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Iowa to test forms of Internet voting
dwh wrote to us about The Boston Globe reporting on Iowa's first steps towards Internet voting. It's tenative, with just putting computers by the boothes, but it's a first step. The article does a good job of addressing the pros and cons while talking about the first states, WA and VA which have tried it already. What do you folks think? Good or bad?
think the best part of internet-based voting is the reduction in voter apathy. Personally, I think this is one of the biggest problems we have nowadays. If everyone came out to vote, we could ensure that the likelihood of a stupid candidate being elected would drop.
You make two completely erroneous supositions above.
First of all, how is internet voting going to lessen "voter apathy"? The problem isn't that people are apathetic to the idea of voting, it's that they don't care enough about the issues to vote, much less learn about the issues first . All internet voting will do is make it easier for the un-informed--the "stupid"--to vote.
Your second assumption--that intenet voting would make it harder for a stupid canidate to vote is even less well supported. Are you going to say with a straight face that somehow the internet makes stupid canidates more obvious?
Or are you saying (with the same straight face) that there are no stupid people on the internet
No, the sad truth is that internet voting will make it EASIER for the stupid and the uninformed to vote. It will make it easier for those who spread lies and deceit to pull the world...I mean the wool over peoples eyes.
What we need to do is make it harder to vote, make it so that only people who care AND are informed on the issues will be able to cast a ballot that counts.
Everyone may be entitled to their opinion, but that doesn't mean that their stupidity should be able to hold office.
Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf might be our opportunity to get the "people don't care enough about security" situation out in the open.
Independent of whether the system is secure enough or not, I certainly agree that there are merits both to:
- Making voting easier
- Keeping the effort required high enough
Highly automated voting apparatii are more strongly associated with Neilson ratings, and thus with determining whether Oprah or Jerry Springer are more popular...Since many elections are showing off lower and lower levels of participation, and
... so that people take their own vote seriously ...
Of course, Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf could be a better candidate than some that have come along...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Ludicrous. You think open source would prevent anyone from trashing ballots? In the short term, it would probably be easier to hack, since vulnerabilities are more apparent, and many would have a real incentive to subvert the voting process.
think that the security for internet voting is something that needs to be proven before it can hit mainstream. When I say security, I also mean the possible rigging of votes... they have to come up with a sure-fire way to prevent anyone from rigging votes...
Pssst. Come here. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Are you ready?
The current system ain't foolproof either. Now I have to kill you.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
"To withdraw in disgust is not the same thing as apathy." -- Slacker
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
WA didn't do a very good job raising awareness-- I've been here five years and never heard of it!
Of course, when it comes to the media I tend to have that disconnected feeling...
I DO care whether they care enough about the issue to fight if they don't get their way.
If they're willing to fight, I want them to have a say in which way it goes - and to see if there are so many OTHER people who care enough to fight and want it to go the other way that they'd lose.
Then they won't fight - win or lose. The winners get their way without fighting. The losers aren't tempted to fight. And I don't have to fight OR dodge their bullets.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How do you know it hasn't been hacked already?
Think about how many people YOU know voted for the winner of the last election - or any election since about 1968.
Think about the political machines of distant history. Then think about the political machines of today.
Remember how Kennedy beat Nixon by less than one vote per precinct in (Richard Daily the First's) Chicago?
Remember how Willie Brown in San Francisco got his stadium ballot measure approved in a stunning upset turnaround when the last precincts were counted? (Remember him sticking out his tongue at the camera as he celebrated?)
Doing it on the internet doesn't stop machine politics. It just lets everybody play with the machinery.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
One of the points of voting booths is that you go in. Alone. You vote. Alone. And you come out. Alone. Simple as that. No one ever knows which lever you pulled, or indeed if you pulled one at all. I can pay you a million dollars for your vote -- but I have no way of finding out whether or not you ACTUALLY voted for me. It's one of those built-in protection type of things. Sure, it's frigging inconvenient to have to vote, but the simple fact is that right now, it's a secure, and secret, system. Online voting would be neither.
Definitely for Internet voting to be safe and private a lot of work has to be done, but I think it's definitely the way to go once they work out the details.
For those complaining about the danger of fraud, there's definitely reason for concern, but do you realize how little checking there is now? I don't know if it's the same way everywhere, but in all the years I've been voting I've never been asked to in any way verify my identify, with ID or whatever. So although Internet voting would allow for a grander scale of fraud, there's not a lot of fraud protection in the current method.
Yup.
BWAHAHAHHAHAHA! Yeah, right. They vote so they can continue the gravy train. There's a reason the elderly have gone from the most impoverished demographic to the wealthiest demographic over the last generation (neatly trading places with children). Next time you go vote take a pay stub with you. See that ``FICA''? That's why the AARP crowd is at the polls. To keep the money flowing out of your pocket and into theirs.
As opposed to just buying votes?
Well, from the perspective of someone who's never voted...
My vote doesn't count. I never like the major candidates. Anyone I wanted to win would have no chance whatsoever of winning. The only effect my vote would have is that they could say they got some tiny fraction of a percentage more of the vote. I consider that to be worthless. I also reject arguments that if everyone thought or didn't think how I feel that things would be somehow different. I can't sway how any substantial portion of people would decide to vote.
Even if I did play the game of selecting the lesser of the two evils, or if someone I did like at least a little bit won, it wouldn't matter. The US government is hopelessly corrupt (yes, many others are far, far worse). I don't see any way to change it, and I'd rather just not think about it (courage to accept the things I cannot change, perhaps). I don't consider it to make any difference which particular politician votes yes on bad laws.
And because of that, it's not worth my effort, or my time. My time is the most valuable thing I have.
If voting became virtually effortless, I'd probably start. And I'm sure you're right, most people would not want someone like me to vote. If there were any chance of it happening, those in power would be terrified of everyone who thinks like I do voting in the same way. (But it's hopeless, we've already given up).
I have no feeling of civic duty. At least I don't think I do. As far as I can recall, I've only heard it used as a reason one should vote. I don't know what the term is supposed to mean (I could guess, but that's worthless) - noone ever told me, I've never had to use it in a sentence, and when I look it on www.dictionary.com, I get this vague definition:
civic duty n : the responsibilities of a citizen [syn: civic responsibility]
So I look up civic responsibility:
civic responsibility n : the responsibilities of a citizen [syn: civic duty]
Sigh. How useful.
By the same token, if everyone votes, then you may find yourself with a bad candidate because a lot of people just voted for whose name they saw the most on signs around their town. I see it in Quebec regularly. The inteligencia in my area all vote Liberal, and the welfare class (50% unemployment in my hometown), all vote PQ. The result? Separatist victory, and endless complaints about how bad the government is with no thought to the fact they put them there.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 01, @05:22PM EST (#23)
Woohoo! Iowa rules!!!!!
This guys got a computer. He's on the internet. You *really* want him voting on YOUR rights?
No thanks.
This is very cool for lazy schlubs like me who have trouble trekking to the polling place, but on a more serious note, I think this would be good in "wide release" IF we also started implementing "None of The Above" options on ballots. I have trouble mustering motivation to vote with the dearth of good candidates and the prevalence of bipartisan crap, so I stay home and don't vote. I get the feeling I'm not alone in this. Imagine the collective weight of all the folks like myself having the power to vote NOTA suddenly doing so. Maybe then we'd get something done. Or maybe we'd get stuck in an endless cycle of NOTA voting and the country would collapse. Oh well.
-cp
I'd rather do it that way than sit and home and click my votes in. I'll leave that to Slashdot polls. :)
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
True, there are many possible problems with Online voting.
One has to remember the current system isn't fullproof either. There has always been voter and election fraud. Question is, can an online system be made at least as safe from fraud as the current system is...
-Tom O'Rear -- tomed@radiks.net
Interesting comment. But open source gives people full knowledge of the inner workings of a program, including security issues. While this is normally offset by the much faster response to fixing the holes than in the closed source community, it does give greater oppotunity to find, and even create holes. Imagine the resources a terrorist group would throw at finding every possible hole in our "holy" open source voting system. They could singlehandedly choose our president and congress. If it is closed, maybe even classified source, it will be much more difficult for them to find and exploit flaws. Besides, the server software would only be used by one organization. If its done right special client software wouldn't be needed. The only special software needed would be by the voting beracracy. This software would have to be kept secure. I'm sorry, but the risks of open source outweigh the benefits considering the resources that will be thrown into cracking it. Keep it simple, and closed. At least until it has a large installed base, at national, state, and local level and possibly even international customers. Then, maybe the number of users(thus potential developers) could be high enough for the open source speed of bug fixes to be high enough to counteract all the resources thrown into cracking it.
Internet Voting is supposed to add tons of convienience to the voting system, basically bringing the booth into your house. Increases in security have made this idea see more and more of reality lately.
What it actaully does is allow uninformed, unmotivated people to shed their opinion on the future of the nation. The current system is set up so that only people who care enough to scoot their arses to the booth and cast their vote are allowed to vote. Internet voting allows people who don't really care and don't know much about the topics to not move but think to themselves, "Well, lets try some of this voting stuff."
I'm not saying that all people who make it to the voting place are clued, but I am saying that all people who make it to the voting place had enough motivation to make it to the voting place.
Summary: Internet voting allows people who don't care enough to make it to the booth to shape the future of the U.S.
Feel free to disagree, but please don't call me a "ironic cynical fuck" again.
Erick
Hey, I don't know if we are ready yet for internet voting, but just using computers is a major step forward because it allows Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) and Proportional Representation (PR). These are arguably the most important advances in democracy since voting itself. They have the potential to break up our current "Republicratic" duopoly and give so-called "minor" parties a chance to actually win elections. Check it out at http://www.fairvote.org and get involved!
In addition to the points raised by the article and by posters here, I think that the biggest worry is still un-addressed. Even if the election board could set up a system that was uncrackable, and robust to DoS attacks, there is still the problem of voter fraud.
What's to stop Steve Forbes from buying a lot of computers and setting up his own voting booths and busing people in? One reason there are election judges that sit and check your signature is to watch and make sure candidates and their aides don't just lead people in and punch the card for them. That's why there are rules about how close to voting places any campaign material can be. With internet voting, there's no way to protect the independence of the voting.
All of this assumes that a technique can be developed that will verify a voter's identity while ensuring the anonymity of votes.
Anything that increases the number of people who vote is good, but not if it makes it impossible to ensure that the voting is fair.
Do you trust the non-open-source, proprietary
software that tabulates the ballots now?
I don't know if we are ready yet for internet voting, but just using computers is a major step forward because it allows Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). IRV is arguably the most important advance in democracy since voting itself. It has the potential to break up our current "Republicratic" duopoly and give so-called "minor" parties a fair chance to actually win elections. Check it out at http://www.fairvote.org and get involved with democracy!
That's where the REAL money in hacking/cracking is.
Once we can work past all of the security/paranoia issues associated with it, I tend to think that Internet voting is a great thing.
For the most part, I only vote on the yearly elections, and even then, I am loathe to wander down to the local polling place.. Why? Because I don't like to stand in line for 1/2 an hour, and have to deal with crazy little punch card forms.
Now.. If I could Internet vote.. and have notificiations of Elections emailed to me.. Then I could happily cast my cote during my lunch hour at work, or perhaps between my evening Quake3 Game.
It's all about conveinience And if we can consider the drooling masses that hey, this is safe/secure and convienient, then we've got a winner on our hands.
http://thepoliticalgeek.com/blog/ Politics for Geeks.
