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

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: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: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: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: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: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.