Split Thread Electronic voting

JoeMorgue

Self Employed , Remittance Man
JoeMorgue
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I wish we'd get over our fear of online voting. 99% of America has a web capable device near literally grafted to them every waking moment of their life and even for the small percentage that don't that just means nearly every home, office, library, and internet cafe becomes a voting booth.

Voting website opens a 8 a.m. Eastern Standard time on a Monday and closes at 8 p.m Eastern Standard time the following Saturday. You login to the website and it gives you breakdown all your eligible elections. You pick the candidates, hit a big "Vote" button. Sign out. That's over 5 full days where the only requirement is "Get to some kind of online capable device for maybe 5 minutes" Over night on Saturday all the votes can be tallied, on Sunday verified by some external auditing system to give people the warm and fuzzy, and the results announced Sunday night.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
I wish we'd get over our fear of online voting. 99% of America has a web capable device near literally grafted to them every waking moment of their life and even for the small percentage that don't that just means nearly every home, office, library, and internet cafe becomes a voting booth.

Voting website opens a 8 a.m. Eastern Standard time on a Monday and closes at 8 p.m Eastern Standard time the following Saturday. You login to the website and it gives you breakdown all your eligible elections. You pick the candidates, hit a big "Vote" button. Sign out. That's over 5 full days where the only requirement is "Get to some kind of online capable device for maybe 5 minutes" Over night on Saturday all the votes can be tallied, on Sunday verified by some external auditing system to give people the warm and fuzzy, and the results announced Sunday night.
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My fear is mostly related to a lake of faith in our government ability to secure an online system. So far, they haven't demonstrated much ability to do so. Neither have many other organizations for that matter. Also, don't see it helping much. You make get more people with less interest in politics voting but I'm not sure how that helps anything.

I have hope that states experimenting with open primaries might help break the duopoly but I'd like to see some form of ranked choice voting or instant runoff voting.
 
ahhell said:
My fear is mostly related to a lake of faith in our government ability to secure an online system.
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Other than just a general distrust of technology I don't see why we'd trust our government to count paper ballots (or some equivalent) but not trust them to do it electronically.

We file our taxes electronically. No reason we can't vote that way.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Other than just a general distrust of technology I don't see why we'd trust our government to count paper ballots (or some equivalent) but not trust them to do it electronically.

We file our taxes electronically. No reason we can't vote that way.
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The decentralized system is harder to hack in a way that would actually effect elections. You'd have to do it piecemeal vs a centralized system that all on the same network and accessible via the internet. Sure, florida has its hanging chad but that was only in florida and even then only seemed to be a problem in Miami-Dade County.

In short, its physically easier to stuff ballots on the internet than in the actual ballot box.
 
Upchurch said:
This is a bit older video, but still a very valid reason why electronic and online voting is a completely horrible idea:
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I was just about to post that video!

Paper votes are great, the system works and is more or less immune to hacking.

This is the FPTP video I frequently post in other threads.

I think this should be required viewing for all children of school leaving age.

 
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Could we have electronic voting but leave control to the states? Wouldn't that address the same concerns?
 
After 35 years as a software developer, I simply do not trust electronic voting and never will. I have no idea if any machines or tabulations have ever been hacked, and that's a big problem, but I know for sure that they can be.
 
WilliamSeger said:
After 35 years as a software developer, I simply do not trust electronic voting and never will. I have no idea if any machines or tabulations have ever been hacked, and that's a big problem, but I know for sure that they can be.
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Which is weird because my own computer science background is leading me down the exact same path.

Sure a machine can be hacked but a human can be bribed, lazy, incompetent, make a mistake, biased, etc.

I'll take hackable anyday.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Which is weird because my own computer science background is leading me down the exact same path.

Sure a machine can be hacked but a human can be bribed, lazy, incompetent, make a mistake, biased, etc.

I'll take hackable anyday.
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That's why you have redundant humans in charge of vote handling/counting. This is addressed in at least one of the videos presented.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Which is weird because my own computer science background is leading me down the exact same path.

Sure a machine can be hacked but a human can be bribed, lazy, incompetent, make a mistake, biased, etc.

I'll take hackable anyday.
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I want a system where any bad actors run a high risk of ending up in prison, and one of the reasons there are so many hackers in the world is the very low risk of that happening. The other problems that you mentioned produce small, random effects that are important only when the vote is close and that can be settled by recounts. For both of those purposes -- physical evidence and reproducibility -- I want a system that preserves original votes.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Other than just a general distrust of technology I don't see why we'd trust our government to count paper ballots (or some equivalent) but not trust them to do it electronically.

