101–110 of 316 posts
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
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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…
I don't get the complexity the US creates around voting. I live in a fairly large city (Berlin, Germany, around 3 million I believe). - I walk 150m to my polling place. It's similar for most people. - I've never waited more than 5 minutes - The polling place is run mostly by volunteers, about 5 or 6 per place, with civil servants filling spots that can't be filled. Costs are neglible. - I get a paper ballot, I mark m…
Experiences vary.
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I think there are big opportunities here for the extension of democracy. Democracy as it stands is quite weak - technically a Polyarchy, meaning that elected officials make decisions which we ratify. This could mean citizens could participate in decision making. The same reason is why the government and many people will try to oppose it, because greater democracy is a threat to any power system. The reason why people…
Do you really want citizens participating though? I have no clue about what it takes to run a state and I'm not a lawyer and can't really read new laws. Also, I have a job and very limited free time that I don't want to spent on keeping up with new developments in politics. So my opinions are likely very biased and quite useless for the political process. Even elected officials seem to have a hard time reading all th…
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…
In Estonian e-voting, you can vote as many times as you want, only your last vote is counted. A week after online voting is closed, there is still a paper voting day, where you can go and override your online vote with a paper vote in the traditional booth. If you were coerced to vote a certain way online, you can still go to this private booth in a public polling place to place your "real" vote.
There are ways to check your vote even in a public polling place. Let's say you need to take a picture of your voting paper before you leave the booth, and you have to send the picture to the person coercing you. The person coercing you is standing outside the booth so that you can't walk back and forth to ask for a new paper.
There are some good reasons against online voting, but most of the obvious ones you can think of are already solved.
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My biggest worry isn't about software security. My worry about online remote voting is What is to stop physical coercion of the voter? When you have to gather at a centralised polling point to anonymously vote you can be damn sure no one is standing over the voter's shoulder twisting their arm while they vote. If you are voting remotely via a computer screen who is to know?
I've seen the following idea implemented: You can cast your vote as often as you want with only the last one counting. Sure, in practice there are a lot of things to consider to make it foolproof and it might be impossible to do securely - I don't know. But it's worth considering.
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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 easier to manipulate the far fewer people who do the aggregation for final results. It is but parties have their watchers spread around the country to report counts to their central. Any substantial difference will be noted and end up in a recount. What saves us is the mistrust between parties. With internet voting watching each other would be more difficult. Actually I believe that there will be no internet v…
Still no good idea to do remote voting (social reasons), but electronic voting can be made secure. I linked my own scheme before;
https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...
"No more taking time out of your workday to travel to a polling place only to stand in a long line."
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'm not going to claim that "current" electronic voting machines are good, but the article makes no convincing arguments beyond an "I am a computer scientist" appeal to authority that it "couldn't" work. Honestly if you are going to talk about the problems involved in voting at least discuss some of the interesting anonymity preserving and deniable cryptographic techniques people have come up with- ring signatures, b…
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>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 transparen…
To be done sufficiently, you need to not only prove that your system is fair, reliable, scalable, tamperproof, anonymous etc., but also that you system actually runs. That combination is nigh impossible. That is the fundamental reason, bootstrapping that trust. Imagine you have a 100% open source system, cryptographically verified etc. How do I know that is actually what is running in the voting box?
You trust that the right software runs, because unless multiple mutually distrusting parties runs the EXACT SAME software in the same configuration, nothing will happen at all - and they'll hopefully never agree to collude on running anything but the officially agreed upon version.
https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...