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

A stupid idea made even worse

[treczoks]

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.

Re:"Technologically impossible?"

[turbidostato]

"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 missing the point

[Cigaes]

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.

Re:"Technologically impossible?"

[Mr D from 63]

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.

Re: Will Internet Voting Endanger The Secret Ball

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.