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Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

engineering.stanford.edu

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Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#41

Post by vacri »

RangerScience wrote: post #21
Ao7bei3s wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electronic voting is an entire field of research. As with cryptography, do not come up with your own methods. Here are some problems with your method: allows coercion (is not receipt-free), violates vote secrecy (attacker can just force voter to reveal password), allows ballot stuffing, allows partial results (no voting under equal circumstances), probably completely relies on server for "security" of passwords, salt…

Is there any solution where I can verify my vote, but someone can't coerce me into showing them?

There are electronic means if you're a crypto-nerd, but for the general public, paper ballots suit. You know your vote is marked to your preference when you put it in the box, and no-one can make you prove it one way or the other. You should also be able to stick around (or get someone to stick around for you) and confirm that the box you used is included in the counting, should you desire to.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#42

Post by Bromskloss »

Dove wrote: post #34
ccvannorman wrote: post #32

Maybe OT, but why is one of the requirements for a better voting system "anonymous"? What's wrong with a voting system in which every citizen's vote is transparent and available? Seems like it would be much less susceptible to fraud and easier to audit that way. I don't see a problem with anyone seeing how I voted! Maybe I am missing something?

In a system where your vote can be verified, you can be coerced into voting a certain way.

As a special case of this, one might see the mild "coercion" in simply being uncomfortable with going against the grain by voting for something that others strongly dislike.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#43

Post by tgb »

adwf wrote: post #24
Strom wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're choosing a suboptimal attack spot in your paper voting attack scenario. Instead of manipulating the thousands of people around the country who count & send out the results of those booths, it's easier to manipulate the far fewer people who do the aggregation for final results. Also a computer voting system that is exploitable via "one hack" is inexcusably badly designed. Yes hacks happen & adversaries have zer…

It's still a 3-point of failure versus a thousand in a paper vote. I've seen the British election many times, there are hundreds of people in the counting hall for every district. They count, then they shuffle the ballots around and have different people recount. It would take the bribery of thousands upon thousands of people. People who are under constant scrutiny, not just by those around them, but on TV also. A co…

I've counted votes a couple times before and can tell you that where I come from in the US recounting is minimal (if done at all). We pair up with a person of our choosing and then count and recount. Collusion is trivial. Just make sure the total counts add up and that your results aren't so wildly disproportionate from the other people's that they'd get reexamined when all the pairs' numbers are summed.

I don't know what you mean by scrutiny on the TV - are local polls counted live on television in the UK?

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#44

Post by rjeli »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #28

Um, I don't think there is much legitimacy of elections right now. How the fuck did Trump buy his way into the Republican party for one? Do I really think my vote counts right now? "Online voting could threaten the fundamental legitimacy of elections?" The author does have some valid points, I just thought it was funny that some people think our elections are legitimate.

Do you believe the majority of GOP voters support Trump?

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#45

Post by sgnelson »

The thing about online voting that has always gotten me is that it violates the ideals behind the "Australian Ballot." [0] ie, one should have the right to cast a secret ballot, and doing so in a public polling place at least theoretically guarantees this.

With online elections, there is no proof or protection of this. For me that's the most important thing. Full Stop. Security implementations, hacking, etc. are all secondary concerns in my opinion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot

note: As a True Capitalist(I say sarcastically), I've actually come to believe in being able to sell my vote (I'm quite serious), which of course, the secret ballot precludes me from doing. After all, if I'm going to be forced to essentially only choose between the lesser of two evils, I should at least be able to profit from the poorly designed electoral system.

