Online Voting Should Be Verifiable -- But It's a Hard Problem

An anonymous reader writes with a link to a pithy overview at The Conversation of recent uses of (and nagging difficulties with) online voting and asks Regular 'internet voting too risky' arguments don't take some approaches into account like verifiability of votes by voters, observers, and international media. Could we have end-to-end verifiable online voting systems in the future? What are the difficulties? Where is it being done already? From the linked article (which provides at least some answers to those questions), one interesting idea:Another challenge to designing verifiability in online voting is the possibility of malware infection of voters' computers. By some estimates between 30%-40% of all home computers are infected. It’s quite possible that determined attackers could produce and distribute malware specifically designed to thwart or alter the outcome of a national election – for example undetectably changing the way a user votes and then covering its tracks by faking how the vote appears to have been cast to the voter. Whatever verifability mechanisms there are could also be thwarted by the malware.

One way to try to prevent this kind of attack is to make voters use several computers during the voting process. Although this is hardly convenient, the idea is to make it more difficult for an attacker to launch a co-ordinated attack across several computers at once.

Comments

Re:Why the Push for Online Anyway?

[DaHat]

Because there are those who believe that voting today is just to gosh darn hard.

Too hard to find your polling place and go there during election hours.

Too hard to request an absentee ballot if you don't be able to make it on election day.

Too hard to come up with a photo id to prove you are who you say you are.

Here in Washington state we ignore all three of those and mail the ballot straight to your house and give you 3 weeks to return it to be counted. No possibility of fraud there!