying, so thats fine), and they can prove the election invalid to everyone.

Once done, the server that does the ballot signing can display its full list of ballot singing requests (Which, remember, are signed with the voter's keys). This must be at least a large as the number of submitted ballots (if they can't find enough, election proved corrupt).

Tada, secure online election. A few details are omitted, and I don't have an implementation finished, but it is in progress.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[turbidostato]

"It reduces the equipment costs by an order or two of magnitude since only standard computers would be required to make a 'voting booth'."

And that's cheaper than a transparent plastic box and some pieces of paper exactly how?

"it would boost voter participation by making it convenient via one's home computer or phone."

And there it goes your ability to vote anonymously and out of your free will.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[Hentes]

Cost.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[gnoshi]

In Australia, we boost voter participation by having compulsory voting. If you don't vote, you either have to provide a written explanation of why or pay a fine.
Of course, you can simply go into a voting booth and scribble on the slip and then it becomes an 'informal vote' and isn't counted.

About 3-6% of votes are informal (according to the Australian Electoral Commission: http://www.aec.gov.au/voting/informal_voting/summary.htm)

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[bunbuntheminilop]

A recount of a paper ballot will generally give a different result.

If you have an electoral system where each vote is counted towards the composition of the government, then this is a problem.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[F.Ultra]

The verifiability of current systems is pretty low. You can't tell if your vote is included in the total. Thats a problem.

Of course you can, over here on election day any one who wants are free to stay and monitor the whole counting process

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here its vote by mail, but even if I could go and monitor the counting, its hard to be sure your exact ballot was not skipped, read correctly, as well as the count it was included in actually was included in the official precinct count. Yes, you can do some observing, but with a proper digital system, everyone can automatically audit it to check that their vote was included, and anonymously forward their ballot to any third parties they want which can also verify that the exact ballot is included in the final list of ballots. And, this process produces sufficient evidence to prove the election is corrupt if your vote is excluded.

Even a naive user could scroll through the big list of ballots and see that theirs is included (its unique by a random number the included in it. Note that not choosing a unique/random number is to the disadvantage of the voter, and they choose it, so I don't see that as a threat).

So yes, while paper systems can be verified to some extent, you can do better with an electronic one in that aspect. Thats the key here: a good electronic system, while still not perfect, can be better than a paper one in almost all aspects, often by a huge amount.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[fredgiblet]

I wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing myself.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[Anonymous Coward]

The right question to make is not this one, though. It is: "Is there a way to achieve both anonymity and security"? The answer is unfortunately no.

This is a bit short, intrested readers should consider the commandments here: http://cpsr.org/prevsite/conferences/cfp93/shamos.html/
And you might find some gems here: http://www.vote.caltech.edu/

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubbish - conventional voting is not "a lot slower" and does NOT "require considerably more work".

And here is an even better method, much less prone to fraud:
http://www.paul-robinson.us/index.php/2008/10/25/the_robinson_method_a_really_simple_way_?blog=5

You, sir, are an idiot.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[fgouget]

It is: "Is there a way to achieve both anonymity and security"? The answer is unfortunately no. That is true for normal, paper voting as well, by the way.

Unless you're doing it really wrong, paper has no trouble providing both: the voting booth, voter list and id check provide security; while the lack of a link from the paper ballot to anything else provides anonymity.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[fredprado]

To provide anonymity the counting and the voting must be separated. In between ballots must be stored in containers. That does provide opportunity for tampering. There can be and there actually were many cases where the containers were tampered with.

The most famous paper vote tampering suspicion that has occurred in US was probably in Florida during Bush's first mandate. The recount was made multiple times and each time the results were a little different. It points to obvious flaws in either ballot security or in the counting process, which are both huge problems especially when the state in question decided presidential elections and both candidates were very close to each other in votes.

And more, paper vote tampering is usually impossible to be proved and untraceable, unlike most electronic tampering.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[fgouget]

To provide anonymity the counting and the voting must be separated. In between ballots must be stored in containers. That does provide opportunity for tampering.

Which is why in France the container is transparent (1), stays in the polling station under the surveillance of the voters for the duration of the elections, and why the ballots are counted by voters right away, still in the polling station. So at no time can the ballot box be tampered with.