We file our taxes electronically. No reason we can't vote that way.
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Canada recently had an issue where hundreds of electronic tax filers had their information stolen by a hacker. So saying that we trust the government to handle taxes electronically doesn't mean that there aren't flaws.

Plus, there is a critical difference between taxes and voting... internet voting would (by its nature) be a rather short-period event. (You'd only have the polls open for one day. Or maybe a few days.) If something goes wrong (System crash, denial of service attack) there's no alternative. On the other hand, 'tax season' lasts several weeks/months. But if there is a problem, the deadline can easily be extended (as happened in Canada.)

https://nationalpost.com/news/canad...canada-revenue-thereby-extending-tax-deadline

From: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/506741/why-you-cant-vote-online/
...the U.S. Department of Defense canceled plans to allow Internet voting by military personnel overseas after a security team audited a $22 million system developed by Accenture and found it vulnerable to cyberattacks....the District of Columbia set up a system that let voters go online, enter an ID code they’d received in the mail, cast a vote, and get a record of the result. Election officials invited computer scientists to try to hack the system in a mock election. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, and two grad students accepted that offer—and soon found an error in the source code that “allowed us to completely steal the election”
 
JoeMorgue said:
Which is weird because my own computer science background is leading me down the exact same path.

Sure a machine can be hacked but a human can be bribed, lazy, incompetent, make a mistake, biased, etc.

I'll take hackable anyday.
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Really? That's illogical.

Yes people might be bribed, lazy, incompetent, make a mistake, biased, but to actually change an election, you need a lot of them to be bribed, lazy, incompetent, make a mistake, or biased. At most a single person could modify the results of a single polling station, and they'd have to do that under the watch of multiple other people. On top if that, with paper ballots you can always recount then should there be a hint of an issue.

With a computerised system, if it's hackable, then depending where it is hackable, and how, a single person could modify the results of the entire election by enough to change the outcome. Further more, it's impossible to recount the votes because they simply exist as data, which if hacked, will always return the same hacked value with no independent way of checking the numbers.

An electronic voting system is at far more risk of being corrupted to create a fraudulent election than a pen and paper one.
 
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Upchurch said:
This is a bit older video, but still a very valid reason why electronic and online voting is a completely horrible idea:
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It is not just an older video, it is out of date.

Blockchain technology has the potential to make electronic voting unhackable. It even has the ability to maintain voter privacy (Monero style).
 
psionl0 said:
It is not just an older video, it is out of date.

Blockchain technology has the potential to make electronic voting unhackable. It even has the ability to maintain voter privacy
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If it's possible to do electronic voting and have the process as high security as paper ballots are today then I'm all for that.

While the video is old Tom Scott does make several points that would be pertinent to a blockchain based electronic voting system

i)The stakes are *very* high. If you can alter the outcome of an election then potentially Trillions (with a T) of dollars are at stake.

ii) We still need to trust the system makers that the system is as advertised. - see point i)

iii) the biggest vulnerability is at the point of voting. I'm imagining a tablet displaying the vote slip and then the voter taps for where they want to put the X, a confirmation screen pops up, user clicks "OK confirm".
How do we know that the voting machine has incremented the count for the actually voted for candidate and added that to the blockchain, rather than a n other candidate? - see point ii) then see point i)
for that matter how often will voters fat finger their vote for the wrong candidate then accidentally click confirm anyway?

iv) Blockchain is *not* unhackable, at least not in the future. It's incredibly difficult given todays technology, but see quantum computers, and then see point i)

Even if blockchain remains unhackable despite potential quantum computer advances, a system based upon it is still vulnerable to attack and the stakes are too damn high.
Electronic voting is great for reality tv shows, for general elections, notsomuch.
 
psionl0 said:
It is not just an older video, it is out of date.

Blockchain technology has the potential to make electronic voting unhackable. It even has the ability to maintain voter privacy (Monero style).
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No, it can only assure that data wasn't altered after it was inserted in the blockchain.
 
WilliamSeger said:
Blockchain technology has the potential to make electronic voting unhackable. It even has the ability to maintain voter privacy
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No, it can only assure that data wasn't altered after it was inserted in the blockchain.
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Yup... votes would still be at risk from the user's side of things.

I had a friend who's computer had a virus that redirected all web traffic that would normally go to google or yahoo to their own search engine. It would have been relatively easy to modify the virus to redirect all internet traffic from a legitimate voting site to a fake one.

I'm not even sure what use blockchain would be here. Yes, blockchain is useful in decentralized applications (such as cryptocurrency) but in the case of voting, your electronic ballot would have a single destination, i.e. the government computer. And we already have other types of secure communications methods (SSL, SSH) for communicating from a peer to a server.
 
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