You just keep saying that when your 80 and in an old folks home with no government benifits and no money. _I_ on the other hand will be up in my summer home somewhere in northern Canada (really nice place out there)because I was smart enough to vote in some really awsome retirement benefits and a really sweet 401k and a few nice mutuals.
I understand where you're coming from, but your view leads in an extremely dangerous direction. Taken to its logical end it means that not only can politicians vote on their own salaries, they can also vote on who can put them in office.
The problem with living in a democratic republic is that you then have to live with the decisions made.
Unfortunately, if the country voted to eliminate violently all blond people, it would have to be accomplished if we are to harbor any feelings of democracy. (Obviously not that simple, first laws and the Constitution would need to change - all doable through voting however).
Freedom and democracy can not be matters of convenience! That attitude will train the government to think "we'll let you be absolutely free - do whatever you like, as long as it is what we want you to do"!!!
Or at least I think so. Once they make it secure enough that casting fraudulent votes is impossible. But isn't securing a system that much impossible? Isn't there always some way in? I'm sure they can come up with something *really* good, but will it ever be good enough?
I don't know, but I hope they do - voting from my computer is a lot more convenient than getting in the car and driving 20 minutes, then waiting in line to vote.
--
you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
I think secure network voting would increase voter participation in the U.S. Let's face it, people only vote if there are hyped up issues. But, if voting were secure and from the comfort of your own home, people would be inclined to do it. Just like the 'new messages' beckons you to read your email...
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
I live in Iowa, and internet voting would be extremely handy for me, a busy college student. However, for it to really be effective, it would have to cover local elections too.
I will admit that I have missed some local elections because I either didn't care, or was scared of the old ladies down at the fire station where the booths are.
If I had the internet vote, I probably would have cast my ballot.
Each candidate should also be allowed to put a 100 word message describing their positions and views on the pages. That way I know who I am voting for and why. Sure I am a Democrat, but it is not democratic to just vote all D's because I don't know the candidate.
If there is internet voting, then they definitely have to help make voters make a more informed choice.
There is also the issue of security. I would be concerned about possible breaches in the validity of the votes. Some cracker could get in there and do some good damage if the system was not very secure. It would be very terrible if a candidate got elected because they hired the right nerd.
EC
EverCode
Internet voting will never take off until it's proven that it can be safely monitored so that multiple people do not vote more than once. There is no real way to track this that I see, however I have not given much thought into this. I'm curious as to what this would do to voter registration if it's ever taken mainstream. Blah.
Most of the framers of this seem to believe that the major issue here is security, but it seems like reliability is possibly even a bigger showstopper.
No vote can be lost no matter what the circumstances. People are apathetic about voting once, so how would they feel about voting TWICE? For example, a power outage would be very problematic. So would a fire in the building which housed the computers. So would a hard drive crash. It seems like if you had a multi-site VMS or Tandem cluster, it would come close to working, but it is still not absolutely 100% (e.g. if there is a power outage in BOTH sites, which would be possible if an entire region was wiped out.), plus it would be VERY expensive.
How reliable is the current system? If there is disaster on voting day (such as an earthquake or a power outage), is voting ever post-poned, due to likely low turnout, or loss of functionality of the voting machines? Has there ever been a disaster which affected the actual ballots cast (such as a building which held ballots catching fire?) Can computers compete with paper ballots insofar as reliability?
I think it's a great thing - if it succeeds, we will eventually be able to have a real democracy with all issues being voted on by general public rather than a bunch of corrupt congressmen. Zero-cost voting is great!
Its been awhile since i've been in Iowa. But does Iowa still tax ISP usage? I know they were talking about it when I left, and I think they finally did it.
Would that be considered a poll tax of sorts?
Tom
This is a great idea, they should force people
to use computers to vote!
The last time I voted, I was the only person there under the 3/4 century mark. I could hardly concentrate on scribbling in all the little boxes for the hissing of all the oxygen tanks. It appears old people have little else to do but sit around and vote all day.
Hopefully the computers will help scare some of them off...
Praise the Force Field! Praise the Laser Project! Slackware Loon #19830573
Iowa is a great state to live in for job opportunities and raising families. We also have one of the lowest unemployment rates in all of the United States.
I can hear the objections already:
Well, my views are:
Because we have always had to vote, the number of fringe lunatics in power is greatly reduced, and we have had for at least 25 years, minor parties and independants holding the "balance of power" in the Federal and most state upper houses, to, as one party founder said "Keep the bastards honest."
I accept this wouldnot work in the US - no doubt enought fanatics will argue that doing this violates all articles of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and is just one step from fascism / communism / the end of civilisation as we know it.
My 2 cents worth.
This may seem wierd coming from a computer nerd, but this is a bad idea - for one simple reason: it makes it easier for those in power to corrupt the process. I prefer paper ballots because they can be audited after the fact. The use of computers gives them one more way to "throw" the election. Let's see: Free elections - gone Write to own a gun - gone Free speech - gone Free to be secure in your house and property - gone Is it time yet?
To me, if you (the general you, not you personally) can't take 30 minutes out of one day each year to vote, then you obviously aren't very committed to a particular candidate.
When you consider that 49 percent of Americans are unable to name any one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment*, I'm all for making voting something into which you actually have to put some effort.
[*] Source: First Amendment Center; The Center for Survey Research and Analysis, University of Connecticut.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Now as for those people who think that internet voting will ruin the whole process (eg: people won't consider candidates properly), I ask this question: how much do people consider candidates with a traditional voting process. Has Bush Jr. made any real discussion about his policitical agenda yet? Last time I checked (which I confess, was a month of two ago), his campaign party was trying to simply push him based on his personality.
When people pick presidents based on looks and pretty speeches rather than political track records and agendas, you know the system is seriously porked. And with a system like the one we have now, no more damage could be done to this monstrousity. On the other hand, there is a lot to be gained from a proper implementation of a digital/analog hybrid voting system. Indeed it would be easier for everybody to vote, but it is also the first step away from a representative-based government towards a government that truley represents the will of the people rather than the policital action committees.
Finally, just to make things clear, I'm not saying that the old voting method should be eliminated. It should be kept as an alternative method for those who don't have net/computer access.
That is all well and true, but what I think most people don't realize is that our current voting system is wildly insecure. Hell, my wife changed her name five years ago, and she *still* gets voter pamplets in both names every year. As far as we can tell, she could vote twice without anyone being the wiser (using absentee ballots).
When you register to vote this days, at least in California, there is almost no checking to ensure that you are a legal citizen and are not registered elsewhere. There was a big article on this in the San Francisco paper (I think) a year or so ago. Wish I could remember more, but the upshot of the whole thing was that it was pretty easy to register illegally.
The cake is a pie
what a bunch of crap. SECURITY THROUGH OBSCURITY NEVER WORKS. say it a few times you'll feel better. if a system is more easily exploitable after having the source code released to the public then it isn't even near the level of quality that the software for a ballet system should be. a truly secure program takes many years of testing using massively wide spread peer review before one can be sure that it is fit for a purpose like this. i don't see it happening in the next few years
Sheer insanity. Really busy lives?!!!??! No mundane activity in _anyone's_ daily life could be more important than the right to vote. Client meeting? You can sue your employer if your leaving work to vote brings any sort of penalty down on you. Favorite TV show on? If that's more important to someone, than I sure as hell don't want them voting, picking the people in MY government, during the commercials! I hope that at least a few slashdotters, and I hope to hell that at least a few of our politicians have read the political philosophy that underlies the American democratic system. Believing in the power of the physical trip to the polling booth has nothing to do with being a crotchety old-timer, it has everything to do with a sense of civic DUTY, you know the word that should always be mentioned in the same breath as 'rights' but seldom is . . .
If everyone came out to vote, we could ensure that the likelihood of a stupid candidate being elected would drop.
I don't know about that... The whole definition of apathy is not caring. If you demand a choice from someone who doesn't care, you aren't going to get a lot of thought in the decision. I suspect that the likelihood of a stupid candidate would increase, as you get a bunch of people who are voting based on little more than name recognition. I mean, if someone isn't putting in the effort to go down to the polling station, or filling out an absentee ballot (which takes what, ten mintutes?) are we really going to expect them into doing any sort of research into what their voting on?
The cake is a pie
Look on the bright side: This would sure speed the transition to IPv6. If every little kid got his own IP address, we'd run out in no time! (Or would we? Anyone care to comment on exactly how many IPv4 addresses are out there still?)
Hrm... Personal freedom or new IP protocols to play with? I'll have to think about this one...
I've said it before, and I'll say it again....
PEOPLE SHOULD BE COMPELED TO VOTE BY LAW.
Let those people who cant name a candidate vote informal, but make them at least show up to a voting booth and put in a ballot, no matter what it says.
Wouldn't it solve all those problems with minorities not getting time off work to vote? Cirtainly make it easier to vote, provided it can be made secure, but don't make a mockery of universal sufferage.
Q: How can a country be a democracy when less then half the population vote?
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
I think that you have missed my point entirely. My point isn't that "smart" people should be allowed to vote, while "stupid" people shouldn't. Every adult citizen has an equal right to vote. I'm simply questioning the wisdom of doing something that encourages people to vote who don't consider elections important enough to take the time to actually go to a voting booth.
Overall, the disadvantages of Internet voting outweigh any advantages. The main problems I see with it are:
1) There is no effective way of preventing vote buying and selling. Unless the system places restrictions on the number of people who can vote from a single host, setting up a vote-buying scheme is easy -- the local political boss can simply buy the desired votes at their (possibly unofficial) campaign office. It's the anonymity of the ballot booth which makes vote buying & selling ineffective, since no one can *prove* how they voted -- if someone can stand over your shoulder to verify that you're voting the right way, they'll be willing to pay for votes.
2) The main argument in favour of Internet voting is that it increases *convenience* (in the hope that this will increase turnout), but it does so only for the economically priviledged class of people who are net-connected. Since the poor must continue to use public terminals, introducing this option will shift power over government even more into the hands of white, upper/middle class voters. At least the current system is equally inconvenient for everyone.
Sadly, I suspect most of the typical slashdot crowd will see both of these outcomes as desirable.
I know, I'm from there. I was sticking up for it.
What a couple of humorless, elitist losers you are. Well, back to my high-energy physics research...
I do my banking, transfer money, and make credit card purchases on the Internet. If I feel comfortable putting my money across the Internet do you really think I would give a second thought to putting my vote across the Internet too? There is no real way to track this that I see, however I have not given much thought The solutions (there are many) to this are so blindingly obvious that you do yourself a disservice to even raise the issue.
I'd rather have the canidate capible of cracking the voting system in office than the dunces that would be voted for otherwise!
Two points which are not taken into consideration by most people who favor Internet voting and other methods of expanding franchise and its convenience:
1. Many people who vote have no idea who or what they are voting for. One name sounds more familiar to them, or, knowing nothing about either candidate, they decide purely based on the party affiliation. Some could argue the validity of party line voting, but can anyone defend a vote of ignorance? At least by requiring *some* effort, there is a self-selection of voters which tends to exclude those who know or care less about the issues.
2. Many people who do not vote actively choose not to do so as a protest against what they feel is a fundamentally flawed system which effectively excludes real alternatives. What percentage of eligible citizens are registered to vote, and what percentage of registered voters turn out to do so. Perhaps low (and declining) numbers for these indicate an actual preference for "none of the above" and do not merely reflect an increase of apathy. Voting behavior closely conforms to public approval of the state itself, as opposed to individual candidates for office.