The most famous paper vote tampering suspicion that has occurred in US was probably in Florida during Bush's first mandate. The recount was made multiple times and each time the results were a little different.

It points to two major flaws in your election system:

• * Voting on a myriad things which requires complex and hard to decipher ballots. In France we vote on one thing at a time and have pre-printed ballots for every candidate or option and there never is any doubt about hanging chads, or partly filled check-boxes. So the counting can be done in about an hour with no doubt about the result.
• * Recounts occur hours after the election so that the ballots have been out of the reach of citizens. Thus the only guarantee that the ballots being recounted are the ones that were cast on election day is that the government says so. At that point you might just as well let them designate their heir. In France the counting is done right the first time and the law allows for no recount.

• And more, paper vote tampering is usually impossible to be proved and untraceable, unlike most electronic tampering.

  Quite the opposite. What makes hacks easy and untraceable is centralization. With a fully decentralized election system like in France you'll need accomplices in a lot of polling stations to actually have an effect on the result. Recruiting them and keeping them quiet makes fraud really hard. In the US the paper ballots counting is centralized which eliminates citizen overview and makes it possible for one bad apple to change a lot of votes. That's what makes fraud easy and undetectable. All electronic voting systems are centralized in their nature: the software and hardware come from a single (county level) or at most a handful of sources (state and federal levels). Anyone having access or able to compromise either can tamper a lot of votes undetectably.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[Shagg]

what exactly is wrong with just voting normally that voting online solves.

Cheating on a large scale is difficult with traditional voting. Online/Electronic voting solves that.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[fredprado]

Transparent urns and local counting do not prevent tampering at all, although they may help to increase security a bit. Anonymity and security are like speed and position in Heisenberg Principle, the more you get from one of them the less you will have from the other. Local counting gives away anonymity for security. You still have a reasonable measure of anonymity although less than you would have in central counting, and in exchange you have a little more security.

And no, centralization does not make hacking untraceable, there is no untraceable electronic hacking. Decentralization makes affecting overall results harder, that much I agree and have stated in my previous post, but it makes affecting local results easier, because recruiting accomplishes in a small town in the middle of nowhere is much easier and cheaper than getting them in high places, which are usually a lot more in evidence.

Local results are not very useful to elect presidents, but they are very useful to elect congressmen, for example.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[fgouget]

Transparent urns and local counting do not prevent tampering at all, although they may help to increase security a bit.

Merely stating so does not mean it's true. You'll have to tell us what reasoning lead you to that conclusion if you want to convince reasonable people.

Anonymity and security are like speed and position in Heisenberg Principle, the more you get from one of them the less you will have from the other.

A bad analogy does not a proof make.

Local counting gives away anonymity for security.

That might be true if there was one polling station for every dozen voters. But there's normally a thousand voters per polling station. Also, unlike in the US where each ballot could be unique due to the millions of combinations of voting just for 20 resolutions, in France there are only 2 to 20 different possible ballots. So there no lifting anonymity that way either.

there is no untraceable electronic hacking.

If that were true we'd know who wrote Duqu, or who stole the account and password information from Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Twitter, Living Social, etc. The problem is that if the attacker plays his hand right we'll never even have any reason to suspect that something is wrong.

because recruiting accomplishes in a small town in the middle of nowhere is much easier and cheaper than getting them in high places, which are usually a lot more in evidence.

You don't need to recruit senators or top brass like that. Just bribe the guy guarding the voting computers in between elections. Use that time to plant a virus on one of them. Done.

Or bribe any one of the programmers at the voting company. Or a low-level election employee pissed at having his salary reduced due to budget restrictions. There are just so many people you can bribe and all you need is one to have a global impact!

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[fredprado]

Merely stating so does not mean it's true.

It is true never the less.

You'll have to tell us what reasoning lead you to that conclusion

No, I do not have to tell you anything more than what I have already told you, read again and you may understand with some effort.

That might be true if there was one polling station for every dozen voters. But there's normally a thousand voters per polling station.

Being one in a thousand people does not provide anonymity. Especially considering these thousand people live relatively near from each other. It is very easy to blackmail small communities and check the local results if the counting is local. It is one of the prices you pay for your less than smart system.

