Ask Slashdot: Should I Fight Against Online Voting In Our Municipality?

RobinH writes: Our small-ish municipality (between 10,000 to 15,000 in population) has recently decided to switch to online voting. I should note that they were previously doing voting-by-mail. I have significant reservations about online voting, particularly the possibility of vote-selling and the general lack of voter secrecy, not to mention the possible lack of computer security. However, it's only a municipal election, and apparently a lot of municipalities around here are already doing online voting. I'm not sure if the rank-and-file citizens care, or if they would listen to my concerns. Should I bother speaking up, or should I ignore it since municipal elections are not that important anyway?

Comments

Yes

[Sigvatr]

Yes

Re:Yes

[Mashiki]

Pretty much that. Even Norway tossed it after trials, we looked at it here in Ontario gave it a go at 33 municipalities, garbage. Same with phone voting, garbage.

same as vote by mail

[alen]

no secrecy? - check
i can sell my vote? - check

Re:same as vote by mail

[Todd Palin]

Oregon has had vote-by-mail for about two decades. Opponents suggested vote selling and other vote frauds would occur. Every investigation into these things since then has shown only an incredibly tiny amount of abuse. Vote-by-mail works very very well in Oregon.

The problem with online voting lies in other issues, like the lack of a paper trail for recounts, fraudulent logins, and the potential for wholesale fraud with software/malware manipulations. These are real potential issues, but don't suck vote-by-mail into the argument. Mail voting works. Oregon gets a high turnout in even minor elections because it is so painless, and that is a very good thing. Democracy is alive and well in Oregon, largely due to vote-by-mail.

Speak up, or be silent forever.

[Ardyvee]

If you have any reservations, then speak up. Even if it gets implemented, you can give input an steer it towards some middle ground that cover some of your concerns.

Get the concerns addresssed

[jader3rd]

Instead of fighting it, fix it.

Re:Get the concerns addresssed

[Kjella]

What's there to fix? There are at least two critical issues that no computer software can fix.

1. Confidentiality, it's impossible to prove there's no shadow system recording who voted for what. In paper elections I pick my ballot and fold it so nobody can see what I vote for, the election officials register my vote as used and stamp it and then I put it in the ballot box. It's practically impossible to track which paper slip is mine beyond that point so barring hidden cameras in the booth my anonymity is now secure. With postal votes the votes go in a sealed envelope wrapped in another envelope with the voter card, they open the outer envelope and register the vote and put the sealed votes in a ballot box. Nobody is supposed to see your individual, identified vote. Of course anyone who gets hold of it can tear up both envelopes to see what you voted for, but there's one-time seals and stamps to prevent it happening covertly so it's very hard to do in scale.

With e-voting, you really just have to trust the system that it won't keep a secret record of the votes somewhere. You can wrap it in as much techno-babble as you want but if you just keep all the information and don't throw any away you can map voters to votes. Open source is no magic bullet that makes sure there's no root kit or secret backdoor or screen grabber or snooping hypervisor or system sniffing the network traffic using the voting machine's private keys. With paper voting you can pretty much prove that information goes away through the ballot box process, with e-voting you simply can't. You really think the NSA can't rig an e-voting machine so it records your vote and nobody would detect it? Then I've got a bridge to sell you.

2. Integrity, since you can't prove a particular vote was cast a particular way - and for good reason - the whole system relies on the integrity of the ballot box. The initial state (empty), the inputs (votes being put in) and output (emptied and counted) is closely guarded to see no funny business is happening. You can't guard a memory location, nor could you guarantee the votes in transit. If you got 50 people voting Democrat and 50 voting Republican nobody will realize if the vote came out 51-49 because someone decided to flip a bit or adjust a counter. You can make all sorts of theoretical proofs that the value won't change but they all rely on the assumption that the system won't be tampered with. Which is a pretty bad idea, when you're trying to assess how hard it'd be to tamper with it.

All you need to do is have some sort of switch to make sure it only does that during real elections and not testing. And it doesn't have to be a huge number of votes to matter, if you did that people would start to question why there's such a difference between the polls and elections anyway. Being able to throw swing votes is huge particularly in first past the post systems like the US, for example you could easily have swung the Bush/Gore race in Florida. Here in Europe the limit for representation in parliament is huge, in my country 4,01% and 3,99% is a world of difference and being able to knock one out could totally shift the balance of power between the blocks. Voting fraud doesn't have to be a third world problem with cheesy dictators and despots, there's plenty money and power involved to make it plausible in free and democratic countries too.

