Surely not security. Not with todays level of sophistication and incryption techniques. I can see a lot of advantages.
Exactly how would someone defraud the system? At gunpoint?
And who actually holds these objections? Politicians? Religious right? Internet illiterate? Sean Hannity?
Peace,
mangeorge
Security, and especially fear of trojan horses hijacking someone’s vote without them even being aware of it.
Possibility of vote-buying on a massive scale.
Also someone might launch a massive attack to shut down the system, thus preventing votes from being counted by the deadline and causing all sorts of unpleasantness.
And identification. If the county election commission gets a request telling them that ITR Champion wants to send in his vote from IP address 10.00.00.01, how do they know it was sent by the real ITR Champion rather than an impostor?
But don’t financial dealings, some very large, face these same challenges? And national secrets whiz around the internet 24/7.
Except for vote buying, and that’s a threat right now. Where was it? Chicago? Where Gore people alledgedly bought votes with cigarettes.
Financial deals are not the same as voting. There the two sides have the opportunity to set up a secure encryption scheme long is advance, and guard carefully against some fake communication being substituted for the real one. Whereas with voting you would have to set up communication to tens of millions of computers, some of them owned and run by people who don’t know jack shit about keeping their computer secure from outside attacks. Yes, millions of people do buy stuff over the internet, but there have been plenty of cases of online identity theft. In a close election, a few charges of “my vote was stolen by a hacker” would be enough to send the entire thing to the courts.
There’s also the deadline issue. If amazon.com is knocked down for a couple hours, then people can’t buy books for a couple hours. If the voting system is knocked down for the last two hours when the polls are still supposed to be open, then the entire election would be thrown into chaos.
And no, the Gore campaign did not try to buy votes in Chicago or anywhere else. Vote buying could happen with absentee ballots, but not in an automated way that would bring in thousands or even millions of votes with minimal effort. (Vote buying can’t happen with physical voting booths, because although I could pay you money I don’t have anyway of knowing who you vote for. You could just take my money and still vote for the other guy.)
You’re right, the “votes for smokes” caper was miles away in Milwaukee. And I don’t know that it was ever proven. What an election that was, eh.
What I had thought about was a subscription deal with the governmemt, where you would indeed set up an account well before the election. Then there would be a one to two week (or so) period in which everybody would actually vote. The polling site would send a ballot to all subscribers who would in turn reply with their choices on that ballot. All within the allotted time, of course. The initial contact would be seperate from the polling, and could be through snail mail, if neccessary. We already have a system in place for absentee voting.
But you’re right, i don’t know jack shit (relatively speaking) about protecting my computer.
It seems to me you may be mixing up electronic voting and online voting. No one, to my knowledge, is suggesting online voting. Urgh…the possibilities for abuse is boundless.
As to electronic voting, see: black box voting or the October issue of the ACM (may require registration?).
I object to online voting, because it makes voting easier for one segment of the population over another. The folks well-off enough to have a have a computer in their home and internet service can vote much easier than the folks who have to make time to get to their polling location.
As much as possible, voting should take an equal amount of effort for everybody. And yes, I realize this is impossible to do completely (people with cars to get to the polls vs those who don’t, etc).
Link to a small vid explaining what would happen.
It’s a joke btw.
That’s the objection I do share.
No, I’m asking about online voting alright.
Not suggesting, for sure. Just wondering. I don’t want to louse up the system any worse that it already is.
Nah. First I want to get rid of the electoral college and change the way results are reported. But that’s because I wish for fairness. Pie in the sky, eh? 
I think the biggest objections are:
a) Fraud - When I vote at my precint, I have to sign the form. The workers can do an instant check to make sure that the signatures match. They can see that I’m a woman. They can ask for i.d. if they’re unsure about the signature. This prevents some fraud. My husband can’t go in and claim to be me as he could with online voting. He couldn’t claim to be his deceased mother (whom undoubtedly remained on the voting lists for years after her death because I doubt the BOE scans through death notices and removes names after death) because he’s a man. There’d be no safeguard for online voting against this type of (easy) fraud.
b) Control - This puts an enormous amount of power into the hands of the programmer. If he were an avid Democrat, he could code the program, for instance, to record every 15th Republican vote as Democratic. Recounts would be difficult because there’s no physical evidence of the vote.
c) Constitution - If a hacker can shut down the SDMB for days on end, what could he do to our electoral process? There is no provision in the constitution for what would happen if the vote didn’t take place on the 1st Tuesday following the 1st Monday of November.