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32 States Offer Online Voting, But Experts Warn It Isn't Secure (bostonglobe.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes: According to the Washington Post, 32 states have implemented some form of online voting for the 2016 U.S. presidential election -- even though multiple experts warn that internet voting is not secure. In many cases, the online voting options are for absentee ballots, overseas citizens or military members deployed overseas. According to Verified Voting, "voted ballots sent via Internet simply cannot be made secure and make easy and inviting targets for attackers ranging from lone hackers to foreign governments seeking to undermine US elections."
And yet 39% of this year's likely voters said they'd choose to vote online if given the option, according a new article in the Boston Globe, noting that "All 50 states and D.C. send ballots to overseas voters electronically," with Alabama even allowing them to actually cast their ballots through a special web site. "Security is exponentially increased over any other kind of voting because each ballot, as well as the electronic ballot box, has military-grade encryption," argues the founder of the software company that assures the site's security. "She also claims that Web voting is more accurate," reports the Boston Globe. "No more hanging chads or marks on a paper ballot that may be difficult to interpret. Web systems can also save money and can be upgraded or reconfigured as laws change..."
And yet 39% of this year's likely voters said they'd choose to vote online if given the option, according a new article in the Boston Globe, noting that "All 50 states and D.C. send ballots to overseas voters electronically," with Alabama even allowing them to actually cast their ballots through a special web site. "Security is exponentially increased over any other kind of voting because each ballot, as well as the electronic ballot box, has military-grade encryption," argues the founder of the software company that assures the site's security. "She also claims that Web voting is more accurate," reports the Boston Globe. "No more hanging chads or marks on a paper ballot that may be difficult to interpret. Web systems can also save money and can be upgraded or reconfigured as laws change..."
With online voting, it is impossible to prevent coercion.
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If this can be made to work, then we no longer need a congress. Everyone can vote directly on every issue.
just put up a Facebook page and see who gets the more Like. Problem solved.
It's not like it really matters anymore. Politicians are entertainers nowadays, not decision makers.
lucm, indeed.
This will result in pales in comparison to the amount of enfranchisement it will create. Every time I've seen someone railing against voter fraud it's always been a transparent attempt to keep some kind of "undesirables" from voting. Usually members of the working class.
Bullshit. I only want people voting who put some effort into it. We're continually throwing away our country by trying to turn elections into zero effort by the voter. In my opinion the two worst things in our elections are open primaries and early voting. Show up the day of the election, darken the oval next the candidate you want and feed it into the electronic counter - an unambiguous paper trail will remain. Save early voting to the true absentee and not leave it open to vote harvesting.
You can take a screen shot or a picture of the screen that shows your vote.
Still, nothing beats good old paper ballots. Too bad not enough people are demanding it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
From TFA: "But experts in computer security maintain that nothing sent over the Internet is secure."
While I agree with the point he's trying to make about the issues with existing online voting systems, this hyperbolic statement is clearly wrong.
It's certainly possible to make Internet voting at least as secure as paper ballots. Heck, it could be made significantly more secure than my state's vote by mail program (which is the only way to vote in Washington state). The problem is, making it secure would also make it extremely inconvenient for each voter, as well as expensive to the state in terms of both money and manpower... so that's not going to happen.
#DeleteChrome
Here we go again, with the "it isn't secure, and we're gonna hack the election" conspiracy. Funny how our entire banking system is online and secure enough, yet voting isn't. We're still forced to accept 1800's era paper trails. Even the multi-million LA County voting system (last designed in 1969) is being redone with a paper balloting process.http://vsap.lavote.net/
Sheesh!
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
The problem isn't so much that the ballot itself isn't secure, it's that the authentication of the voter isn't reliable so the identity of whoever cast the ballot isn't secure. The only ways to make that authentication reliable involve encoding the identity of the voter into the cast ballot, which blows away the whole idea of secret ballots so nobody can confirm how you voted.
It's possible to do it, but you'd need a) a state-issued smartcard with a unique key-pair assigned to that specific individual capable of encrypting and signing arbitrary blocks of data, and b) a front-end system that'd accept the voter-signed ballot, verify the signature and contents, strip the voter's signature and replace it with one from the election authority, and this system would have to be trusted not to record anything tying voter identities to ballots and verifiable so that anybody could confirm that not only was the system actually trustable but that the running software was generated from the verified code. That's a non-trivial system to set up.
Want to end democracy in America once and for all? Then sure, go ahead and move all voting to electronic systems.
