Google Submits Patent Application For Online Voting (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Google has outlined a concept for real-time online voting in the Google home page in a patent to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Entitled 'Social Voting-Based Campaigns in Search', the application proposes a voting user interface (VUI) that will enable a user to submit one or more votes in a voting-based campaign, giving the hypothetical example of a campaign to vote for the 'Top American Singer', with users authenticated via Google log-ins. If implemented, the system would represent a new foray for Google into generating rather than recording analytics and metrics of popularity.

Comments

Use it to select patents

[goombah99]

This would be great for voting down stupid patents.

Do Not Want

[Etcetera]

There are vaguely smart people here in Slashdot. At this point, I'm comfortable saying that there's NO mass-electronic voting system I'd want to adopt. The attack surface is too high, the rewards for a successful intrusion or intentional modification by the controlling interests are too high, and the benefits are too low.

Electronic voting is fine in small cases, where the number of votes is so low that it's not worth a massive effort to break.

If it's connected, it can be hacked. If it's electronic, it can be modified. Even WORM/DVD-burning systems can be altered via firmware that's not writing what you think it's writing (and falsely spits back info on a "read" to fool at-moment auditing).

You know what humans are good at securing? Little pieces of paper, often with Presidents on them. Usually it involves guns. Doing it at scale requires scaling up your investment. Altering the contents of one polling station's box doesn't mean you've also altered the contents of the other 85,000 that also have ballots. Intrusion is limited by physical restraints. And usually is easy to spot after-the-fact.

It definitely doesn't involve glibc bugs, Romanian hackers (or the State of Romania), and trusting the political process to the cloud.

No thanks.