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Ask Slashdot: Internet Voting?
coldfusion asks: "There's been a lot of talk about internet-based voting systems recently, in order to increase voter turnout & make the whole process more convenient. I know that the UK has such a system in the works. What about the US? Is anything like this in planning or discussion? If not, why not? If so, what kind of timetable might be involved? What will be used as security protocols (eg., PGP signing)? And another tangential question: is anything being done to eliminate the "unfairness" of voting in the US (and elsewhere)? Have alternate voting methods (approval, ranking, etc.) been considered by the US government? " Interesting questions. Although I agree that the internet will change the way we do things for the next century and beyond, I don't believe it's ready for voting. ESurely something like this will happen eventually, but not now.
thing to be careful with there...is that you would get informed people running the country. This of course....goes against the current system and therefore would be a bad thing.
-Matt Jankowski
Increasing voter turnout is not always a good thing. In the ideal democracy, those who care about a subject vote, and those who don't, don't.
Polluting the votes of those who care with those who don't risk random results, or worse, risks corruption due to the ease which the votes of those who don't care can be bought.
Increasing voter turnout by making it even easier than it is now to vote merely floods the votes of those who care (that is, they care enough to drop by at the voting booth on the way to work) with those who care so little they can't be bothered to do even that.
Look how much trouble the government has with its websites. Internet voting would just about open them up to every type of hacker attack. Those machines would have to be really secure. They'd also have to deal with massive amounts of bandwidth. Besides the Republican party is has traditionally been opposed to making registration and voting easier. Remember the bill to make voter registration easy with drivers license registration? They opposed it.
-- Moondog
a government that is currently doing its best to
keep people away from encryption and putting its intelligence agencies plugged in to every wire they can find.
In a more progressive government it would be a very intersting experiment, but here and now it would only give politicians less control over the voting process. We can't even register online right now yet it would be relativly simple to set that up.
This is still Amerika.
the internet isn't really ready for voting yet, first it's too insecure, and second everyone I know who uses the internet votes already. However it would be good to start brainstorming on how to get it to work.
char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";
There is an article today on MSNBC about just this kind of thing: http://www.msnbc.com/news/305543.asp I for one hope that such things become possible as I am quite lazy (but I do vote in most elections).
If the US powers-that-be really wanted to increase voter turnout, they'd eliminate the prerequisite of voter registration. Registering is annoying and decreases the likelihood that young people will vote. The actual process of voting isn't all that bad -- just find the building and do it. Making registration easier (by eliminating it, or allowing voters to register at the voting site on the day of the vote) is the key.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
I'm planning to bring a website up on 1.1.2000 called Netocracy.org. I intend for it to be a not-for-profit site for people to vote on issues which are of importance to them. Not just U.S. issues, but of any nation, state, province, town, organization, or group. It's intended as something that could, possibly, someday, have an effect on real life political systems. We'll have to wait and see if it works out that way.
I'm only just starting to lay the site out. Anyone interested in the project can contact me.
T.G.Wysong
tgw@email.com
Any form of "remote voting" requires a means of positively identifying the voter.
Postal voting requires you first send back your unique voter card, receive the unique postal registration form, then you sign it and send it in.
Any on-line method of vote registration must address not only this, but also prevent the same person voting electronically and manually.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
And what happens if the tabulating systems are running *cough* an operating system that is incapable of handling high load? Or what if that operating system isn't secure, or wide open to well know denial-of-service attacks?
A certainly more effective solution would be a dial-up type solution. (This eliminates most of the problems with internet voting.) Keep a redundant backup system, and enough modems to handle the task, and viola. (Keeping in mind, that this solution only works if the gov't is hell bent on getting voting into an online medium. In my opinion, it works the way it is now, and if it ain't broke, DON'T FIX IT.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
In Australia we have "optional preferential voting", which means you can rank the candidates from most to least prefered.
When it comes to counting, all the first ("primary") choices are added up. The candidate with the least primary votes is removed from the count and all their votes are given to their voters second preferences. This is repeated until someone has >50% of the vote.
Oh, and voting is compulsory.
In addition to a greater voter turnout being a bad thing, this doesn't make it easier for everybody. It means that the voting boots would get flooded by people who have the money to own computers and have Internet connections. People too poor to own a computer would still have to go to physical booths.
This would make the situation for poorer minorities even worse than it is already.
This is one of those good bad ideas...
First, the possibilities for abuse are just plain outstanding. Also, you have to remember that only people that can afford computers have them. This means that poor people and welfare recipients and such still won't get to vote if they weren't going to. If you say "what about internet cafes and such" well if theyre gonna go there just to vote, what was the point in the first place? Anyway, as I was saying, this would prove for a little bias-ness in the votes. My next thought is of privacy. Since there will have to be some sort of verification, that means they will know which way you voted, so say this is some local election and whoever loses feels like breaking your knees, they can. One of my other little opinions is if your lazy enough to use this, you shouldn't be voting anyway. (Unless of course we go back to the people that are stuck at home and such). Also, one last little consideration, you would probably have to provide a LOT of personal information to restrict tampering, so just think of those poor people with trojans on their computers that go and vote while someone is sitting there watching keystrokes...
I could go on and on, but I need sleep...
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"I'm not gonna say anything inspirational, I'm just gonna fucking swear a lot"
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Even if we implemented this system on God's own, presumably unhackable, system (which we all know runs linux) with infinite bandwidth it would be a terribly bad idea.
Consider the fact that we need some way to identify citizens. Sure we can register private pgp keys but their is no reason that these keys could not be stolen at the user end (think virus that hacks into individuals computers to steal their key). Any system, no matter what, which requires verification without personal knowledge causes these problems.
These problems are present in conventional voting and as we know stuffing the ballot box is certainly possible, certainly postal ballots can be forged. However, manual voting has a fixed effort associated with stuffing the ballot box. Sure in a tight election maybe someone can stuff 1000 votes but it is an organizational impossibility to stuff 10 million votes without leaving huge obvious trail.
Voting done by computer allows easy repetition of the same action by one individual without thousands of staffers. What keeps voitng safe is not security measures but the difficulty of voting itself if we take away this difficulty we allow widespread easy cheating attempts.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
If the government actually decided to do this, I imagine their system would be one the biggest targets for crackers in history. Seriously, that would be one of the ultimate accomplishments, changing votes. It could also turn out to be really funny. Someone like Ross Perot could pay someone millions and millions of dollars, and we'd have the first midget president :)
Joseph?
I've always found the US system to be a bit unusual, and when-ever I've asked some americans about it they get _very_ defensive. It mostly boils down to why votes in some states are effectively worth more than votes in other states.
In New Zealand the Electrol Commission is very careful about defining boundries such that every electrote has the same number of people (within a resonable range), so that the votes are all worth the same. If I was an american and outside of the big 7, I wouldn't bother to vote (for president) as my vote would have almost no meaning.
Whether or not the particullar varient of voting is better or worse (aside from the point above) is probably very subjective. I'm very supportive of the system NZ has recently moved to - MMP (even though the first election resulted in a lot of mess, it'll take a few for people to understand how it works..)
Under MMP, the vote is split between "who represents my electrote" ("Electrote vote") and "who controls the house" ("Party vote"), with the latter vote over the whole country and actually determining the final make-up of the House. If you get 30% of the party vote you get 30% of the house. That's on a nation-wide basis, making _everyone's_ vote equal.
It allows some things that might seem odd but do make a lot of sense - splitting your vote between who you'd prefer to represent you and who you're prefer actually ran the country. In the first MMP election (1993) as much as 75% of the votes cast were split.
It's not without it's pitfalls, but any system is. I guess you just end up picking a set of pitfalls you're willing to live with.
Dave2 (posting as an AC because I can't be bothered digging out my password :) )
Well, I'm reminded of Winston Churchill's comment, something along the lines of "Democracy is the worst political system possible, except for all the rest."
I've come to respect the two-party winner-take-all voting system in the US. When I was younger, I preferred a parliamentary system, but I came to realize that most of them tend to give splinter parties too much leverage (especially the systems in place in Israel and Italy). The workings of our democracy may be ponderous and slow, but the founders thought that was a good thing!
The principle of one-man-one-vote is extremely important to American democratic ideals (although it isn't enshrined in law quite the way people think it is). The electoral college is a bit of a tinker-toy mechanism in between the popular vote and the presidential selection, but it nearly always validates that popular vote (there were a couple of 19th century exceptions) -- and what people forget is that it reinforces the idea that we are a Federal Republic that represents the interests of 50 quasi-independent states. Heaven forfend things should ever require it, but the electoral college provides a means for the states to prevent a fraudulent election.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Internet voting would be a wonderful thing if ...
...
:P). That issue in itself would undermine any proposal within the next ten years.
(conditions to numerous to be listed)
So, what do we do? Force everyone who wants to vote online to get a secure digital signature (which, of course, the NSA, FBI, and CIA would all want backdoors for--bring up questions about whether they could fix elections). You would also have to have a transition period for online voting as an "experiment," i.e. allow the old voting system to remain in place. Of course, you would have to assure that someone who voted online didn't also vote by hand
Also, not everyone in the U.S. has equal access to computers, nor the ability to operate one properly (no comments about 'we need a meritocracy anyway'
I don't see it happening anytime soon, though I can imagine lots of people talking about it.