Doing so, you eliminate any real citizen oversight — you don't need all those election observers and volunteer pollsters anymore, so that's thousands of people who no longer count ballots, or supervise the machines that scan paper ballots now. Less oversight makes it easier to rig the system — something that's much less plausible now, because we have so many people involved.
Voting needs to happen on paper. Technology can improve our lives the other 363 or so days out of the year, but when it's an election at stake, I want a paper ballot for each and every person who votes. I want a tangible record, no matter how expensive it might be. A paper ballot is not entirely flawless and there are other kinds of fraud that can happen. But I'd prefer the startlingly low incidence of those kinds of issues because this is the only way we can be sure that other, more pernicious, less obvious or even provable types of fraud cannot and are not happening. Electronic voting should be illegal.
I wonder, do those sites include ga.js? Probably they do.
Marketing. Military grade is commercial off the shelf (COTS) for many things. If not, "lowest bidder" gets thrown around a lot too.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
The only way to nip this dreadful idea in the bud is for a serious hack to occur that proves it is insecure. Thus the system reporting a billion votes cast for Abraham Lincoln would probably do the job...
Because then you only get votes from people that are stupid enough to use Facebook.
Hey, dipshit...read the constitution and understand our federal form of government is a representative republic - it's not democratic. There, did calling names convince you of anything or does it just sound ignorant?
The problem is, people in the USA, take their rights & freedoms for granted. The (un)education system in this nation, over the last 40+ years, along with our short attention span, people don't have a clue how our system is SUPPOSE to work. People are deathly afraid of the IRS, afraid of the CIA, afraid of pretty much any government agency. THAT my friends, IS the problem. People are afraid of government, but, the government should be afraid of the people. We have become not a free nation, but a nation that is now is a soft tyranny, and we are quickly approaching a hard tyranny. Once "something" triggers a nationwide crisis, be it terrorism, a huge global pandemic, depression, war, whatever, the government will quickly suspend our rights and we will become a socialist dictatorship. I only hope it doesn't happen until my time on this Earth is finished. The Constitution EXPECTS its citizens to police those governing it, and, to throw out any such government that usurps the rights guaranteed in the constitution. Considering how we've allowed the government to get to this point, shame on us for not being good stewards of our country.
The term "military grade encryption" is a telltale sign of snake oil. People outside the military do not know what encryption the military uses in classified systems, and AFAIK there is also no general "military grade" encryption grade in the military. I'd rather wager that encryption in military systems ranges from ad hoc and easy to break now (though perhaps very fast in hardware) to very hard to break. It doesn't matter, though, if the endpoint security is not given. For what it's worth, the military could use weaker than "civilian" encryption in many scenarios, because the military has stronger endpoint security plus better working security by obscurity.
And this is exactly why it will be strongly fought against.
To give a concrete example, in the last presidential elections in Austria the neonazi party FPÖ won in the polling booths, but lost in the postal votes. Their answer to that? Forbid postal voting, of course! Who uses it the most are university students that are away from their hometown, and have very little sympathy for the FPÖ.
entropy happens
Here we go again, with the "it isn't secure, and we're gonna hack the election" conspiracy. Funny how our entire banking system is online and secure enough, yet voting isn't.
But it isn't. Bank fraud happens all the time. When it happens, you show the paper trail, and the bank verifies it and gives you your money back. They accept the loss as the cost of doing business. How do you get your vote back?
Here is David Pogue's comment in Scientific American (www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-will-we-be-able-to-vote-online/):
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The "effort" test unfairly favors retired seniors who have a lot more time to waste than someone working long hours. It's not a fair measure of actual interest in voting at all.
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All of the recent "election stealing" has been done by Hillary. BTW, Hillary is a Democrat.
Fuck you, you undemocratic piece of shit. The constitution says nothing about "putting in an effort" or any other such crap. You've proven the original poster's point - that people who complain about those that vote are usually wanting to clear out their notion of undesirable voters (in your case those undesirables that aren't putting in an effort).
Well, to be fair, "the Constitution says nothing about" the requirements for suffrage in general. In the early days of the U.S., states restricted voting rights to mostly white male landowners... by your standards, the original Constitution as interpreted by the states who decided who got to vote was profoundly "undemocratic." The phrase "right to vote" never even appeared until the Fourteenth Amendment was passed after the Civil War.
