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Elections on the Internet -- Not Any Time Soon 329

Posted by CmdrTaco from the sad-but-true dept.
jACL writes "From the Technology Review article: "After several years debating minimum requirements for voting equipment, the computer science and public policy communities appear to agree that the Internet--as it exists today--can't sufficiently safeguard the privacy, security and reliability of the voting process. Pitfalls range from the obvious, such as malicious hackers, to the obscure. For example: Every state requires that votes be cast in secret, but how can officials verify that a party hack isn't standing beside a remote voter?"" Unfortunately, this is probably all to true.
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Elections on the Internet -- Not Any Time Soon More

Elections on the Internet -- Not Any Time Soon

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  • Are also arguments against absentee ballots. Perhaps we should get rid of those too- wonder who the president would be today.

    • Re:All the arguments against online elections (Score:5, Informative)

      by markmoss ( 301064 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @11:07AM (#2974095)
      One real, unsolvable difficulty with both absentee ballots and internet voting is that it becomes impossible to guarantee people are voting in secret. But we also accept that blind people won't be voting in secret -- although there are both technological and non-technological ways to give them a secret ballot, no American district I have ever heard of has implemented them. For that reason alone, absentee ballots should be restricted to real need, not Oregon's policy of giving them to anyone who just doesn't want to stand in line.

      Aside from the secret ballot, at present paper absentee ballots, properly run, are considerably more secure than internet voting could be. You'd have to suborn a lot of people to be able to tamper with paper absentee ballots in the mail, and someone would talk, but for e-voting you just have to crack a computer.

      The bigger challenge in either system is verifying the identity of the voter. This gets worse when election officials aren't following all the rules. Florida rules required the request for an absentee ballot to include name, address, and voter registration number. Missing ID #'s got a lot of applications thrown out, but for certain voters in certain counties, republican party workers filled in the ID #'s. Furthermore, ballots were supposed to be postmarked before election day, which creates a difficulty when the damned post office doesn't date it's postmarks; in some counties, Kathy Harris got that rule waived, but not in others. (Who was it that sued about not counting everyone's vote the same?) But if the system had been run honestly, very few bogus absentee ballots would have been counted. It's just too hard to steal large numbers of identities when you have to send paper documents by snail mail, unless you create an organization big enough to make leaks probable.

      My best guess is that if Florida had accurately counted all the votes statewide, George II would still have won. But we'll never know, now. And if the entire system had been running honestly, I do not think that either the Bush's most wayward son, or Mr. Roger's evil twin (Gore) would have had a chance at the nomination...

  • It only makes sense (Score:3)

    by ramb ( 256851 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:29AM (#2973838)
    The city council has moved to mail-in ballots for municipal elections in my jurisdiction. This too was a schmozzle of the hugest proportions, and think of how trivial that is compared to electronic voting...
    you know where people live, they don't change their address every time they go home, you know from tax returns how many people live at an address. Who can verify anything electronically. Remember that old saw "on the internet no one knows your a dog"?
    • Unfortunatly I don't see how they would make sure some jerk doesn't steal the ballots from the street and vote for several people at once.

      Feel free to fill me in on how they prevented that.

  • Privacy (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Peaker ( 72084 )
    You can never verify the privacy of the voters, because they may choose to tell their vote. If they choose to let others watch their vote on their machine - fine. As for 'hacks' regarding viewing people's votes on their machines, this may be solved by vote-boxes or so that connect directly through your physical media, and run some firmware.

    If its all digitally signed and cryptographed, vote boxes sound nice to me.

    Ofcourse it should always be allowed for people to vote as they do today, if for some reason they cannot guarantee their privacy, or an internet connection.

    If people do vote as they do today, give voters a day off to vote, as sane Democracies do :)
    • You can never verify the privacy of the voters, because they may choose to tell their vote

      Two points on this

      1) You can lie "Sure I voted for you Mr Big Gun"

      and the second is that this isn't the issue the issue is Mr Big Gun standing next to you as you put the X on the sheet making _sure_ that you vote for him.

      Not sure which countries allow people the day off to vote either.

      Imagine managing the digital signature for everyone, BUT STILL ENSURING ITS ANONYMOUS.

      The problems are huge, and they are right to reject it, especially in light of the problems of access to the internet.
      • Imagine managing the digital signature for everyone, BUT STILL ENSURING ITS ANONYMOUS.

        Not sure how it is in the US, but in the UK ballot papers are individually numbered and can (theoretically) be traced back to the individual voter using the information on the polling card (which you must present). This is, apparently, to ensure that Mr I R Bukkake doesn't vote twice.

        Admittedly, since this information is only stored on paper, it would be far harder to trace than a digital signature. It is still possible though.

  • No internet elections is A Good Thing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by envelope ( 317893 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:30AM (#2973841) Homepage Journal
    Having to actually get off your arse and go to a polling place to cast your vote is A Good Thing. It makes sure only the truly motivated actually vote.

    • That makes a refreshing change from the usual 'We must combat voter apathy!' Instead, a laissez-faire attitude, on the principal that if they are too lazy to walk to a poll booth then their vote is pointless anyway.