I actually "back of the napkin" calculated this for the last presidential election, and I believe it came down to something like a rather pitiful $3 for each presidential vote (forgive me, this was a while ago). Of course,once you add the other elected positions, this increases, but I believe it was still generally under $20 per vote. I did not take into account geographic discrepancies (different number of positions up for election/different amounts of money spent on highly contested elections, etc)

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#46

Post by adwf »

tgb wrote: post #43
adwf wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a 3-point of failure versus a thousand in a paper vote. I've seen the British election many times, there are hundreds of people in the counting hall for every district. They count, then they shuffle the ballots around and have different people recount. It would take the bribery of thousands upon thousands of people. People who are under constant scrutiny, not just by those around them, but on TV also. A co…

I've counted votes a couple times before and can tell you that where I come from in the US recounting is minimal (if done at all). We pair up with a person of our choosing and then count and recount. Collusion is trivial. Just make sure the total counts add up and that your results aren't so wildly disproportionate from the other people's that they'd get reexamined when all the pairs' numbers are summed. I don't know…

Yep - this is the kind of thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XydeHaqxBbg

It's almost impossible to imagine that someone could bribe that many people to influence an election in the UK. There are 650 seats with over 100k population per seat. I just can't imagine it being bribable on a large scale. Maybe some tiny constituency in a tiny district might get influenced, but the absolute smallest is about 20k votes. That's very difficult to rig.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#47

Post by mikestew »

ccvannorman wrote: post #40
ccvannorman wrote: post #32

Maybe OT, but why is one of the requirements for a better voting system "anonymous"? What's wrong with a voting system in which every citizen's vote is transparent and available? Seems like it would be much less susceptible to fraud and easier to audit that way. I don't see a problem with anyone seeing how I voted! Maybe I am missing something?

Thanks for those (other comments) - it seems obvious in retrospect. As someone whose vote cannot be bought these things don't occur to me. :-)

I'm not looking to buy your vote. But should you choose poorly come Election Day, maybe me and the boys will pay you another visit.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#48

Post by msdos »

The key claim is: there’s no way with any reasonable amount of resources that you can guarantee that the software and hardware are bug-free and that they haven’t been maliciously attacked

The same could be said about other electronic systems that already govern lives, like planes, cars, phones and medical equipment.

And yet life goes on.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#49

Post by pdkl95 »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #29
jacquesm wrote: post #14

Some of the people behind 'wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet' (we do not trust voting computers) are active in the CCC and have some pretty good arguments on why electronic voting really is a danger to democracy. https://www.ccc.de/en/tags/wahlcomputer The link between electronic voting and online voting is a strong one and one would expect the online voting situation to be far more suspect to all kinds of trickery than…

I agree with some of the arguments against online voting. However, it isn't really realistic to do re-counts right now, nor do people do them regularly. If the people doing the counting are bought then that is an issue too. Both ways suck right now. One thing that I would like to see is an open source, standardized system though. There was/is an effort towards this right now. http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/our_s…

> However, it isn't really realistic to do re-counts right now, nor do people do them regularly.

About half of the states require by law a recount by hand at a random selection of voting locations.

> If the people doing the counting are bought then that is an issue too.

That's why you have hostile observers from opposing parties present.

> open source software

So you have the source. Now prove that it is installed at both the client and server. Then prove that the operating system, bootloader, and every other part of the computer you need to trust is actually loading and running your software properly.

Difficulty: Volkswagen showed it's easy evade inspections, and good luck proving anything on a system with Intel ME. Do you know that there isn't an extra core or ROM hidden inside one of the chips?

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#50

Post by sgnelson »

vacri wrote: post #37
ElijahLynn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with some of the arguments against online voting. However, it isn't really realistic to do re-counts right now, nor do people do them regularly. If the people doing the counting are bought then that is an issue too. Both ways suck right now. One thing that I would like to see is an open source, standardized system though. There was/is an effort towards this right now. http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/our_s…

> However, it isn't really realistic to do re-counts right now, nor do people do them regularly. Australia uses paper ballots, and every election there's a seat or two somewhere that there's a recount. The major parties get their volunteers[0] to scrutinise the officials as they count as well, so you have multiple opposing interests scrutinising the actual count. Every vote basically gets at least three pairs of eyeb…

The US has been down that road, and I forgive you for not knowing this (as you're Australian). But let me introduce you to Hanging Chad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_(paper) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_election_recount

Although, calling this system a "Paper ballot" is not quite the truth. While it uses paper as the medium, the hole punching method is non-traditional in relation to basic written checks/X's or even scantron selection (which also has issues). But my point is that even "simple" and "low tech" methods can still have unexpected issues, such as the infamous Florida case.

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