-drstatgeek (close enough, at least
Eh, I didn't really pay much attention to the Internet portion, but the mathematical implications of the different voting systems is most interesting. Unfortunately, it's not for America, and here's why.
The majority of America is stupid. I'm not talking "can't get on the Internet" stupid, I'm talking "can't look both ways before crossing the megahighway" stupid. Changing the way we vote is actually a great idea for those of us enlightened enough to understand it. The Internet is forming one of these such enlightened aristocracies and the ideas that we throw around we assume will be great for everyone. But very few people (relatively) are even on the 'Net, much less understand it enough to be considered "enlightened" and of those few enlightened members, few would truly understand the present problem with "fair" voting and realize how great it would be. The majority of American citizens can't even understand that their Presidential vote doesn't even choose the President, it just provides a general rule for other more enlightened voters to follow.
No, America is too dumb to really understand such complex voting practices, and so, the most fair way for us to vote is the one-off, guy with the first-place majority wins. Why, because a) it makes the citizen's vote that much more important and thus makes voting such an important part of democracy and b) it's so simple that even little kids can understand it (and don't we say that all the time about the Internet?).
The problem is, that as open as the current system is to abuse, and as much more secure as an internet based system could (hypothetically) be, the potential for abuse is still much higher. On the internet, all multiples are effectively infinite. That means, we have an infinite number of script kiddies attacking the sysstem, and each one that gets in can generate an infinite number of bogus votes. And if you have an infinite number of monkeys banging on keyboards, sooner or later one will crack the systems. When a local official stuffs a ballot box, the damage they can do is limited by both the number of votes they can legitimately claim as well as the number of electoral votes their state has,
How can you claim that the system as it is now works when statistics show that less than 50% of the voting age population voted in the last presidential election? Voting over the Internet is nothing more than a technical challenge that can be overcome with the appropriate resources. The real question does not lie in the logistical issues, but whether or not the politicians want to make it any easier for the general public to cast their vote.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool populist, but I don't believe in the idea that "more people would vote if it were easier".
The reforms I do support:
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
I'm no expert, but there does seem to be some confusion here about what can and can't be done with electronic elections.
Chapter 6.1 of Applied Cryptography (second edition) gives a summary, and shows a lot of different protocols. Several of them meet all the standards one could expect from an election, including the important one that one should not be able to prove how one voted (no selling votes). A little digging in the Counterpane crypto-papers, gave these papers online (I'm sure there are many more).
"Blind multisignature schemes and their relevance to electronic voting"
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/8967
"A Secure and Optimally Efficient Multi-Authority Election Scheme"
http://www.research.ibm.com/security/election.p
"Unconditionally Untraceable and Fault-tolerant Broadcast and Secret Ballot Election"
http://www.semper.org/sirene/publ/PfWa5_92DC1_1
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What's wrong with rich white men? Which part offends you? The rich part or the white part?
"They'll take care of it..."
When's the last time you heard someone use "they" in that way? Americans have gotten used to everything being done for them. This is the real cause for voter apathy. They will take care of it.
Some caring group or individual will think for me, and make sure that I don't poison myself with chemically-flavored candy.
Until this mentality goes away, nothing will fix voter apathy. However, Internet voting will make buying votes a lot easier.
---
I don't think an internet voting plan would ever be approved. Not because it would be impossible to secure it, but because the general population would fear that it would be impossible to secure it. If we used some kind of PGP encryption we might be able to securely do it, but there are so many people that are scared of the internet so they would be up in arms if the government suggested using the internet to vote. I think peoples biggest fears would be:
1)What if some cracker either found some way to vote several times or broke into the server and changed the results of other people's votes.
2)What if a candidate set something up with a insider that for example set up the security of the web voting and left a back door for a price so the results could be changed.
My takes on it
1)If they handled security correctly they "should" be able to prevent this.
2)I don't think this is any more likely than a candidate setting up some kind of corruption with the counting of the votes in the current system.
Now the question of should it be done or not. I am not going to go into detail on this since there have already been many good points. But I will say that do we really want to make voting so easy that people who don't really know about the candidates policys' and don't care about the results just vote randomly just so that they can say they voted? I think that this would happen in situations where they are pressured to vote by there family or friends even thought they do not have a opinion.
First of all, increasing voter turn-out is in fact a double-edged sword. You get the problem of diluting votes and turning the whole process into more of a popularity contest than it already is. However, there are in fact a number of people who *should* be voting, but for whatever reason can't or won't.
IMHO, there are too many people who vote...only people who are properly educated should vote. That way we get rid of the losers who simply either vote for the candidate with the best haircut or vote one way or another because because someone or some organization told them what to think. If you can't think for yourself, you shouldn't be voting. Enough said.
The other problem is the obvious instability and insecurity of the Internet. The Net was *designed* to be an unstable network. (No, I'm not going to explain this concept...if you don't understand, learn something about the history of the Net before flaming me.) Glitches are inevitable. Servers collecting votes that are running *ahem* certain operating systems that are equally unstable and insecure introduce even more problems. Then there's the obvious problem of crackers and the resulting possibility of fraud (ballot stuffing, count fixing, etc.) Add to that the complications involved in makign sure that someone doesn't vote once electronically and once manually (hell even the IRS has problems with that, but thats another story...)
That being said, if the security and instability problems were fixed, and the voting system had a way of ensuring that the thing didn't become a popularity contest, then I'd be all for Internet voting.
My journal has hot
The original laws governing who could vote in the U.S. effectively limited voting to a group of "respectable wealthy white males". They wanted to limit who had a say in running the new country to conservative land owners who had a vested interest in establishing a stable government. Knowing who would have a vote may have resulted in some ommisions in the Constitution. For instance, there were few limits on government spending in the Constitution because the group that would be voting was the same group that would be financing the operation of the country and they were a frugal bunch. Had they imagined a future in which anyone-breathing-can-vote they would certainly have limited laws governing taxation and spending since the absence of such laws would allow the majority (poor) to pass laws to take the money of the minority (wealthy).
The limitations on who could vote also tended to also limit the voting to people who were relatively informed on who was running and what their politics were. The character of the voting population has certainly changed over the last 200+ years. Today any uniformed and ignorant person who is of voting age has as much power at the polls as a person who has carefully researched and understands the issues and the candidates.
Voter turnout is currently reduced because of the need to register. The need to visit a polling place also provides a barrier to marginally interested voters. Reducing the barriers and increasing turnout will not improve the election results if the added voters are randomly selecting candidates based on which candidate had the best commercial on television.
The Internet could provide the opportunity to improve the process of selecting a candidate, but not if it simply makes it easier to cast a vote. If voting on the Internet were to be made possible I would hope it also required a competency test prior before voting. A simple test of 10 questions per candidate would be required. Only those who could score an 80% on a test would have their votes count. There would be no time limits on taking the test and you could take the test over again if you failed but each time the test is given it would have new questions.
Before someone starts flaming the message as being unfair please remember everyone as an equal opportunity to learn about all the candidates. The goal of requiring a test is to have well informed voters, it is not to restrict voting. In fact, the ballot test could include links to all the online documentation about each candidate. The only requirement this test would have is that someone would have to make an effort to learn a little about ALL the candidates on the ballot. Doesn't it seem that knowing the candidates is much more important than being of a certain age or having registered in time for the election?
Government solves our problems by educating our children however they see fit, enforcing savings plans (Social Security), deliver our mail, buy our medications -- they even help us pay for therapy from the trauma of being told "Hey, nice ass" at work!
The problem is that people would rather have government do for them poorly than do for themselves.
Some of us wake up in the morning (or stay up all night) and thing "I can make it big. I have big fucking ideas and I'm going to do something about them!" -- other people wake up in the morning and think "How can I get more? Who is going to help me today? Who is going to tell me what to do and how to think? Who's going to feed me and take care of my self-image?"
Our government, on paper, is pretty damned cool, but is interpreted and carried out ineffectively. Everyone wants to make a law now. If your child rides his bike into the middle of the highway, his mother starts a national campaign and lobbies legislation to make highways safer for stupid kids riding their HotWheels bike into them.
Stupid is a state of mind, and we're brought up to live in that state from the day we're born and lead to believe it's a masked nirvana.
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
Background: The system of government here consists of one House of Representatives, originally of 99 members, made up by representives of individual constituencies around the country. There is no real President-equivalent: in theory the governor-General (this is a commonwealth country) has to ratify all new laws, but this is mostly a rubber-stamp procedure, by a political appointee.
Previously there were two major parties, and government swung back and forth between them. At one election a major third party succeeded in gathering ~30% of the popular vote, but due to it's distrubution only won a handful of seats (Social Credit).
About 4 years ago, we all voted via a special referendum to switch to a form of Proportional representation known as Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP). This was put in place for the previous election. The system now has 120 MPs (Members of Parliament): half constituency based, and the rest chosen from the "party lists". At election time you vote for your representative, and for the party you want to see in government. The number of seats a party obtains is based on the percentage of the party vote they obtain. If Party A only win 5 seats, but receive 20% of the party vote, they will be given more seats to make up the difference. There is a 5% threshold that says: if no constituencies are won, a party must hit this threshold before any party seats are given.
At the previous election the government only received ~45% of the party vote, and didn't have the muscle to form a government. After a long period (4-6 weeks) they formed an coalition with a third party (a mildly Xenophobic group lead by an ex-party member with a Napoleon complex (just my spin)). They later split with this party and continue to govern from a minority (with co-operation from others on day-to-day issues and some legislation).
