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In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

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Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#181
post #132

All these "e-voting can never work" comments just scream ludditism. Estonia has already demonstrated that it works, we have online banking and cryptocurrencies worth billions of dollars in market cap, and people want to say it's not possible. Yeah, ok. Feel free to express your views, but don't pretend to represent the software engineering community.

Nobody said it's impossible. It's just insecure, unverifiable, and non-anonymous. Unless you inspect every voting machine, smart-card reader, internet connection, encryption algorithm, etc. for every election completely , you can potentially manipule millions of votes from your home from the other side of the planet. Or on a smaller scale, change all votes of one or multiple voting machines.

Paper ballots aren't secure either, who's to guarantee that your paper ballot was recorded correctly? In many countries paper ballots have been tampered with, altering elections (Venezuela, South Korea). Remember Bush vs. Gore in 2000? I don't understand why people are so trusting of paper ballots, I would much prefer an e-voting system where my vote can be verified afterwards.

You don't need to inspect every internet connection, there's HTTPS.

The key is that one should be able to verify one's vote to ensure that it was properly recorded. If everyone can verify their own vote, then they can verify that the voting wasn't hacked. With paper voting, it is impossible to verify your own vote - it is equivalent to tossing it into a black box.

One might say "then people can sell votes!", but as Estonia has done, you can have it so that one can vote multiple times. And of course there should be extraordinarily stiff penalties on anyone buying/selling votes (I'd say minimum $30k or 20% of one's total wealth fine + prison time).

Needing paper ballots is holding back democracy. E-voting would revolutionize democracy and for the first time in history allow a true direct democracy at scale. Of course e-voting cannot be conducted by emailing votes or some other insecure nonsense like that, but it is ludditism to suggest that it cannot be achieved, which many seem to suggest. This kind of thinking is literally holding society back.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#182
post #83
post #2

I like this trend towards e-voting since it seems to be influenced by trends in cutting edge blockchain technology like decentralised autonomous organisations. It means that novel types of national governance may follow from blockchain governance models, such as liquid democracy. This would be a vast improvement over our current representative democracy model since we'd be able to hold politicians accountable more ea…

As is often the case, by far the best comment is the least popular. It's amazing how short-sighted people are.

Mention blockchain around here and everyone loses their minds.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah but part of cracking down on vote buying has to do with making it difficult to track if you actually did vote for who you said you would, with online voting it becomes totally possible to track you did the vote, give it to the guy who has promised to pay you, forgive your debts, the debts of your son, not beat you up, allow you to keep your job etc. etc.

> with online voting it becomes totally possible to track you did the vote Not necessarily. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19355603

ok it is true that with sufficient technical prowess one could fake that they did the vote, but as a general rule hold your iphone up in front of the monitor and make a video of you doing the vote would be a good enough solution for most criminals.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#184
post #95
post #32

"The system has been designed to ensure that voters' computers are not infected by any kind of malware that could change or block their vote." I'm sure this cannot be subverted by an attacker with the resources of USA/China/India/.., or with access to the supply chain from the chip fab onward (don't forget about malware hidden in USB cables!), or or,... And you'd have to be dead sure , because, unlike with physical v…

Really, it strikes me how luddite people are when it comes to voting. In every other case, people welcome technology making stuff easier. But in this area, all I hear is complaints how far the voting booth is, how you need ID, how there is no national holiday and so on. What about absentee ballots? How do you make sure they were mailed by the right person? Listen, if an attacker can subvert 30% of the votes, don’t yo…

In online banking the bank knows who you are. In this case that would be the government, this is not and should not be allowed.

If such a system could be made that it somehow was able to verify that you are actually the individual registered to vote, but also anonymous so no-one could possibly trace what you voted for. Then you need to be able to setup a secure and verified connection (but still anonymous) but unlike your bank account, isn't the target of multi-international efforts to subvert democracy to gain political favour. Deciding what compatible devices and technology should be used and to ensure that all of the voting population has access to it is another challenge.

Another thing required is for there to be a presence of the candidates or representatives on behalf of them that can monitor the voting process and call out any foul play, which would require people with the right expertise to examine the system so they know it properly counts the votes. Which means a open-source system is required, but the exact details of how it verifies voters will also be exposed.

And what happens to the votes, are they not stored at all or stored temporarily? How do you do a recount if they are not stored and if they are, how do you make sure that data is destroyed completely once the result has been declared?

