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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

#241

Post by marcosdumay »

dforrestwilson wrote: post #174
FatalBaboon wrote: post #164

> In fact, online voting is such a dangerous idea that computer scientists and security experts are nearly unanimous in opposition to it. Stopped reading. Online voting is not just about electing presidents. If you can poll the people easily, you have a democracy where people directly chose, instead of having a mafious bunch in a grand building making what corporations want the law, ahem I meant doing what is good fo…

Exactly. Representatives made a lot of sense when the fastest mode of transit was by horse and buggy, and it took weeks to get a letter from Atlanta to Philadelphia. They make very little sense in an instant and digital age. Internet 1.0 may not be built for online voting, but eventually some sort of internet with a ubiquitous online ID system will be implemented.

The internet is perfectly fit for online voting, except for this "you can prove how you voted" problem.

Problem is, voting requires that you must not be able to prove how you voted, and that you are certain that your voting was counted correctly. Those two requirements are at odds, what makes all voting systems insecure to some extent - yes, even paper.

Now, vote buying is something that can be dealt with on the real world. Any systemic buying will leave traces. I do think the flaw should be on it, instead of the correctness of the result. Paper, by the way is flawed on both, but lives traces on both, that the winners never follow...

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#242

Post by relix »

icebraining wrote: post #235
relix wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, so it is at least as secure against coercion as current methods.

No, it's not. The paper system allows you to spoil the vote after taking the picture. You can't do that with the digital system.

Which is still coercing your vote. Not to mention normal postal voting is also susceptible to the same problem, and I bet we'd all agree that's much less secure, yet we still use it.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#243

Post by marcosdumay »

adwf wrote: post #12

The biggest problem with online/computerised voting is that it is a single point of attack for malicious actors. Even the best software security gets broken from time to time, online voting would allow zero-day attacks on elections - an absolute disaster. Whilst standard paper voting may also be subject to fraud, it takes the manipulation of thousands of people in order to alter ballots across a whole country. Comput…

It's easy to create online voting systems that guarantee a correct result. You just didn't think about it hard enough.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#244

Post by marcosdumay »

rlpb wrote: post #142
pi-squared wrote: post #111

Not convinced that in an age where I can buy a plane ticket for thousands of dollars, where we are thinking of sending people to Mars and I can securely communicate with people, in age where Edward Snowden is able to send private documents or whatev, and I have computers on my wrist, pocket and dick, I have to go to a physical place, stand in a queue and draw on a piece of paper to cast a ballot. I've been hearing th…

Give me a way to permit online voting but also be sure that the person who is voting was not coerced. I think you'll find that this is impossible. At least with a polling booth, even if the voter is being coerced, it is difficult for the coercer to verify which way the voter voted. One might come up with ways to surveil the booth (whether in general or through the coerced voter), but at least we have a chance at dete…

Give me a way to permit paper voting but also be sure that the person who is voting was not coerced.

Really. I'll wait.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#246

Post by astazangasta »

icebraining wrote: post #236
greeneggs wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a matter of degree. Anyone can carry a cell phone into a voting booth to photograph their ballot. And we already have voting by mail in many jurisdictions.

Anyone can carry a cell phone into a voting booth to photograph their ballot. And then they can spoil the ballot before putting it in the box. Not so with this digital system. And we already have voting by mail in many jurisdictions. Which I'm also against, except possibly for emigrants.

Why? Voting by mail vastly increases access and has few risks of fraud. What's not to like?

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#247

Post by marcosdumay »

rlpb wrote: post #166
yummyfajitas wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a chance at detecting purely electronic hackers also. For example, hackers made 574 attempts to connect to one of my servers as root since the logfiles were rotated. This idea that physical is somehow categorically better than electronic is just magical thinking.

Let's say I'm an abusive husband. If my wife has the choice of voting online, I can force her to choose online voting, make her vote at home and in front of me, and nobody has any way of detecting my coercion. If my wife has no choice but to go to a polling booth, election observers absolutely do have a chance of detecting my coercion. > This idea that physical is somehow categorically better than electronic is just…

You won't go very far by tampering with a single vote. Try coercing with 10 thousand people, and see how easily you are tracked.

The benefit of online votes is that coercion and data stealing are the only flaws we must take care of. Instead of this huge structure trying to cover for all the flaws of paper, we can focus on those two well specified ones.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#248

Post by AdrienChey »

athenot wrote: post #231
AdrienChey wrote: post #212

For a 2016 article about online voting, i'm really surprised to find no mention of block-chain related solutions... It seems most of the concern addressed here can be solve with this kind of "open-computing / open-data" technologies. If you are interested in this topic, I strongly advise you the reading of: https://medium.com/@DomSchiener/publicvotes-ethereum-based-v... And more generally what can be done with contra…

The article indirectly addresses that in the last paragraph: paper is something everyone understands. I'm all for improving processes with technology but I'll have to admit that even though I've been neck deep in Software development for 2 decades, the block-chain solutions require a fair amount of mental work for me. They may be good but I don't readily understand them. And I can guarantee you that my parents don't.…

Indeed, that's seems like a big weak point: you need to understanding the technology to trust it!

First, I think that's a great news, if the limitation is only human and not logical, because humain can changes (a bit).

Let's look at the digital world currently: Peoples, companies and state, use internet to store and transfer private and valuable informations. All the world financial assets are process on the network, almost everyone use ATM, and store personal picture online etc. All of this with just a very few percent of the population (people like me and you) knowing "more or less" how this really works!

A main adoption of online voting on the block chain will required efforts for everybody with the knowledge to democratize it, but in fact you don't need to understand all of it to trust it (like when you withdrawing money from an ATM).

We could say right now that everyone owning bitcoin "trust" the block-chain, and I would be surprise if more than 50% of them have read and understand Satoshi's whitepaper and the fundamental basics of the network.

Also at the end, even if it's intellectually new, it's not that difficult to understand even for our beloved parents :)

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#249

Post by mydpy »

In fact, online voting is such a dangerous idea that computer scientists and security experts are nearly unanimous in opposition to it.

I hate when articles make these ridiculous claims in order to inflate their credibility. Are there problems the security community needs to address before using technology to vote in a democracy? Yes. Is online voting a danger to democracy? No, but there are bigger problems that need to be solved before online voting should be implemented.

Point: I just tried to temporarily remove a freeze on my credit report after the Office of Personal Management (aka, the office for federal employees) lost all of my PII in a large-scale hack that occurred more than a year ago. For those of you interested, all of my credit is essentially frozen indefinitely as a result of this hack. Now, in order for me to validate my own identity, I had to reproduce (sometimes unsuccessfully) a series of data points that anyone with a hard copy of my credit report combined with my OPM breached data could reproduce. The real issue is the fallacy that a human being is uniquely identified by a set of data points (paper or otherwise). This is fundamentally the issue that must be overcome before we can breach issues like online voting reliably. We continue to create systems based on this fallacy of personal identification, and it is creating more problems than it is solving. Again, paper or otherwise.

Re: Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

#250

Post by meerita »

Anibal Fernandez, who was a candidate for governor of the province of Buenos Aires by the political party of the former President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, he spotted going out with his jacket full of voting ballots from opposition party of current President Mauricio Macri. He (Hannibal) and other party Kirchner used this practice so that people could not vote the opposition.
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