      You know, I'm beginning to like that idea - the only problem is that the highest percentage turnout will be the fanatics (on whatever side - but not necessarily cancelled out) and the disabled would be under-represented.
      • not realy since it takes just a trip to city hall 3 months in advance to order an absentee balot

        the disabled have no reason not to vote except lazyness, whby the way, I find that most TRULY disabled folks are the most motivated people I know.
        (I say truly because being a fat ass is not a disability, nor is any other controlabl ailment that we so often see folks using to get those nice little handicap stickers so Grandmothers who have to use a wheelchair to get around, can not park in an accessable spot.)

        sorry about the rant :-)
    • Besides, if we went to internet voting out next President would probably be...

      Cowboy Neal!
    • We must remember that there are people who cannot make it to the polls. I was in a wheelchair during last year's election due to a car accident, and it was too late to get an absentee ballot. I found it exceedingly hard to get to my place of polling because I live in a hilly mountain town and the bus didn't go close enough.

      The Internet would be an ideal place for the mobility challenged to cast their vote. It is better to require everyone to cast their vote on the same day rather than send in early absentee votes because opinions may change over the lag time. I think that, rather than having traditional absentee paper ballots, we should be able to give the local board of elections our public keys and submit our enciphered ballots electronically. If we can't trust the Internet for election purposes, how can we for our financial transactions (ATMs) and taxes (e-file)?
      • Having worked for several political campaigns, I can tell you that if you contact your party they will send someone to take you to vote and drop you back off at home. We do it all day long during election day -- And some campaigns even send lackees door to door trying to find people that haven't voted yet and offer them a ride (albeit in neighborhoods that heavily favor their party). "But I'm an Indepedant" or "I belong to . Not a good enough excuse, for ever party there are people that will come pick you up and take you to your polling place, and as well there are non-partisan groups that do the same thing for people with any party affiliation. You may not think your one vote counts, but the different political parties do, you wouldn't believe how much they scratch and claw for those single votes. "But I'm too lazy to pick up the phone to call someone for a ride." -- Put down the voter registration down and back away from the ballot!! ;-)

  • Maintain the Status Quo even easier! - on the 'Net (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:30AM (#2973843) Homepage
    The notion that voting on the Internet would constitute an advancement is disgusting. How many people without access to the Internet would have to work /harder/ than those who already are wealthy enough (presumably) to cast their vote via computers.

    More wealth stroking. Internet voting would be all about making life easier for those who's lives are always considerably easier than those who couldn't vote online. How on earth can the article not point out how internet voting would undoubedly contribute to less political representation by those already on the wrong side of the digital divide (even if simply by increasing the participation of those on the right side of the digital divide.)

    I'm not against using it for over-seas voting, etc, but to hope that one day we'll all be using the Internet to vote is a scary thought - the poor already have enough of a hard time being heard.
    • Note that the above assumed by 'voting on the Internet', we mean voting from home. I'm not neccessarily against using computers at poll stations, as this doesn't discriminate against those without access to the Internet at home, or disproportionately empower those that do.
    • Geez. Nobody ever said life was fair. Maybe we should all just give up our computers since the poor and uneducated don't have access to them? Wait! I'm College educated, I should get a lobotomy so I don't trample the rights of the uneducated?

      Plus the local non-computer owners can go to the library to cast their vote. I saw this as a chance to avoid having to go to the elementary school (especially since it's several miles out of my way and has exactly enough parking for the teacher, and nowhere near enough for voters) to cast my vote. Also, it involves standing in line for over an hour if try to go before work. Voting is already pretty darn inconvienent for everyone involved, and I'm not going to complain if someone figures out a way to make it much more convienent.
    • Well....half of americans, %54 are on the internet.
      The study has just been published. Noone said that would be the ONLY way to cast a vote either.

      Now THAT in ITSELF is a larger percentage than voted in the last election. Demographics say more than HALF of that HALF is middle to lower income and minority.

      Lemme guess, your either

      Poor,

      aCommunist

      or a Democrat ?

      If youre poor and have no car you already have to work harder to get to the polling place. So we make it easier and more accurate where we can. So that argument flies like a brick pig with wings.

      How can more people voting cause "less political representation" ???? Just because the wealthy will vote for somethign YOU dont like dosent mean less representaiton, it means more people voting, more representation. Like I said Im guessing this was either a troll or...one of the above 3

      • >Lemme guess, your either Poor, a Communist, or a Democrat?

        Let me guess. You want to pigeonhole my theology so you can feel yummy warm at night in concluding that I'm a raving idiot.

        None of the above. I make lots of money, I dont believe in communism, and while I probably align myself with Democrat values, I dont know enough about either American party.

        In a land of supposed 'equality', why are people so glib to dismiss a technological class gap.

        Look, when it comes to getting your ice cream, or filing your taxes, or whatever, I could give a flying fuck if you do it in your Lexus, or you have to walk cause you have no money.

        But when it comes to voting, don't you think that the means by which we vote should be independant of our social position? Otherwise you defeat the purpose of a democracy - by 'tipping' the accessability of representation in favour of a particular class.

        Let's get one thing straight. I /am/ the wealthy. However, giving people the ability to vote from home is like going door to door to those who make above X$$ and saying, "Well, things are good enough, right? You have your house and car .. here, sign here, and you're vote is cast.", while those who already believe that the system is stacked against them (and rightly so) now see themselves lose even more ground in terms of access to representation and technology; the psycological devestation is recognized by psychology, and dismissed by the wealthy with the 'life isn't fair' argument. It's nothing but more self-affirming perspectives by those with the 'I'm here because I earned it' dillusion.