The country as a whole feels they've been "held to ransom" by this smaller party, and seem almost ready to chuck the whole MMP thing in. The media have been convinced the government is lurching from crisis to crisis. Some how they've survived the full term.
And now it's almost election time again. No date announced, but there's all sorts of campaigning happening again. It should be soon.
Oh, and the Prime Minister (PM) is a woman. All the signs are that next year the PM will still be a woman, because the leader of the opposition as also a woman. Both seem to have public image problems.....
... and today's pet project has
In the old old days, the slogan was to vote early and often. The current voting system is not perfect but it is more legitimate than any internet system would be today. I remember reading not too long ago that Bob Dole (the coolest dude, even with e.d.) managed to cause a huge "traffic jam" by prompting people to go to his site after a debate. In closing, I would like to note that the people have been known to manage to rig elections even today (where I live, a special election is being held for a school board position because the original vote my of been rigged) but it is a lot safer than what the internet offers at the moment.
there are enough problems with the current system. adding an internet based voting option would compound the current problems with the voting process. although, it would make it easier to vote, maybe it would make it too easy.
Power corrupts.
Regardless of how the voting is done and how many people vote, it will not change the people being voted for.
Anyone running for office wants to be in that office for a reason and is therefore the LAST person you want in that office. How we vote will never change tha fact that voting is simple a choice of the lesser of many evils.
I like the idea of Internet voting myself, I just wish we could vote for anyone at all rather than a select few who want the power.
Mandos D Shadowspawn Esq
Mandos D Shadowspawn Esq
Internet voting would be a big disaster. I am not a big fan of voting or democracy in general. Does it mean if 51% of the poplulation thinks all of sudden my right to do X is no longer important that I cannot do it because I am in the 49%? Too much of this going on already.
Much prefer a few set of simple rules that we all abide by, and then anything else we do is up to us. Hmmm, sounds kind of like the Internet itself.
..appoint me King and Emperor. I'll handle things from there-on in :-)
Y'all do trust me, doncha?
Reading through all of the comments in this discussion, I didn't notice any mention of the obvious reason against internet voting. (Excuse me if someone did mention it, and I missed it.)
It is simply this: When I vote using the current methods, I vote in a small, private booth, and my privacy is mandated and ensured. If I were to vote over the internet, no matter how secure the connection, someone could look over my shoulder.
This is one of the most grave possible sources of election fraud.
If someone can watch your vote, they can bribe you and be assured that you will actually vote in the agreed way. They can threaten you, and rough you up if you don't vote in the demanded way.
Absentee ballots suffer from the same insecurity, but fortunately they are usually a trivial fraction of the total ballots cast. Personally, I believe that absentee ballots should either be cast securely from ballot booths in other states, or with several trusted and qualified witnesses swearing that the vote was private. The security hole probably doesn't matter much for absentee ballots, since there are so few, but I think it would be huge in internet voting.
I think this issue alone is enough to rule out internet voting.
John Karcz
Ahh, there is that. Whose definition of "fair" will we use this in this year's election?
Premise: fairness can only be adjudicated when all the facts are known.
Premise: the facts of the worth of any candidates up for election will never be known until after their terms.
Conclusion: no election can ever be fair.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
An electronic voting system, internet or otherwise, is easier to defraud than a traditonal paper-count system.
In a paper count system, you have multiple people at ever level counting ballots.
In an internet or other network based system, where does the accountability come from? You can't through average citizens into the counting process and expect them to understand it. But in a traditional system it's easier to understand when someone is stuffing ballots or lying about the count.
So what, is every returning officer going to be some geek, and people will have to trust that it is accurate and not tampered with? No thanks.
Internet voting seems to be gaining favor among Democrats, who seem to benefit from dragging every available warm body to the polls, and it's getting opposition from Republicans, who tend to think that anybody who doesn't care enough to make a minimal effort shouldn't.
I must say, "Voter turnout" is one of those areas where everybody assumes that more is better, but is it really? The fact is, countries that have high turnouts in elections tend to be countries with pretty lame democracies or a history of oppression.
Instead of assuming that a big voter turnout creates good democracy, maybe we need to realize that good, stable democracy creates an environment in which people can afford not to vote.
Cold Fusion specifically asked if there are any Internet voting systems being developed in the US? The answer is, yes! Check out http://votehere.net. I work for this company and making the voting system workable on the Internet
is my task in life at the moment. The security aspects are a challenge but very doable even at this stage. We have already done trials with several counties in the state of Washington and have more elections coming up soon. These are only trials at this stage, to do an actual vote from a generic remote Internet machine will still require changes to election law.
Many questions are raised about the security. It is important to first make a distinction between the security of the voting system and the security of the Internet site that is hosting it. Our voting system uses cryptography at the client machine to encrypt a voters choices. The encrypted choices are then sent to our server (the ballot box) where they are stored for tabulation. In our system, which is called a "universally verifiable" system, *anyone* can see that a voters ballot sits in the ballot box (along with the encrypted ballot), but *no* one can see that voter's choices. We never decrypt the ballots, they are tabulated in an encrypted fashion. I'll leave that for the cryptologists to explain. But the election system is secure in its own right with the cryptography that is in place. So even if our site was hacked during an election, the data is not at risk to modifications. The real issues are then voter authentication and denial of service attacks on the site itself. Denial of service attacks are the primary worries and an area that we are putting a lot of effort into.
Watch for more information through this upcoming political season, this is a very hot topic right now.
[Shameless plug: We have a position open now for an Information System Security Officer if you are looking for a challenging Internet security position!]
The sad bit is, he's right.
You could use encryption to do it (using it like a digital signature, giving the government your public key) but the problem with that is, people can make many signatures.
You could solve that problem by tying a key to something unique about a person, say a Social Security number (which has the advantage that each number is unique and that each person can only be assigned one). Each number could only have one key associated with it. But privacy advocates would just hate that one, besides which you still have people who can manage to get multiple numbers.
It's a problem. The only way you could ever eliminate voter fraud is to eliminate voting altogether (which is counterproductive), so you're going to have to live with the fact that a few will always slip through the cracks. But, is there any real way to minimize the fraud? Not without strong encryption, which the government would never allow.
Or who will? As soon as you try to create a class system for polling, you are moving away from any semblence of democracy.
Government is supposed to serve ALL the citizens, not just those with IQ > 130 or who happen to have a certain ethnic background. Oh, did I say that? I guess I did. Yes, I am comparing your suggestion that only educated people should be allowed to vote to other reasons used in the past to deny the vote. For example, race and sex.
If the citizenry is stupid enough to elect someone based on his haircut, so be it. It's their bed, and they'll have to sleep in it.
And I suppose you would like to create a commission that would decide voter eligibility. Oh, I'm sure there's *no* way that could be abused.
I predict that if Internet voting becomes a reality, you will see a dramatic increase in the "young" vote. Politicians will finally have to confront issues that affect young ppl (like fixing social security). One could say that the "older" voters would also increase; for instance, put computers in retirement community centers and retirement homes. However, they already get vans to transport older ppl to the voting centers.
Some other thoughts: I wonder which company will get the contract to put together the voting system? I bet you will see ppl trying to sell their voting private key on eBay. Finally, I would really get paranoid if someone found _NSAKEY in the voting program.;-)
What kind of nonsensical thinking is this? "Enterprising liberals"? Is that anything like the "scheming Jews" that Hilter and his pals used to complain about? Is all this imaginary vote fraud your excuse to round up all the "liberals" and send them to the gas chambers? I can just see it now -- "Die Liberals sind unser Unglueck!"
When liberals win elections, it's because the liberal American electorate votes them in. Face it, buddy, many of your fellow citizens are liberals, and in some districts, they are in the majority. You may not like that, but it's too bad. New Yorkers can elect whoever they darned well please, they don't have to check with you first. If they want Hillary, then they will vote for her. If they don't want her, then they will vote for Giuliani or someone else. It's that simple. (I personally don't like Hillary, but I think she has a right to run, like anyone else.)
Vote fraud is committed by both parties. You are living in a fantasyland. The Right wing is far more full of Cheetoe-munching, propaganda-swallowing morons than the Left. Just listen to the mindless drivel that comes from the mouths of Right wing leaders.
"Enterprising liberals fish them out." That sentence just kills me. What a troll.
One of the biggest problems in online voting is that one must be able to verify that no-one has voted twice without tying a person's identity to her vote in any way.
/. readers as the claim that we could prevent improper release of escrowed encryption keys in the same way.
Guaranteed voter anonymity is required to prevent effective reprisal or bribery for votes cast. It must be impossible for me either to coerce you ("vote for Bob or I'll fire you/arrest you/break your legs") or to bribe you ("vote for Bob and I'll give you $50"). Today, I could try either of these approaches to fix the outcome of an election, but there would be no point in doing so because J. Random Voter could just say "I'll vote for Bob, please don't hurt me (and thanks for the bribe!)" and then go vote his conscience anyway. I'd have no way to prove that he did otherwise.