Peace and love, y'all
personally, i don't want everyone to vote. do you really want every uninformed idiot to cast a vote? there's already enough of them (you can tell by how much charisma is a part of what gets people elected). more brainless, emotion driven, non-thinkers is not what we need for voters.
No... duh assign everyone a digital signiture. Even cooler if this digital signature decoded in some way to reviel something unique but non private about you IE fingerprints or something. But I digress, assigned non mandatory (aka only used for serious/legal documents not like the SSN's have become) digital signature would be be perfect solutions to such problems.
A couple weeks after I cast my MSFT stockholders' votes via a secure website proxy, I read this article. I'm seeing a lot of nerds proclaim "but authenticating the votes as being genuine would be nigh impossible!"
And you call yourself nerds? Nerds are supposed to say, "Hey! It's software! We can make it do anything, we can solve any problem!"
What system do we have, today? Have you actually gone down to the local VFW or Baptist dance hall or Gymnasium? Watched a grandmother volunteer's wrinkled melanoma-covered hand as she followed the lines of barcodes and registered voters' names, until it fell on your own unprotected name and address? Wondered how a little checkmark near your name on this list was somehow more secure than what you could do in software?
We stand on the edge of deciding if we can export many-bit security methods to other countries. The politicians' argument: but we can't let them use our robust security methods! Shouldn't we be using our robust security methods?
For a voting method to succeed, it must match our system's ideals and exceed our current approach. It must exceed today's system's performance on security, voter's convenience, and counting accuracy.
Security: You have to validate the fact that each cast vote represents one registered voter; that each voter can, at their will, avoid coercion of choice from third parties; that any found fraudulent votes can be redacted within a reasonable period of time; and that each voter can keep their vote private if they desire.
(Partial solution: e-voter must specifically register for "license" to use e-vote methods; the use of said license implies the voter bears more responsibility over the e-vote security. Those who don't register for e-vote must use physical vote methods where government bears all responsibility over the p-vote security.)
Convenience: You have to make sure that those voters who find the gymnasiums and vfw rooms to be more convenient CAN use them. If an e-voter finds a website more convenient, that the website is open and available. It can show your current and past vote history. You can *change* your vote up to the vote deadline.
Accuracy: come on. Remember the old lady at the VFW using a checkbox? I'd trust a billion-transaction-per-minute server more than I'd trust Granny Mae.
[
Iowa isn't the first to think of this. Louisiana is also thinking about internet voting. Hopefully this means campaigns/issues will be more available on the net rather than having your favourite TV show blasted with election ads (eugh!). Heres the link to the Louisiana internet voting story: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctf279.htm
No, I dont.
You bring up a point... how do you filter out the tards? But hell, the vote represents the people, and if the people are mentally deficient... well.. . Yukon Ho!
I think that the best way to handle this would be to give people the option to sign up to vote online at an actual polling station, that way they could set up a voting account with all the requred security, plus then they can check to make sure that you're you. All in all I think that if you can trust people to bank online or have online trading accounts, you can have good enough security for online voting. After all, a virtual vote is basically the same as a virtual dollar, i.e. not physically there.
The physical possibility of voting is not really the issue, the technical kinks can and will be worked out, the real issue is wheter or not you trust the people running the polls and the people running for election not to rig it somehow. I mean, if Al Gore invented the internet, he probably could hack the voting servers so that he would win.
If there are write ins anything is possible. i Remember time held a man of the year poll a while back. with a few voting scripts we managed to get dust puppy to the top. I'de hope there would be mroe security with a governmentvote, but there still could be problems. For instance if there was a call for a revote how would that be done? Have everyone vote again?
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
People don't vote because they don't care about the outcome. They don't care about the outcome because they don't see any difference between the two parties that are built into the system or between the carefully coiffed career politicians.
Occasionally someone breaks through and excites interest (like Jesse Ventura), showing what might happen if there were a connection between government and the people.
The system is broken. The Internet won't fix it.
In some respects, I'm just as glad that I don't have a vote, as the choice between the options of "I claim I didn't inhale!", "I will not answer whether or not I used coke," and "I'll bodyslam my honorable opponents!" doesn't admit a clearly reasonable choice.
Based on that and on local "fun and games," I'm not particularly surprised that the voter turnout for Dallas' last election was, for a city of nearly a million people, what I used to consider poor turnouts for elections of school board trustees back in Ottawa...
The problem isn't merely of ignorance; apathy can arise when it's not clear that the vote cast will be of any useful value...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
My problem isn't that it's easier to vote. It's that I have no faith that they'll even try to educate voters on what choices there are. The less effort required to vote the lower percentage of people who strongly care about what's going on. Not that the middle-of-the-road type people don't have a right to a vote, but when we see an election or issue we don't care about we're more likely to choose one out of fancy, or who's name we recognise most.
Also as far as I can see no one seems to have mentioned that Internet voting would effectivly limit voting to the middle and upper classes. People who don't have or don't want computers or Internet access would still have to fight traffic, wake up early, and stand in line while the old lady in front of them makes a fuss about something or anouther. So we'd effectivly be doubleing or tripleing the number of upper and middle class voters while keeping the lower class votes at the same level. That's going to scew results.
If we took this one step further it could be an even greater tool for democracy but it would have even more risks. What if we were alowed to vote on the issues themselves and not just the politions? This would definetly reduce voter frustration. But it could be extremly easily skewed simply by rewording the first paragraph and even the first line of whatever we were voting on.
I sugest that when Internet voting becomes available that a mechinism should be employed have short boiler-plate summaries of each polition's views and histories. Not just autobiographies either. Watchdog orgs should be in on this to. And this should be on the screen that comes up BEFORE the voting page.
I also think that when Internet voting shows up Telephone voting should also become available. Otherwise you're cutting out people without Computers. (pay-phones are everywhere.)
You are so correct. Most of the other posts are belly-aching about how to put the square peg of representational democracy into the round hole of the Internet. The Internet is about removing communication barriers and provides a path to democracy as the Greeks first intended it to be. The downside is that it will probably take decades, if not centuries, for this to be realized.
I was referring to the first statement. Nothing against you. Sorry for the mis-communication.
What if we used a private network (like bank machines) then gave everyone secure voting devices (like bank cards)? The banks could charge $0.50 per vote thus saving we the taxpayers million$ with a system that is "unhackable", immune of DOS attacks, and anonymous. Think outside the box.
First of all, I think that there should be some effort required to vote. As much as I sometimes worry about "the other side" winning a given vote, it scares me even more that some apathetic dork might just randomly pick a choice on a ballot he doesn't really care about and hasn't even made a pretense of informing himself about. If "the other side" actually has more supporters, fine, I'll grump off into the corner and hope to do better in the next election. But if someone wins based on convincing enough lazy people to vote for something they don't know a thing about, well, that's just downright frightening.
But even more frightening is the notion of duress at the polls. At a physical poll, they do not permit multiple people to be in the same polling booth. Period. What this means is, that no matter how much someone pays you and no matter what sort of extortion they hold over your head, they can't buy your vote because they can't know for sure how you voted. There is this danger with absentee balloting, but as long as that is only granted in "special cases", it isn't as much of a worry. With internet voting? The mind reels at the sort of thing that could happen. Hey you, wanna make $500? Come into this shop and click these buttons. Easy! Hey you, peon, you're not getting a raise this year unless you come in here and vote for my candidate. Hey honey, come into the family room, you do agree with me on who to vote for, right?
Terrifying.
``This, too, shall pass.'' ---Eastern proverb
Did anyone ever read the article over at Dr. Zaius about internet voting? It was a hypothetical situation in which Chewbacca was elected President of the US and Spiro Agnew, although dead, was elected Vice-President because the majority of internet users found the fact that his name is an anagram for "Grow a Penis" infintly amusing.
Here's the URL
http://drzaius.com/index.php3?view=12
I am not an Idiot! I am A Phule! (Fool)
I have seen people saing that this is a bad thing because it will be the ``special intrest groups'' which get this power. This is a pretty stupid statment because it presupposes ``all special intrest groups are bad.'' Specail intrest groups are extreamly diverse group and everyone likes some of them and dislikes some others.. so please lets talk about specific examples when we make statments like that.
Example: 1) Industry special intrest groups may loose a LOT of power since they hold power by making direct campain contrabutions, but this is by no means clear since advertising (internet or otherwize) will remain extreamly importent. 2) The Pro- and Anti- Gun Lobys which are primarily people based (as far as I know) will pobable both be effected in the same way.. which will not shift the balance of power.
Special Intrest Groups are here to say.. and many of them, like the ACLU and EFF, are extreamly importent to the future of this country. These groups are especially importent when you consider the homogonous polytical landscape that the two party system creates.
I think the answer is really to take advantage of the specail intrest groups by doing thing like making it easier for them to express their ideas to the voters. The internet voting system could provide links to special intrest group score card pages which assessed the candidates. This would be a wonderful research tool for voters who were tring to make a decission about candidates. These groups have a much longer memory then individuals and can tell you all sorts of things that you need to know. Ok, so some of them can be pretty moronic, but one would hope that people would notice eventually.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I graduated from MIT last year. I can speak from experience when I say that student government elections at MIT have been conducted online for at least the past four years. The Cryptography and Information Security group at MIT's LCS has been working on a secure voting system for some time. Check it out.
I concur that this is a very good thing, provided it is implemented correctly.
Electronic voteing (made possible by the communications revolution) for direct democracy will make capitalims anarchistic production process obsolete. It will now be possible to have a democratically planned economically organised by full working class emancipation of the production process. That is the more direct democracy you give to the people (and take away from centralized beuarocrats) the less need there is for so called 'free market' forces. I am both a Marxist and a child of the communications revolution. I am NOT a Lennist! I can see dialetically that high tech democratic communism is real and that it's going to happen within my life time and it's making my heart sing!
Democracy and the people's faith in democracy is simply far too important to be worth risking it on something like Internet voting. There is enough cynicism and voter apathy as it is without giving people even more reasons to not trust in their system of government. Also, frankly, anyone who isn't willing to spend the half hour that it takes to vote down at the local polling station obviously doesn't value the system that they live in very highly . . . Consider for a moment: How hard would it be to convince a non-computer-expert that their vote would truly be secret or that the ballot box hadn't been stuffed or that the votes had been counted correctly (i.e. the results weren't faked). Also, consider the sort of hit that the people's faith in their system would take if a major election fraud were to ever be committed by taking advantage of computerized voting. I suspect that switching to even optional computerized voting would result in a pretty significant drop in voter turnout simply because the average person just doesn't trust computers. For what it is worth, I'm a Canadian but I don't see this particular issue being any different up here than it is "south of the border". I'm also a very serious computer professional with code in the Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD kernel so this isn't coming from a "computer phobe" or "computer newbie". Frankly, trusting the democratic systems under which most of us live to something as fragile as computer security is absolutely absurd. Our systems work in large part because people believe that they work and anything which makes it even a little harder to prove conclusively to people that the game isn't rigged is a stupid idea.