        Yes, your point about car ownership contributing to the problem is duly noted, but if you aknowledge that it exists, why are you so glib to furthur that gap in availability to the resources of exersising one's democratic rights? I can envision a world in which the wealthy are completely ignorant of the numbers of poor simply because its so much easier for them to vote that representation is tipped heavily in their favour. And then the wealthy wonder why the poor arn't voting - it's a lack of confidence in the system, much in part due to attitudes exactly like yours. Why should they try if the fundamental improvements to a democratic system is only available to those who are already prospering under it?
        • Look, when it comes to getting your ice cream, or filing your taxes, or whatever, I could give a flying fuck if you do it in your Lexus, or you have to walk cause you have no money.

          But when it comes to voting, don't you think that the means by which we vote should be independant of our social position? Otherwise you defeat the purpose of a democracy - by 'tipping' the accessability of representation in favour of a particular class.

          Yeah, so let's make a law that you have to walk to your polling station, in order not to put those at a disadvantage who can't afford a car...

        • I like this "I dont know enough about either American party" Youre not a US citizen ????

          GUESS WHAT your COMMENTARY on OUR politics is MOOT.

          You have NO fundemental understanding of the Democratic proccess here in the United States. It has been like this and always will be, look up Jim Crow laws.

          There is no glibness, everyone is equal, to a point, and can vote, even with a Internet voting system in place.

          REDUCING everyone to equal IS COMMUNISM.

          Actually the POOR DO VOTE, Sometimes more often than the rich, Apathy infests the rich, not so true with the poor. Clinton being elected twice in this country is proof, MOST educated, upper class people (with the exception of liberals, in our country a socalist). COULDNT STAND HIM, He won his fist election with LESS than the MAJORITY vote, only some 40% of people in the US.

          So what you are saying is, you have NO understanding of either our system, or parties, and yet you offer a foriegn comment on OUR process..This is rich....

          Go back to the pub...........The UK's Govt is in such perfect shape I know you have nothign better to do than critisize ours.......Let me remind you OUR govt saved Europes ass TWICE
          • > GUESS WHAT your COMMENTARY on OUR politics is MOOT.

            Politically, sure. But if you think I'm incapable of affecting the way Americans (who's comments are not moot, according to your logic) think about their process, thats your own set of blinders.

            > REDUCING everyone to equal IS COMMUNISM.

            My dear scared friend, who said I wanted to reduce everything to equal? It's truely not my fault if you want to extropolate my 'moot comments' to an extreme that aligns with a political ideology I reject in my .sig. I'd simply rather say that things are so wildly unequal right now that we need more equality. Not total equality.

            > Let me remind you OUR govt saved Europes ass TWICE

            Thanks for the help, even though I'm not in Europe, assumer. Now, if only America could help nations because they actually wanted peace and freedom, not the IOU you seem to implicitly believe America deserves in these cases.
            • Well, the IOU system was failed when we started it, EVERYONE lent to has defaulted. They want and take, but wont repay,

              I am personally of the school we should go after our bad debts in the form of land or resource, england, russia, japan, etc. We SACRIFICED OUR BLOOD, for your people. Im an Isolationist too, so actuallly helping anyone is out of the question.

              Youre correct, I apologize, I could tell from the speech pattern you were a UK'er, Canada, pretty much the same thing.

  • Another pitfall ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by pyramid termite ( 458232 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:31AM (#2973857)
    ... Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf is elected President.

  • Shame (Score:5, Funny)

    by CaptainAlbert ( 162776 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:33AM (#2973871) Homepage
    What a great pity... I'm sure I'm not the only one who was looking forward to voting for CowboyNeal. :)

  • Slashdot Polling Engine (Score:3, Funny)

    by arget ( 447057 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:35AM (#2973887) Homepage
    You mean we can't use the Slashdot polling engine? I thought that was accurate to within .001%...

  • Text voting (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stephen_rymill ( 321960 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:35AM (#2973891)
    Voting by mobile phone text message is going to be trialled in the UK at the next election. See this BBC News [bbc.co.uk] story. This has a lot of the same issues as internet voting - have they really been thought throught yet?
    • Voting by mobile phone text message is going to be trialled in the UK at the next election.


      You're going to let teenage girls decide your next local elections?

  • Karma Whoring (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ezubaric ( 464724 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:35AM (#2973895) Homepage
    A report on the reliability of various voting systems (including Internet) from MIT/Caltech [caltech.edu].

  • First of all, to institute a federal mandate to require all votes to be cast over the internet would require an amendment to our Constitution, which currently gives the States the right to decide how they want people to vote (within limits). Assuming this is done (a herculean feat), securing the internet for voting shouldn't be that hard a thing to do really.

    Imagine this, each county in every state runs their own VPN between the voting offices. Each VPN would feature a different encryption screen, and each vote would be encypted as well. This means that not only would every vote feature 128-bit encryption, the entire VPN would as well, making it impossible to know who placed what vote. Also, ballot stuffing could be eliminated because not only would you have to crack the VPN, you'd also have to submit a properly encoded vote in order for it to count. One misplaced 0 or 1 scratches the entire ordeal. Since the VPN's would only be up for one day, hackers would have little time to break the encryption.

