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Will Internet Voting Endanger The Secret Ballot?
MIT recently identified the states "at the greatest risk of having their voting process hacked". but added this week that "Maintaining the secrecy of ballots returned via the Internet is 'technologically impossible'..." Long-time Slashdot reader Presto Vivace quotes their article:
That's according to a new report from Verified Voting, a group that advocates for transparency and accuracy in elections. A cornerstone of democracy, the secret ballot guards against voter coercion. But "because of current technical challenges and the unique challenge of running public elections, it is impossible to maintain the separation of voters' identities from their votes when Internet voting is used," concludes the report, which was written in collaboration with the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the anticorruption advocacy group Common Cause.
32 states are already offering some form of online voting, apparently prompting the creation of Verified Voting's new site, SecretBallotAtRisk.org.
32 states are already offering some form of online voting, apparently prompting the creation of Verified Voting's new site, SecretBallotAtRisk.org.
yes it will stupid. read up on Tammany Hall in NYC in the 1800's. people were marched to voting booths, overseers made sure they voted for the right people and then they were given gifts. same here. low paid people will be hired or voters will simply have to provide screenshots of their votes to receive prizes
are secret anyway. I had to show them my voter registration card, my picture ID, and from that, they entered something into a computer which spit out a 4 digit number. Then that 4 digit number is used on the voting machines. So they already know that my ID is tied to that number and that number is tied to my votes. There's no secrecy any more.
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
Unattended voting booths have two major problems, fraud and failure.
Attended voting booths do nothing to stop fraud. Democrats have blocked every law that requires a person have some form of identification at the polling place. They also point out the the level of fraud detected is very low. Ever stop to wonder why they don't want a process which would detect fraud?
Voting is meant to be anonymous; the process should be comprehensible to anyone, and anyone should be able to contribute to assuring that the ballot count is accurate. Paper based voting meets these requirements, and has the important bonus of being pretty resilient to tampering if enough citizens actually step up and help verify the results. The more you want to fraudulently influence a paper based vote, the more people you need to include in your scheme. Electronic voting on the other hand meets none of these requirements: anonymity is not guaranteed, the process is either sensitive to large scale fraud or hardened against fraud using encryption, making it completely intransparent to laymen. And auditing the count can only be done by experts, and even then fraud is pretty easy to miss.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
You're not well-acquainted with human history, are you? The reason that voting is setup this way is precisely because all those things you poo-poo as not being realistic actually happened. Not in the hyperbolic forms you state, but in effect. Vote buying. Intimidation. These are real problems, and you don't realize it because you've only ever voted while the solutions have been in place.