A chance to work for doing it right

[Logic Bomb]

You have an opportunity to help make your town a case study for doing it rightâ"which might result in a decision to avoid online voting. You can advocate on security/vote integrity issues by raising awareness of the complexities. Make a strong push for requiring vendors that don't hide their products' inner workings from their customers. Talk about the importance of being able to audit the vote.

The big questions everyone should answer before making a decision are "what do we gain?" and "what do we lose?" I think people often forget the latter.

Yes. Defenitely.

[prefec2]

Ann election must be free, equal, and secure. To ensure equality, the count must be repeatable for everyone. Online voting vor any voting machine does not provide that feature. The German supreme court ruled that voting machines do not allow real democratic elections.

And it is not a good argument that voting machines or online voting is faster. Fast and convenient is not the core concerns for democracy. The above criteria are.

Re:How about no

[CRCulver]

Have it be as an Opt-In program then, where they send you a CD, containing a Live version of a modified Linux distro, putting it in your PC will make it boot to it and thus your viruses no longer matter, from there you can just connect to the voting site and enter your information.

A bootable CD, what is this, 2004? The average person today is likely to want to person any network-based task from a device that doesn't have an optical media drive, such as a tablet or laptop.

Municipal elections are *more* important

[crow]

Municipal elections aren't less important than the Presidential election. On a per-vote basis, they're much more important. Your vote makes much more difference in a local election. The choice you make are much more likely to have a real impact on your community.

The problem with municipal elections is that it's much harder to learn who to vote for. You have to do real work to figure out who the candidates are and what they stand for.

Note: I'm an elected municipal official, so my opinion is a bit biased here.

whence slashdot polls?

[Thud457]

This story is useless without a Cowboy Neal option.

Re:How about no

[Em Adespoton]

I hate it when people try to vote against something that makes life easier, out of privacy concern and security...
If you have viruses on your machine, that's your own darn fault, why penalize everybody for your stupidity?

The second half has already been responded to, so I'll tackle this bit.

If you have malware on your machine, that's likely your own fault (most likely through ignorance). Unfortunately, everyone on your network, on your social network, and on the malware's distribution chain is penalized for your stupidity.

So let's back up one level...

Online voting makes life easier, agreed.

Unfortunately, abuse of online voting doesn't just affect the person not using it to vote, but also affects everyone in the municipality.

You can't have it both ways: either the upstream has to think of the privacy and security concerns, or the end operator (citizen) does.

As "online" implies global, it means that unlike mail-in, where abuse is likely limited to people who are actually a part of the municipality plus a few external interested parties, suddenly abuse is open to the entire world, where statistics indicate that a 0.001% of the 7 billion population = 70,000 actors likely to attempt to abuse the system for reason X instead of the 0.15 of a person who is likely to abuse the system for reason X locally.

The main way to ensure best security is to limit scope: only expose a function to the actors that need to access it. "On the Internet" does the inverse.

And that's just one reason it's a bad idea; there are plenty of others. All of them have solutions, but all the solutions are going to run afoul of statistics when you move a system that's been exposed to 15,000 people into an arena where it's exposed to 7 billion people.

Re:What's changed?

[Animats]

The fact that your municipality is almost certainly using COTS software is actually a plus in this case, even more so if the software is being operated by an outside third party; they're unlikely to have a horse in the race and be tempted to sway the results.

Walden O'Dell, the head of Diebold Election Systems, was a top fund-raiser for George Bush in 2004. He wrote in a fund-raising memo that "he was committed "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President." He did.

Re:You should encourage it

[Em Adespoton]

I'd disagree to your first part: there's not much difference between one President and another when you come right down to it; they are heavily restricted in their actions by policy makers. Plus, your municipal vote for the president has almost no effect on the result, compared to municipal elections where one interest group can sway the entire outcome. Mayors and aldermen have huge amounts of leeway, and their decisions affect your life directly.