    Just a few thoughts.

    • Are you talking about having secure kiosks at each voting office? If you are, I assume that you mean to only allow voting from these kiosks, and not allow voting from home. If this is what you mean, then why use the Internet at all? Phone lines from each voting office to a central collection office would be much more secure. 56Kbps is plenty for this, since we are not talking about very much data, even with encryption.

      If you are talking about having home users connect via the Internet to their local voting office, then you are missing the big security holes.

      It is trivial to secure the actual connection between the voter and the voting office. The big problems lie in securing their PC.

      Picture a version of any of any of the big worms that have circulated recently. All it would have to do is intercept the voter's mouse clicks in the voting app and redirect them to a different vote. If it was clever enough, it could even manipulate the video display buffer to make it appear to the voter that nothing has changed.

      These worms spread like lightning, and could be unleashed on the day of the vote, making it unlikely that Joe User would update his virus checker in time.

  • This idea scares the willies out of me. I mean, I can hardly browse /. reliably. My connection is terrible, the potential for hacking is huge, and jeez, every voting server would get slashdotted *by design*. Talk about inaccuracies...

    Plus, there's the "Punch the Monkey to Vote for Gore!" banner ad menace. :-)
  • Chances are, a link to the voting site would pop up here and get slash-dotted anyway.

    On a serious note, I doubt there will EVER be a computer that can be considered secure. If a human can get to it, they can hack it.

    Awaiting rebuttals...

  • Similar Problems (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fizban ( 58094 )
    This reminds me of the problems we had at the Universty of Michigan a number of years back with the student government elections, which allowed students to vote online. The problem arose because candidates would walk through the dorms pumping their platform, knock on people's doors, log them into the voting website and show them how easy it was to vote for them. Obviously, quite an uproar came about because of this and I'm sure a similar situation would occur on the bigger scale elections.

    Couldn't you just imagine the candidates to sending out their lackies to people's homes showing them how to vote online and how to click on their candidate's name and then click the submit button? I wouldn't put it by any political party to try this type of underhanded scheme, and I hope we never ever see that.

    We won't get online voting for another 10-20 years and especially not until we can safeguard against "attacks" like these.

    On a sidenote, I'd be interested to hear from any current Michigan folks to know if the student elections are still happening online.

    Peace out.
    • The problem arose because candidates would walk through the dorms pumping their platform, knock on people's doors, log them into the voting website and show them how easy it was to vote for them.

      How about chartering a bus to bring people to the polls, and showing them a marked sample ballot during the ride? This is actually a fairly common practice. Where I grew up, a big real estate speculator funded a political organization that would pick up old folks from their homes, prime them to vote against anything and anyone that might raise real-estate taxes, and took them to the polls. In local elections, this could actually amount to 1/3 of the total vote. Or I heard about Democrats in Florida's larger cities sending busses out to the welfare housing, etc. But in one case they got the instructions wrong -- told their clients to be sure to make one punch on each page, but in this city the presidential candidates had been spread across two pages (to avoid the damned butterfly ballot), so anyone who followed instructions voted Gore and someone else for president...

      The Democrats ability to shoot themselves in the foot, again and again, has always been amazing.

      Getting back on topic -- we've always had party workers trying to be "helpful." Before voting was reformed with ballots never leaving the polling place, they could be even more helpful, giving people an already filled-in ballot to drop in the box. (To prevent any form of this, where I vote there is a tear-off serial number on the ballot. You come out of the booth, they check the number is the same you went in with, then tear it off and feed the ballot into the scanner.) The big trouble wasn't the helpfulness -- it was that too often the party workers were also paying bribes to get voters to cooperate. And that's the reason no form of voting from home (including absentee ballots) should be allowed except for a few percent of people who genuinely cannot make it to the polls.

  • One of the main problems with internet voting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Stickerboy ( 61554 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @10:46AM (#2973967) Homepage
    Oh, come on, we have a couple of hundred thousand people in the US who can't figure out how to vote using a punch card with printed directions, for crying out loud. And now people are suggesting standardizing voting using a computer and an internet connection to make things easier? *chuckle*

    Now, touch-screen computers at the polling station to simplify voting... that'd be a much better idea.
    • Those already exist. CNN was showing them last election; I think in a west coast state (Oregon?). Touch screen with pictures and text of the candidate, possibly in multiple languages.

    • In Canada, national elections are handled by a nonpartisan Federal agency, Elections Canada [elections.ca]. Everyone across the country gets the same kind of ballot, a simple card with circles beside the names where you make your "X". No punch cards, machines, or other fancy things that can go wrong or confuse people into voting for Pat Buchanan. It's only a coincidence that the same party [liberal.ca] keeps winning elections. I swear!

      If you want electronic voting, the best idea is probably the system used by the City of Toronto in last fall's mayoral elections -- the ballots were paper, but the counting was electronic. To vote, you filled in a region beside a candidate's name, much like those computerized multiple choice tests. All the counting was done 1 hour after polls closed, and they still had paper records to verify the results.

    • Two problems with that.

      1) I've programmed for touchscreens for almost 1 decade. None of them are 100% foolproof. Depending on the type all kinds of contaminants, dry air and wear can register incorrect selections. There'd have to be a more complicatd setup of "Are you sures" making the entire process slower and maybe even MORE error prone.