The requirement of anonymity forbids assigning public/private keys to each voter to sign her vote -- if the signature is nonrepudiable, you would have a provable record of who voted for whom. One could argue that the Elections Commission could prevent improper release of voter/vote pairs by imposing heavy legal penalties on the violators, but this argument should be just as distasteful to
Today, our election systems are heavily weighted in favor of voter anonymity, with relatively weak protection against multiple voting. This compromise made sense in late-19th-century America, when corporate robber barons frequently tried to coerce/cajole their employees into voting for pro-big-business candidates. It makes just as much sense today, for the same reasons.
The easy options for online voting today either move the current system online -- which makes multiple voting very much easier -- or guarantee no multiple votes through digital signatures -- which suffers from the aforementioned vote-tying problem. I believe there are known cryptographic solutions to the online voting dilemma, but they are too computationally expensive to deploy for more than a handful of voters.
Actually, one of the reasons for the electoral college was to PREVENT rich old white men from England from controlling the outcome of a vote. Many U.S. citizens at that time were still loyalists (close to 40%), and a Presidential canidate ran who supported re-colonization of the United States, he would capture the loyalist vote, and if he could get part of the undecided vote (people who didn't care either way about continuting to be a colony constituted about 30% of the population), the U.S. would once again fall under the rule of George III. Futhermore, the electoral college consisted of Patriots anyway. Why would a newly formed government put members of their ex-oppressors in their system?
Maybe way back when I was a pup I thought "fairness in voting" was a noble ideal. Then I grew up. I first realized the Majority is ALWAYS wrong. Then for a while I thought "well, if They knew any better than they would vote better". Then I realized that the principle of voting was only a sham to legitimize the current power structure, which is, shock and surprise, the ruling class - the current monopoly of aggresion in a given geographical area. Finally you realize that voting is handing over authority (choice, decision, responsibility) to someone else. The answer is "NO, I'll decide for myself." Most of the pioneers of the internet appreciate this in their escape to cyberspace. Soon enough, government will be irrelevent, superfluous, and archaic. By the way, early polls of political affiliation on the web showed they were mostly libertarian.
tcboo
The majority of America is stupid. ...a great idea for those of us enlightened enough to understand it... ...enlightened aristocracies...
Do you really think like this? Putting oneself on a plane above other people is the first step to fascist tyranny. And it's really creepy when combined with the doublespeek of using words like "enlightened" and "democracy".
This is claptrap.
Can you name any famous dictators from history? Did any of them happen to come to power with the support of the lower classes (the majority), and with the intention of putting down the aristocracy? Hmmm, let's see now.... maybe we can make a list of them:
The people who wrote the constitution wanted to avoid direct election of the chief executive because they knew that the worst tyrants generally do enjoy the support of the lower classes. You can't be a tyrannical oppressor without enjoying support from somebody, and preferably from a good number of people.
The purpose of the electoral college was not to "maintain their grip on the lower class". It's purpose was to be a final, last-ditch check on the potential rise of a dictator. This is why the electoral college is composed of people who do not otherwise hold office under the US (no Senators, Congressmen or Governers, etc.) and it's also why the electors have to meet in their respective states. It's a lot harder to bully them if they are all spread out. The US has never been threatened by the rise of a dictator, the electoral college has never overturned the outcome of any election, ever.
Can you name any American elections in which the outcome of electoral college elections did not match the actual election results? How many times did this happen? In the instances where it happened, can you explain why it happened? Can you name any facts which support your idea that the electoral college has prevented the rise of any candidates, against the will of the lower classes? Can you offer any facts at all?
If the purpose of the electoral college was to maintain a grip on the lower classes, then why did the electoral college elect Abraham Lincoln? Surely he was one man they would have wanted to get rid of. Right? So what's your explanation?
I see three major problems with Internet-based voting:
Occasional accusations of vote fraud notwithstanding, nearly all countries with widespread Internet access also have a high amount of integrity in their elections. I think the process of having the vast majority of voters physically appear before appointed observers, then cast their votes in booths guaranteed to be private and isolated from all influence, then submitting the ballot anonymously into an isolated counting system, is still how elections should be done. Voting without physical oversight, whether it's electronically or any other way, seems like a very bad idea to me, unless it's in a country where physically appearing at the polls is dangerous.
And one last rant, for people who think all this should be completely overlooked for the sake of speed: Millions of people have gotten maimed and killed so you could go play golf and perform your supposedly important work, instead of rotting in a jail cell with a gun at your head and some sort of disease that makes you bleed through all the holes in your body for 50 years straight. If you're busy helping third world countries or tending to medical patients on election day, I'm sure you can get an absentee ballot. Otherwise, see if you can pull yourself away from your oh-so-vital duties for 20 minutes every year or two. Or, better yet, don't.
Right now there is only one form, single vote every n years for a represenatative. The Net allows for issue based voting, so that people can be directly responsible for leglislation. Not only that, it is easy enough to allow a moderated discussion of the issue to be voted on, and only those that contribute to the discussion allowed to vote, therefore making it more participatory. and more in line with meritocratic systems like OSS. Perhaps this is the future, I hope so, current politiicans are so inept and show little understanding of the subject matter that I'm sure we can do better.
The greatest nourishment is food for thought - Me 1999
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Maybe this is an unusual example of the pitfalls of online-voting?
Sorry to make this second post, but I put a good deal of time into backing up my statements, providing links to my sources and illustrating my points in that post and to have it ticked-down to 'flamebait' is insulting.
I'm no Jon Katz, Alan Cox, or Rob Malda, but I have a damned good record of comments being marked-up since moderation began and if I have to worry that some trigger-happy-kid with five moderation points to squander is going to paint my post with white-out without cause, then I may think two or three times before bothering to participate in discussions here.
Save your moderation points for me too, first post and what does this have to do with Unix posts and real flamebait/trolls.
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
Many people here are skeptical about the security of an over-the-internet voting scheme. Funny, because the problems strike me as real, but fixible. And the current voting systems are currently subject to abuse, and badly in need of some sort of fix.
Not too long ago there was a vote on public funding of a sports stadium in San Francisco, where there was clearly an attempt made at rigging the result. There is no question about whether the election was dirty, the only question is *how* dirty it was, i.e. were the dirty votes enough to swing the (evidentally quite close) election. There was funny stuff like election watchers reading people's ballots, boxes of returns that took hours to get from the polls to the counting site, "special" poling sites opened in neighborhoods likely to be in favor of the stadium and so on. Someone was even caught voting twice... the DA (known to be pro-stadium) declined to prosecute.
Our current electoral systems are badly in need of improvement. New technology might provide a partial solution.
Think about this in terms of the presidential race a few years ago. All of the republicans (who hate democrats, of cours), would have voted like so:
2. George Bush
1. Ross Perot
0. Bill clinton.
They would have put clinton last because he's a democrat. Conversly, any democrat would have voted like this:
2. Bill Clinton
1. Ross Perot
0. Bill Clinton.
As you can see, this would have given each candidate an equal number of votes.
Factoring in the number of people who voted for Ross Perot first, this actually would have allowed him to win the race.
Ross Perot for president. A plurality vote may be biased, but it doesn't seem to me that this way will work for political elections, where voters don't just like one candidate, but hate the other.
It becomes a least-hated rather than a most-liked election.
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
Right now voting happens on a single day, and if you can't get to the booth that day you're stuck. (unless you can cast proxy votes? but I suspect setting that up is a *huge* pain) Why not allow votes to be cast over several days? Not much help, but it would make things better for people on tight schedules. (I assume the difficulty is the trouble of keeping the voting infrastructure running for several days) :-)
More interesting is a related idea, which pretty much requires some form of computerized voting. Make the polls open for a much, much longer time -- say a year or more -- and let anyone vote at anytime, with the stipulation that the votes aren't actually counted until election day. (people who have voted would be allowed to alter their vote) The main problem here is that the running totals would have to be kept absolutely secret, and seeing how sieve-like large organizations, be they government or business, tend to be, this is a problem. Maybe they could hire some Transmeta folks
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Ok, I was very strongly in support of internet voting before I read some of the posts (and I will explain why in a min.), but there have been some interesting arguments that while there is plenty of security from direct fraud in internet voting there may not be security from interpersonal fraud, i.e. a family member making his/her whole family vote a specific way and being able to watch how people voted. This is a serious concern and I think it would need to be resolved before internet voting could be implemented.
That having been said I think there is a really wonderful possible side effect of internet voting: More involvment of special interests. Why is this good you ask. Imagin we had an internet voting system where special interest groups (Amnestry International, ACLU, NRA, CATO Institute, PETA, etc.) could host there own information servers and there would be services which list the servers. Then I could just check off the list of people who's opinion I gave a damn about and read what they had to say before I voted. It would be wonderful: Joe Random guy who knows zip about polotics but cares about gun ownership somewhat and has heard of the Libertarians would see what CATO and the NRA had to say about the candidates and if Joe had half a brain he would be able to look at the candidates voting record on the bills he cared about (ACLU for example keeps a score card).
Luckily, we don't really need internet voting to start this process however: How about when the next election commes arround we have an ask slashdot where people post links to geekish special intrest groups which have score cards?
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
When I feel really paranoid I sometime entertain thoughts about the powers that be and how we may manipulated.
Now, I think the Internet is a wonderful thing. I think that it allows people to communicate much more easily without the gatekeeper institutionalized filters like the press being involved. Access to more information, even if the quality of it is questionable, is a Good Thing in my opinion.