It might be insecure however the effort required to change the outcome of a large election is enormous. Stuffing several ballots is easy...half a million is going to be near impossible to do without being detected. That is the danger of computer voting....it raises the possibility of massive voter fraud without the machinery and expense of a nationwide ballot stuffing campaign and the associated risk
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
Ok heres some water before you burst into flames. Ok think about this, ignore everything you've heard about open source vs. closed source for a moment and consider this situation on its own merits. Open source is secure due to a large number of people reviewing the code and finding holes and fixing them. For the most part, OSS developers code for software they use. Noone but governments will be using the voting server software, which will drastically decrease the number of developers looking at the code to try to improve its security. Due to the great significance of a voting server, there will however be a huge amount of resources spent by terrorist groups, rogue states like Iraq and North Korea, potential superpowers like the PRC, militia groups, maybe even some fanatics in more mainstream special interest groups. Or if one of the political parties is expecting a losing election... Simply put if just the US, or even one of the states, implements an open source voting system the resources devoted to finding and fixing security wholes will be dwarfed by the resources devoted to finding and exploiting security holes. With a closed source program, the government will have control over who sees the code, so that any security holes will require binaries to run through trial and error which will take a much longer time to find and exploit bugs than in open source. With proper security on the servers and strong physical security at server sites, it will take a huge investment of resources to even get binaries to test in isolation, away from IP traces, connection drops, etc... By the time the bad guys get the binaries, the good guys will have a head start finding and fixing the obscure bugs that inevitably will slip though. Maybe when the software is widely deployed, throughout the fifty states, through hundereds of municipalities, and in a few (trusted) foreign countries, the resources that Open Source can bring to bear on finding and fixing security flaws will be greater than that expended on cracking the system. Until then, anything that might give enemies of US national security an edge, like the source code, must be kept extremely tightly controlled. Classified Top Secret/US Only, and binaries For Official Use Only-Releasable to Britain, Canada, maybe Austrailia. This is something that if deployed, and compromised, could cause the hammer and sickle to rise over Washington. While I would accept that if it was the will of the people, as I hope you would, I also hope you would be horrified if it was because the wrong people got ahold of the software and cracked it. Closed source is the only way to go, at least in the beginning.
Not to mention the fact that the routing for such a system would be near impossible.
Given about 20 years of moves we would have 270 millin IPs scattered at random around the country.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
I see few arguments in favour of Internet elections, and considerable ones against. There are other ways to tackle the issue of participation rates.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
As some tabloid editor once remarked, the three most beautiful words in the English language are "Win Free Sex!" The state can't give you sex (except Nevada), but they can give you the other top attactors: money and violence.
Or we could all just grow up a bit and realize that 20 minutes to vote in a relatively fraud-free environment is a damn cheap price to pay for something that is literally priceless. Election fraud *is* a real problem; Costilla county, Colorado, is a classic example from this decade, and many people think the "motor voter" law has resulted in fairly serious election fraud in California. The fact that no fraud has been seen with this system proves exactly one thing: nobody gave a damn. Use the system for something more controversial than county dog catcher and you *will* see election fraud.
(E.g., in the last state election the difference in votes for the two major candidates for governor were less than 1% of the total cast. Anyone who thinks that one of the candidates in the next election will know that a little bit of initiative, ahem, may be enough to ensure that God's candidate wins.)
coyote-san on soon
If the election models the civil war closely enough, power blocks who lose an election by a large margin will not try to reverse it through force of arms, because they know they won't win. And they won't try to reverse a close one because they know that will bring out a lot of fence-sitters and add them to the other side - so they'll probably still lose, and even if they win the war will be close, and thus long, bloody, and probably more costly than losing on the original issue.
This works only as long as the elections are perceived to be reasonably honest and the electorate to be a reasonably close approximation to the recruitable civil warriors. And that's how it was in this country for a long time.
The registration process was about as hard as getting to a recruiter or an organizing cabal. The franchise started out being held only by landowners - i.e. the people who had fought the Revolution - and was progressively extended to various groups after they had shown themselves capable of organizing mass violence.
Non-landowning white males got it early - after the Whiskey and Shay's rebellions. Women got it after they took axes to bars in the Temperance movement. The blacks had it handed to them as part of the Civil War and had it pulled back by corruption - then got it for real significantly after the freedom rides (which didn't work but provided a nice face-saving) but immediately after they burned the cities in '68. The 18-20 year olds got it right after the Vietnam Un-War protest marches graduated to riots, bombed buildings, and the National Guard firing into student crowds (with the implication that the shooting wouldn't be one-sided if this continued).
Getting down to the polls was about as hard as getting to a militia's muster. So even though voters were members of groups capable of fighting a war, they often wouldn't vote if they didn't have strong feelings on at least one candidate or issue in the election.
But lately we've got a few problems with the model:
Thanks to motor-votor, anybody can fill out a postcard and become registered - without producing I.D. - as many times as he thinks he can get away with. In some states, anyone can get mail-in absentee ballots, with no excuse beyond "I want to", and never attend a physical poll. So it's a lot easier to vote than to fight.
Checking I.D. at polls has been inhibited by various court rulings. So fraud abounds at the polls. And the motor-voter and absentee ballots make it easy for any power group to create as many bogus voters as they dare, and for whom they can come up with mailing addresses. (A single address in Berkeley CA was recently found to have several thousand absentee voters "living" there.)
Since 1968 progressively larger sections of the population are being disarmed by "gun control" legislation. The amount of this disarmament is wildly different among different ideological, cultural, and ethnic groups - and thus among different power blocks. (Fortunately for stability, the cultural groups remaining armed - so far - are also some of the strongest supporters of paying attention to elections.)
And the count itself is in doubt. For decades much of the tally have been counted by private contractors using proprietary software, with procedures and source code not open to public scrutiny, reading electronic ballots whose raw data is not available to those who would like to check the results.
So we're already in trouble on the stability front, due to the failure of the elections-as-model in fact. The failure in-perception is not as far advanced, which may have been why conflicts have been averted up to this point.
Internet voting could change that in two ways, both destabilizing. It could further weaken the correlation between voting and willingness to fight, by making voting so much easer. And it could break the perception of the elections as an accurate model, by raising the public perception of opportunity for electronic fraud. This is a hazard regardless of whether it actually increases or decreases the actual amount of fraud.
The only way I see internet voting as a positive force is if it results in an improvement in the actual accuracy of the electronic count, by bringing scrutiny to and improvements in
the process and reducing fraud that might be occurring in the current system. This could result in fewer groups of potentially powerful citizens having their oxen gored by government, and thus decrease both the motivation for instability and actual responsiveness of government to its citizens' wishes.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> I think the best part of internet-based voting is the reduction in
> voter apathy.
Why do you say that? How does making something easier make it more
valuable?
> Personally, I think [apathy] is one of the biggest problems we have
> nowadays.
No, apathy is the symptom of the problem: an electoral system that
makes an individual vote almost worthless, especially if that vote is
for a position outside of the Democratic-Republican Party.
> If everyone came out to vote, we could ensure that the likelihood of
> a stupid candidate being elected would drop.
First, it would ensure nothing but that everyone came out to vote.
Just because everyone votes doesn't mean that they will be primarily
influenced by substantive arguments of an intelligent candidate. If
anything, it would be more likely that a "stupid candidate" who
panders to the lowest common denominator would get the votes. Just
look at network television.
Second, making it easier to vote in the past hasn't decreased apathy
or voter turnout, at least not in the medium-to-long term. Making
cosmetic changes to voting systems will do little to decrease apathy.
What I think would help to reduce voter apathy would be to radically
redefine Congressional districts (to start at the top). Combine each
states Congressional districts as follows:
1-5 Representatives - 1 district
6 Representatives - 2 3 Representative districts
7 Representatives - 1 3 Representative district, 1 4 Representative district.
8 Representatives - 2 4 Representative districts
9 Representatives - 1 4 Representative district, 1 5 Representative district.
10 Representatives - 2 5 Representative districts
11 Representatives - 1 3 Representative district, 2 4 Representative districts.
12+ Representatives - 1-4 4 Representative districts, remainder 5 Representative districts.
In each district, proportional voting would be used - each voter would
get as many votes as the district had Representatives. The voter
could use all of the votes on one candidate, or spread them among as
many candidates as the district had Representatives. This gives a
segment of voters as small as 20% of the voting population a voice, a
voice they do not currently have.
I think that a system like this is used in most European countries. I
think that it's worth a shot here.
> As well, we could vote on many more small issues. The government
> could always "put an issue to the people" and not inconvenience us.
Is this a good thing? Would votes like this mean that the best
positions would win, or the best marketed positions? One goal of a
representative form of government is to have representatives who can
devote the time necessary to an issue to make an informed decision in
the long-term best interests of their constituents. While our current
electoral system causes most representatives to look no more long-term
than the next election, and be heavily swayed by the best interests of
their campaign contributors rather than that of their constituents,
putting issues "to the people", especially in a manner designed to
"not inconvenience us", is a formula for disaster.
Before any type of computerized system is rolled out, the system would have to develop some type of anti-fraud/identification system that goes beyond "enter your voter ID number". Webcams, fingerprint analysis, or even reverse dialups could be used to authenticate users and voting locations, and one of these must be in place before the politicos authorize anything like this.
Why?? None of these wild ID schemes are present now, so why suggest them only when the subject of Internet voting comes up?
Also, all of your ID suggestions would violate my right to have my vote remain secret.
This is an excellent point. The real problem is an apathy deeper than getting people to the polls (virtual or real) to vote. Many people just don't care about politics for one reason or another. Why should they vote?
Possible but unlikely.
Suppose we had any sort of identification number which is availible to the government. As some government employees (who probably aren't paid enough so that a bribe won't tempt them) have access to these numbers. As once you are inpossesion of the unique identification numbers/passwds the automated nature of internet voting would make it relativly eassy to commit the fraud.
There is a solution. Issue every citizen a smart card containing a non-recoverable private key (the smartcard only signs documents). Then each citizen must physically register their public key at a government station. As the private key is never revealed only theft of the msartcard itself with suffice to allow fraud making the system seemingly more secure then todays voting.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
Before any type of computerized system is rolled out, the system would have to develop some type of anti-fraud/identification system that goes beyond "enter your voter ID number". Webcams, fingerprint analysis, or even reverse dialups could be used to authenticate users and voting locations, and one of these must be in place before the politicos authorize anything like this.
Why?? None of these wild ID schemes are present now, so why suggest them only when the subject of Internet voting comes up?
Also, all of your ID suggestions would violate my right to have my vote remain secret.
Personally, I like the idea of internet voting...
However, before that happens, I'd like to see some web sites get comprehensive about getting out information on candidates and issues. Where can I go to read an in depth written interview of a local candidate? Where can I go to read, in detail, all of George Bush's views on various topics, and his answers to my questions? Where can I go to see voting records?
I'm sure there are places on the net for this, but I don't know them (well, I have been to congress's site, but reading about all the stupid things they voted on was absolutely mind-numbing!). How about slashdot interviewing some candidates? Hell, that's not even slashdot's job, but someone should do it, and I think the slashdot style interview woud be great for that.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
I'm not sure that internet-based voting could decrease apathy per se (see ucblockhead's comment). But it certainly could increase turnout by making voting much easier.
I used to be an economist. We have a pretty cynical and simplisitc view that humans take action when Marginal Benefit > Marginal Cost.
Now the Marginal Benefit of voting is feeling like a good citizen, helping your favorite candidate get elected, etc. I.e. non-apathy.
The cost of voting is mostly the opportunity cost of time, and here the internet could make an obvious difference: vote from home, without a wait!
Personally, I'm so jaded that, if I was asked to (A) commute and wait an hour to pull the lever for, say, Bush or Gore, or could (B) watch two episodes of Seinfeld, I'd vote to veg. It's a protest vote, honest. But if voting just took some mouse clicks, I would at least take the trouble to write-in Pigasus.