      2) Secondarily, the idea of an electronic only system is also bad. At minimum, this touchscreen terminal had better punch out a physical card that can be recounted! There needs to be a hard record of every vote. Otherwise power failures, HD failures, both accidental and not, will lose votes FOREVER.

      I believe that the only proper way to do it is mechanically with punch cards. Now the machines themselves can be greatly improved over the cheap ass pin systems most states use today. But I really don't want to use a computer to vote in any way and I've been a software engineer for 23 years! I know what there is to be afraid of.

  • OK, let's not categorize this as "elections on the internet." A more accurate subject would be "voting via web pages." What most people want, and I have asked, as well as observed, is an electronic voting booth. These devices will hopefully reduce human error, they will produce a physical paper ballot for each voter, and they will send the totals instantly over a VPN over the internet to a central collection point. That is technically voting over the internet, even though individual citizens still have to go out and hit the voting booths. Our elections will greatly benefit from such devices using the internet, and it is in the works. I posted a story not too long ago about Rhode Island's plans to work on such a system (rejected of course.) Slashdot admins, please watch what you say. I thought JonKatz was the only one who went off the handle with wild claims and broad misconceptions...
  • Where there is a will, there is a way. If we wanted to setup online voting, we could, but the powers that be don't want it, so it isn't going to happen. The technology is there, the problem, as always is with people. When people are at home, how do you know thier abusive spouse isn't watching them, thier boss, or Union chairmen. The only way to provide any reasonable privacy is to provide a place to do it.
  • Voting on the Internet would allow more people to vote creating a more accurate representation of the countries ideas. Politicians don't want voters from all over the country voting, they just want the voters that support them to vote.

    As for people saying that voting on the Internet would create a bias because only rich people could vote is just plain untrue. You will still have the plain old voting booths, and if not, just replace those voting booths in the town hall with terminals to log on the Internet. You don't have to own a computer to vote.
  • is an extremly interesting subject. have a look at for example http://www.radwin.org/michael/projects/voting.html [radwin.org]

    An untraceable, universally verifiable voting scheme

    Recent electronic voting schemes have shown the ability to protect the privacy of voters and prevent the possibility of a voter from being coerced to reveal his vote. These schemes protect the voter's identity from the vote, but do not do so unconditionally. In this paper we apply a technique called blinded signatures to a voter's ballot so that it is impossible for anyone to trace the ballot back to the voter. We achieve the desired properties of privacy, universal verifiability, convenience and untraceability at the expense of receipt-freeness.

  • The secret ballot is not an obscure issue. It is one of the most important aspects of the US voting system. Perhaps it would not be so important without our history of every manner of vote fraud imaginable. The secret ballot prevents coercion of voters by threat of force, losing their job, or any other means by which one person can inappropriately influence another. This must never be compromised, and would be a serious issue if it were. We need developments that decrease the chance for vote fraud, not increase the chance.


  • But, concludes Stewart, "my hunch is that even when the security issues get solved, Internet voting is going to be a niche."


    This is an idiotic statement. When the security issues get resolved, who the hell wouldn't vote over the internet instead of having to go out to the voting booth?

    And it seems to me that the security issues could be easily resolved by the government issuing us public/private key pairs. We would all go in somewhere at our leisure, verify our identity and get a doohickey that plugs into the PC via USB, serial port, or whatever. The doohickey would have a public & private key in it, and wouldn't provide a way of getting the private key out. But it would provide an interface for signing any data sent to it and returning it to you. They could just note who got what doohickey (and correlate the public key with your social security # in a central repository), and now you have easy electronic identification, signatures, and the ability to send private info. Of course, I wouldn't trust anything like that for my own encryption (FBI backdoor, anyone?) but it should be fine for voting. It just signs your vote with your private key, encrypts it with the government's public key, and sends it on its way. I should be able to log into a specific site on the internet and see my vote (encrypted with my public key, so others can't see it) so I can go contest it if it was somehow falsified.

    Now that wasn't so hard, was it?
    • I would love to see that ID dongle become common for many other purposes, but not for voting from home. Consider this scenario:

      Knock, Knock.
      "Hello"
      "We're from the Cosa Nostra party, and we're here to 'help' you vote."

      --- later ---

      "You understand that you can go to the election commission and contest this vote. Do you also understand that we'll hear about it and blow up your house?"
      • Hmm, good point, for which I have no answer :( Sounds like a social problem rather than an internet problem, but a killer nonetheless. Bummer.
        • More seriously: secret balloting and several other security measures were instituted because of widespread vote-buying in 19th century America. Early in the century, party workers could accompany you to the polls and "help" you vote. (It did solve the problem of illiteracy. But if you actually _want_ illiterates voting, you paste pictures of the candidates onto piggybanks and give each voter one token to drop into the slot.) Later on, when ballots were marked in private booths, it was common for party workers to pass out pre-marked ballots, and pay the voter when they returned with the blank ballot from the polls. So now, ballots have serial numbers on a little tear-off piece; when I come out of the booth, they check the number matches the blank ballot they gave me, then tear it off.

          Now if they only had a way to detect dead people voting... Although the local poll workers might resent that, they're all over 80 and it's getting hard to tell the difference. ;-)
  • Hello. I have to say that I can't even favour use of the internet for elections (and I mean elections in voting for your government sense). I have to admit here I'm actually someone who would resist the technology.

