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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

#191

Post by kosievdmerwe »

dbdjfjrjvebd wrote: post #129
belorn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who create the security tokens that banks use? I could see few things more lucrative and advantageous than a perfect backdoor into that hardware, especially since here in Sweden you can create electronic government ID from said token which can be used for everything except voting. It is not without reason that most common fraud here in Sweden (around 80%) is someone calling under false pretense asking a victim to use…

The thing is that bank security is at least theoretically possible. Banks and/or governments act as a central sources of trust in such systems and trust for can be derived from this source. I.e. a bank could build the hardware tokens from scratch themselves. With an election the trust model is inverted. I'm not sure there is any practical way to allow the trust sources (every voter) to audit the hardware tokens.

Also importantly, banks don't have to be anonymous. Every transaction has the identities of the people involved.

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

#192

Post by vladimirralev »

JDiculous wrote: post #181
foepys wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interne…

> Who's to guarantee that your paper ballot was recorded correctly?

Each reporting station must accept observers and counters authorised by each of the interested parties with local representation. It's a big deal when this process is compromised and always makes the news. And these counters and observes are generally your neighbours from the local community so there is some amount of trust already. Further the section count is acknowledged back from the central counter.

HTTPS doesn't have the proper guarantees for this application.

Changing votes doesn't have the proper guarantees that people won't be buying or extorting votes. Not that it matters, because that's not really the biggest concern with evoting.

Penalties also don't matter against a malicious state actor for any abuse. As an example, Chinese spies go after the relatives in China of US tech employees to force cooperation. A state actor can stack the deck without anybody to prosecute even if caught.

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

#193

Post by KorematsuFred »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #122
zanny wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Newver understood the fascination with e-votes. People want convenience. Citizens would like to vote online, and are largely ignorant of the technical challenges that make it impossible to secure, at least on your average everyday Internet connected consumer device. Its the job of us techies to keep shouting from the rooftops how all these implementations of online voting are deeply flawed and exploitable the same…

Don't vote = don't get any benefits. You would have to have an allowance for certain Disabled and Housebound voters and maybe be allowed to miss one election.

That is worse. It means people on welfare might be willing to vote more and hence peters would vote to steal from paul. Probably an argument that only those who pay certain amount of tax alone should be able to vote.

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

#194

Post by runarberg »

pedrocr wrote: post #190
runarberg wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Exit polls are not done everywhere, and in some countries they are even illegal. Just make soliciting around poll stations is illegal and the problem is solved.

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

#195

Post by jakeogh »

darawk wrote: post #185
usrusr wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

By definition, electronic voting is easier to game. Simple example: you just asked for evidence on a procedure that didnt have a physical paper trail.

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

#196

Post by riffraff »

darawk wrote: post #74
riffraff wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can avoid that, by having your vote correspond to multiple potential entries. But that is still pointless cause the person you sold your vote can be physically next to you, or you can film yourself voting. Online voting is unsafe, and should only be used if any other option is unfeasible.

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…

we have evidence of widespread irregularities in casting votes via mail for people abroad in italian elections (there are a ton of italian citizens abroad, due to ius sanguinis rules).

That entails basically going to people, buying a voting slip and casting it on their behalf. Or better, buying packs of slips from officials. For e-voting it would be the same.

Sure, you can increase jail time and reward revealing it, but that is not a panacea, as the existence of _any criminal activity_ proves.

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

#197

Post by [deleted] »

darawk wrote: post #185
usrusr wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

[deleted]

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

#198

Post by anticensor »

deogeo wrote: post #82
IanCal wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's entirely possible in the UK, while "court order" is probably the wrong terminology, the core meaning is still there. Ballots are numbered and the number recorded against your name. You would need access to both to work out who voted for whom. I don't know of any reason why it could be accessed, though since parliament is sovereign "if a judge agrees" is always a safe disclaimer to add since the underlying law ca…

> Ballots are numbered and the number recorded against your name. It's hard for me to express what a terrible idea this is. Pray you never get a government that would exploit this.

Yes, that downgrades the election from secret vote to concealed open vote.

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

#199

Post by anticensor »

pytester wrote: post #16
HarryHirsch wrote: post #11

That is worrying. How do you know that the voter could vote freely and didn't sell their vote? Corruption around vote-selling is a concern in certain ethnic enclaves in Britain, and there were even elections annulled over that. The foremost concern shouldn't be convenience, it should be that the vote is safe and secret.

>That is worrying. How do you know that the voter could vote freely and didn't sell their vote? Historically, vote buying in the UK and the US used to be rife until it was cracked down upon (which came after it was made illegal). Once that happened it completely disappeared. For voters to sell their votes, somebody needs to advertise that they are willing to buy their votes. That advertisement makes them easy to dete…

Prohibition of vote buying does not prevent Bulgarian train style attacks.

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

#200

Post by IanCal »

runarberg wrote: post #86
IanCal wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes voter intimidation much easier though. Nobody without a court order can check how I've voted, and can't ask me to show how I've voted.

Then vote for the party your intimidator picked, show them you voted for them when asked. Then simply vote again for the party you want (during election day if you are afraid they will show up unexpectedly again before election day), voiding your intimidated vote. Your intimidator will never know who you voted for during election day (unless they spied on you, but you also have that problem for non-digital votes)

What in this is stopping the intimidator checking with you after the vote closes?
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