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.

Comments

Re: Will Internet Voting Endanger The Secret Ballo

[Lordpidey]

Really? Noone can figure out who you voted for and you can ensure your vote was counted properly? I thought it was one or the other.

Care to point me in the right direction?

precisely - it's the diffuse one person booth

[Anonymous Coward]

The modern system using one person voting booths distributed around with the ability to have outside supervision that people are really voting by themselves works quite well.

Likewise, marking a paper ballot and using electronic counting gets "auditability of results" and "rapid tally" - a recount is possible if there are questions, but the tallies can be electronically (and vulnerably) done quickly.

The remaining flaw is "access by disabled persons" - if you're blind, it's tough to mark a ballot with a pen - historically, in California, a sworn poll worker would assist the voter who could not get into the polling place, or help a blind person mark the ballot. That's compromisable, clearly, but not surreptitiously on a mass scale - you'd have to suborn hundreds or thousands of poll workers to have a significant effect.

Re:"Technologically impossible?"

[craigm4980]

"we'll probably figure out how create a system that uses authenticated electronic ledgers to prevent fraudulent tampering (blockchains, etc) while still preserving anonymity."

We'll probably not.

This is not impossible. In fact it is a solved problem. Blind Signatures can be used to do this. I actually designed and mostly implemented such a system: Source and docs here. I also was not the first to do this (David Chaum deserves far more credit than I do: his contributions to cryptography have enabled so many amazing things including my little experiment) .

That system lets everyone vote exactly once, maintains secret ballot, and gives voters the tools to confirm their vote was counted, and if not they can cryptographically prove it to the media or any auditors available.

However it also makes buying and selling of votes very robust and easy. Without an isolated voting booth, there really isn't any hope of making it impractical to sell your vote, or force people to vote particular ways. This is as important as the secret ballot: both are requirements for our electoral systems.

I have designed electoral systems, that use a voter booth, paper records, and some cryptographic verifiability that are resistant to coercion and vote selling/buying which makes me think there may be room improvement in this area. However paper ballots and voting booths are pretty close to ideal: The simple paper system is also easier for people to trust and verify, which is very important for elections.