    People are saying voting over the internet, but I would say this was insecure. I believe voting for the government is so important that you really have to minimise the security risks. There are problems with manual voting as it is. But i'm still happier with it than internet voting. When I think voting, I'm now assuming all the computer are ones owned by the government kept in central locations for public voting. I can't see voting from home being too good.

    I'm going to throw some ideas out here - if you can find a reason against them, i would love to here (this isn't a challenge, but I'd love to see if someone could put my mind at ease over voting).

    (1) I would think that the internet was insecure that you had to use a VPN to allow proper voting. Even then I would still like a closed system where all the power is in government hands.
    (2) The system has to have power backups just in case someone starts to tamper with the election. This would be essential in "unstable" areas which are about to vote.
    (3) Who controls the system? I would say it would have to be open and free (yeaahhh! - obligatory slashdot herd cheer) with anyone, and I mean anyone, being able to get to the source code. That leaves the fact that the binary produced from the code has to be verified. You'll need qualified people to do this, which costs even more cash.

    I also thought about electoral lists, but either way (computer or manual voting) they can still be tampered, although it might be easier on a computer. I just think that allowing people to see the process prevents as much tampering as could be done if people managed to attack the "box" which controls the lists. When i say a "box" I don't mean the central lists, but the one PC which contains the list at the local school where voting could take place.

    I do want to believe, but something keeps on telling me that we should keeps things as they are for the now, and restrict this kind of voting to places where it doesn't make too much of a difference. If they could test it in school polls and then corporate polls, and it was shown to be foolproof I wouldn't mind, but I'm very skeptical (the theme of this whole post). I wouldn't mind if they tested this in government opinion polls, where they realise that error could occur, and that it might not make too much of an impression on the governing of the country (i.e. discard the poll if the results are within 5% of each other or something).

    Anyway, that's my rant over for the day. Later
  • The ability of the internet to handle large-scale voting in a fair and secure fashion is here [hotornot.com] today [ratemymullet.com].
  • i think that is the best way to balot folks, that way, you can get sections presented to you one at a time, allowing larger buttons, and less confusion, not tomention you could standardise on all interfaces, and even keep a running tally so you can just release the results as soon a the polling station is closed.

    to make it safe from crackers, just make them so that they have no connection to the internet, the polsers can just hit the results button on their master station at the end of the night, and get a print out of the numbers, then call whom even with their results.

  • This is not an all-or-nothing issue. Even if trusting the vote of an almost anonynmous user somewhere on the Internet is ludicrous, this doesn't mean that we should ignore the Internet's rightful place in the electoral process: distributing public information

    Because we have strong crypto, and we have the political institutions to handle certification authority, and there *are* ways to do authentic but anonymous signatures, I feel we should use a vote recording system that takes advantage of these features to avoid the vote recording problems of the 2000 US presidential election.

    Imagine authenticating ONCE PER YEAR with the County Clerk's office, where they register you in their LDAP directory and give you a card with an x509 certificate. The judges at the polling places can hand you an anonymous x509 certificate -w- private key from a pile once they authenticate you via LDAP (with your picture). You can use the anonymous x509 to record your votes to another LDAP directory from a machine in a voting booth. You put your card in, the machine asks you to verify the fingerprint on the certificate matches what the card says, and then presents you with a slate of choices. When you're done, it shows you a raw XML format completed ballot. You sign it with the anonymous key. The voting machine accepts the signed ballot only when it has a certificate revocation for the signing key to go with it. The election judge sees a green light over your booth, presses a button, and the directory of votes and CRL of valid anonymous certificates are updated. You go home, and at the prescribed closing of the polls, each polling place opens its directory of recorded votes up for the big LDAP replication. Votes are tallied in batch time, and recounts can be done at will after the tally directory is populated.

    The real problem is the federated system of feifdoms down in all the County Clerk's offices of your hometowns. Putting this kind of minimum standard to their practices amounts to cutting their crooked balls off. The bigger the Clerk's office, the bigger the fight they put up.

  • The problem of assuring that someone's vote is uncoerced is one that means Internet voting should never be implemented. Oregon's approach of doing all mail-in ballots is a terrible idea for exactly the same reaon. This is a fundamental problem and not one that can be fixed by technology.

    It's actually a difficult thing to make sure that people's votes are both secret and uncoerced even in public polling places. The rules about who can stand in or near polling places, how they have to be arranged, what the booths look like, etc., are complex and detailed because over the years people have come up with all sorts of ways to control the results.

  • I doubt it'll happen in my lifetime (Score:3, Interesting)

    by baptiste ( 256004 ) <mike@baptis[ ]us ['te.' in gap]> on Friday February 08, 2002 @11:18AM (#2974158) Homepage Journal
    I think the main point - voting in privacy, etc will be a difficult thing for Internet voting to overcome. There's vote fraud now and even if they do develop Internet voting, there will be fraud then. The trick is figuring out which method would be worse. For example - in Internet voting, it is a sure bet that operatives will go door to door, asking if folks have voted and if not showing them 'how' I also wonder if you could ever develop an online system that hackers could imact (doubt it) Our curren tsystem is far from perfect - but it would be nice to see the Internet used to imprve the current system in terms of validation and vote tabulation from precincts. Ideally we'd have touchscreen voting machines - more accurate with results sent in via secure Internet connections - not from each machine - too insecure, but fr9om each locality. Yes, that too could be compromised, but it would be easier (standardized equipment, etc) to ensure encrypted connections were proeprly used, etc, etc.