Gradually, over the years, we've added suffrage to other folks, and now it's pretty much universal for people over the age of 18 (excepting felons serving time and such edge cases). But twas not always thus, and citing the "Constitution" in this discussion brings in a host of problems... since that Constitution had to be amended at least SEVEN times SPECIFICALLY to enfranchise voters which had been previously excluded.
And Congress has had to pass other bills to extend voting rights to other random groups who would not necessarily otherwise have it under the Constitution (e.g., citizens overseas, some Native Americans, residents of D.C. in some elections, etc.).
Anyhow, I do NOT agree with GP's attitude here. But the Constitution is pretty much a terrible model for enfranchising people to vote -- the default position over the centuries has basically been "no, you don't really have the right to vote..." because the Constitution does such a poor job of granting it.
Oh, and by the way -- if you think that normal U.S. citizens have "the right to vote" today, that's really up to interpretation. For example, you really don't have the right to vote for President of the U.S. You have the right vote in an election, but it's up to your state legislature to decide in what manner the results of your state voting can be tallied to select members of the Electoral College to vote for President on your behalf.
Basically, the Constitution is profoundly undemocratic in sense of "direct democracy." It was designed to have many layers between the votes of the people and the actual officials and laws in the government.
For our "Representative" democracy, as many others are saying, electronic voting simply makes no sense. Too easy for coercion, too hard for identity confirmation, etc.
However, a "teledemocracy" system makes sense in the form of a national referendum, or maybe more like a national conversation about specific issues. It could pull some issues back into the realm of direct democracy. Probably not for everything, and probably not all at once, but having a serious system (unlike previous attempts which were largely ignored by our representatives) that could guide reps and congresspeople more directly than the current system(s) of "polling", which is again, all too-often ignored.
Such a system could be not unlike the one here on slashdot, with moderation, karma, etc., which though perhaps less than ideal, could lead to a system where the American People actually get to set (or at least nudge) the agenda, rather than the status quo, where lobbyists, and power-brokers get to not only set the agenda, but write the legislation.
I'm sure it wouldn't be perfect, any maybe not any better, but it's hard to see how it could be any worse than what we have now.
you just advocated voter disenfranchisement, right? And what, exactly, do you define as sufficient effort? Here in my neck of the woods voting for Bernie in the primaries was a 3 hour wait. That wasn't an accident, you know. Wasn't there some old saying about coming round for the socialists? I forget how it went, and evidently you did too.
Oh, and only 9% of voters turned out for the Primaries. That's why you get to choose between Fuckface von Clownstick and Wallstreet's Girl.
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Any fraud possible from electronic voting is nothing compared to the fraud possible with the current paper system. Paper votes can easily be lost or rendered unreadable. And many states don't require any sort of ID to vote, making it possible for the dead to vote.
Democracies by definitinon allow anyone to vote. If anything, taking voting rights away from children and washington DC, and most US protectorates are bad enough.
The informed voter ideal is certainly something worth really looking into, but it is NOT democracy. Read Star-ship troopers and you'll see at least one image of tiered democracy. In at least a few EU countries, you can't vote without spending time in the armed services, even if it's treated more or less a 2 week summer camp.
Bye!
Off course they can be made secure :|
your boss can make you vote at work their way with on line voteing!
> The question is whether we're going to have a democracy or not.
The answer is no, the US is not a Democracy.
I look forward to discussing with you more after you finish the fifth grade.
> It's certainly possible to make Internet voting at least as secure as paper ballots.
I've been involved in computer security for 20 years. Before that, I did physical security, lockingsmith work. Before that, I was a professional magician. I could cheat a paper ballot. Might use a bit of sleight of hand.
I could also cheat an internet ballot, and very easily put a FOR loop around to run the cheat a million times. That's the big difference with networked computer systems vs physical systems. You can rob someone in person once; you rob EVERYBODY in the entire database via computer.
Electronic systems that serve many people are fundamentally less secure because nobody can ever physically do anything a million times; computers routinely do things a million times per second. One improper ballot is less than the noise floor; a million improper ballots will swing the election.
Federal purchasing, including DoD (military) is done through an open bid process. The acquiring agency publishes a very detailed requirements document. The encryption requirement normally refers to FIPS 140-2 (FIPS: Federal Information Processing Standard). The standard specifies not only which algorithms, but which implementations are acceptable, so you use a FIPS-certified library. FIPS-140-2 can be found here:
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST...