These are all questions that nobody seems to have a practical answer to.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#185
post #152
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can film yourself voting now. Vote buying is not a serious problem, and can be readily solved by stiff jail time for attempting it, and large monetary rewards for reporting on people doing it. If you get 10 years in prison for trying to buy votes, and the government offers a standing reward of say, $100,000 for evidence that leads to a conviction, all of the sudden you have to pay substantially more than $100k/vo…

> Vote buying is not a serious problem It's not a problem because there is too much "friction". Vote buying is already not impossible but way too hard to establish itself. When it becomes gradually easier it still won't be a problem, because it is still not yet established. So you allow even more changes that make it easier, because it's not a problem yet. Call it a slippery slope argument all you like, but there is…

All of those things are possible now, yet they don't happen. I see no reason to think electronic voting would make it more likely. And in fact, we have a test case: Estonia. Is there any evidence of any of this happening there?

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#186
post #165
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that makes any kind of sense. You can't risk it when the equilibrium is that bad for you. Remember, to make any appreciable dent in an election outcome, you need to convince thousands of people to vote for you, and not turn you in, despite the 100k reward. There is zero chance of that ever succeeding.

If there is a $100k incentive for framing someone for vote buying, people will do it.

That's what we have investigative agencies for. We already offer these kinds of monetary incentives to criminals all the time. We also offer them for reporting tax evasion. Seems to work fine there.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#187
post #162
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they got caught. Everyone knew the elections were rigged. With electronic vote you can get away with the crime and nobody's wiser.

Vote results are always really close to pre-election poll results. You can't really manipulate the results too much unless you somehow prohibit polling.

[deleted]

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#188
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t even need that. In many systems, you can vote multiple times, and only your most recent vote counts. As a buyer you have no way of knowing if your agent didn’t vote after they photographed them self voting for the party you picked.

That's definitely a good improvement over a single final commit, but there has to be some cut-off time and it would be perfectly possible to control the voter's ability to make last moment corrections. Buy/coerce the vote close to the deadline, then keep them occupied until it's over. A countermeasure might be an undisclosed deadline lottery: a guaranteed voting window until some time t, then allow corrections until…

> but there has to be some cut-off time and it would be perfectly possible to control the voter's ability to make last moment corrections

There is. In the Estionial election it is something like the day before election day. But even if there wasn’t if you need to spend the time and effort to coerce your agent for anything longer then few hours, buying enough votes to sway any election is going to be unfeasible.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say I sell my vote. The person picks a party I don’t agree with. I will simply vote for them anyway in the prelimenaries, screengrap my proof, and send to my customer. I can do this multiple times. Each time I void my previous ballot, betraying my previous customer. Then comes election day, then I show up in person and cast a physical ballot for the party that I favor. As a buyer, my customers have no way of knowing…

I can't see a way of that working without breaking down somehow: - If every time you vote you get a receipt for that vote that can be checked if it's still valid then you can send that receipt to the buyer and he can then check that your vote is still according to his purchase - If you can only check that the receipt was registered but not if it's still valid you can't check that your vote was correctly counted becau…

Iceland doesn’t have e-voting, but they do have absentee voting. You can vote as often as you want during the absentee ballot, and your most recent will count (or none if you also show up during election day). If you need to physically be present to make sure your agent does’t show up during election day, buying enough vote to sway any election is going to be hard. I suppose if you are a part of a larger organization, you can post several spotters around every voting station. But that will increase the chance of them being spotted and spoofed by the police.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see a way of that working without breaking down somehow: - If every time you vote you get a receipt for that vote that can be checked if it's still valid then you can send that receipt to the buyer and he can then check that your vote is still according to his purchase - If you can only check that the receipt was registered but not if it's still valid you can't check that your vote was correctly counted becau…

Iceland doesn’t have e-voting, but they do have absentee voting. You can vote as often as you want during the absentee ballot, and your most recent will count (or none if you also show up during election day). If you need to physically be present to make sure your agent does’t show up during election day, buying enough vote to sway any election is going to be hard. I suppose if you are a part of a larger organization…

> I suppose if you are a part of a larger organization, you can post several spotters around every voting station. But that will increase the chance of them being spotted and spoofed by the police.

It's easy enough to deploy spotters without being found out. Just deploy spotters as exit pollers, they're already part of any modern election :)

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