Electron Voting

Great Debates
1

I read today that DoD is working on a system to allow service men and women the ability to cast their votes while overseas via a secure web interface. Appearently they are trying to write the software in such a way that it will be nearly impossible for someone to hack (well, thats their ultimate goal). I assume that they will be working with various state and federal voting authorities to get it acreditted once the software is fully developed.

It brings up some thoughts for debate though:

A) What will be the reaction of the people that military personnel will be able to vote electronically?

B) What will be the confidence that such a system is secure and also tamper proof?

C) If there is another close election contest like the Bush/Gore disaster, and the decisive votes come from our overseas personnel using such a system, what will be the reaction? Will we get yet another round of “I won!” “No I won!” back and forth between the parties? How would such a thing be resolved?

D) If such a system could ever be made and shown to be secure (something I doubt) should it go into general use, not just for the military?

E) If such a system were in general use, would it greatly change the character of voting in the US? From what I understand the actual percentages of the voting public is fairly low, usually below 50% of voting age citizens (I’m pulling said number out of my bottom…I have no idea, just something I remember). If the internet was used to vote to augment traditional voting, would the numbers increase? If so, how would that effect the dynamics of voting?

F) Who would be the governing body for such a general use electronic voting system, how would they be audited in the event of a close contest, how would we be able to be assured that they would be unbiased and not corruptable?

G) I’m sure that putting such a system in place would be like throwing blood and red meat into the water for the sharks, namely every two bit hacker out there would be climbing out of the wood work to try and hack the system. Not to mention some governements that might try and either wreck the system or influence the election. What would be the result if someone DID manage to hack such a system, or worse yet, influence the election?

H) If a truely secure system could be put in place, that was accessible and easy to use (even by the people of Florida), could such a system be used to further empower the people by letting them vote more often on key issues? Or at least allow the people to have more direct input into both local and federal government?

Hopefully this will be an interesting debate. To be honest, part of me would love to have such a system. I would love the convience of voting from my home, would love to have pre vote forums where the issues come be discussed, the candidates flamed, etc. I think that I would feel more connected to the government. On the other hand, I would worry that either the people running the thing, or some hacker out there would be influencing who becomes president.

-XT

2

As a first reaction, I would absolutely love for (H) to be the case.

3

I’m not voting for an electron. I dislike negativity in political campaigns.

4

Yes yes…I realize that the title should have been ELECTRONIC voting. sigh Unfortunately I didn’t notice until well after I posted the thing, and its too late now.

-XT

5

Far too late. You’ll just have to try to spin it properly. :smiley:

6

DAMN! beat me to it! :wink: I wanted to know if electrons were old enuf to vote.
In case of electronic voting, if they allowed that in Florida, would the resolution of the monitor be an issue since a candidate might be in the middle of a pixel separation? :rolleyes:

I say test the electronic thingy within the US first. Then lets do it for the boys and girls in the armed forces.

7

You know, I hear that a positron has a rest mass of over half a million Electron-Votes.

8

Problems with electronic voting abound.

Diebold has machines in place at the moment, but researchers have found their code to have more than a few back doors that someone could take advantage of. Keep in mind, this is ‘private code’ and all, but its really terribly written software that is easy to take advantage of.

There’s no way to double check the accuracy of the votes- you don’t get any sort of printed confirmation of who you voted for or anything.

Web voting brings up even more problems: Servers can be crashed, servers can be overloaded by MILLIONS of people voting at once.

Everyone would love an easier way to vote, but its no where near maturity.

9

For some reason I can’t edit, so I wanted to add that not only is it nowhere near maturity- but I daresay it has no place being used at all now.

It is being used in a few states, fyi.

10

They’re introducing electronic voting in Ireland next year (it was previously used in only a few constituencies), and I’m generally in favour of it, but the potential problems have been scandalously ignored by the media. El Mariachi nailed most of them.

That’s the biggest problem. They could make the machines give printouts. They could also use these printouts to resolve any questions that might be raised of fraud/ machine failure/ etc. by having voters deposit these printouts into a ballot box before leaving the polling station. Unfortunately the e-voting lobby seems to think that would defeat the whole purpose, even though the printouts would only have to be counted in exceptional circumstances.

11

Wait a minute. Elections are organized by the several states,not by the Federal Government. How are the feds getting into the election business?

12

Sorry, but I didn’t have time to add this tidbit as I was leaving:

Johns Hopkins researchers were the ones that found the code to be faulty. Quick quote from an article that was circulating recently:

http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/2240291

So, among those glaring security issues you have

  1. A company privately compiling code that isn’t readily verifiable by an independent agency. This not only poses security risks in itself (no experience ‘in the wild’) but also hidden back doors which can be covered up
  2. I said before about confirmation of vote, or even knowing the terminal recorded the vote as you chose.

If you really wanted to go the distance- you could speculate that its possible for the machine if properly programmed to record two votes for one person for every vote another candidate got. Or more complicated things. Of course, I’m not saying this is going on- however when you have private code that has terrible security and backdoors and can’t be verified or tested it creates problems.

13

I do not feel like getting getting into a deep discussion about the technical part of this but I believe the problems presented here are already resolved. Anyone interested can read the article “Achieving Electronic Privacy” by David Chaum published in Scientific American in August 1992 which can be found online. This discuses the concept of blind signatures which can be used for voting:

A casts a vote which is encrypted and signed. Observers from the different parties and the state sign this vote electronically but cannot know what the vote contains. The vote is then tallied by the counters who can know who the vote is for and that it has been validated by the observers but they cannot know who cast it. Even if the observers and the counters cooperate they cannot know who cast the vote. The counters can also sign the vote as it is counted and the voter could have confirmation the vote was counted. Read the article. It works with money and it would work with votes too.

14

sailor, thank you very much for referring to that very interesting article.

15

sailor, what’s to keep someone from just overriding the output? That’s how I would attack the problem.

And I can guarantee you that however clever the adults are the bored 15 year old code-hounds will be smarter. They always have been before.

16

What’s to keep someone from overriding the results of a count of paper ballots? If you have several people cooperating you can always rig an election. The only prevention is that impartial observers oversee the process and this can be done just as well, if not better, with electronic means.

Well, that’s a pretty broad statement. So, why does the NSA not hire 15 year olds? PGP has not been craked by adults. Has it been cracked by 15 year olds?

Your post is just generic “I don’t trust anything or anybody” and can be applied just as well to paper ballots.

It is amazing how much distrust there is for new technology. My bank will not accept electronic signatures (which are more secure than anything else they have right now, including paper signatures) but they will accept a fax which is child’s play to forge.

17

I love new technology. And I’ll gladly embrace electronic voting once it gets out of the hands of Republican business cabals and is made open for anyone to inspect and verify as being bias-free.

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