I'd rather someone discovers a president was fraudulently elected than a mayor. But I'd rather that they found out the mayor too, if there was fraud involved. This is much easier to do with offline voting than with online voting.

Get Involved

[tomhath]

Local politics can be a lot of fun. Get in touch with a couple of the elected officials and tell them you want to volunteer some time on this initiative. Present yourself as neutral but interested in the idea. If you didn't grow up in the community they won't trust you, but stay with it and get to know them.

Example

[Anonymous Coward]

Verified Voting New Mexoc was started in a Municipality of 17,000 people, and the first action was to persuade the town council that the vote they had taken months earlier to purchase electronic voting systems be rescinded. that's actually quite a difficult thing for a politician to do-- admit they made a poor decision. But it's easier to do if you are not a full time politician in a small municipality.

that decision let us take it state wide and persuade other County clerks to hesitate. It got us meetings with the secretary of state. Eventually the governor and in the end a state law to rescind electronic voting state wide.

so heck yes.

Local very important. More working-age voters.

[raymorris]

I'd agree with others who have said local elections are very important. My local fire, police, schools, roads, and job opportunities are more important to me than whatever Washington did today.

I think you've missed the largest difference that online voting might make. Retired people are over-represented in local elections because they take the time to vote, more often than working-age people do. Online voting might make that more balanced or even swing the other way. Retirement age people also have the majority of the money and therefore influence through political donations.

Along the same lines, traditional voting methods mean only people who care enough to take the time to vote do so. (Unless a politician has a pizza party on the voting bus and pays each voter $10 to get on board.) Online voting, if it takes just a few seconds, MIGHT increase the number of votes by people who can't be bothered to take a few minutes to get involved. That could be good or bad. Personally, I think that if you don't know the name of the incumbent, you probably aren't informed enough to make an informed vote and I'd prefer you choose not to vote that time around. I'd hope that everyone gets informed, but if someone isn't interested enough to know what's on the ballot ahead of time, I don't see a need to encourage them to vote anyway.

Yes

[PopeRatzo]

Local elections are the only ones that are important. The national system is so rigged that nothing individuals can do will make a difference.

However, be aware that local elections are the next target of corporate types. In the past two years, the Koch brothers have spent millions on school board elections, and not in the areas in which they live.

If you do get involved locally, be prepared to make a real fuss, and make sure you don't get busted for pot or beat your wife. In fact, don't even allow yourself to get into a situation where you can be framed for a pot bust. People have tried to get involved in local politics and have had their lives destroyed for their trouble.

And if you try to fight what has been cynically referred to as "election reform", be prepared for death threats.

Absolutely

[EmperorOfCanada]

I am in Halifax, Nova Scotia and we have shockingly stupid online/phone voting. In our last election it didn't make or break any elections but my trust in it is exactly zero. The software used is not open to the public, in fact almost nothing is told to the public except for sanitized versions of how secure the software is and how thoroughly they have tested it. Even many of the discussions about it were secret.

I have read a few mumblings about the dangers online voting but nobody substantial has come out and said that online voting is a clear and present danger to democracy. In Canada we had someone (never conclusively identified) who robocalled a bunch of people who were probably going to vote for one of the parties and tell them that it was "Elections Canada calling and that their voting station had been moved to a location far far away." The result was that many voters either didn't bother to vote or went far far away only to find out that they were in the wrong place and had to go way back to vote, again presumably this reduced number of voters. This was a clear and presumably effective law breaking cheat. If the person(s) behind this could have hacked an online voting system I am 100% sure that they would have. As the robocall thing turned into an actual scandal whereas a harder to detect hack would not only reduce their risk but also increasetheir chances of success to basically 100%.

I can consider myself to be somewhat expert in computer security but my simple explanation is twofold. Facebook, Google, major banks, companies like target, etc have all been solidly hacked; so how can some proprietary publicly untested system be so magically secure? Secondly how would anyone know that an election had been "adjusted" unless someone's cat bob wins with 99% the election will have results that surprise some people; just like pretty much every election.

And most importantly, anyone who wins through some sort of hacking will pretty much have failed the good citizen test at that point.

