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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.
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
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.
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,
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!}
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?).
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!}
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?
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
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
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.
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.;-)
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?
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?
Unfortunately, our government is opposed to letting the unwashed masses see in brilliant detail everything they did. They say that mirroring all congressional action to a web server would be "too expensive", among other things.
As much as i dispise journalists for the slime-sucking worms so many of them are, I would not be the least bit opposed to the idea of appointing state funded journalists to cover each and every thing a single representative does. What does a communications major cost these days, $35k/yr? In the grand scheme of things, a little muckrake is pretty easy to come by.
Unfortunately, you'd need to pass a law to get away with that, and the people who pass laws aren't about to open themselves up to public scrutiny. they're "above" that.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
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
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
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.