I'm not sure that internet voting by itself would make us care more (on the left-hand side) but it could increase turnout by making voting very non-costly to individuals (on the right-hand side). So I agree with Rayban that turnout should increase, especially for small issue where
marginal benefit is low.
But the broader, long-term effects of the internet on the left-hand side are less clear. Will the net foster digital democrary make us better informed and active citizens? Or will it deter democracy by making government less relevant or citizens less involved with the physical world? What do you folks think?
Do you want them voting on issues they hardly care to comprehend...because they will.
Yes, I do. If you accept our political system as the one under which you wish to live, you should too. If you had written a few more sentences, you'd have arrived at the thought that we should create an aristocracy which would have the exclusive right to vote. A bit over to the wacky side lies Nazism.
I get kind of a democracy rush over standing in line with my neighbors, going behind that little plastic curtain, marking the ballot, handing it to the judge, and seeing it go into the ballot box.
BTW, I've voted by machine, punch card and pencil marked ballot and by far the most satifying to me is the last one.
OTOH, Internet voting is worthy of exploration and thought. If it can me made at least as secure as a Chicago voting machine, (and I'm a former Chicagoan) I'd consider it.
Out here in sunny CA, we can vote absentee without any reason other than we want to so you don't have to go out if you don't want to or can't, right now even without the Internet.
I'd still miss the neighbors in line. It's the only time I get away from the computer.
I could easily write a script that would keep sending the same web form info over and over again. Maybe only until the next voter got into the booth, but I can take my time too.
If there ever is a voting client for ip, I hope it's made by uber-trustworthy NSA geniuses.
dan
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Hi!
Internet voting is just as dumb an idea as Oregon's experiment with vote-by-mail.
Lovely concept. Stupid idea. Permit me to explain.
I'm a geek. But I'm also involved in politics. The first election I volunteered for was an election for mayor of Boston in 1967. My (widowed) mother used to date Mike Dukakis. I worked for the McGovern National Campaign Committee in 1972, and have worked on political campaigns every year since 1977. I have spent 6 years as an elected official.
Elections, by their very nature, must be a public process. Each and every voter must personally appear in the polling place--or place his or her signed ballot on a public bulletin board in that polling place (absentee ballots) or the system is open to fraud. When you go to vote tomorrow (today!) you will step up to a poll worker. That worker will announce your name out loud--ideally so everyone in the room can hear it. One or more other people will check your name off lists of registered voters. And somebody might--possibly ask if you're the Joe Schlibozel who lives downstairs from that nice Hispanic couple, the Rodriguezes?
The first pollworker is a member of one party. The second pollworker at the table is a member of the opposite party. The person who asks a question may have noticed that you haven't voted before, and it is unusual for new voters to turn up in a general election when no federal offices are at stake. What all of them are doing is keeping the system honest.
Internet voting (and vote-by-mail) make cheating so easy it will take all the fun out of stealing elections. One of the interesting facts of politics is that you can go down the voter rolls (sometimes called "street lists") and you'll discover that there are 200 registered Republicans at one address; and there are 325 registered Democrats at another address. What gives? Both addresses are nursing homes--and there's either a resident or an employee who has signed every single resident up. They come around with the form all filled out, possibly after medications are dispensed, and ask for a signature. "We need this to help you vote, Mr. Schlibozel...." So the addled Mr. Schlibozel signs the form.
It's a registration form, plus a request for an absentee ballot. When the ballots come in the mail the helpful person visits Mr. Schlibozel and asks him who he wants for president. And most probably *will* punch the block for Mr. Schlibozel's choice. But Mr. Schlibozel almost certainly will not have an opinion on the ballot questions, or the judicial candidates, or the local municipality candidates--"so we'll just leave those blank, okay, Mr. Schlibozel?"
Later, after all 325 absentee ballots have been filled out and signed, the helpful volunteer goes back through the stack. And punches the blocks for all the "right" judicial candidates and municipal candidates, and ballot questions, etc.
Take it from me--if you see an election with thousands of absentee ballots in a single congressional district, there is vote fraud.
You can catch that kind of fraud. But vote-by-mail and Internet voting make it too easy to cheat. Suppose you run a flophouse (nowadays we call them SRO--single room occupancy hotels). You have the flotsam and jetsam of life--and chances are several are behind on their rent. You offer a choice--sign this blank ballot, or pay up on your rent. Or sign this blank ballot, and I'll turn your water back on.
And suddenly we're back in the Victorian era, when wealthy landlords in England "owned" seats of Parliament because they effectively controlled enough of the voters to guarantee the results of any election.
The problem of "voter apathy" is bogus--there is no such problem. We do have a similar problem: "motor voter" registration laws. It is now practically impossible to renew your driver's license without also registering to vote. That doesn't mean that you actually show up to be involved--you just got your license renewed, and the DMV handed you the form. The same people as always still show up to vote--but the motor voters stay home. The "turnout rate" is lower--but in fact the same number of voters as always has come to the polls. Bag motor voter, stop wasting money at the county registrar's, and keep the public voting system intact.
John Murdoch
(In point of fact, I am aware of a number of methods to steal elections--but I have never actually used any of them.)
Also, all of your ID suggestions would violate my right to have my vote remain secret.
Really? When I go vote, the guy running our local polling place always asks for my ID, and checks it against a list to make sure I'm who I say I am, and that I'm where I need to be. How is that any different? I am forced to authenticate myself at the polling place, but my ballot remains anonymous, what's the difference?
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
i'm not going to burst into flames. sorry to disappoint you but i already ignored everything i heard about "open source" vs. "closed source". ESR is selling snake-oil. the "bazaar" is an overly simplified analogy. that being said, i don't think you paid attention to my comments and instead assumed i was an open source bible saleswoman. my basic point can be summed up with this quote by alan j perlis, "Unfortunately, as programs get large and complicated, as they almost always do, the adequacy, consistency, and correctness of the specifications themselves become open to doubt, so that complete formal arguments of correctness seldom accompany large programs. Since large programs grow from small ones, it is crucial that we develop an arsenal of standard program structures of whose correctness we have become sure ... and learn to combine them into larger structures using organizational techniques of proven value." program correctness can hardly ever be proved. the only way that anything can be secure enough (like a voting system) would be to test it for many years, with as many people as possible involved. DES is a great example of this as was noted by the interview on cryptography (Schneier sp?) a few days ago. why is it almost universally excepted as secure? because it has had a long history of impartial review by huge numbers cryptographers, mathematicians, physicists, etc. why is the new AES an going to be an open standard? because that is the only way to ensure that it will be secure enough for the important systems for which it will supply infrastructure. the only reason to not show the source for a supposedly secure program is because the author doesn't believe it is secure.
Some caveats though: I hope that they don't get too carried away with this. Not everyone has net access, and I'd hate to see a person's right to vote depend on their having a computer. Also, I think it'll be a while before it catches on globally: here in the UK Internet access, although growing, still costs a fair bit (local phone rates and monthly ISP charge), so one could argue that such a mechanism would favour the better off...
I think you are right. IP assigned at birth is privacy invading stuff at best.
I think I mentioned both of these in a previous Slashdot voting article, but they're important points people need to think about every time this subject comes up.
First: It's important to guarantee that each person is alone when (s)he votes. I know several people who come from families where an overbearing family leader would decide (s)he knows how the family members ought to vote, and either vote in the name of each family member, or demand to see what votes were submitted. I'm sure most of you know someone in that situation too. Do you want that person to have to spend even a moment thinking about whether casting a free vote is more important than "not causing problems" at home? How many people like that do you think there are just in the USA, let alone in all the countries that have free elections? Do you want all those votes to lean in favor of pushy scumbags who assume their opinions are vastly more important than free elections? And that's just what would happen immediately from everyday jerks. People with actual reasons to shove you around would come up with much worse things soon afterwards.
Second: I see some people here claiming they'd vote more often if it wasn't inconvenient. Because of the controlled environment a polling place offers, I think it's still the best place for 99% of citizens to vote. You don't misplace your ballot under your bed. You don't use last year's ballot from under your bed by mistake. You don't have to remember some password to be able to exercise your rights. You don't have to somehow prove that you didn't already vote by some other method. You just appear, prove you're you the same way you would to anyone else, and you get to control your government. It's not that much work, really. Today's the first Tuesday in November. I don't know if there's an election in my town today, but you can be sure I'll drive by my polling place and see if there's a sign. Not to be too rude to the pro-convenience folks, but: Unless you've been seriously injured fighting for freedom, you've probably received more of democracy than it's received of you. If you think that standing around for a few minutes once a year is too much work to collect on your rights, that's fine with me; I usually don't mind getting my way instead of yours.
So what is he has a slight alcohol problem. His intelligence and insight into important issues makes him a formidable canidate. Heh. "Mr. Hank, what is your position on..." I ff-ucked your mutha! "Uh, okay, thank you for your time."
State senators in Illinois have been elected this way for at least the last quarter-century...
I recognize that my comments are peripheral, but I'd like to raise a danger that is neglected in much of the internet voting/cyberdemocracy postings. The issue which James Madison (aka Publius in the federalist papers) called "the Factious Minority".
For any given issue, there is a small minority of people who care passionately about the issue, and a great majority who are apathetic. This is a 'design feature' of our government. In order for an issue to become a bill, then a law, then a regulation, that factious minority must persuade (through free speech) a majority.
Apathy is part of the process. Apathy is the check that the populace exerts on the government. Fanatics can defeat apathy through short term appeal to emotions - whether that is demagogery or advertising. However the government is intentionally slow to act, which counteracts the demoagogery.
OK - with that as background, (sorry - too longs - got into my old college professor mode), my point is this. The Internet, and modern communications media provide us the time to shorten the cycle time of the government process. To submit more "small issues" to the people through the internet. But the cycle time was never intended to be short. Short cycle time is a good thing in consumer products, but not in laws.
Imagine if you will that someone had submitted new laws to the voters after Columbine? Remember the bill in Pennsylvania which gave the principal of a school the right to commit any student to an insane asylum without review or accountability? - and no obligation to inform parents (indeed, immunity from lawsuit if the power was exercised frivolously!) [N.B. I don't have a citation for this - this may be an internet myth, but I believe I read it on Slashdot, so I reguard it as potentially credible)]. Point being that submitting small issues directly to the voters can be a bad thing - people want to "do something" quickly - to respond to horror and tragedy. But Laws should be made by deliberation, not through emotionqal reaction.
Final note - I'm not saying tha tdemocracy or cyberdemocracy is bad. I have reservations about the implementation, based on the fact that it will affect one of the design features of our government.
The Federalist Papers are a very good and important read for anyone who wants to change the way we do government - as is the Articles of Confederation.
When you're at the polls, nobody can tell how you voted. If you're at home or at work, others can make sure you vote the "right" way. Or just throw a big "internet votng party" with lots of booze and good times for one candidate.
The Iowa experiment simply looks like a way of tallying the votes over the Internet. Not particularly interesting.
In any case, the reason that folks don't vote is that they feel, rightly or wrongly, that their vote won't make a difference to anything they care about. The "inconvienence" of going to the polls is simply a convienent excuse.
So how do we insure a secret ballot with Internet voting? What stops a union from pressuring its members to vote the party line at work while others look on? That may be a bit far fetched, but I am certain there would be numerous cases of husbands making sure their wives voted the same way they did. Sure it would be illegal, but I suspect that domestic vote watching would be quite common.
I would not be surprised if Internet voting were ruled unconstitutional based on the above problem.
I also agree with others that have commented that it is important to make voting slightly awkward so that people take it seriously and only vote if they believe that the outcome matters.