Having said this, I'm not sure I understand the attraction of the Internet Economy. eCommerce is only marginally better than the JC Penny catalog and the phone or (oh no!) The Home Shopping Network. Sure, eShopping via web sites has some advantages, but they seem to be rather marginal ones that wouldn't directly impact most consumers.
Where's the huge win with on-line brokers? With cable TV and a phone you can just about have the same kind of access to financial markets.
Having news delivered by the Internet is only marginally better than CNN, really.
We're rushing headlong into a new Internet with many times the bandwidth of what it is today. Why, someday soon, it's promised that we'll be able to do everything we do with TV and Radio over the Internet!
Of course, I don't want TV and Radio over the Internet. I like this public discourse using written language. It allows us to be reflective, to have a record of what is said and to digest it in it's time, not in real-time, not in sound bites. If I wanted TV and Radio, well, I know where to find them.
Sometimes, I wonder if the Internet economy really isn't being pushed down our throats in an effort to centralize many institutions that are currently handled in a patch-work fashion. This will accelerate the ability of the big mega-corporations to take over these functions (news, commerce, libraries, credit, etc. etc.) and gain greater control over our lives. I just heard a report yesterday on the Radio that local merchants are concerned that they will increasingly be losing customers to eBusiness.
And it's not just the mega-corporations either. If, in some future where all of our information and communication is over the Internet, evil forces in the Government could declare a state of emergency (say, by denotating a nuclear weapon in a populated area, or looking the other way as some terrorist does this) and easily lock down all of our institutions by just gaining control over the big Internet pipes. They could make encryption instantly illegal and jack-booted thugs (who actually believe that those who encrypt are most likely child molesters and/or nuclear terrorists) would break down your door and haul you off if you dared to communicate where they couldn't listen in. News would be carefully managed and controlled. Commerce (food, water, etc.) would be allowed for those who cooperated.
Now, Internet voting is being explored.
sigh... Somehow, I just don't feel good about this. I don't care what kind of technology is backing this up, if the computers are run by sinister forces, they could just tell us who won and we really wouldn't be able to question it. It's not like we can get a court order to lock down the ballot boxes and count the slips ourselves.
Oh, wait a minute, this can't happen, everyone in the Government is benevolent, mega-corporations only have consumer interests at heart. I'm really sorry I brought up these ramblings. Really.
I don't know what I was thinking.
Perhaps we are forgetting the most critical piece of evidence against Internet voting; only a relativly small, (but growing) % of people are accually wired.
Have alternate voting methods (approval, ranking, etc.) been considered by the US government?
Lani Guinier, Clinton's first nominee for head of the Justice Dept. civil rights division, had some very interesting proposals for alternatives to both proportional representation and the "first-past-the-post" system in place now. When she was nominated, the conservative activists made those proposals part of their brief against her. Liberalish talking heads like Cokie Roberts and David Broder, being too ignorant about the math behind them too understand, took up the conservatives' case. She ended up getting savaged by both sides, and Clinton weaselled out and withdrew her nomination (claiming he hadn't known about her "indefensible" views beforehand).
In "The Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" John Allen Paulos gives a good synopsis of the whole episode, along with an analysis of her proposed systems.
boy oh boy, i can't wait until we get things like beats by more votes than the population of america, cause somebody hacked the voting program.
hey we could even set up a "vote for your friends" website. it'd be a form.
name of voter:________
vote:______
hahahahha...oh geez, the more of our government that gets controled through the internet, the more HUGE economic/political disasters will happen. i mean throughout computer history, the hackers and crackers have always been a step ahead of the big companies. i mean everything gets cracked sooner or later (usually sooner)...what are we gonna do once EVERYTHING is online. William Gibsons world is going to happen. very scary.
The purpose of the electoral college is to "filter" the vote. Without filtering of some kind, you get direct democracy, and outcomes that can change from day to day. The typical voter (at least in the US where voting is taken for granted) will not inform himself on the issue at hand, and rely on the presence of media and advertisements to tell him how to vote.
An example of the failure of direct democracy can be seen in the California initiative process. A few years ago, there were five different insurance reform inititives on the same ballot, each of which was incompatible with the other, and most of them won. Therefore, the majority of the voters were so stupid that they voted for incompatible measures.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The last person I want to vote is someone who's so lazy that they won't register to vote unless someone shoves a registration form in their hand at the welfare office. During election season I can't walk fifty feet without passing a registration booth, yet some people still can't get registered without "motor-voter" laws.
Now here we go catering to the lazy voter again. "We're so sorry that it's inconvenient for you to take one half-hour out of every year to go and vote, so we'll make it easy for you. Just vote on the internet."
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Here's how much the People's Poll thinks of my opinion:
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Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
The men part.
:-)
I agree with Heinlein; let's rescind the franchise from men, and let women run the country for the next 200 years.
On another front, the major problem with online election is guaranteeing non-repudiability, one-vote per voter... _and_ anonymity, all at the same time. There's been _extensive_ work on this topic; check the RISKS digest archives, among other places -- available on the web at
(forgive me, Lindsay)
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks.
Let's not re-invent the wheel, shall we?
Cheers,
What's wrong with rich white men? Which part offends you? The rich part or the white part?
The "few" part.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Hmm. IANAL, and know of no such precendent...
Why not make it *mandatory* for people to vote? I know of a few places that do (90+% voter turnout. Those that don't face a fine).
After all, no one's restricting anyone's right *to* vote, just they *have* to. (Don't know if there are any precedents regarding forcing people to exercise their rights. Certainly different.)
Those that fail to do so, face a reasonable fine (say, $50 on the next tax bill?).
Just click on the results of the last few /. polls to get an idea of what kind of election returns you can expect from internet voting. When you don't care who wins it's easy to toss your vote away for a joke choice by clicking that mouse. Very few of these people will drive to the polls and wait in line for a chance to cast a vote because they think it's a good joke.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
You actually live in the Cambridge territory of the 'People's Republic of Massachusetts' where you're free to do anything you want: except use any bank other than BankBoston, get a tattoo, or get your cuticles trimmed at the manicurist. The government has decided these things "with your best interests in mind" because you are obviously too stupid to make a decision about your own bank or toenails for yourself.
-Barry
Ensuring theat the ballot is honest, and anonymity have been covered by other posters, and I will not repeat their points here.
The accessibility problem arises because the Internet is not freely available to all. Disadvantaged citizens of all kinds find it difficult to get Internet access: the geographically isolated, the poor, the computer illiterate, and so forth. Allowing people to vote by the Internet would be like setting up extra polling stations in rich neighbourhoods, thus swaying the vote in favour of political parties that favour the rich.
It is a worthy idea, but the time is not yet right for its implementation. Only when Internet access is as universal as access to running water may we consider such an option without risking the fairness of the political process.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
The running of the country is what we, the voters, do. You may be cynical, or too busy, or naive or slept through those boring Civics classes to remember. The important thing of internet voting is not to inform the candidate but of informing the citizen. Informing the citizen that there is an election and what it's about and how it matters to that citizen and how that citizen can participate. If there's a question of actually casting ballots on the internet, that is going to be some years off in the State of California. Right now you can copy an Adobe file, fill in the blanks, mail it off and become registered. But there's just something about having something in the Election Official's hand to count, inspect, recount, archive and count again until everyone is satisfied with a valid election. It's all done out in the open. Every ballot is backed by the voter's signature on paper. Very hard to hack into looking like your Grandma and then forging her signature so you can vote for (Your Hairbrained, off-centered, opinionated, bought and paid for candidate here). They could accept digital watermarks or some form of electronic signature, but why? Most districts are just now getting used to Vote-by-Mail. It used to be absentee balloting was done only for Servicemen. Now it's standard for use by shut-ins and "the Busy People". There will probably be a limited internet voting someday. Most likely along the lines of a "National ID Card." Now, honestly, who's going to vote for that? YOU? ME? It doesn't matter what operating system on the server. It doesn't matter how big your hard drive or monitor is. The elections systems, at least the ones used in California, can't be hacked into and the results manipulated because we use a piece of paper and a closed network. I tend to recall somewhere in the Pacific Rim, a nation had their big-deal-new-fangled Election System hacked and busted open on an election night. There's enough fraud in the paper-trail method now in use. People registering by using their business address. People using the Vote-by-mail ballots of their family. People not legally enfranchised.(Not just illegal aliens but felons and the mentally incompetent) It's not glossy high profile elections that you run this country with, either. It's the sanitation district and the school district. It's the city council seat that represents a thousand registered voters. It's the choice for District Attorney. It's the old white lady who knows what's best for the less fortunate little brown babies. Those are why Hunter S. Thompson called politics the Great American Spectator Sport. To see the eyes of a supporter trying to put "crackheads away from the decent God-fearing people of this Great Land" about an hour after the polls close on a close 2500 voter contest to change the wording of a city charter is almost like a Denver football fan at the last Super Bowl. Right now, on the internet, you can do things in elections that were slow and tedious. Just like everything else out there we do. It's faster, easier and cheaper. You can check the local elections and figure out if it concerns you. You can read the statements of qualifications that the candidates give out. You can find your polling place. You can volunteer to help with the election. Because you, even if you don't want it, run the country in the United States. You'd like to believe in vast conspiracies and secret societies but they don't buy the lousy text books and approve low bids. Black helicopters don't let a couple hundred new houses get built in an area whose sewers can only handle fifty. It's not space invaders that make it hard to raise the tax base. It's not President Clinton's fault your roads suck or that the gang-bangers run the street at night or that if you get caught writing one more bad check it'll be a "Three-strike offence" and you'll do 5-8 in a State Pen. Try that civics class again if nothing other than trying to find your local government's website and send them some flame mail. Throw the bums out. Vote early and vote often.