    It amazes me how old our voting system is. I live in teh sitcks, but somehow we've managed to use fairly recently technology - like the tactile button/LED machines with scrolling paper a few years ago to the new touchscreen machines in the last election (modelled just like the tactile button machines) to reduce confusion

    Just because we CAN do something doesn't mean we should. I'm not sure Internet voting would improve the integrity of the voting and in teh end that's what relaly counts. If you don't care enough to get off your fat butt and vote in your local fire station, etc, then you don't need to be voting!

  • I can just see it now: the voting software wouldn't be user-friendly enough, my mom wouldn't be able to figure out how to use it, and just power off the voting station computer. :-)

  • For all the groaning in November, it's still critical that a recount was even possible. It was eventually done, the results published, and history knows exactly what happened. Had ballots been stolen or tampered, that would have become part of history too, even if the results then couldn't be.

    The moment it's exclusively electronic, it can get cracked *undetectably*. The detection is the key.
  • "After several years debating minimum requirements for voting equipment, the computer science and public policy communities appear to agree that the Internet--as it exists today--can't sufficiently safeguard the privacy, security and reliability of the voting process.

    In different words: it's just like the voting system we have now.

  • From the article: "But voting poses a unique problem: elections require that the voter's identity, once verified, be stripped away to ensure anonymity."

    This is probably the toughest nut to crack. Not only must identity be stripped away, but it must be stripped away in a way that's transparent to the voter.

    When I vote in my local precinct here in Virginia, I go to one set of poll workers to identify myself. When they're satisified that I'm who I say I am, and that I'm a registered voter, they hand me a little index card that acts as a chit which allows me to vote.

    I then hand the chit to the voting booth attendant. The voting booth attendant knows I'm permitted to vote, but doesn't know anything else about me. Consequently there's no way to tie my identity to my ballot. Furthermore, it's plain to me as I go throught the process that there's no way to tie my identity to my ballot.

    Online systems could use a similar chit system to insure voter anonymity, but this would not be in plain view of the voter. The voter would have no way of knowing that his identifying information is not being stored along with his ballot.

    Until that problem is solved, I personally have no interest in casting my ballot online.
  • I was looking forward to Slashdotting the vote!

    However, I was *not* looking forward to Bill Gates running for president and all of MSFT's employees each voting hundreds of thousands of times.
    • However, I was *not* looking forward to Bill Gates running for president and all of MSFT's employees each voting hundreds of thousands of times.

      Yeah, we'd have to crack the MSN computers (it's been done before) and change all those votes to ...

  • All of the commercial vendors of election software are using closed source, running on top of closed source OS. This allows wholesale rigging at either end.

    Just insert a script into next version of Windows: If Date is 11/4/04....

    Here's Industry Standard's coverage [thestandard.com] of a panel on Internet Voting sponsored by the Freedom Forum during the last Democratic National Convention. My Q&A with election.com CEO Joe Mohen is at the end, tho they missed the closed source issue.


  • Besides the easy ability for fraud, etc, that others have mentioned, I think it's a bad idea simply because it would attenuate one more of the instances where you get to see and speak to the other people in your neighborhood.

    Everyone there at your polling place lives somewhere nearby, as you do. Isn't it nice in our personalized, lonely world, to once in a while be in a situation where you get a good look at who the neighbors are, maybe even get to say hi? Maybe you can meet that old lady who's always going on her evening walk past your house at about 7pm. You might be able to say hi to the guy down the street who's always working on his car. I think it's a wonderful exercise, not only in civil rights but in community, of which there are damn too few these days, and it'd be a shame to run the risk of losing it in the future.

    Remember California kiddies, primary vote is on March 5!

    • Does internet voting isolate us from our neighbors any more than absentee voting?

      • I suppose not, except in that I think internet voting, if they ever got over the security/legal hurdles (which are huge), has the potential to become THE way to vote, since it'd be quicker, cheaper, & easier to count (& recount). Hell, you could have vote tallies in real time.

        I guess I'm just not that eager to do away with one more community interraction. Doesn't anyone want to know the people in their neighborhood anymore?

  • I find it funny that we can file our taxes over the internet to the IRS, but we can't get an anonymous voting system put together.

    does that seem odd to anyone else?

    • No, not really. When you are filing your taxes, the only parties that can be affected are you and the IRS. If there is some sort of fraud, then the only ones that may be harmed are you and the IRS. If there is voter fraud, on the other hand, then the entire population can be affected.

    • Re:Voting on the net. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by markmoss ( 301064 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @01:17PM (#2974948)
      I find it funny that we can file our taxes over the internet to the IRS, but we can't get an anonymous voting system put together.

      1) Different challenges. Anonymity conflicts with security. You can't keep an audit trail on computer without identifying information. With internet tax filing, the ID has got to go along with the records; with voting, it's supposed to be stripped out.

      2)Your vote is supposed to be entirely private. Your tax return isn't (your spouse signs it, your accountant may know more about it than you do). I'm not sure there is any real security against internet snooping, except that finding your return in millions of packets would be a big job...

