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University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone
smitty_one_each writes in with this story about a professor developing a new electronic voting system. "A Clemson University professor is developing a new electronic voting system that will allow voters to cast their ballots from home computers, tablets and smartphones. As Clemson's chair of human-centered computing, Juan Gilbert has lead teams of students over the last 10 years to create an online voting system accessible at home or on the go that will be more accurate, have increased verification and make voting more accessible to people with disabilities by offering mobile and voice-command options."
hackers will not only steal my identity, they will steal my vote.
Sorry, but the GOP will never allow this to happen. They're voter base still hasn't figured out how to use the coffee cup holder on computers yet!
Back when Digg was big and Reddit was new, I wanted to make a factional voting site. Basically it works like this: Everyone votes and downvotes stuff like Reddit. But everyone also has sub categories for their affiliation. An example might be: Democrat/Republican. They'd have a long check list and radio buttons of different affiliations. This way something opposing groups disagree on would be voted up for their own personal faction.
We were going to have petitions where you could negative sign the petition to disagree. So politicians don't see a list of 10,000 signatures when 100,000 people hate it.
The problem we had was determining who is a registered voter. It is hard to verify people as having a real identifier especially if you have no start up capital to send out stamps for snail mail verification methods. And another problem is once you have registered voters, how do you watch out for hackers? We decided we couldn't solve these problems and gave up.
Someone really could make a hyper democracy site though. there's a market for it. Educate the voters on their desires for politics, and tell them which of their elected officials voted for or against certain topics they're interested in! It is real simple in concept. It'd start out as a voter education site, but if it seriously got powerful, politics could be different with an educated voter base.
God spoke to me
Even if it could be secure (which I doubt), this would take away the ability for political parties to bully voters as they come to the polling places. It would be voted down by all existing politicians, since it would change the voting demographic too much.
Same story as Gerrymandering. Everyone is against it... except enfranchised politicians that are being protected by it... which also happen to be the only people that can do something about it.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
@echo off
:10
Vote.exe "Hillary"
goto 10
As long as there is the ability for someone to stand behind you and make sure vote a certain way, I won't support it. No one knows how I vote when I step into a voting booth.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
All hail the ruling party of AT&T
839*929
Hopefully they'll include a way to spoil my ballot. The last time I actually voted for a party was 1998, and that was only out of naivety.
The whole democratic system doesn't work:
-Two parties don't express the full spectrum of political views
-The two parties you get generally end up pretty much the same and only differ in what bullshit they talk before an election
-None of them do what they say they'll do
-None of them are accountable, so when they don't do what they say they'll do nothing happens
Democracy us upheld as a defining principle of freedom when in reality the whole system is a sick joke. Providing a method of voting with tablets doesn't do anything to solve the fundamental problems.
The only way this would ever be even remotely secure is if users of the system had to get a unique key in person or have a key mailed to them that can only be used once. Even then, it obviously could be guessed what the key is or snail mail could be intercepted. Then you'd have the issue of people claiming someone stole their vote when their party member didn't win. Why are we taking this seriously? Because someone in a University is doing it instead of a for profit company?
Two years ago I would have looked down on this, saying that the minimum requirement for participating in government would be showing up one day a year to check some boxes on a form.
However, those two years have brought on voter registration laws designed to disenfranchise, laws so blatantly racist that it's pants-on-heads insane that anybody let them get away with it.
Gerrymandered districts can't be fixed til the next census. Mobile voting could be a hell of a stopgap before then.
Actually, the issue is not technological as 'remote' vote could be done over the phone (with or without voice recognition) or even with door-to-door voting unit with a mobile terminal. The problem is how to guaranty that the vote is not cast under coercive situation? Coercive can go form a gun in your temple to simply family members bullying you... That's why the vote is cast in a small secretive room.
Why everyone is so hostile to the PC in recent years?
Why this story left "PC" out of the headline, for example?
Why everyone is so quick to embrace proprietary, locked-down devices that have only a tiny fraction of the PC's power, and only the few can develop for and that nobody can repair or upgrade or even change the battery in?
Ever wonder?
Pass on this story until someone more reputable reports with relevant details.
It's easy to authenticate the votes when the elections are all rigged anyway!
as i've mentioned before, i owned a software company in the 80's that developed real-time interactive modules for Galacticomm's MajorBBS...pre-www and http stuff. it was actually really cool and cutting-edge stuff.
Tim Stryker, the creator of the MajorBBS (who sadly committed suicide in the 90's), preached that he built the MajorBBS to promote the idea of "Superdemocracy", the idea that citizens all vote on the issues that our relatively-corrupt politicians currently do.
Here is a fascinating newspaper article about his idea...from 20 years ago!
in a nutshell...
SUPERDEMOCRACY - A PLAN WITH `SYMMETRY`
In contrast, what Stryker proposes ``is a continuous network hierarchy of online referenda, open to all.``
By plugging into the system, any time -- 24 hours a day, 365 days a year -- citizens (anyone, in fact, 16 or older) could propose law, add their comments to the public debate and vote on the proposals offered by others.
