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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.
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.
Just like postal voting, Internet voting is a bad idea.
In a family group, you simply don't know who is really voting. Yes, the correct person may be marking the postal ballot, or clicking the votes, but a dominant family member can be looking over the voter's shoulder, making sure the vote corresponds to the dominant family member's preferences.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
We are really really good at handling online transactions of various kinds. Voting is easy. You just have to give up the secret ballot...
Anonymous secure verifiable voting is a bad joke.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Or we could just use paper ballots that simply work.
Why the need to push technology into places where it is not needed and it doesn't improve the process?
We can't even get voting machines that are secure and verifiable. We contract companies with no accountability to make these, and they don't even listen to third party researchers, or calls for open reviews. Why on earth would we think we could secure it on a public network, with umpteen more attack vectors?
I am a ( small ) contributor to the future IEEE 1622 standard. We chose not to deal with the security problem, and to tackle only the electronic interchange format. Security, in electronic voting, seems too hard a problem to solve right now.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The same thing they claim on-line voting has problems with, is the exact same thing we have problems with using boxes. Every election there is somehow missing ballots, and don't even get me started on dangling chads, absentee ballots, and how many dead people are voting every election.
No system is perfect, but what they have currently can't be any worse than on-line voting.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I don't want people who aren't invested enough* to go to a poll to decide policies that affect my life.
(*modulo people with disabilities or who have work conflicts, but we already have mechanisms in place to account for that -- I'm talking about the general issue of lowering the bar too much)
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
Why have online voting? Really, voting in person means people who are interested enough bestir themselves to do so. And if they are interested enough to go vote, presumably they at least know the candidates' names ahead of time and hopefully something of the issues. Until you can guarantee there are no ultra-low information voters then universal turnout is not good. Otherwise might as well turn voting over to Mechanical Turk.
By time we get to the polls we get to choose between Kang and Kodos. The real choosing has been done in back rooms by power brokers and billionaires. Low voter turn out is in part fueled by the apathy that comes from only getting to choose between two pre-selected options by those with very different morales and priorities from the rest of us. The candidates on the ballot only got their by becoming indebted to those power brokers and rich, meaning they have to be corrupted as a per-requisite.
Some people will actually support one side socially, and vote for the other in the ballot box. The reason for doing that is your friends and popular culture might think you're a "socialist" or you're "intolerant" if you vote one way or another.
While it is better to be fully out there with your beliefs, its not always an option. What if you were a closeted gay individual in the Deep South who feared complete ostracism or even physical harm, but definitely wanted to vote for a candidate who would support gay rights? What if you were a member of an unpopular religion who tries to keep their beliefs private, but now has them on display for people who refuse to be tolerant.
You know as soon as it would become public record, that some asshole is going to put your vote and you on a map using Google Maps and spread it around. We've already seen that with gun license owners.
Democrats, hipsters, and neo-technotards, please give it up.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with paper ballots that reminding people to double-check the accuracy of wouldn't solve. It's worked forever, reduces security to the (relatively known problem to solve) of physical security of a location and transit -- something banks have done for centuries. For voter verification, require Photo IDs from a recognized entity, and/or "vouching" similar to what's done now in many states when needing to notarize something from someone with insufficient ID.
Make ballot-by-mail and online voting special-case-only (eg, registered expats; those on deployment; etc.) and such a small scope that it's not worth the coordinated, targeted investment in massive hack schemes, then secure using the best, reasonable internet-encrypting technology.
Stop trying to re-invent things that aren't really that broken to begin with. And sorry Millennials, the inability to vote by app from your cell phone is a feature not a bug.
In related news: I wish more people would go watch Max Headroom again. Sometimes I feel we're living about 15 of those 20 minutes into the future
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
And yet, we don't feel we are secure enough to allow people to vote? How the fuck does that make any sense?
Voting should be simple. And by simple I mean low-tech. Canada's system is nearly perfect. Everyone can understand it. Everyone can see how the votes are counted. An observer can watch the voting, can watch the counts. Recounts are easy.
As soon as you make it online, it becomes inscrutable. Even if you design a system with open hardware, open software, etc most people still can't understand it, and can't verify it. And even if they verify the software and hardware, they can't know that's the software and hardware that was actually used, or that it wasn't remotely patched with new software the day of the election, and then patched back after the election. There are ways of securing it... but they are themselves inscrutable, crytopgraphy, digital signatures, ... might as well be using more magic to show the original magic was right. The system should be something everyone can understand intuitively.
Paper voting is that. You have X paper ballots, each person is handed a ballot, person goes into a booth marks it, and then turns it in. You can see for yourself that the number of voters matches the number of ballots. You can see for your self that the voter puts the ballot in the box. You can watch the box yourself to see its not tampered with. At the end you can watch them take the ballots out of the box, you can watch them be counted, and recounted.
Democracy should be THAT transparent.
NOTHING beats the ease-of-use of and time saving of online voting.
But why on earth would "ease of use" and "time saving" be the most important aspects of choosing the system by which we select our governement?
You propose giving up a voting system even a child can understand and verify for a system that only the elite could even begin to understand, and which would be all but impossible to prove was operating correctly on election day.
While I disagree with Shakrai, you point about college students isn't valid--college students can register at their college address or their home address. If you can't make it home, register at your college address.