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

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.

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.

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.

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.