Stryker likes to stress the ``symmetry`` built into his plan. There is, he contends, no built-in elitism, no snap decisions required, no lack of checks and controls to protect against what he calls ``wild gyrations about the legal landscape.``
While Stryker`s system would abolish Congress, it would retain all the implementing portions of the government: the president, cabinet, FBI and so on. (Originally, he thought even juries could be eliminated, but he`s not so certain of that now.)
Citizens` proposals would be collected into a subquorum pool, accessible to all, where they would be discussed, debated and voted on. When a critical level of interest was shown (reflected, in most cases, by participation of 50 percent of the eligible voters, 75 percent if a constitutional change were involved), the measure would be elevated to an active pool where debate and voting would continue for precisely 30 more days.
trust me...i read his books...Tim was a genius and thought everything through and even engineered and developed a brilliant system to make it really happen. his idea on voting proxies and subquorums seems to be light-years ahead of the stuff this professor is doing. ...and so what became of all this effort and thought? exactly nothing.
lets face the facts...the LAST thing our politicians are EVER going to do is write laws that limit and restrain or HELL-EFFFING-NO!! ELIMINATE their power and their ability to coerce the wealthy to part with their cash and give it to them.
So the chances that this guy's ideas or work are ever going to see the light of day are exactly 0.00000000001%, IMO
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
so you boss can force you to vote at work there way.
No we need the system where you can vote in that box where others can't see you are voteing for.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR3A9rG022M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmsdSVQSXLg
Making your vote not count even faster
Voting on your computer at home, or on your cellphone, or anything like it, means the elimination of the secret ballot.
The point of the secret ballot is not only to allow you to vote without any person knowing how you voted, but to compel you to vote secretly, and thus prevent bribery, coercion, and other evils.
That's not just me talking, that's The American and English encyclopædia of law, Volume 10, from 1899, page 585.
But voting on your own device on your own time opens up for possibility all manner of coercion. This is probably where we're headed, and if you don't care about the issue, fine, but at least educate yourself about it first. I hope that's not too much to ask.
Having someone stand behind you and make you vote a certain way could be a problem - especially if employers started coercing employees to vote a particular way in the office (which no employer may ever do, who knows, but there is a power difference and proximity).
The bigger problem is vote buying. If you can prove to someone that you've voted one way rather than another then suddenly vote-buying becomes possible.
(In contrast, there is currently no way to prove which way you voted to someone else. As such, if someone pays you to vote a certain way they are basically limited to hoping you follow-through on your promise. They can't check.)
Considering the amount of money being spent on election advertising, outright buying of votes could be quite a low-cost way of winning an election. If it was $100 per vote, then the election could have been turned by spending under $500m in a few key states, and frankly I suspect you could probably convince a non-voter to vote your way from the comfort of their own home for less than $100.
That already happens in some states in the US. When I was an admin at Microsoft, our boss's boss told us to bring in our ballots one day. Yes, in this state, we are not allowed to vote securely like in much of the country. Instead, ballots are mailed to us then are returned by mail. Several women's groups claim a large portion of husbands votes with ballots intended for their wives or children over 18. I know that working for a huge tech company means that you will have to vote the way you're told. A friend's church has their members collect ballots then a group of volunteers fill-in the forms for the members and drops them off in bulk. It's a shame that the Republicans that rule this state care so little about the right to vote that they decided to destroy our rights by making voting 100% insecure. The Democrats may have the majority, but they always do what they are told to by the Republicans.
How can I vote if I don't have tablet, smart phone?
Let people vote on lots of issues that are important not just an occasional one that the pols decide we are allowed to decide once every couple of years. We should have the option of having a say in the every day issues just like the pols. This is plenty doable with current tech. It will be the more informed people that want to be more involved, too.
Why not just apply Bitcoin to voting, so that we are able to have real democracy?
Instead, for some odd reason, people think the federal government is the end all
Corruption. The reason is corruption.
State and local governments tend to be corrupt. Also small-minded.
Yeah, let's trust an SEC school when it comes to voting....
Not much bleeding point in having the most secure voting software in the universe if the client's OS or GUI is compromised. This is what TOR users found out when the NSA broke not the TOR network, but simply hacked the user's browsers and got them to betray themselves.
Before: "BUSH ELECTED PRESIDENT"
After: "ANONYMOUS ELECTED PRESIDENT"
Hey! There is an up side!
it would not be democratic, at least not by German standards, since the layperson cannot check it. Even if it's secure, which it cannot be, you need at least a degree in mathematics and several days of work to understand and check it yourself. Since a voting system must be resistant to large scale attacks, i.e. the government conspiring against the voters, it is vital that everybody can check it for themselves.