If that were true we'd know who wrote Duqu [wikipedia.org], or who stole the account and password information from Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Twitter, Living Social, etc. The problem is that if the attacker plays his hand right we'll never even have any reason to suspect that something is wrong.

If it was economically viable to know it we would, but many times, like these, nobody cares enough to make the necessary effort and pay the price. There will always have reason to suspect irregularities in high profile activities, though, like voting.

Just bribe the guy guarding the voting computers in between elections. Use that time to plant a virus on one of them [infoworld.com]. Done.

Which is considerably harder than just tampering with ballots. Requires inside information about what is running in the machine and the hiring of technical expertise in addition to local bribes, in comparison to just local bribes.

Or bribe any one of the programmers at the voting company.

Even harder.

You live in fantasy land, but that is the place most of your country likes to reside in anyway, so at least you shouldn't be lonely there.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[fgouget]

You live in fantasy land, but that is the place most of your country likes to reside in anyway, so at least you shouldn't be lonely there.

Oh, ok then. I thought you were reasonable but now I see I've been wasting my time discussing with you.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[fredprado]

"Reasonable" is so far removed from your personal experience that you wouldn't likely recognize it even if it bit you in the ass, my friend.

Re:What's wrong with "normal" voting?

[F.Ultra]

Providing such a lists would enable forced votes and buying of votes on a large scale. Both which are extreme disadvantages of an electronic system and which you do not have with a paper system.

I can more than some observing, I am allowed (and many people exercise this rights) to stay and watch the ballot box from the moment my ballot enters it and until it's counted.

The counting itself is performed by a minimum of three people, the ballot passes by each counter and they tally their own results. If the three values do not match then they have to recount. And this whole process is public as I said earlier.

Electronic voting brings only two benefits to the table: speed and availablity. But what good is it to get a new result in seconds when it's valid for the next four years (and in our case over here, does not go into affect until a few months later anyways). Also the availability is of questionable merit, if you don't bother enough to go to the election place, why should we be interested in your vote?

Vote early and vote often!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now via the internet from the comfort of your home.

The shill is ousted, long live the shill

[OhANameWhatName]

Nicholas Sarkozy (an obviously corrupt shill for the content industry) is ousted and what do you know .. there's a voting system brought to bare which can be easily manipulated to meet the required outcome of corrupt business.

Seriously, who really believes in voting anymore? As long as these supposedly democratic systems CAN be manipulated, they WILL be manipulated. It's long past time to recognise that the governments that were supposed to serve us are now imprisoning us. Our rights to do just about anything are being slowly curtailed and now even the false facad of democracy is falling over.

Re:Hate group

[Anonymous Coward]

Ianal, but as far as I know you are not a criminal unless you are convicted for a crime. If Nicolas Sarkosi hasn't been convicted, calling him a 'criminal' isn't just about rethoric.

China will hack online voting system

[Anonymous Coward]

In the last few years, China has demonstrated what a large organization can do with cyber warfare. If China can hack the computer systems for designs of the F-35 and V-22 Osprey, wouldn't China also be able to hack some online, nation wide election system? Maybe Taiwan should try online voting systems, just to show the world it can be done.

Re:Hate group

[larry bagina]

Jacques Chirac is a convicted criminal.

on line vote = foreced to vote your bosses way at

[Joe_Dragon]

on line vote = foreced to vote your bosses way at work.

Works in a nation of mathematicians and CS

[Anonymous Coward]

Sir,

    You forget a key point. If most of the populace doesn't understand, can't verify, and doesn't trust such a system, it's COMPLETELY WORTHLESS.

    Even I, with a far greater sophistication in understanding of cryptography than the standard, would have a very time feeling confidence in such a system--it's all in the implementation and there are SO MANY ways to screw up.

    It's very hard to screw up a piece of paper.

    Yes, I even agree that if implemented properly, your scheme is far better, except for the faith and trust issue.

Best,

--PeterM

Re:Works in a nation of mathematicians and CS

[Anonymous Coward]

My system could be presented in a way that to a naive user was basically identical to what the article describes happening in France. They were happy to try and use their system. Just doing a design swap between what they had, and a well designed system, that is opensource, should be fine.

I agree that it would be very hard to get the masses to accept that its actually secure enough top try and use, but it sounds like many people accepted such a claim about a system where that wasn't even true.