Because most companies and standards bodies aren't run by security specialists, they too often refer to FIPS-140-2. "Must meet DoD security requirements" is a lot easier to specify in a contract than figuring out all the details yourself.
each polling location is provided with a set number of boxes that are sealed and rigged so that once a ballot is inserted (by the polling machine) it can't be removed.
number of ballot forms is a logged number (number of registered voters+ a reserve to recover from spoiled ballots with one brick being opened at a time and spoiled ballots kept)
when you vote you place your marks and then feed the ballot into a polling machine and it then spits out a ticket with a set of random numbers from a pool (each number is used once )
checks in place
1 they inventory the boxes afterwards "Missing" boxes or evidence of tampering results in a redo (and criminal charges for the staff)
2 they also inventory the ballots (again missing ballots result in a redo if it is large enough to effect the election FOR THAT LOCATION)
3 a voter can input any number they want to check what a given vote was (may be their vote may be somebody elses)
Rigged election much?
That was 129 votes, a bit more than "ones and two's".
So, yes-- a gubernatorial election twelve years ago was decided by a little more than 100 votes, and it's "among the closest political races in United States election history." I think that pretty much demonstrates my case: even here, voting fraud at the ones and two at a time level isn't what we need to worry about; it takes voting fraud on a much larger scale to swing an election. And you can count on most elections not being that close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
In 39 states both hillary and trump gets over 100 million votes, and third party candidates wins by over bilion votes.
©God
People who care can use the mail in or go to a polling place. The problem is that state government are responsible for voting. That means they will each be attempting to put their own voting systems into place, potentially all different designs. Feds can't regulate voting much because it's voting and has to be done by states. Russian hackers seem very interested in our election and so far they've seem to only attack Democrats. I don't trust non tested opensource voting platforms. I want online voting, but I want it to be highly tested. I don't see how this is tested enough to go live. Government IT departments are notoriously bad. This solution should be tested and shared among the states for the sake of costs and security. The last time we rapidly switched to electronic voting we wound up with Bush.
Promises are a bet on the future. But the future may not happen as envisioned at the time the promise was made.
Would it be fair to punish people for not correctly predicting the future?
Do you really want any promise to be applied even if it does not anymore apply to the context it was envisioned?
Actually, states determine the right to vote and citizenship is not a requirement by the constitution. The constitution has only been amended to prevent states from prohibiting certain voters, it still does not completely define how states determine who can vote. The president is selected by electoral college, of which you vote your opinion but the electoral are not bound to that opinion. I doubt most know who all their electoral folks are...I sure don't...and by the constitution they cannot be a senator or representative - so not someone you democratically elected.
Yes, yes, the Constitution is flawed, and the Electoral College is the biggest joke of them all, but let's not digress into that technical argument here, you're really not approaching that subject very well.
...but to my original point. It's simply my opinion that people who vote should put some effort into it - if that means lazy, ignorant people don't make it to vote so be it. You can disagree and provide reasons as to why you really want lazy, ignorant people to vote but calling me names doesn't make your case.
Your point is flawed, because you aren't suggesting any effort that would be impacted by laziness or ignorance, the only quality that directly arises from your presented objections (to absentee ballots and early voting) is the stubbornness to stand around on one given day if there's a crowd. Which speaks to poor planning on the elections staff's part, not a real trial. Open primaries don't even do that much.
So far, your opinion seems to be based on a irascible temperament of your own. I'm not sure I want *you* voting with that attitude. Then again, your complaints aren't helping your case either. You're being subjected to obscenities, not name-calling, the descriptions may be pejorative, but you really need to pay attention to the criticisms rather than brush them off so blithely. Or rather, use the excuse of vulgar language to conceal your lack of ability to approach the substance of the complaints against you. I'd recommend you just let the vituperative language go, rather than be distracted by it.
If you want to consider why people have the right to vote, regardless of their ignorance, laziness, or other qualities, it's because the government is legitimized by such an action. Giving all people influence over the decisions and conduct of the government is important because said government has authority over those individuals. That's why instead of barriers to vote, the government should act in the opposite direction when it comes to voting. Now when it comes to acting under the authority of government, there you have a good case for selections of character and virtue.
Show up the day of the election, darken the oval next the candidate you want and feed it into the electronic counter - an unambiguous paper trail will remain.
What about ranked choice voting? How does that fit into the 'darken the oval' method? Ranked choice is a much fairer way of conducting elections
Rights: Now only for those deemed worthy by ChickenFat.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Because at the time of the founders the word democracy referred primarily to what we now call "direct democracy". the phrase "representative democracy" didn't exist yet, even though it means the same thing as "representative republic".
the founders used a lot of words that refer to the democratic selection of government. words like: self-rule, self-governed, voting, election, etc.
what you are essentially doing is talking about your new car, but refusing to call it a car, saying instead that it is a "motorized conveyance device".