No, Tasmania :)
I think this has gone a bit off track:
The point is this: In a representative democracy you DON'T get a say, whether you want one or not!
Did you, for instance, have a say in the last tax bill? Did you get to help choose whether or not the GAAT went through? what about NAFTA? Did you even get to hear what these fairly important agreements are?
Did you have a say on matters of immigration? Did you get to vote on whether to go to war with Saddam Hussein?
The answer to all of these must be a resounding "NO!" What we have is a democracy in name only. We DO have an Aristocracy. It's an aristocracy of the ruling class (oops! That's a rude word in America) over the working class, and the only way to fix it is to get EVERYBODY WHO WANTS TO to vote on EVERY ISSUE THAT THEY WANT TO (not just on which party makes the same decision as the other party would have...)
-Shane Stephens
You can't mean that the State takes everyone's word that they're legally enfranchised and haven't voted more than once? I'm not filled with confidence in that. I'm guessing that you've gotta sign SOMETHING.
Same-day registration happens. Some counties in California are there already and some are going to try it soon. It's expensive and in tight races will hold up the final count until all the voters have been inspected. When you fill out that registration card, it doesn't just get tossed into a pile and sorted by address so they can send you across a couple of streets to a far off polling place. You're being tabulated. Or didn't you know that?
I think maybe if you split up the ideas of the electoral process you can find some good things. I doubt if you're going to find any widespread internet ballot casting. There's just no reason for it.
Living in Chicago (a city where the deceased vote with frightening regularity), and having seen just about every current poll-taking method, I'm not sure there's a way to reasonably implement an online voting system without making so egregious or privacy-violating as to frighten away the people it was meant to reach.
At least with the current level of technology, it isn't really going to go much further than the "nice idea" stage.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Massive voter fraud is handle by the day-to-day workings of the county elections departments in California. Every registration is cross referenced against first name, last name, date of birth, address and drivers license number. Big brother is actually a clerk called big sister and she checks and double checks where you live and where you were born and if you're driving or not. The Secretary of State is also wondering about you. Any of the above fields are also cross ref'd by them for the entire state. Frauds are usually stupid and easy to find. Huge fraud is pretty much impossible unless you can get the cemetary to get a couple thousand phones installed and everyone takes their driver's license test again. (The Elections Department is usually connected someway to the County Clerk/Recorder so that death certificate lists find their way down the hall pretty quick.)
You're naive beyond your years. The turnout for a contest is based on total registered voters. It's almost impossible to calculate the registered to non-registered rate. Freedom of movement. Only the people who care even registered so in some strange way, you're right after all.
We already complain about the slowness of the government in reacting to certain issues (dare I say it?).
We'd go nowhere as a country if they had to get a majority vote on any of the issues you pointed out. But we elected the people that make those decisions for us.
Maybe you don't like it? You can always run to "try and change things" (that's always the reason people state they're running... they rarely seem to succeed, however).
While I'm not sure about the internet as a voting mechanism for a number of reasons:
#1 - Less than 1/2 American households have computers. Their vote is just as important as any other.
#2 - Fraud. How about writing a script that automatically resubmits your vote, over and over. Or they could counter that and use PGP for authentication... That'd be an such an incredible amount of overhead, that most of the people with the means would probably go to the ballot booths.
#3 - Security. Rather than trying to break into gov't computers, you'd face hackers & foreign countries potentially trying to disrupt the elective process. How about 50,000 distinct IP addresses DOSing the voting sites? 100,000? 500,000. There's no way to ensure that people could vote under such conditions.
#4 - Basically, a lot of other variations on #1 and #2 and #3 that can occur. Yes, you can order stuff via the internet, and if a site flakes on you, that's regrettable, but okay. No matter what you think of the gov't as it stands today, having elections conducted over the internet is not going to change things one iota, but could stand to disrupt things in many unfavorable ways.
I'd love to see the internet used as a campaign platform: Set up a website with all the info anyone could possibly want, splatter the everywhere with banners and buttons and what have you, and you could probably save a fortune over traditional campaign costs.. but that leads us back to the fact that the only people that'd hear much of your campaign would be people with computers.
Just because californians are idiots....
Most candidates aren't. people usually know an idiot when they see one, Idiots, know their own kind. And although we don't usually elect the BEST candidate, we always elect someone competant. Indirect democracy gives all the power to the big states, if you live in D.C. you might as well not vote, you can't affect the election. Same deal for smaller states.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Eliminate registration, and you suddenly get graveyards voting for a candidate (Remember Chicago?)
In Sweden you don't have to register to vote. The government sends you a voter card, you bring it to the voting place, show your ID, and it's done. I think most countries work like this.
Vote fraud is literaly unheard of.
I never really understood why the US has this arcane registration procedure, but I guess it's because they don't keep track of where their citizens live. Or even if they're alive, it seems.
Anyway. Just wanted to point out that what you take for granted is not at all the only way to do things.
If you are getting mailed a voter card that sure sounds like you are already registered. What happens if you move? Let me guess, you notify the government and they update your registration. Not much different then what goes on in the US.
I'm not sure exactly how the US system works, but it seems that you have to manually go somewhere to register your intent to vote, possibly for each election.
In Sweden, every citizen is kept track of, and you get a vote card whether you asked for it or not.
Yes, you do send in an address update when you move, but it is not just for voting, but for every possible governemnt interaction (of which there are plenty over there).
Actually, the _real_ problem is something I like to refer to as "resolution".
Think of it this way: the representatives you choose are in fact the pixels on the screen. The image they "form" when put together should represent the most clueful elements in society as closely as possible.
(with a lack of clue in society, remove "clueful" from that)
Now, obviously, more "pixels" is good, in the sence that this way more different opinions are being represented. Since we have a party system of organized groups, that means that more parties is, essentially, good.
However, a "screen" has two other factors:
Color depth, and frequency of refresh.
These articles don't handle either very well. Sure, they try making the image less blurry, but in black-and-white, who cares?
In all this discussion about internet voting, the most obvious advantages of it tend to be overlooked - wich are, more votes in any given timeframe, and more fine-grained voting.
"More votes", in this context, means the same thing your screen refresh rate does - wich is, a much, much more dynamic image. If people could vote whenever they wanted, whereever they wanted, and have their votes register fairly often (once a month, or more), then throwing much money into one overkill campaign every four years isn't going to cut it anymore. Even more so when you do some 'smoothing' by taking the average over a given period of time (say, one year) instead of the votes themselves directly. Also, "voting parties" would be a lot less effective simply because people could change their minds whenever they wanted.
Add this to allowing people to assign "partial votes", as in assigning a percentage of their vote to different candidates (wich is the _real_ way to get a proper image of what someone wants), and having parties declare their intentions with a certain vote before each monthly vote count, and you'd have a pretty powerful system.
I don't really see what artificial systems like the ones described in those mathematical papers can add to it. It doesn't get more simple than this without losing image quality.
The internet is a tool, people. Let's use it that way, instead of as a fashion statement.
Floris
--- Your superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons
I don't want to cast a vote from any machine that has an NSA backdoor. You never know when a JBT is going to want to kill your for voting against the Ruling Party. -jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
inconsistent rambling that is Katz will
remember the day(s) last year that he lept onto
just this platform.
Alas, I came to the issue about three days late,
so my beautifully-crafted post was ignored.
Perhaps this time it will be read.
For your enjoyment, warts and all.
WARNING: What follows will likely be opinionated,
arrogant, badly spelt, badly edited, quick, not
really thought through, and liable to incite
flamewars and - in particular - piss off US
citizens.
Sounds like a real Katz article to me
Anyway
--------------------[begin]-----------------------
Mr Katz;
I read with interest your articles "Digital
Democracy" and "Digital Democracy II", and it is
my personal belief that you have missed the point.
It's quite simple: the problems with the US system
are simple, critical flaws, that have been well
understood for some time by mathematicians.
I hasten to add that no country enjoys a 'perfect'
system of voting. Indeed, no country employs
classical Greek Democracy, for example. I myself
have heard words from "Hierocracy" and
"Ogliocracy" through to "Stupidocracy" and "Bloody
pollies" employed to describe the elected people
at Australia's own Parliament House (a very nice
Parliament house it is too - all $1.1Bn of it).
However, the US Pluralist system has been long
since shown to be less than optimal in providing
'fair' and 'reasonable representation'.
There are two reasons: Voluntary voting and the
"first past the post" system.
First Past the Post
In a typical US election, every US citizen has a
single vote to use; the "one man, one vote" maxim
so popularly quoted. Who is then chosen to lead is
based on who gets the most votes.
This leads to some troublesome paradoxes. It is
noted by mathematicians that Plurality is the
only in-use voting system where the majority may
actually prefer A over B, but where B can win.
This is because of the way the field is divided.
If there are five canidates, there is every
possibility that one canidate could win with a
'majority' of 30%. I submit that 30% of the vote
is not very representive.
This means, in essence, that whilst I support
lower taxes (canidate A's platform), I place
higher value on protecting the right to bear arms
(canidate B's platform). I must choose between
them. The level of preference is not taken into
account. My attitude towards each canidate and
their entire platform is assumed to be binary
in nature: I am absolutely for or absolutely
against.