Here in the USA, we have some electronic voting systems that are closed source, and proprietary. People use them, despite knowing they have caused errors. I don't know why they put up with this shit, but perhaps we have hope for installing a sane system because, for some reason, they are willing to keep trying new systems, independent of quality.

Realistically, I don't expect my setup to make it into real national elections any time soon, but I could see in getting popular via the private sector (use it for board of directors type things), and then perhaps a company would build a commercial voting solution around it which might gain traction at the precinct level in a few years. Eventually sanity could win that way, because the companies that do vote counting in a sane manner using free software saves them money, and lawsuits.

I'll happily concede that you are right, no one will understand it, and it will likely never get used for anything. I just want to have a working implementation to point at next time I see an article like this, so I can feed my superiority complex. It also seems like a fun thing to code up.

Re:Hate group

[manu0601]

The only political form of opposition they actually opposed since the new president got elected was on the topic of gay marriage

OTOH, time is hard for right wing opposition, since the so-called left wing François Hollande is pursuing the exact same economic policy as former right wing president Nicolas Sarkozy.

During the presidential campaign, François Hollande said he would fight finance power and renegociate the treaty on stability, coordination and governance (TSCG), which commits signatories to austerity. He did none of this.

Right wing in France != US right wing

[tlambert]

It means "...either conservative (Catholic, etc.) and/or supporting neoliberalism."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Right-wing_parties_in_France

Not quite the same as the US right wing.

Re:Hate group

[rossdee]

Napoleon Bonaparte was a hell of a lot worse than Sarkozy,

Napoleon wasn't President, he was Emperor
(You don't vote for Emperors)

Re:Used by both right and left...so what?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's good that you included Obama's middle name or I wouldn't have known which Barack Obama you were referring too.

The US eVoting is just as bad...

[joocemann]

It's funny... Diebold/Evergreen make many of the ATMs you probably use. The ATM will never give you an extra $20, and yet the voting machines they design are shown to be 1-3% off....

And this is in-person electronic voting.... why would the internet, a wild-west pool of hackers and government agencies, seem like a safe place for clean democracy?

For me, counting the hand cast ballots with witnesses, no matter how laborious (exaggerated claim, btw) is the most superior and reliable way to ensure that democracy is indeed what is happening.

Remember this question..... what is the point of saving money if you're letting democracy slip away? Chances are, the people that will manipulate the electronic voting will strip money from you anyway...

A few facts

[Yvanhoe]

UMP is not "centre-right". Their model is US Republicans, on the French political spectrum, they are clearly right wing, and trying to attract far-right voters. Even by US standard, they would be clearly Republicans.

This is not a French official election, this is an internal party vote, organized by the political party itself. There are no rules or law to regulate how they vote. The UMP has made itself ridicule already with their leaders' election, but the socialist party was not particularly better when they did the same (fraud in both camps, but they agreed to settle it down)

No one really expects UMP anymore to make a non-fraudulent election. The chief of UMP recently said " We are learning democracy at UMP, it is a bit new." Said this seriously. They were just in power for 10 years...

Re:Hate group

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you commit crime - you are criminal. Whenever poster above has legality to say it - is another question. That makes him criminal as well, but hei, i like poster above more than criminal he accuses of crime.(that now also makes me criminal by French laws, but do I care?)

By definition criminal is person is who commuted crime, whenever it was proven or not - is irrelevant for the definition.

The possabilites

[secondhand_Buddah]

The main benefit of a workable electronic voting system is that we will be able to vote more regularly on a range of issues, taking some of the power away from the politicians. I think that this may be one of the primary reasons why Diebold, who can produce near perfect ATMS, cant/wont build an accurate voting system.

The Robinson Method cures all of this

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.paul-robinson.us/index.php/2008/10/25/the_robinson_method_a_really_simple_way_?blog=5

But somehow it appears to be too 'scary' for the Slashdot crowd.

If we can bank online, we can vote online.

[Anonymous Coward]

If we can bank online, we can vote online.

I wouldn't buy into this anti-online voting bs.
Many have vested interests in keeping the corrupt paper vote system going.

Anyone really convinced that sticking a paper in a box that will be read by politically affiliated people can be more secure or less corrupt than voting online ?

