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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.
Computer based voting of any kind is a bad idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
ARE there any other questions?
Electronic voting is one of the most stupid ideas that politicians have croaked up so far. And that means a lot, even after gerrymandering, lobbyism, and two-party-systems.
Electronic voting is basically outright stupid. You cannot control if your vote was really counted, or if it was counted for the correct party or candidate. Votes can be manipulated by inside jobs or hacking, and with a political voting result being a very profitable target, and the voting machines safety and security record far from being unblemished, voting fraud is a very interesting goal for many, not only political, parties.
The problem is that electronic voting cannot fulfill the legal and philosophical demands for a democratic voting. This is not a failure of the planners, programmers, or hardware developers, this is system inherent, as many aspects cannot be implemented correctly without invalidating other important aspects of the same.
Now there is this totally broken idea and they want make it available online, opening the doors to fraud and abuse even wider.
"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.
Authentication means "undoubfully identifying something's author (or owner)". Anonymity means "impossibility to identify something's author (or owner)".
See the problem?
I'm with you about distrusting "any blanket assertion", but in this case is an obvious logical impossibility, not even physical impossibility (i.e.: a perpetual motion device)
Now, remember this whenever somebody comes to sell you a "trustable e-voting system": it's even less credible than a guy trying to sell you a perpetual motion device.
You are completely missing the point. All the cryptography and the blockchains and the secure protocols in the world can not detect if someone is standing behind the computer with a wad of cash (vote buying) or brass knuckles (coercion) and checking that you are voting right.
One of the core features of the secret ballot is the voting booth, where the voter is alone to do the final choice, with official oversight.
Of course, the privacy of the voting booth is not perfect, it is weakened by all sorts of features, from absentee voting to tolerating children in the booth with their parent. But it is still the norm for most voters and is way more solid than a situation where the norm would be to vote from home.
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!
Why doesn't anyone trot out Betteridge's Law of Headlines when questions like this come up?
#DeleteChrome
Secure voting is only part of the problem with internet voting. The only practical way to ensure a person does not have someone physically looking over their shoulder when voting is to have designated voting centers with private one person booths.
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?
Some people encrypt by using rot-13 twice. I prefer the more secure method of using rot-1 a total of twenty six times.
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.
"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.
What about people who live or work in areas in which voting for the wrong person could have consequences? Someone working at a coal mine who wants to vote Democrat? A person with an abusive spouse who doesn't want to vote they way they were told to? Just because you are comfortable telling people who you vote for not everyone else has such luxury.
Setting aside all the clear fraud, tampering, etc. There is also the possibility of fraud within the household. I can name piles of cultures where the man rules the house; full stop. Immigrants from these countries tend to congregate in communities in many countries. Thus the "man" of the house will do all the voting; can we guess where his voting will lay on the spectrum of women's rights, investigations into honour killings, curtailing of an oppressive religion, etc?
So in addition to all the wonderful possibilities for fraud and rigged elections, there is the simple disenfranchisement of entire groups.
Then we have bully voting. Quite simply an enforcer for some minor gang might show up at an apartment block and tell everyone that they vote in front of him and his men.
The above voting irregularities might not seem like much, except that so many elections are won by a percent or less. In the case of a local councillor or alderman a few hundred votes could easily flip the result of an election.
In a nation with a problem culture like one of the above. This could easily swing an election.
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...
Laymen cannot audit this system, nor is the process of assuring anonymity and an accurate count transparent or comprehensible to laymen. That means they cannot trust this system... which is kind of an important aspect of a ballot.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...