This tends to mean that moderate canidates get
washed out by the more voiciforous and extremist
factions. These factions can dump negativity upon
opponents, scare the electorate, or generally
make a lot of noise. This can convince a quite a
few voters to hand over their single votes to
a canidate who they marginally prefer. Whereas
the largest common body of preference might rest
with A, the binary majority (even if the number is
well below 50%) might eventually rest with B.
Voluntary Voting
The problems of plurality are severely exacerbated
by voluntary voting. Whilst I respect what I
understand to be the ethical basis of that idea -
voluntary abstention from difficult choices - I do
not believe that voluntary voting achieves this
end at all.
Voluntary voting is noted for leading to voter
apathy. Because many people aren't forced to
make a choice, they don't. Instead, they assume
that the elected representative - about whom they
have expressed their non-interest - will simply
read their minds and do their will anyway.
Not at all. These representatives will cater to
those who voted for them. And, in the way that
voluntary voting and plurality encourages, these
people will often be more extremist than moderate.
So why does voluntary voting encourage extremism?
Perhaps another example.
Again, we have five canidates. Canidates B thru
E are all fairly moderate, arguing on quite
reasonable platforms. Canidate A, however, is a
real rabble-rouser. He rants, he raves, he invokes
all sorts of biblical curses on his rivals. He's
hardcore, and he incites "all true Americans" or
"all true Christians" to vote for him, and him
alone.
Due to voter apathy, most of the voters who might
have otherwise voted for canidates B thru E do
not turn up at the polls. A, however, having
mobilised a small army of single-issue,
single-vision zealots, easily manages to overwhelm
his 20% bracket to take an absolute win.
So those moderates don't get a word in edgewise.
And A, knowing just who voted for him, and how
the system works, will play his A-game from
beginning to end - no matter how the polls read.
Digital Democracy?
What I must ask you, Mr. Katz, is wether the
problem lies with the politicians, or wether it
lies with the voting system that - in a fairly
Darwinian process - weeds out moderates and
provides sustenance to extremism.
These electoral officials aren't interested in
people who didn't vote for them. They know full
well that in 2 years time, the voters will be
back to their apathetic selves, but that the
zealots who put them in office will have an
encyclopaedic knowledge of everything they voted
for.
Digital Democracy might help a bit, but if it is
merely to be a net-based US voting system, it will
tend towards the same problems. If it is, as the
current system is, pluralist and voluntary, then
your Digital Democracy will not solve the problems
you have advanced.
As my father once pointed out to me: "Son, you
can have all the technology in the world, but
people will remain people. If you want something
done, think about people first, and technology
second."
Thankyou, Mr. Katz, for your interesting articles.
And thanks to Slashdot for allowing me such a
free and open forum in which to convey my shoddy
little arguments
JC.
Authors Notes: It's not as bad as I thought. Not being a US citizen and no constitutional lawyer, there may be inaccuracies in the stuff above. Apologies.
I admire the US greatly: here is a nation, which, in its foundation, was Great Ideas made flesh. You are so proud, America, and rightly. But you rest on your laurels, just as many before you. And you forget your Great Ideas, just as many before you. But for what you have given, thanks.
As for improving the way governments work, I think the key is innovative micro-reform. Governments and systems of government are large, deeply entrenched systems. They have enormous systemic inertia, gigantic forces and tensions reside within. Hence it is clear that:
forces and tensions. Do you really want that to happen all at once?
Try other ideas. Think outside the box. For example: governments often have programs that many people object to. Why not have a system on tax forms where, up to a certain percentage of your payable tax, you can deny usage of your dollars for a given program. Don't like paying for welfare? Have those dollars withheld. Agree with military buildups? Leave the money be!
I'm sure the bright minds here could think of many other examples. The world certainly changes; but seek the path of least resistance. The brick wall does not so easily fall to the battering ram; but to the gentle removal of mortar
Be well.
JC.
-- The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the fictional entity who may or may not have expressed them
We have made electronic voting systems for the Netherlands and for Belgium. One of the basic issues for any kind of voting is security and fairness. If voting is allowed from home (or anywhere else) using the Internet, these conditions are not met. Without thorough precautions, someone can easily see your vote on the screen or even worse, someone can force you to vote for the candidate he is preferring. Secure and fair pollings can only be organised in officially controlled voting booths. One could still use Internet technology in these booths; however the big advantage of the ubiquitous availability of the Internet is no longer valid. It is not sure that in the current booths there is an Internet connection available. Setting this up for a one day event while guaranteeing a high level of security is too costly. In both the Netherlands and Belgium we have made stand-alone voting systems where the results are put on floppies. These floppies are transported by taxi to the central voting office where all votes are collected. Concerning the voting college, both Belgium and Netherlands have a system that respects as close as as possible the ratio of the votes for assigning the representatives. This leads to an explosion of small and weak political parties. In Belgium we need 6 parties to form a government, a nightmare for an efficient management.
i wish i could agree with you, but most people in this country are either uninformed, or horribly misinformed. we've got to be damned near the most propogandized nation on the planet.
it's our own fault...i don't even consider myself well informed, and i pay more attention to the news than anyone in my immediate circle of family and friends.
it is not in best interest of either major party in the united states to inform people...it _is_ in their 'best' interest to toss around soundbites and catch phrases so that people can lull themselves into a feeling of being informed enough. people thinking for themselves doesn't keep campaign contributions coming in from those same people, and it doesn't give them the leverage to solicit large corporate donations.
i'm not so much mad at the individual politicians as i am fed up with _us_. we've put ourselves into a position where a monopoly (or trust, if you think more kindly of the democrats and republicans than i do,) dictates to us how we feel about everything...regardless of what the american people actually think or feel.
worse, most people who try to vote against this corruption by voting against candidates do so in a manner which only propogates the process...by simply voting for the other major party.
we do have choices, and we do have the power to affect change...i'm just not certain what it's going to take to make us realize it (nor will it last long if we do.)
"The things we wizards have to put up with."--Jethro Bodine
How about holding people responsible for their actions, whether or not they're on drugs? If someone chooses to smoke up, get in his/her car, and causes personal injury, death, or property damage, hold them responsible. Pretty soon, the idiot druggies will be taken care of and those who aren't will have managed to find ways to keep themselves from being a threat while drugged up (perhaps by smoking/snorting/whatever in the comfort of their own homes?)
Great. My wife has this nasty habit of voting for jerks. Now, with Internet voting, I can look over her shoulder and make sure she votes for the right people.
Also, with the bars closed on Election Day, it's hard to get a good voting party going. This way, I can throw a big party, serve lots of booze, and make sure lots of folks vote for the right people.
Seriously, electronic voting is wide open to all forms of coerced voting. The ward heelers and party bosses will love it. Marion Barry controlled Washington, DC for years with a variant of the second tactic above.
(Disclaimer -- If you think I'd actually do something like that, you don't know me very well. Get off yer arses and *work*, not just vote, for your candidates.)
well, you could always use the old fashioned ballot box method. :)
of course, as an experiment, you might set up some kind of trial internet vote, as well...when students stop by to vote, encourage them to help you with the experiment. the electronic vote wouldn't mean anything, but it would give you something of a comparison to traditional balloting.
"The things we wizards have to put up with."--Jethro Bodine
Why do we have representatives? Well, back in the good ole days (think original 13 states), there was no way for everyone in the country to be aware of what was happening. We therefore had to choose a representative whom we trusted to make good decisions for us. It then became his job to stay current on all political issues. It was also difficult back then because the average man did not have an education that is adequate for that job.
This is also why we still have Senators and House Reps. They live and breathe politics every day, all day (a job I don't envy them for). They know a great deal more than almost anyone else politically and can bring this knowledge to bear on anything presented to them. The common man is not going to take the time to stay informed on all political matters, so again we choose someone to do it for us. I agree that the current system is becoming corrupt. Hey, we had a good run tho... 200 years before the corruption began to become a real problem. That is the best track record in history, I think...
Were this to become a 'real' democracy, there would be no need for House Reps or Senators. Everyone would have access to all of the imformation that they would need to become informed on a single topic that interests them. It would be as simple as reading the information, looking at the proposal, reviewing what expert opinions are on both sides, and then clicking that little yes or no button in your web browser.
The implications of this suggest that the internet may well suck the power out of the government just as it does with every other power structure that it touches. The Recording Industry, Software Industry (Linux is the internet's collective answer to the Microsoft virus), News Industry, and very soon Radio, Television, Movies, and Printed Press are all feeling the bite of a superior information dissemination network that is slowly cutting into their business and providing more useful information and consumer choice without the bullshit.
The government is not ready for this. We aren't either. Give it a few years. Hopefully we may also be the first country to have a truly 'bloodless' revolution in our government - a restructuring without the need for lots of angry people with guns. In any case, it is clear that most people in the US are becoming more and more dissatisfied with their government. Give those people a tool and they will use it. Once again, history begins to repeat itself.
Isn't this fascinating? The internet drains all power out of every apsect of society that it touches, and returns it directly to those who use it. We can't survive without it now, it has become far to tightly tied to the economy. It is immune to most laws since it is a global network, and few laws apply everywhere. There is no way to control it, regulate it, destroy it, or even corrupt it.