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Security is not the current political attack point. Instead, it is voter disqualification
Voter disqualification may be the current attack point, but it's not a good idea to open up new attack points.
what you are essentially doing is talking about your new car, but refusing to call it a car, saying instead that it is a "motorized conveyance device".
<Pedantic>I think a better analogy would be: You got a new "motorized conveyance device", which is what they are called now. But you continue to call it a "car" even though the definition of "car" has changed to mean something slightly different.</Pedantic>
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
That's true for in-person voting at the polling place, but all the states allow absentee ballots, which are sent in by mail. Absentee ballots are not protected by the safeguards you mention. In most states, you don't need a reason to vote by mail; in many states (including mine), people are actually encouraged to vote by mail. But voting by mail has no safeguards to protect anonymity.
As always, security and convenience are a trade-off. My personal preference would be to slide that trade-off toward security, even if it makes voting slightly less convenient. I'd like to see absentee ballots allowed only for voters with a valid reason that they cannot vote in person. There have been some companies that, in the past, have demanded "vote the way we select or you will be fired." Secret ballots are secret for a good reason. But I do understand the argument for convenience.
Overall, I'm more worried by the prospect of wholesale election fraud-- altering vote counts-- and less by the prospect of one-by-one vote buying.
A distinction without a difference. Our president is elected by an electoral influenced by a democratic voting process by which each state defines qualification and only with recent amendments to the constitution, has been further defined but still not specific. The founders put in place the electoral in just such as case as democracy would become idiocracy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - at least for the president. The house originally was our democratically elected branch, with the senate selected by the state's legislatures. That's all been changed by the 17th amendment. I don't know which would be better but I do know I have much better access to my federal and state house representatives than my senators or the president.
Sorry, my quick "not democratic" response to mr "fuck you" was not well defined. Frankly, I'm disappointed in the overall lack of understanding of the constitution and its history found here on slashdot; although, I'm not surprised as I wasn't taught much in high school either and had to take a full semester in college on the "right to vote." Slashdot used to be a place were people defended their ideas with information and reason...now it's just "f-you" and "move if you don't like it" - the same useless drivel found all over the internet.
I only want people voting who put some effort into it.
And whomever gets to define "some effort" wins the elections.
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Rights: Now only for those deemed worthy by ChickenFat.
Actually, as defined by the constitution, which does not provide for nor exclude early voting or absentee voting. That's left to the states to define and that's where my opinion should count with my elected representatives.
What's your opinion about felons or foreigners being excluded from voting by most states? The constitution does not expressly forbid felons or foreigners. Who deemed them worthy to be excluded? It wasn't me.
I really like the second video you linked to, where you count the number of times the players pass the ball. I saw that for the first time a few months ago - maybe you linked it from another post, or maybe I encountered it elsewhere.
> As a professional magician, were you more amazed by how the tricks worked mechanically, or by the very fact that people are too stupid to live and will simply not notice what they're looking *right* *at* if it's out of the ordinary?
As you may know, the mechanical working of most effects are quite simple and boring. It's mostly about the psychology - directing people's attention (though *some* tricks involve interesting mechanisms).
However, I have a different viewpoint on this than "people are too stupid .. not notice". I tested off-the-charts ADD. One of the tests for ADD was somewhat similar to the "count the passes" video - I was to click the button every time the number 5 showed on the screen. I thought I had done very well, that I hadn't missed any or clicked when there was no 5, but the results showed different - I did actually miss the giant 5 on the screen several times as I was noticing the adjustable feet on the stand for the screen, the knot in the wiring, the stains on the ceiling. The results DID match up with my experience in daily life - I often have to ask people to repeat what they just said, because I was noticing the imperfections in the wall finish or some other irrelevant thing about the background of the room. Most of the time, that's NOT good. Most of time, paying attention to the important part is better. When you ask people to count the passes, most people can do that rather than be distracted by bug in the light fixture or whatever else is going on in the room - they pay attention to what they trying to watch. Being easily distracted by unimportant details of the room isn't normally a good thing.
