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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?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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'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?
* First: Many folks don't know what a public key is. Most of them won't want to learn, and won't bother.
* Second: Many folks have computers nowadays which, perversely enough, don't have floppy disks.
Also, what filesystems? MINIX? FAT? ext2?
* Third: Candidates have been using personality *forever*. It's gotten far worse since the invention of television (think JFK), but it's always been there. However, most people who are polled, wouldn't vote; that could change significantly.
* Fourth: The people have, in general, neglible will; it's not like it's difficult to write a letter to a politician or editor, or cast a vote. Voting is correlated with motivation. The system largely does represent the wishy-washy will of the people, in its own way...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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.
Do you mean "revote", which only happens in significant cases of voter fraud, or "recount" ?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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
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.
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!
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.
Imagine THAT debating format.
*** Candidate Deathmatch ***
Featuring:
- VP Al Gore, who's stiffness inhibits dodging (when he's not doing the Macarena), but comes equipped with the Chaingun of Connections...
- Ex-Sen. Bill Bradley, who may be able to blind Gore with his Spotlight; who can toss a grenade for 3 points over his shoulder...
- Gov. Bush, who's both encumbered and armed with huge bags of money, and used to get occasional boosts from a mysterious powder...
- Sen. McCain, who's got experience, a shotgun and a meeeeeean temper,
- Steve Forbes, who's got a penchant for flattening his opponents and folding them into postcards,
- Gov. Ventura, who's ALWAYS got the 'Beserk' power-up,
- Pat Buchanan, who's got intrinsic fireproofing and can isolate himself from the world at will, and, finally,
- Donald Trump, who's fortunes seem to vary as much as those of his patrons...
*** ding!
:)
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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
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 you don't think that it costs you anything to keep track of the issues, you're dreaming! If the public voted on every issue, everything would be decided by the activist fringes who actually cared enough about the issue to get out and vote for it. You think things are determined by extremists now... just watch.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.