Computers by the booth? Man, we've had that for years!
On a more serious note, I think that (if it'd be secure) internet voting would be a great thing, more and more people tend not to vote because they're busy, don't have time, weren't in the neighbourhood, whatever excuses.
With internet voting, you can vote whenever you want, and wherever you want, as long as there's an internet connection.
I'm starting to wonder if those wild stories about hackers starting world wars aren't going to be all that wild soon. IMHO, there are some things which computers should NOT be relied upon for. Banks have been hacked before, and there HAS been blackmail and money transfered. I don't think it's all that much of a stretch to imagine a voting system being hacked. Can you imagine what it would be like if the government had to say two months after an election "Oops, Clinton didn't really win, a hacker stuffed the ballot"?
I would honestly be more comfortable with people being able to telephone in their votes, where a living breathing person was responsable for cataloging the votes. Yes, people are prone to mistakes, but people are alot less likely to have a security hole in them exploited (Yes, this is a debatable fact).
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!
Using a call-back system does not make sense. Aside from the problem you mention (not everyone has a modem), see also below.
Biometrics are also not a reasonable solution unless you have strong crypto to back them up; and since you need strong crypto anyway, why bother with the biometrics? It just adds expense.
But I do rather like the idea of having at least some kind of hardware-secure token...
The appropriate balance of cost vs. security might best be met using smartcards or iButtons or the like, one for each voter, with a passphrase required to unlock the key stored therein. Those who don't have a card reader on their PC would be required to go to a polling station.
There should be a password required as well: not a secure passphrase, just a simple but very confidential password... and, most importantly, a "duress" password as well.
I think the whole idea just falls down unless there is some equivalent of a duress password.
If the duress password is given, the voter should probably be allowed to correct the vote by doing it again (when not under duress) using the correct password. Or not, depending on just how paranoid you are.
Of course, whether internet voting, implemented in a secure way, would actually be more convenient than the current system... I'm not sure. It'd be easier to count, anyway.
A slight digression re callbacks:
I take it you don't remember how easy it was to defeat BBS call-back systems.
90% of them could be defeated by just staying on the line, playing back your own recording of a dial tone, waiting for the call-back modem to dial, and then having your modem answer. Those that used a different line to call-back, one could dial in to that line at just the right time and achieve a similar effect.
Even if the call-back system is smart enough to foil that method... there is always call-forwarding. To make call-back secure, you'd have to get the cooperation of the phone company.
If it became a requirement I'd stop voting... We cannot even secure the baning networks properly, the CIA get hacked and you want to put the LAST FREEDOM we have in the country in the hands of some programmer from M$ probably...no thanks Our founding forefathers would be in armed rebellion at this point in time...we HAVE lost somthing in 200 years...BIGTIME
That's all I can come up at this moment but I'd be interested in other ideas. Post your ideas as a reply to this post, I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to hear them.
IPv4's maximum number of ip's is roughly around 4.2 billion, unfortunately, the world's population is just over six billion. The largets problem with assigning an IP with a person, is the fact that, that would require everyone their network everywhere they went. I don't even want to think of the unimaginable routing tables constantly re-inventing themselves everytime you went from work to home :)
:)...
IPv6 has a theoretical limit around 10 to the 38th power. I'm going to go on my own and say that that should cover the entire population of the world and ALL of their gadgets without any serious problems. An interesting thought though, to have a class "X" domain (wayyyy down there) and then giving your kids a subnetted class "y"
Or maybe we should just use our social security numbers, like we do already.. Line that up against your mothers Maiden name, your name, and maybe a password they could send you in the mail or something, AND encrypt the entire thing at 128 bit).
-Dextius Alphaeus
-- Java is not a Jedi trait... "do, or do not, there is no try" --
I built an Internet polling booth for the California Homeowners Association ~4million voters. The implications were pretty straight forward. Once their opposition learned they were organizing online, their issues came to compromise quickly. California outlawed Internet voting that following session. The *idea* of organizing votes online is politically more powerful than an actual system in place.
/. effect would kill my cable modem...
Security aspects reduce to the age-old conundrum of proving the voter is who he says. Fraud, spoofing, server attacks and other multi-vote schemes can be dealt with. You can never insure the voter hasn't *sold* his vote, which applys to existing and online systems.
In practice online voting is far more practical and powerful in the organizing at grassroots level than nationally. Demographics, statistics and cross correlation of the two add much more insight to a campaign than the final tally. Our client liked online voting's ability to overlay Zip+4 votes against Legislative districts. Weak support in key districts allow channelling resources for outcome based campaigning.
Upside of online voting is it's ability to match $campaign$ contributions to issues (issues based donations). Funding issues directly from the constituency overcomes the vested interests of the lobbyist/corporate funder. And finally, having tabulated results *in-hand* to give a representative of _voters_ in **HIS* district who want him to cast his vote for/against an issue is quite compelling. Votes are what legislator's live on and going against their constituents is not done lightly where it can be shown that a large number of people in their district are tracking the Legislator's vote.
A cryptoanalysis is available on the voting scheme which I can repost if there is an interest. The system is demo'able on an appt'mt basis as
Once the technical problems associated with authentication and prviacy have been solved, the number of voter decided issues must multiply. Proportional representation as we know it today only exists because our ancenstors lacked the technological resources necessary to permit the people to cast their own votes. There will come a time when the proletariat will decide the important issues that affect it without deferring to a privilaged powered minority. 21st Century telecomunications are going to revolutionize government.
No, you still don't get it.
If it's closed source, and only a few people ever see it, then there will be many bugs. With that kind of power directed at trying to break the system, those bugs will be found. Then we're screwed.
If it's open source and the code is made available well before the election, you'll have millions of geeks, the ACLU, political parties, etc., all looking for bugs and trying to figure out how to fix them. Then, when it actually gets used, while all those subversives may have full information on the system, it won't help, because the bugs will be gone already.
It's not at all impossible to find bugs in closed source products -- read bugtraq sometime. And there would be massively more effort directed at trying to break this.
Also, all those crack attempts would be a huge DOS against the system -- if the people had the source, they wouldn't need to bother, since they would know what would or wouldn't work (not that anything would work, because of reasons above, but it doesn't matter for purposes of this argument).
Of course, people might still try to DOS the system, but that's much more likely to fail when you have millions of geeks looking over your shoulder to fix buffer overruns.
This article gave me the impression that there are folks who stand firmly against the idea of Internet voting, simply because of who has access to the Internet. There were little blurbs in there about 'mostly white', and reservations not even having complete telephone coverage yet.
So what?
If such a system were implemented, it would have to coexist with traditional voting. I think the main idea here, is to get more people to vote. The more options you provide, the better, in my opinion.
Does Internet voting discriminate against those without Internet access? Sure, but there ARE OTHER WAYS TO VOTE. Similarily, do absentee ballots discriminate against homeless people who don't have a mailing address? I think we need to worry a little less about demographics and worry more about the hugely apathetic voter-turnout levels in many areas of the nation.
Just my $.02
SEAL
One of the neatest things about the Internet (or at least a small corner of it) is how Usenet heirarchies vote on proposed new groups. Anyone can vote; votes are counted by a vote-counting program, and the voting occurs over a period of time, typically a month. During that period, any individual voter (i.e. email address) can vote as often as s/he likes; at the end of the voting period, only the most recent vote counts. As we head into what promises to be the longest presidential campaign in history, that technique has some considerable appeal. Assuming that issues of fraud and equal access can be solved (big assumptions, granted), a voting period that covers the month of October and that's handled a la Usenet could present a couple of benefits. It could involve people more intensely in the process. If I've voted, but knew that I could reverse or alter my vote, then I think that I'd be more attentive to the issues and the behavior of the candidates than I am under the current system. The candidates, too, would have to watch their steps more closely. A candidate who is leading dramatically in the polls could still lose it if some dramatic act by his opponent or a gaffe by himself could trigger a large flurry of last-minute vote changes.
Everything possible to be believ'd is an Image of Truth - Wm. Blake
only be used by one organization.
How do you propose to defend against corruption in that organization?
Vote counting must not just be honest. It must be seen to be honest.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Considering that many people must leave for work early and get back late because of long commutes, crazy traffic, and longer work hours, this sounds like a great way to raise pathetically low voter turnout rates. 'Course, making it secure enough to actually use doesn't sound easy. Though, now that I think about it, it would probably be a simple matter to have people enter their SSN or something and then the computer at the other end would check a database to make sure the person was a registered voter, still living, etc.
My $.02
This is a huge step, or at least I see it that way... Even if it is something so simple as a bunch of clients with two buttons (this guy) or (the other guy) hooked up to a little server behind the registration desk... It always takes someone to break ranks, and try a new thing in order for the rest of us to go ahead also... We'll just have to see who else follows...
Some of the protection schemes for internet voting must be fairly hefty... I think the cons outway the pros. I can understand where lower security voting is adequate, for petitions and opinion voicing, but I don't think that with the common multi-computer and multi-IP situations, as well as most people getting their IPs from a dynamic pool, can we ever be completely secure... even if everyone had a secret password, etc, it must be retrieved via mail, and, if it is distributed like they distribute them up here, many will be discarded into the junk mail bin by the recipients, and will illegally be abused.
I don't think we're ready to vote people into office using this one yet, folks... I'd hesitate to use it in less serious cases like re-zoning for an Exxon station on the corner, either.
You'll eat it and you'll like it.
it sounds too insecure for me. i hate iowa anyway.
I think the best part of internet-based voting is the reduction in voter apathy. Personally, I think this is one of the biggest problems we have nowadays. If everyone came out to vote, we could ensure that the likelihood of a stupid candidate being elected would drop.
As well, we could vote on many more small issues. The government could always "put an issue to the people" and not inconvenience us.
æeee!
hmmm wouldnt it be possible for politicians to buy personal identification numbers from voters? that could spell disaster in the future!!!! The richest politician would most likely win!!!! Well I live in Iowa so I'll have to check out these "internet polls" tommorrow
...people could mistakenly act like it was a slashdot poll and vote for a professional wrestler...
oh wait... that happened.
You say you want a revolution?
Now, the mob doesn't have to go door-to-door to get absentee ballots here in Chicago to "do the handicapped a favor" and drop the ballots in the mail (after making sure they voted for the proper candidate, of course), all they have to do is find a halfway decent cracker. Remember the Chicago politicians' motto: "Vote Early, and Vote Often!"
Current security issues aside, I still think it's a bad idea. I like that there's a bit of an inconvenience in having to go down to the polling booth. If someone has to put some effort into the action (including registering to vote in the first place), it usually (not always) means that they've actually put some thought into it, rather than just a knee-jerk click on a web form. I'm no fan of Bill Clinton, but I'd really rather not see Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf as the next president of the United States, either.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
/. can't/doesn't do real voiting. I don't know of any one who does. I could see doing it with clientside certificates, but I don't think most lusers could handle that on their end if they shared a Workstation.
I stuff the ballot box every once in a while of the local TV stations, just because they are such idiots.
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
Here at Rice University (Houston, TX),We've found that online voting actually reduced the number of voters.
This is a school of 2000 where nearly every student has a computer in their room or has easy access to several fast university computers. In '96 we used paper ballots for elections and we had 1360 students vote.
The following year we changed to an online voting system and the number of votes cast has dropped to 1100 in '98 and now 733 in '99.
The Student Association is considering going back to paper ballots because referendums that they pass require at least 50% of student population to vote.