Yes, that *can* be manipulated, but that doesn't make it a bad thing. Magicians do it constantly. Hillary's friends got a whole bunch of people looking at "who released the Democrats' emails?", ignoring the truly much more important issue of what what said in those emails. Still, on balance a driver *should* be looking at the road ahead of them, not how many LEDs burned out in the green light, or the color of the buildings they are driving by.
And whomever gets to define "some effort" wins the elections.
Yes, I realize "effort" is subjective, but dang, the path we're on right now is what has us voting for the worst possible people to hold office. The only effort I'm suggesting is showing up on election day...presumably only those that care enough would make the sacrifice. It would also severely limit the ability to vote harvest over weeks - and by that I mean individuals or groups that round up what can only be called "useful idiots" to cast votes in return for whatever - food, money, a ride, something to do, nothing, etc.
There are updates to FIPS 140-2 every few months, as you can see here:
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST...
Therefore you can easily be *compliant* and up-to-date, no problem.
If you want to be *certified* and up-to-date, the low cost option is to use something like the OpenSSL FIPS Object Module, which is recertified every six months or so. (This is a very restricted subset of OpenSSL). That provides the latest certified encryption.
If you want to also certify the product as a whole, you can do that and batch any security-sensitive changes into new versions, then recertify new versions only infrequently.
The Scott Adams thing reminds me of what I do sometimes. Something I can't quite describe about giving off the vibe that you belong there. I used to do lighting and sound for bands on the weekends, and sometimes I DJ. I've made it a bit of a game to just walk right past the bouncer without *telling* them that I'm with the band. Everybody else is paying the cover charge, I just walk right by like it doesn't apply to me (because it doesn't). 95% of the time the bouncer doesn't challenge me. If they make eye contact, I nod as I continue walking. It would be interesting to do or read some experiments about the psychology of that.
A note about magic tricks - very often, the tricky bit is done BEFORE the audience thinks the trick has really started, and certainly before they know that the deck will change color or whatever. The first time you see a trick, you CAN'T be paying attention to how the magician makes the color change because you don't yet know that he's going to make the color change. If you watch a trick twice you're much more likely to see the secret because the second time you know you're watching to see how he causes it to change color.
> I'm going to try to get a Modafinil prescription from a doctor now, and uh. Patient walks in asking for drugs, seems well-informed. Spinning a line of bullshit or nah?
What worked for me was to very humbly ASK the doctor about my preferred medication, to not seem overly confident that I wanted that specific medication. "I was reading about ABC and sounded interesting because XYZ. Would it be worth trying ABC, do you think?"
Exactly this.
Having to take unpaid time off from work (if your employer even lets you) to go vote pretty much guarantees that a certain portion (working poor) of the electorate will not vote.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Okay, darken the ovals next to the candidates you want, in order of preference. Works just fine around here.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The military has more sophisticated security models than Joe Shmoe, but doesn't necessarily need stronger encryption. For example, the orders for an attack need to remain secret until it's too late to do anything about it, and in some circumstances that doesn't even require encryption if things are moving fast enough. Encryption that, as far as we can tell, is unbreakable is cheap and easy nowadays, and there's no reason the JCS and Joe C. Shmoe can't use it equally.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Billions of dollars/euros/yuan cross the internet daily without much difficulty.
Why would voting be less secure?
Just as some voters are disenfranchised by ID requirements, etc, some are disenfranchised by physically having to go somewhere to vote. Students, for instance, aren't interested in standing in line with a bunch of old people. Old people who aren't able to stand for long. Moms & executives who are too busy... If they could sit at their computer and do it conveniently, the balance of demographics would change. That could mean an advantage for conservatives or for progressives. This is why authorities hesitate. Until they can be sure who benefits from online voting, they will delay.
...omphaloskepsis often...
the path we're on right now is what has us voting for the worst possible people to hold office. The only effort I'm suggesting is showing up on election day...presumably only those that care enough would make the sacrifice. It would also severely limit the ability to vote harvest over weeks - and by that I mean individuals or groups that round up what can only be called "useful idiots" to cast votes in return for whatever - food, money, a ride, something to do, nothing, etc.
If the goal is improving vote quality, then it's much safer to improve the media and education apparatus, than to come up with artificial hurdles for voters. While it would be nice if there was a philosopher king that could choose voters based on education, intelligence, effort, etc., it's just too much power to give any one person or government entity. It's better to make voting incredibly easy, and develop strong first amendment rights (free flow of information) and quality institutions that utilize those rights. This way, the power to influence voting is spread among many instead of the few. It's not ideal, but it much less prone to developing too much power in too few.
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