      3) No one is going to come around to your house offering $100 if you will let them file a tax return in your name. Before reforms were instituted in the late 19th century, there was a lot of flat out vote buying in the USA, but now only congressmen get to sell their votes...

  • Same for real life (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @12:18PM (#2974555)
    "Every state requires that votes be cast in secret, but how can officials verify that a party hack isn't standing beside a remote voter?"

    And how do they do the same for physical elections? They have vote "watchers" or some such. Even with vote watchers people can be influenced by others [1]. There is nothing stopping us from voting electronically (disregard over the net) in the same way we do physically, in central locations. What voting electronically DOES do, is allow us to have verified results as soon as votes are cast, without introducing human error and speculation (yes yes, subject to the usual haxoring of the process, but that is probably lower than the margin of error introduced by over-speculation and human error).

    [1] Real event: the mother of somebody I know was told upon going to vote for the first time in a new county, that she had to reregister, but was strongly dissuaded from registering as a Democrat, because, as the pollster said, the county was largely Republican and she "could not vote if she was a Democrat" (a half-truth: she wouldn't be able to vote in *Republican primaries* (DUH!), but this wasn't made clear to her.), so she registered as Republican. Yes it might have been her fault for being persuaded, but AFAIK, it is a *Federal crime* to defraud the election process...it's even more horrible that the people supposedly watching over the polls to keep them neutral do it.
    • "the county was largely Republican"

      You don't happen to remember what country this was? I want to know what other country on earth has both Democratic and Republican parties.

  • Why is this even a good idea? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by D_Fresh ( 90926 ) <slashdot AT dougalexander DOT com> on Friday February 08, 2002 @12:33PM (#2974661) Journal
    I think the disadvantages of remote voting far outweigh the advantages. Sure, you include those who are homebound or somehow can't make it to the polling place, but you lose a whole lot more. When people are actually present at the polling place, you can guarantee that they:
    • Are voting in a standardized fashion
    • Are voting alone
    • Only vote once
    • Understand the voting instructions
    Ironic that on the heels of the whole MS security discussion, and the rehash of the "computers will never be truly secure" conversation, that we somehow think that one of the fundamental tenets of our democracy can work not only on computers, but over the Internet. Doesn't anyone else see the lunacy of this proposition?

    Now, computer terminals safely ensconced at the polling places themselves might offer a few advantages...

  • It would be amusing, were internet voting (or, for that matter, any computerized system like a touch screen) to ever be implemented, to have the system also provide information on the candidates. For instance, a full listing of all the financial information that the FEC requires, plus their voting record or other history as is relevant and of public record.

    ("Vote for ---? This candidate has been funded by... and his party has been funded by... Please confirm." ;) )

    Plus, allow the candidates to specify a short statement, and maybe the same for news services. *shrug*
  • ...against Palm Beach voters. They've figured out where the cup holder is on their computers, but haven't figured out why you need a rodent to operate it.

  • vote "no" on internet voting (Score:4, Insightful)

    by supernova87a ( 532540 ) <kepler1@@@hotmail...com> on Friday February 08, 2002 @01:01PM (#2974836)
    Let me not address the technical issues of how people's identities will be validated if internet voting is tried -- that's an implementation problem, and I'm sort of a big picture kind of guy... :) Or just unqualified.

    Instead, my question is how internet (or any type of remote, instantaneous) voting will affect people's attitudes toward elections in general.

    I can, on the one hand, see how internet voting would open up great possibilities -- people's votes are counted exactly, no room for error, people don't have to trudge through rain or snow to get to the ballot box, people living overseas or traveling at the time can vote just as easily as people in their home district, and people who may not have had access to voting before now get a chance. Internet voting might also give people a more direct feeling of influence in a vote's outcome. If the results could be released immediately, you would see how your one vote stacked up with the rest of them.

    But on the other hand, and what worries me more, is that these very advantages might erode the significance and importance of elections. Or, change it into something that I might not like. Is it possible that voting, if made so easy as a click of the mouse, placed right next to the CNN poll, would become as meaningless to the average person? If every day, we encountered 10 polls asking for our opinion, how would voting for a person for office be made something with more weighty consequences? I know how little thought I put into an online vote, how would most other people feel?

    The thing about voting, the way it is now, is that the physical effort, trouble, or fact that it is an extra-ordinary event, gives it significance and reminds people that this isn't just another mouse click after opening a web page. I worry that if we make it too easy to vote, or too commonplace, people may forget what voting actually means. They ought to travel to polling places, and see the other people who're voting, see who the members of their community are, and at least be mildly provoked to consider thoughtfully what their physical vote translates into. To that end, we should make the current process of voting as easy and as fair as possible. We can improve the system of registration to make it easier, create more sophisticated voting machines, help people get to the polls if they have difficulty, remove barriers to people who have been unfairly treated -- by all means do these things -- but in the end, voting should remain a special event, I think.

  • what problems? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @01:37PM (#2975044) Journal

    Privacy, security, and reliability, all seem like problems that are easy to solve. Just give each person in the U.S. a CD with their public/private key when they register to vote. As an added bonus we'd eliminate spam.

    For example: Every state requires that votes be cast in secret, but how can officials verify that a party hack isn't standing beside a remote voter?

    Simple solution: let them change their vote. Even if someone watches them vote, that's no more than their word that they won't change it.

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