BTW, although this wasn't the purpose, I believe that I have the first post!
Mark Covington
markcov@rice.edu
The ISP I use has had a tidbit on their page about their hand in the Online voting project for about a month now. Here's the link
I think that the security for internet voting is something that needs to be proven before it can hit mainstream. When I say security, I also mean the possible rigging of votes... they have to come up with a sure-fire way to prevent anyone from rigging votes... most polls that I know of have some way or another to get multiple votes in, and either you have to get a record of every person voting and ensure that they fill in their names and their names match those on the record, or you have to come up with some other way of doing it, that I really don't know about. The problem isn't preventing one computer from voting multiple times, but one person... they could easily go over to a friend's house or another net connection on a different computer and make up a name and vote... that'd be bad.
Enough ranting.
- Julian
I think its a great idea to have online voting, but there are still too many problems. /. story on this not too long ago, but I dont care to find it). Its fairly easy to take over 100 servers and use them to ping flood the voting servers.
First off, no operating system is "unhackable" there will always be people hacking it.
Second, Denial of Service attacks (there was a
Lastly, and probably most importantly, how do they know you are you? Your Social Security number is know by your school and your employer. One easy hack and someone could be you. Your drivers license is known by every cop that pulls you over. Fingerprints and retina scans are expensive and require a huge database to be stored on every terminal.
I think its a great idea to make voting easier to do, but there are too amny problems today...maybe in 2010...
Mark "Erus" Duell
duh assign everyone a digital signiture
That might be cool until Distributed.net cracks your encryption and anyone can vote as anyone else.
-- Freedom means letting other people do things you don't like.
I'm generally of the If you can't be bothered to get your ass down to the polls, you don't deserve a say school of thought. Still, I think this is a good idea in theory.
I would, however, be extremely wary of its implementation, particularly because of the disparity in internet access. Adding an internet vote right now would probably drastically skew voting results towards those who currently have internet access.
Of course, if we wanted to decide that internet access should be universal, we could undertake some huge project to give everybody computers with modems, a la the Tennessee Valley Authority bringing electricity to rural communities during the FDR administration. Though, with the political mood of the country these days, that probably sounds too socialistic to get any popular support.
Francis Hwang
Do domain names matter?
Nice article. If I had the moderator points, I'd give you one for sure.
Now, I read what you said about the bad part of easier voting, and I disagree with you. It seems that your main beef is that easier voting has made it easier to cheat. Well, that's true. But so far nobody's implemented the process correctly.
Using ID cards? What a joke. Easily forged by teenagers.
Signatures? Also a joke. Easily forged by teenagers.
An easy voting process implemented with a secure cryptographically based protocol would not be trivial to break. Voting would be easier, and more difficult to defraud.
Easy secure voting would preserve the election as an accurate model of a civil war, which you presented to us.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
No, you still don't get it.
I don't think you do.
If it's closed source, and only a few people ever see it, then there will be many bugs. With that kind of power directed at trying to break the system, those bugs will be found. Then we're screwed.
The bugs will be found. NSA would be responsible for finding them on our side. They would find them much faster than the enemy would, they would be able to have access to the source, binaries, be able to test it in varying systems both on the client and server end, they would be found.
If it's open source and the code is made available well before the election, you'll have millions of geeks, the ACLU, political parties, etc., all looking for bugs and trying to figure out how to fix them
Good in theory, but a recent article either here or at geeknews.net talked about how very few OSS developers contribute to much of anything. Not many geeks will be out there trying to fix something they won't use. And I don't want any private group writing the server software for this system. Especially not those with political aims like the ACLU or any political party. They may insert something subtle, to help their side. This may slip through. Unlikely, but no special interest group should have even the chance to try. Bugs slip through even on open source with thousands or millions reviewing the code. And what if Kim Chong-il or Saddam Hussein gets ahold of the code? Every effort will be made to get special code into the final release to give them a backdoor. If one attempt is caught, they will try again. With closed source, even though you may not have as many people trying to fix it, you don't have to worry about backdoors being slipped in by anti american interests. If it is done as an NSA project, the first beta will probably be sufficiently secure. By final release after heavy testing, maybe a few mock nationwide elections, any exploitable bug should be found. Trust me, after 3 or 4 years of testing, the NSA will be able to make this the most secure software available. It will be easier to hack the system through the servers BIOS chip than the software. And make it a non flash BIOS and the only hole would be the operating system.
Open source is great for some things, like operating systems and consumer software, but purely internal applications it does nothing, because noone except the user has any real interest in it. Open sourcing this properly would require that you return all code mods to the government, report anything you can't fix, and that you devote a huge amount of time just to this project. Some of the problems there are the same reasons the OSS community dislikes the Sun OSS license. Plus, how many OSS developers would devote their time, time that can be spent improving linux, emacs, atc... and their time advocating open source. Probably not nearly enough.
So here is how it should be done. NSA along with the voting people designs server software to process internet votes. It is made client independent so that the widest variety of voters can access it. NSA and the voting people put it through 3-4 years of heavy duty testing, at least one mock election a week internally, at least one per quarter nationwide. Have hacker/cracker groups invited to crack the system and report methods tried, successes, failures. Give them immunity to prosecution for all previous cracking activity, at least on the criminal side of the law. Pass the code to all programmers who are cleared for TS/SCI for code review and comment. Then after 3 or 4 years of this constant testing and review(during which the code and binaries will be classified Top Secret) the binaries can be unclassified and put on servers for a real election. Or, if there are still problems, kept classified and worked on for a few more months or years until it is as close to uncrackable as software can possibly be.
I supposed this would be workable once the security aspects (spoofing, etc.) have been addressed. It'd be a problem for our household since our net access only allows a single IP address assigned via DHCP. If we all got IP addresses assigned at birth then we'd all have a unique ID that could be used for things like voting, email, IP telephony, etc.
That's ridiculous, why use IP addresses to identify people?!?! That's completely insecure for one, and it is completely against the law as well -- voters must be anonymous with regard to the votes they cast.
The simplest/best solution would be to just assign a random PIN when one registers to vote. This PIN would be known only to the computer system in use. The PIN would either handed to the person or mailed using the USPS (don't complain 'bout the USPS, I think it sucks too, but remember - its used for almost all government correspondence already). This PIN would then be used as the login password when voting.
Simple, huh?
The most important consideration (beyond security) is whether access to the right to vote will remain open to all.
If voting becomes computerised, will it result in polling station districts becoming larger? Will it become necessary to travel further to make your vote? In Canada (or, at least, in the past two cities I've lived in), one could walk to the nearest poll.
The public must not allow the government to close polling stations. The consequence will be that an already under-represented population will become even less represented.
It is imperative to maintain a long-term perspective. Yes, computerised voting is exciting, and us geeks are in love with the idea...
...but be sure it doesn't harm the ability of others to vote.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Everytime I read about internet voting, the experiences of John Linnell come to my mind, and I point everyone at http://www.tmbg.org/cool/linnell/. Head Linnell's warnings! -bs
Well, I'd assume someone could find a way to secure against that type of stuff if we were holding elections using that type of system. It doesn't defeat my intent either, that public voting should be held over a closed system, not the Internet. Why? A closed system can be secured and controlled easily in comparison to the Internet. You give the voter one point of access (the dial-in point), allow one logon per user, and restrict their access to the one running application. These systems could be located at the clerk/recorders or registrars office in each county throughout the country, further reducing the danger of widespread fraud or hacking (anything that did happen would be localized).
The problem with using the Internet is that it's too public. Even greater than the problem of voter fraud is the dangers of tampering or malicious attacks from either American or International sources. Imagine a bunch of Middle Eastern terrorists paying off a bunch of Russian hackers to fsck up the Internet on the day of a presidential election ("Honey, I just punched in www.vote.gov, but I keep ending up at www.goatporn.com, what's happening?") Or maybe they could just attack the servers directly to make them inaccessible to voters. Furthermore, conducting online elections using centralized online voting locations (www.vote.gov or www.votecalifornia.gov) places all of those votes at one publicly accessible location, on the server that handles the election or it's connected backend network. Even if you use encryption to keep people from hacking in and changing the results, what's to stop a skilled hacker from entering and just deleting them. Surely that'd do just as much damage. Using a closed system would eliminate those problems, and in conjunction with encryption it would provide a fairly secure voting method.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Assuming the security and privacy issues could be taken care of, and given the problems listed here it won't happen any time soon, could internet voting, if it became widespread, replace the electoral college?
It seems at least part of the reason the electoral college was established was to solve the difficulty the early American population - made up of small, wide spread rural communities - had in handling the administrative problems of getting out the vote.
Streamlining the administrative burden of the voting system, in addition to eliminating the need for the archaic electoral college, would also, hopefully, eliminate the time zone problem. In CA we already know who is going to win before our polls close, hence fewer people vote at the end of the day. Maybe with online voting the US polls could close all at the same time.
a Cedar Rapids newspaper editorial headline warned that Internet voting ''cheapens the value of the vote.'' But the thrust of the piece was that voters themselves were the problem. It demanded: ''How much farther must we stoop to make sure no citizen is forced to expend any effort to vote?''
This made me laugh. I imagine there were a lot of people, close to two hundred years ago, who had similar disdainful views when the vote was given to people who were not property owners. I'm sure there were some people in the south who were simply shocked that voter eligibility testing was abolished a couple of decades ago.
People in power, or people satisfied with the status quo, regardless of whether the status quo is broken, are usually the most resistant to change. I remember when George Bush (daddy, not junior) tried to stymie legislation that would have allowed voters to register at State Motor Vehicle establishments! Can you imagine the irony? The leader of the free world fighting back the effort to make it easier for potential voters to register!
Bush wasn't a fan of the legislation because as far as he was concerned, this had no benefit for him personally. He was told that the majority of people who would take advantage of this opportunity would be immigrants, minorities and unemployed people; individuals who usually vote Democrat.
I'm not surprised that there is similar reluctance to open up the voting process to the internet. It is new and fraught with security issues. There are legitimate concerns that need to be ironed out. I do think however, that some people are really only concerned with the bottom line; who are these people that will be voting via the internet and are they like me?
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
) terrible and arduous task of...getting up half an hour early? Driving ten blocks out of
) the way during their commute?
Finding the damn polling place in the first place? AAAAAUGH! I get lost in my own house...
Ahhh, so we should allow you to vote because you're so very smart?
Pardon us stupes, how could we dare to think we're smart enuf to vote.
In Chicago, the possibility of dead people voting in the Internet age has just come closer to reality. It would be ironic if internet voting allowed the restablishment of "machine" politics controlling a large city or area.
and I see little hope for the present political system. "Democracy" in America (read: majority rule) worked reasonably well for a while, but we are beginning to see cracks in the system.
/. - how the Internet drains capable brains from other aspects of society). While Jesse Ventura may be exciting, he's managed to upset many people by telling what's really on his mind (r eaction to controversy about his Playboy interview). What needs to be done now is examination of various types of fundamental changes to our political system.
Internet voting won't help with the lack of qualified candidates or voter apathy (see "How the Internet Boom Harms Society", Sunday on
We've heard for far to long from "champions of Democracy" that majority rule is the ideal form of government. I can't say what the next step in the evolution of government will or should be, I only know that the fundamental changes needed to make the system better will not be simple or easy to make, but nonetheless need to be explored.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
People shouldn't be allowed to vote until they've served a term in the military. And military service should be mandatory. See Starship Troopers for a reference.