With pen and paper everything is easy to check. You look into the ballot before it is sealed, you check if everyone just throws in one ballot, and on the end you can count the ballots easily. This is something which can be checked trivially.
The technology has existed far longer than tablets and smartphones. It's called HTTP/HTML and consists of so-called webpages with so-called forms that allows feedback using buttons and similar. Technology to read a webpage aloud to the visually impared has also been around for a long time.
Now, how to secure that vote - making sure the right one votes and votes only once - that's the tricky part, but hardly a giant issue. We've had systems featuring parts of this also for a long time so it's just a matter of putting together the appropriate parts. One bit would be fairly important and different from most other systems: While we want a secure login, we don't want to retain who exactly the user is once we're logged in. Usually linking the login to an account is the center of most systems but in a voting system this is exactly what we don't want. But besides that it's all business as usual: Secure communication, login-screen that makes brute-forcing very difficult, data handling that ensures only one vote and that this vote isn't changed later etc.
It might also make sense to add a full backdoor to the NSA so they can register who votes for what and whatever else they need to know without having to hack the system and thus possibly open up new vulnerabilities that can be exploited by others for vote manipulation... ;)
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Yet every time I post it up, people seemed to be terrified of the thought of a fraud proof voting system, with instant results, that ALL participants can see. Why?
seems legit
Why do well-meaning researchers waste so much time and energy on e-voting? They should do something more likely to have a positive outcome, such as working on a perpetual motion machine.
You might want to lookup the "Battle of Athens", a corrupt group of local politicians and a sheriff were using intimidation and vote rigging to stay in power. It took a major effort on the part of the community (including an armed raid by WWII vets) to route them out.
It also opens up an avenue for flash votes. Not sure if that's good or bad, but it could enable new rules. President violates the 4th amendment rights of every person on Earth? Why wait years for it to get to the supreme court? Hold a public vote tonight. Vote his ass out and get a new guy tomorrow. Same goes for congress or any other public official.
Frankly, with >30% of the votes now coming from absentee ballots, I think you've already lost the coercion/buying votes battle.
And by Simpsons I obviously mean Estonia.
"It is also something that can be manipulated easily."
On a small scale yes, but on a scale necessary to swing an election? First off you would have to have agents in a large portion of poling places, you would have to generate false ballots, you would have to dispose of the official ballots and somehow keep the whole conspiracy a secret. You might be able to swing a very close election with a small dedicated group, but it becomes exponentially more difficult the further apart the candidates are in valid votes.
Because using i := i + 1 or i++ operators are difficult.x
Seriously, how bloody hard is it to COUNT votes.
Isn't that something worth researching? Why can't there be a one-time-access key mailed to every registered voter? Mass produce a bunch of keys, don't record who gets what key, and don't record any data about the device that uses a specific key. I know the obvious problems with that kind of setup, but if I had all the answers I'd make a remote voting system and sell it, instead of arguing about it on /.
Surely we can't just say "It's impossible, so let's stop trying."
Isn't that something worth researching? Why can't there be a one-time-access key mailed to every registered voter?
You did not read my comment very well, because what you propose does not, in any way, deal with the issue I raised: if the system does not compel you to vote secretly, then it is not a secret ballot. Simply giving you a one-time key does absolutely nothing to compel you to vote secretly: you can still show your ballot to anyone you wish.
Surely we can't just say "It's impossible, so let's stop trying."
That is not what I said. I said I know of no way to do it. I welcome proposals that would, but any system that allows a voter to show his ballot to someone else during or after preparation of the ballot is definitionally not a secret ballot, and is still wide open to bribery and coercion. So you would need to find a way to enforce secrecy in the home. Maybe there's a way ... but the burden isn't on me to demonstrate it.
MacDork: my goal is less to preserve the secret ballot than to point out the fact that we've lost the secret ballot. There's massive value in it, and we lost it without most people even realizing it. In my state, it is literally gone: WA has all-mail voting, even though our constitution requires "absolute secrecy in preparing and depositing" our ballots. And there was no debate or discussion about the fact that it clearly violated the constitution.
If we want to live with no secret ballot, fine, but we should understand what it is we're doing.
Also, I disagree with your conception of flash votes: I think recalls should be rare and deliberate and not taken in the heat of a moment. The idea that we can recall people on a whim undermines the point of representative government, which is not that we just elect people to think and act and vote on our behalf, but that we elect people for their judgment, and this would make representatives essentially beholden to polls, instead of exercising their judgment. The problem of officials violating our laws can be dealt with through more access to recalls and so on, perhaps, but without allowing this kind of immediate recall.
There is no way "home voting" can ever be at the same time respectful of privacy and ensure sincerity of the vote.
Either the "respected professor" hopes to make sure that "pater familias" can make sure that the "whole family votes right" ! ...
or he has no idea of the realitities and history of voting
Or under the pretence of "helping disabled people (and lazy people) to vote" he want's the make sure that he gets some funding in the great "electronic voting" con ...