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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

#51

Post by jagbolanos »

vacri wrote: post #41
RangerScience wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been talking with people involved in elections in Honduras and they explained a technique that is normally used for paper ballots. It's called "La Cadena" (the chain) and it works like this.

A person goes to the voting center and gets a ballot That person goes to the booth and marks the ballot That person skips entering their ballot and goes out Shows the ballot to the coercer, verifying the vote The coercer gives the ballot to the next person The next person gets another ballot and has the previous one hidden. That person introduces the new ballot, hides the old one and goes out. And the chain goes on.

Apparently it's a common way to coerce votes in low income urban areas and rural areas. You only need distraction or complicity from a person from the voting table and it's hard to detect.

Another common issue is vote stuffing.

On the philosophical part, it is in the end a human problem, but with technology at least you should reduce the possibility of cheating

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#52

Post by yen223 »

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.

In a system where your vote can't be verified, there's no way to assert that

- your vote went to the candidate that you chose

- all votes come from actual human beings

Politicians can rig votes without coercing anyone, so I guess that's a plus.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#53

Post by sgnelson »

adwf wrote: post #46
tgb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

But you don't have to bribe 100k people. You just have to bribe/influence 50,001 people (and I know that's not exactly true, this is based on a US two party system, not the variety of parties in the UK, but hang with me here.) And in reality, it's as the saying goes for Baseball. "Every team is going to win a third of it's games, and every team is going to lose a third of it's games, it's what you do with the last third that makes a difference."

Every party is going to have a large number of supporters and a large number of detractors, it's what you do with the unaffiliated votes that matters.

Now I'm really going to talk out of my ass, in a horrible, gross generalization with no support to back me up; I'd guess that for many elections, it's less than 20% of voters who actually decide the fate of their country/district. And since we're talking about voters (not citizens or residents/people), we're then talking about an even smaller group of people you must influence. That's why bribery, voter intimidation and pure old fashioned marketing matter; You don't need to get everyone on board, only a much smaller percentage of key voters. Isn't democracy great?

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#55

Post by philipn »

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…

San Francisco has started the process of creating just that kind of end-to-end open source voting system (using the existing paper ballots, optical scanning and manual recount process that exists here). Here's some more information: https://gcn.com/articles/2016/06/02/sf-open-source-voting.as...

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#56

Post by Raticide »

msdos wrote: post #48

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.

But those things do go wrong all the time. Luckily they don't dictate who controls the entire country.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#57

Post by Retra »

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…

>It's just standard programmer NIH hubris; we think we can do it better, therefore we should.

It's not NIH at all. Electronic voting has not been implemented sufficiently. It could be done. It's not about doing it better, it's about doing it at all. It's not-invented-anywhere hubris, and that's plenty of reason to do something.

People aren't much harder to manipulate than machines, and they're also just as transparent. There is no fundamental reason to believe computers can't be more secure than humans when it comes to collecting data and tallying it.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#60

Post by doctorstupid »

I feel that our fears are misplaced towards the wrong kind of voting machine, the one that collects the vote. The other kind, the one placing the vote, is far easier to manipulate. Facebook and Google have the mechanisms at their disposal to influence elections globally, and within a couple of election cycles could probably have the world's democracies more aligned to the interests of the US.
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