What I currently question most about Internet voting are the security issues. However, I think that, in time, these can be worked out. Internet voting sounds like a good idea... increase voter turnout, etc., etc. But is that *really* such a good idea? Think about how many apathetic people there are who don't really follow politics at all and don't bother to vote because they don't think it's even worth the effort it takes to go out and do it. Do we really who don't even care enough to go out and vote determining the fate of our nation? Internet voting makes it easier for the more apathetic folks to vote... people whose knowledge of the issues likely only goes so far as the last smear ad they heard.
Personally, I think it would be great to be able to vote from my home or office and avoid the trouble of having to go and stand in line to vote. But this may be a case of something that is good for a few people (the informed ones, in this case), but, when extended to everyone, ends up being a bad idea.
I supposed this would be workable once the security aspects (spoofing, etc.) have been addressed. It'd be a problem for our household since our net access only allows a single IP address assigned via DHCP. If we all got IP addresses assigned at birth then we'd all have a unique ID that could be used for things like voting, email, IP telephony, etc.
But, on the other hand, that pretty much does away with Anonymous Cowards, doesn't it? The personal privacy freaks would excrete masonry if this happened.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
As long as we can find ways to circumvent fraud, I think Internet (or even a dial-up BBS style) voting would be great. I personally vote in every election, but after many discussions with other people my age (mid-20's) I have found myself to be in the minority. While 1/4 to 1/3 of the people I've talked to don't vote because they simply "don't care", most cite a lack of time or the hassle involved in actually voting. Some of these people would very likely take advantage of a computerized voting system which, IMO, makes it a worthwhile project.
The only caveat would have to be fraud. Before any type of computerized system is rolled out, the system would have to develop some type of anti-fraud/identification system that goes beyond "enter your voter ID number". Webcams, fingerprint analysis, or even reverse dialups could be used to authenticate users and voting locations, and one of these must be in place before the politicos authorize anything like this. There is way too much fraud now, and if computerization offers a chance of increasing it we should hold off until more secure technology comes along. I think a BBS style direct dial voting center with reverse dialup would be the most secure method of implementing e-voting, but in an age where people are increasingly chucking their modems for DSL and cable, I don't know how well that would go over.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Woohoo! Iowa rules!!!!!
On the other hand, if we had adequate security measures in place (e.g. digital signatures generated with personally-registered smart cards, the kind of thing that would suffice for official ID), these issues should not be problematic. We just don't have the infrastructure to do this yet.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
If any part of an internet voting setup is based on
anything other than completely open source, I see
no reason to trust it one bit.
People seem to think that if you walk into the voting poll that you took the time to think about your vote. But I find this to be totally the opposite of my experience. When I voted at the polls I often would vote haphazardly. Now that I vote via Absentee Ballot I can take the time to look over the ballot, review the materials and then fill it in.
Granted there is no reason I couldn't have done this if voted at a polling center, but I found I often wouldn't.
In the state of Washington (where I live) the State puts out a voting guide every time before we vote. Now that I use an Absentee Ballot, I sit down with my ballot and the guide and read the guide as I vote. I felt like I couldn't take the time to do that at the polls.
The same benefits of allowing you the time to think about your vote and cast it at your time applies to internet voting. While I'll agree that the security of voting systems must be a priority, I don't think that we should be suggesting that making it harder to vote makes the decision of what to vote for any more thought out.
Four words:
Kasparov vs. the World
Just a tiny reminder that the net may not be ready for online voting yet. Someday I look forward to it - I think it'd be great, but I think its still too early. Give it a few years.
You make good points, but there are other issues... What about hadicapped people, or elderly who have are failing physically? Or those too sick to leave the house? Maybe your kid comes down with a bad flu or something right before election day. Not nearly enough time to get an absentee ballot, and if a parent will leave a sick child alone to vote, thats just wrong. If there are two parents, and one can be at home at all times, great, but that doesn't happen all the time. Single mothers and fathers should vote too, but if their children are sick on election day, they shouldn't leave them alone, and day care for a sick child isn't always available, especially if the child is too sick to go somewhere. Internet voting would be wonderful for them. No more judging between civic and parental duty, they can easily fulfill both. My idea I mentioned about Bill Gates or some other rich computer geek starting an internet based voting service could help voter knowledge. Imagine a free online service devoted to nothing but information on candidates and voting on them. Log on, links to the candidates campaign materials, as well as news articles about them from independent sources. You can log on, quickly learn about the various candidates and their views, and make an informed vote without the hours upon hours of watching commercials, reading the paper, going to rallys, etc... that properly researching a candidate requires now. And all it would require is a computer and a modem. Make it HTML based rather than a full program like AOL so that you can use any web browser to access it, any links to the net as a whole through some CGI program to prevent the free service from being abused, and you have a great way to get people informed and voting with convenience.
Too bad he got caught, he could be in office. Grin.
Remember that /. poll about favorite poll behavior (The "Crappy of Options" one)? Vote from as many IPs as possible!
sup
is legitimacy. Technical problems can be overcome; that's their nature. But an election system will only work if average, everyday people believe it is legitimate; if everyone expects a particular method of voting to encourage corruption, it won't be adopted, and won't be popular if it is.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with internet voting (which would be easier, and cheaper, than the current systems) is that there is a major legitimacy problem: non-computer people are going to be reluctant to accept that their votes are being counted accurately, and are secure, in an online mechanism.
That's not to say it can't be done: nobody likes the voting mechanism in use in Los Angeles County, and they've had machine-read ballots for decades. But someone's going to have to do a hell of a PR campaign.
If your saying Im slowly becoming a nazi, your very wrong. If IM saying I dont want a certain percentage of the people in this country to vote on an issue they have no understanding of, but they have 3 free minutes after sally jessee raphael, well then color me jaded. Remember the people who were born here (like me) have an inherent ability to NOT know how monumentally FANTASTIC it is to be allowed and encouraged to help make your goverments policies(not me)and because of this they often times dont spend the time to learn the issues and their repercusions. Now you may be thinking that im nuts or paranoid or an egotist who doesnt trust his fellow man...fine as long as Im away from the nazi section, and Id say your still not right. Do you think that 1% or 2% of the votes could be cast by people who dont know enough and who WOULDNT have voted if it wasnt so easy....well MOST elections (besides these presidential avalanches of Mondale-isms we keep having) are decided by 1 or 2%. I want my fellow americans (da da dah dahh dahhh dummmmmm....)to help run this place. But lets face it, even you know a lot of dumb bastards (maybe you just see them in the 7-11 when your buying milk) who you'd only encourage to vote because you wanted them to vote your side. I hardly want an elite class voting like with roman citizens...and I dont think it should be hard. I just wish they made you take a test before you voted that proved you knew what you were voting for or against. There. My point lies withing that last bit.
Where are the keys to my whore?
One point that the Boston Globe talked about is that those with computers and internet access would be more able to vote than those without these tools, and that if another method of voting were more available, an uneven shift would result in voter statistics. I think this is a valid concern, but not a new one. Just getting to a polling location may be a problem for someone who does not have a car, and it can be a very long bus ride to your nearest school or wherever voting is conducted. The new method of voting would expand the difference between rich and poor voters even more, as far as accessibility of polling area is concerned.
/. polls. :)
I don't know if it is a good idea to conduct internet polling, even if all the security issues were worked out, but to tell you the truth, I still wouldn't vote.
I think that this is a somewhat Democratic approach to the situation because instead of fixing the problem directly, they are throwing programs at it that may help an individual if he chooses to take advantage of them. This does nothing for the horribly poor voter turnouts in either case, because if you don't care, chances are you're not going to use your valuable slashdot time to cast a vote with any government.
I also think it would be a neat experiment to see what percentage of registered slashdot users votes on those
-S
I think this is great. Some people have extremely busy lives and getting to vote can be difficult or even out of the question occasionally. Internet voting could allow these people a chance to vote quickly and easily, without requiring them to skip out on work or family. The potential problems are security and the fact that most net users are white. The first is relatively simple. Simply require people, when they register to vote, to specify if they want an internet vote ID number. This ID number would be a random string of characters unique to the individual. The system will check to see if that ID had been marked off as voting traditionally, and one or both ballots would be cancelled and referred to whoever handles voter fraud. Since the numbers would be random, the odds of someone guessing another ID in attempting to stack the vote would have a hard time at the least. If you let someone get your ID, and they vote in your place, you get issued a new ID. I'm not sure if your votes should be cancelled... some people might want to change it for silly reasons like embarrasment. Once it passes the check for duplicate voting, the vote passes on, stripped of the ID number, to be tallied with the rest, and the ID number is logged, stripped of the actual votes cast, so that future voting attempts for that election can be checked.
The possibility of whites stacking the election is more complex. First off, perhaps a law that all companies that have an internet terminal let their employees use it to vote? With some exceptions of course, in cases like a 200 person company with one internet terminal. Perhaps a non-binding resolution encouraging businesses to let employees use the net to vote? That should allow a wider audience to use net voting. Maybe some regular, non internet businesses with net access can advertise "Free internet vote with purchase". Internet Cafes can give a free cup of coffee and free net access for the purposes of voting. Bill Gates could use some of his billions to set up a free online service that gives all candidates equal access to speak their views, and gives access to internet voting. Internet voting should of course be platform independent, accessible through email(including web based like hotmail), the web, telnet, maybe someone can even set up an IRC bot or java applet. The white dominance of the net is a much more complex and expensive problem to solve, but solvable, and well worth the effort for the benefits it will provide.
For people in inaccessable locations, I say let them vote by the internet...but, how many confusing bills will be passed and how many elections by blatantly corrupt (not like the ones we have now..haha) poloticians will be pushed into office by ignorance. Vote? sure. For what? If voting were as simple as turning on the TV, then people who sit around watching TV all day will do it. What? Democracy? Well if its easy to vote then more people will do it without thinking. How many people do you know who know the issues NOT just the tagline of a bill. Now how many people do you know who know very little of a position but what they see in a sponsored comercial. A person who goes out in the rain to vote will probably know the effects his actions may produce MORE than a person who can vote as easy as turning on oprah. Its not that I dont want people to help control the country that exhists for them...but Ive seen a lot of these people...and I dont want them to CASUALLY vote and negate mine. If I dont know an issue and its REAL repercusions...I wont vote. Just like if I dont like anything on TV, Ill turn it off, not sit there watching crap thinking this could be better but what the hell, and thats what many people do. Do you want them voting on issues they hardly care to comprehend...because they will.
Where are the keys to my whore?
National elections over internet. Bad bad bad. It's a bad idea. Bad.
A national election costs a fortune. Can you imagine the expense involved in setting up the thousands of voting sites, staffing them, keeping track of all the votes, etc, etc.
Internet voting would simplify all of that and save untold millions. Until.
Until some wise-ass figures out how to crack a voting server and starts stuffing ballot boxes from San Diego to Bangor. If that happened, we'd have to spend a few weeks and millions of dollars to figure out how the crack was done, how to safeguard against it, fill out the appropriate paperwork in triplicate, and implement the security fix. Then the whole election would have to be restaged.
Hopefully, there would be no cracks of the next election. But who knows.
Jesus, why do people complain about voter apathy? If you don't care about the issues, please - don't vote!
It is like open-source vs. closed source. A government voted into power by people who don't care is just like software written by people who don't care: bloated, stupid, and inefficient!
C'mon. This is ridiculous. Given how much television ads seem to sway voters -- elections are more about how much money you can spend putting your name in front of voters' eyeballs than about voting records or substantial policy differences -- I wonder if we shouldn't make it harder to vote!