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Researchers Devise Voting System That Seems Secure, But Is Hard To Use
An anonymous reader writes: According to an article in ReadWrite, a team of British and American researchers have developed a hacker resistant process for online voting called Du-Vote. It uses a credit card-sized device that helps to divide the security-sensitive tasks between your computer and the device in a way that neither your computer nor the device learns how you voted (PDF). If a hacker managed to control the computer and the Du-Vote token, he still can't change the votes without being detected.
I vote yes!
Voting must be secure, private, equal, and transparent. If the counting is done by a machine and there is no paper trail then this transparency is not realized. Nice to see that they are able to secure the transmission, but now the devices can still be tampered with. What I do not understand, why is it so important to replace the voting process with an electronic voting process. Voting is an important act in a democracy, therefore, it is also important to give it enough time and ritual to perform it.
It is conceivable that the World's Cleverest People (WCP) will devise a system that reliably enables people to vote over the internet. And researchers tell us America is no longer a democracy, so I suppose it doesn't really matter that only the WCP will have rational reason to have confidence in the system.
But for those of us who think people should be able to prove to their own satisfaction that their vote was counted as cast, paper inserted into witnessed boxes and then counted in public seems like a better idea. It will never make Microsoft rich, though, so I doubt Microsoft Research will admit this.
Voting should be a low tech process that anybody can understand. Too much technological magic erodes the trust of voters who are capable of understanding it. Simply marking a ballot with a pen is understandable by anyone. Maybe you count them by machine but you always have the fallback of machine counting. I don't trust any voting process that doesn't have that fallback option. If the voting records are only held electronically how can you ever completely trust the results haven't been hacked?
Beside hacking a device to steal votes, there is a number of other concerns about the online voting which cannot be eliminated by any device you can imagine.
For example, how can you be assured the voter has not sell his vote and the buyer can just sit beside him to make sure he is getting what he paid for? How can you prevent someone to impose a candidate to someone else by threatening him/her/them? At a vote poll, you can make sure nobody is intimidated and anyway there is no way someone else can check the vote he tried to steal.
Online voting is a big No-No.
Achille Talon
Hop!