How the hell did something like this come into being by accident? It wasn't by design, I seriously doubt that the founders knew what they were doing (to this extent at least). This seems to be a natural result of the process of information sharing.
Did you ever notice that the internet maps posted on here a while ago look a lot like a map of the human brain?
Looks like I lived in China in a past life and pissed off a few people... I live in interesting times.
EvilNight
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
Two major objections to online voting:
1. "Voting Parties": Vote coercion/buying is possible if a binding vote can be submitted from anyplace that isn't guaranteed private.
2. "Hacking/Spoofing Votes": Someone could crack the security of the system, and alter votes or submit votes for other people.
One possible solution: Don't make the online votes binding. Still require a voter to show up at a polling station and verify their choice. They could submit multiple votes, if they liked, and then check off the one they really meant while in guaranteed privacy. If their real choice was altered or removed, or if they were flooded with fake votes, or if they just didn't or couldn't vote online, they could re-vote while at the station.
If they still have to go to the station, why bother allow online submission? To make things easier. In the (hopefully) normal case, you would simply go in to sign off on your single submitted vote. You could take as much time as you wanted to make your decision. If the system allowed, say, preferential ranking, you wouldn't have to memorize your choices. The voting "interface" could provide ample data and handholding. Changed your mind? Vote again, and choose that vote at the station.
Simple, yes?
I just read the Bucket Proposal(tm) and found it absolutly hilarious.
Here's a few of the points for those not wishing to go to the site...
a. Stability. Buckets would meet performance criteria that would
ensure that the buckets were sufficiently unstable that if a child were to fall into one of them, the bucket would tip over. The buckets would have to tip over if subjected separately to specified horizontal and vertical forces.
Great. A bucket that's always falling over. Useful, eh?
c. Liquid retention. Buckets could be constructed so that they
cannot retain liquid. (They still could be used to ship solid materials in a liner.)
Uhhh...what??? A bucket that cannot hold liquid? Isn't that currently known as a 'box'?
Anyway, this is the kind of thinking that's kept me fairly apolitical for that last eight years. I for one believe that it's time for Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor scenario to happen.
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
We discuss the messy mathematical ins and outs of various single-winner and multi-winner systems, in an effort to fully understand the spectrum of systems available and their relative merits. Not for the faint of heart, but if you are interested in that sort of thing...
That being said, clearly there is something wrong with today's representative government, where all power radiates outward from the media and money; where the voice of the individual is unheard; where the interests of constituents are determined not by direct communication with their representative, but rather by polls architected by special interests; where campaigns never end and candidates announce they're dropping out of the presidential race because they've run out of campaign funds 16 months before the election; where politicians refuse to take a stand on any issue for fear of alienating a single campaign contributor; where the voting records of representatives are insignificant compared to their sex lives, because sex makes for better soundbites.
Getting more people to vote would certainly reduce the voice of special interests and help counter some of these problems. Voting online might make it easier to vote, but will that really counter voter apathy? A solution that would induce a lot more people to vote (and probably be cheaper too) is a tax deduction for voting.
As for arguments about Net voting increasing the potential for fraud, well, that presupposes that current methods of balloting are less susceptible to fraud, a supposition I find laughable. Living in San Francisco and watching our mayor/crook Willie Clown (whose email address is damayor@marlboro.com, talk about being BOUGHT) collaborate with the 49ers to pass the stadium financing bill, I see how easy it is to manipulate polling, extend voting hours and absentee deadlines only in specific districts, and somehow motivate lots of dead people to vote. (Don't get me wrong - Go Niners!) It seems to me that digital balloting could be more secure, more accurate, and easier to detect fraud... though of course that's assuming it would be implemented by competent goverment IT staff, which is like a double or triple oxymoron.
With polling booths, the privacy of the voter is assured. You may say either yes or no if someone asks, "Did you vote for Johnson?" and they'll never know whether you were lying or not.
If you vote from home, they may intimidate or convince you into allowing them to monitor your vote. The simple act of keeping them out of your home could cause some people to act out against you.
The government must ensure privacy during the act of voting, and that privacy must not be optional.
John Karcz
However, this doesn't mean that it can't be done. <pulls well-thumbed copy of Applied Cryptography, 2nd Edition down from its shelf> Chapter 6 in this book has a bunch of 'Esoteric Protocols', including 'Secure Elections'. I'd wholeheartedly recommend anyone doing any research into this field to get this book.
In a nutshell, there are at least 6 (and sometimes more) different requirements for a protocol that can be used for secure voting. These are:
- Only authorized voters can vote.
- No one can vote more than once.
- No one can determine for whom anyone else voted.
- No one can duplicate anyone else's vote (meaning, they can't just say "okay, I'll just make it easy and vote the way Bob did over there").
- No one can change anyone else's vote without it being discovered (and invalidated).
- Every voter can make sure that his vote has been taken into account in the final tabulation.
Some schemes can also have another requirement:There are very simple voting protocols, and the book describes the reasons these protocols don't meet the aforementioned requirements. (Some of these fall prey to the 'clipper chip' paranoia... "ohmigod, the government (or 'my party', etc) can figure out that I didn't vote for them!!!". Since voting's supposed to be -completely- anonymous from the time you're in the booth to the time you're not... I see this as a valid concern.)
There's a lot of useful things to be found in this book, and again, I wholeheartedly recommend it. There's undoubtedly been more research done in the 4 years since it was published; however, I've not been keeping up on that portion of the literature.
References:
_Applied Cryptography_, 2nd Edition, by Bruce Schneier, ISBN 0-471-11709-9. pp. 125-134. http://www.counterpane.com
Some of the above was taken directly from the book. Since I don't know HTML well enough to be able to format this the way it's supposed to be formatted in that case, please don't complain about my lack of proper formatting.
Internet voting is a lovely use of the technology--and a very bad idea for the country. (Apologies to SlashDot members from outside the U.S.A. If your nation chooses to adopt Internet voting, that's your problem.)
Two issues: First, there is the technology. You can cheat. Second, and more importantly, it permits ballots to be cast in private.
What? you say--don't we decide elections by secret ballot? Yes--but that secret ballot must be cast in a *public* place. And the reason that the vote is cast in a public place is so that representatives from all the political parties can be in that public place to object if you are not who you say you are. Or more to the point, if you claim to be somebody that they think does not exist.
Further, those political party representatives are present when the votes are tallied--and the votes are tallied by hand. Everyone present has to agree on the totals--if the process was not completely open to review, someone would cheat.
In recent years some political entities (notably Oregon, with their let's-bring-back-ballot-box-stuffing initiative to hold elections by mail) have either lost sight of the concept of vote fraud, or have tacitly decided that a little bit of good ol' vote fraud might be a good thing. I'd suggest that the latter is the case: lots and lots of elections can be (and are) stolen because nobody's looking.
The Ancient Geek
(formerly a Republican committeeman for 12 years, and an area chairman for 4 years. I've been a poll worker almost every year since 1978.)
Hmm - you are right about the infeasability of internet voting at this point in time, or with the internet that we currently have.
However, I still have to disagree with you about a "representative" "democracy" (both words in quotations because both are currently used by govts in perversion of the real meaning of the words!). A representative democracy is basically a dictatorship, with a few obscuring facts to make people think otherwise.
For one, the "head" of the dictatorship changes. Be careful here, though - although the head changes, the policies (and the outcomes) don't.
Also, there's this funny thing called "the vote" that makes people think they have a choice. But remember - they essentially get to choose one of two "heads", who will make the policies anyway.
Anybody who wants to change the system, as you mentioned, is going to have an extremely hard time of it. One of two things will happen:
(1) You won't address the fundamental issue, but instead "high XXX in XXX", or something. Sure, maybe you'll even win this issue (you probably won't), but if you do, the basic state of events doesn't alter.
(2) You try and address the fundamental issue, and get shot down in flames by a huge amount of scare-tactic type politics directed against you by the majority of politicians who like things JUST as they are, thankyou very much!
Not to mention the fact that the media benefits from the current system as well - remember that the current system is completely corporation-oriented. The media is a corporation. QED!
-Shane Stephens
I must say that voter fraud will happen no matter how the people vote.
Take Landreau vs Jenkins for US Senate. there was evidence of massive voter fraud. Jenkins thought it was enough where he would have actually won, even though he was 10,000 votes behind.
We have the same controls as any other place for voting. We use electromechanical voting machines that are verified by a clerk of court in the open. But, we still have people voting twice in two different parishes (counties) and getting away with it. We also have people getting paid from "anonymous sources" for voting one way or the other.
Voting on the internet will not change the amount of voter fraud, at least here. It will get rid of voter anonymity, though. Currently, there is no way to tell who voted what because the machines contain only counters.
Think about it, it solves all the problems, doesn't it? Sometimes the best approach isn't always the most modern. You lot can't see the wood for the trees, methinks.
In your example, there isn't a problem. I just think there is a problem when there are 2 mutually exclusive parties that hate each other. It guarantees that the best guy Not from either party will win. From a political stand point, this might be a good thing. From a mathematical/voting-strategy standpoint, this shows a flaw in the system. I might add, also, that this system might encourage candidates that are less radical, and ignore the spotlight. The least-hated system would favor politicians not willing to go out on a limb. I'm not really leaning toward any voting system (other than getting rid of the electorial college), I just thought this was something interesting to think about. Thanks for the response.
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