In Halifax, Nova Scotia the two main reasons given for the online voting were: to increase voter participation, and to reduce costs. Participation was basically at the same anaemic levels of the past; and nobody in their right mind would sacrifice the security of our democracy to save a few bucks. On top of that the election results were unusually slow to come in anyway, and I don't understand the money saving as they have just as many traditional polling stations as ever. The electronic voting does cost a bundle, plus I really hope the city is spending money auditing it which should be some serious auditing thus costing even more. Plus the extensive education campaign couldn't have been free. So if it somehow magically cost less than it would just be accounting magic, not reality.

On a personal opinion level, the reason for the anaemic participation levels is that government doesn't listen to us. We throw one set of bums out and the next bunch act identically to the last. If they genuinely wanted participation we would have referendums to approve the council "decisions". The voting would be fast and furious on a fair number of issues.

Lastly from what I have read, ever single different electronic voting system that security researchers have ever gotten their hands on has easily and completely been hacked. Often in many many different ways. The voting technology companies almost always have a similar line. "That was a previous model and our present systems have been proven to be 100% secure." yet they said that the easily hacked system had been totally secure when it had been released.

So if you figure out a way to have a ground swell political movement that shuts down your local online voting please PM me and I will try that here.

Yes

[grep -v '.*' *]

Our small-ish municipality ... I have significant reservations about online voting ... Should I bother speaking up?

You should do the "right thing". Municipal elections (or at least local, to regional, to state, to federal) is how Bill Clinton got elected. If we (I'm in Arkansas) hadn't voted for him to start with to be the Guv, he never would have gotten his start. (Debateable, but go with me here.)

At best, you're informing them that the emperor has no clothes. They probably don't know; they believe all of the hype and wonderment of Web 3.0 and all. It's all glory and wonder, don't you know? Nothing bad ever happens here.

At best, you're dealing with caring people that don't know. At worst, you're dealing with caring people that do know. (Hopefully the latter isn't the case.) And really, on the surface it sounds wonderful: easy, fast, no hanging chads, etc. Also, a minor point: no real vote verification. (Now we can debate on what 'real' means; that's why I like actual, physical objects. And with arrows [see below], no hanging chads. Not quite connecting? They voted. Kid scribbled all over the page? Nope, they didn't. Connected the wrong ends? NOPE, they're stupid. (Dotted lines show how they connect. If YOU can't see the dotted lines then YOU should have gotten someone to help you.)

Try to inform them of all of the issues. And then let them inform you of their concerns and assumptions and issues Hell, maybe they're right! Maybe you (and I) are just paranoid. Lets all talk about it. That being said, nothing is perfect, so let's talk about all of the worries about ALL of the technology.

I personally like our old paper "connect the broken line with a pen" that is read, counted, and stored in a sealed box all at once. (Problems? It's rejected immediately while I'm right there, so I can redo. (I assume, it's never happened to me.)) So the computer counts the votes, and if there's any problem or just for random auditing purposes you open the sealed box with everyone around and verify the votes. As long as the machine matches the physical vote count, great. But the minute they don't, you start escalating the physical counts until you reach your "statistical insignificance" number. And if you don't, that's what the machines are for.

My vote had better count, even though it's drowned out into insignificance. Otherwise, why even bother voting to start with? Just do it to me and let's get it over with.

Norway

[lynet]

I recommend reading some of the reports produced after the E-voting trials in Norway:
http://www.ifes.org/Content/Publications/News-in-Brief/2012/June/Speed-Efficiency-and-Compliance-an-Evaluation-of-E-Voting-in-Norway.aspx

As for my point of view (as a former sceptic), I was convinced during the process that the trials were held at a necessary level both with regards to voter and ballot security. The reason for not continuing the trials was "political" - not based on the results from the trials. We had a general election in Norway two years later, and the parties that are "against" E-voting in the first place won that election...

The source code and documentation from the trials are available (the web page is in Norwegian):
http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/kmd/prosjekter/e-valg-2011-prosjektet/kildekode/tilgang-pa-kildekode.html?id=646007

Cryptography

[merockstar]

If they use http://followmyvote.com/, that's a BitShares DAC. It uses open source software with a blockchain, similar to bitcoin, and cryptography to publicly ensure that votes are legitimate.

It would make it an experiment worth pursuing.