If the system in France is insecure then the fault is in their system, not in online voting itself.

And meanwhile, on the interblag

[Anonymous Coward]

Projects providing the necessary software to make online voting get ignored: http://www.rockethub.com/projects/20176-friction-free-democracy

Re:Hate group

[Anonymous Coward]

U.M.P aren't much worse than the alternatives. The country is not in a better shape now that the government has changed. Globalization and the European Union makes the government power much weaker than it once was anyways.
As for criminal activities, just look at all the affairs surrounding François Mitterand. There are strong suspicions that he actually assasinated people to reach his goals. Not saying that Sarkozy is better, or who is right or wrong but saying that he is "the worst criminal" without further insight is very short sighted IMHO.

My favorite UMP moment....

[Eunuchswear]

"...at the UMP we're learning about democracy, it's a pretty new idea for us" - Jean-François Copé, president of the UMP.

Nice. The people who ran France for the last 5 years or more "are learning about democracy".

Re:My favorite UMP moment....

[fritsd]

I think it is almost a given that certain centre-right political parties (mostly christian democrats in EU countries) attract the type of career politician that is out for power (because his/her party is almost always in government coalition due to the political place in the spectrum), and then after 20 years or so the rot sets in and instead of being a centre-right christian democrat party (religiously conservative, socially between right-wing liberal and labour party) they become the "Party of the Power".

What you can do then in your country is to vote the bastards out and watch them flail and squirm amongst themselves--let the infighting start!

In many countries there has been great progress once the Party of Power is excised from government; and in 4-8 years they can come back, chastised, leaner, and closer to their original centre-right christian democrat ideals, with the powermongers retired or in jail.

IMPORTANT: this mechanism only works in democratic countries with a representative voting system, i.e. the entire democratic world except for commonwealth (US, UK, Canada and Australia IIRC). So in order to let this cleansing mechanism work you must first change the constitution so that every party with more than 3 or 5% of the popular vote can get in governing coalition. For the US this would probably mean a Green Party government with the Republican-Democrat Power Party in opposition. It may seem a bit far-fetched this century, I admit...

Re:My favorite UMP moment....

[Eunuchswear]

In many countries there has been great progress once the Party of Power is excised from government; and in 4-8 years they can come back, chastised, leaner, and closer to their original centre-right christian democrat ideals, with the powermongers retired or in jail.

What a ridiculous theory.

Jacques Chirac. "Vote for the Crook, not the Facist".

Re:My favorite UMP moment....

[fritsd]

OK, maybe it wouldn't work in France, as it is difficult for me to imagine a political coalition between Hollande and Le Pen... and if Marine Le Pen becomes the first female presidente, maybe you'd never have to vote again ;-)

Re:Hate group

[AdamWill]

OP said "Nicolas Sarkozy, the worst criminal this country has ever known". Nothing about 'president', 'Emperor' or elections was specified.

TYS

[Catbeller]

These systems have no other purpose but cheating.

The Canadians have a manual paper system with multi-party guarded counts. It scales, it works, it can be recounted.

E-voting was an idea slammed home in every case. It cannot be secured. No purpose but an invisible and unstoppable means to alter vote counts. The counts have been altered, the machines and systems compromised numerous times on investigation. And that's just outside cracking; anyone on the inside can change code, accumulated totals, and elections at will, if they aren't stupid enough to get greedy. Recounts recount altered votes, so they are useless. We can't analyze code; it can change on the fly. We can't look at the data, because all wee see is the altered datasets.

We need to shut these cheating boxes down and switch to paper before we can't actually cast a meaningful vote ever again.

Re:What does it say about the people who buy these

[Shagg]

What makes you think that the people who make the decisions to buy electronic voting systems want it to be truly secure?

Please change the subject of that news

[Anonymous Coward]

Please change that subject asap. It's confusing. French who lives in North America voted online last weekend for a new deputy (a real one here) to represent them in France.

Also, a political party of France is not France (hopefully). I believe that the news should be better checked before publishing on SD... It's really disappointing.

Re:Hate group

[JakeBurn]

A criminal is one who has committed a crime. Whether they get caught, tried and convicted is irrelevant to whether or not they are a criminal.

so instead of voting,

[Anonymous Coward]

they should just surrender?