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Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

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Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#231

Post by topspin »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #63
ggm wrote: post #3

I live in an economy where people vote with pencils on paper in cardboard booths and at scalable cost, it just works. Obviously the cost also has to scale linearly for the 200+m voter economies, and time becomes a factor, but for community acceptance I still think paper and pen/pencil beats machine hands down. (this is Australia. we have compulsory attendance at voting booths for eligible citizens, you can spoil your…

I've heard great things about the way that India votes. It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.

> It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.

A key part of India's system is the Elector's Photo Identity Card (EPIC), required to cast ballots. Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#232

Post by whimsicalism »

arjunchint wrote: post #211

Honestly we should just have block chain based PUBLIC voting. This article is right about secret internet voting: it’s fundamentally incompatible with unsupervised devices and global networks. But secrecy is the constraint that breaks everything. If you instead require public, verifiable voting, most of the "unsolved" problems disappear. The core requirement becomes: everyone can independently verify inclusion and co…

of course, then you get vote bribing and retaliation. i'm generally in favor of public or provable voting because i think it is the best solution - but you do have to sort of how eyes wide open.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#233

Post by asdfaslkj353 »

hackyhacky wrote: post #203
hintymad wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I failed to understand is why only in the US the voting procedure is so controversial. Want paper vote? That's racism. Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting? That's definitely racism. It's funny that the US criticized that EU countries were getting less democratic. Well, at least those countries have a much more sane voting process.

> Want paper vote? That's racism. Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting? That's definitely racism. This characterization is reductive and basically a straw-man. The principle underlying opposition to "counting in one day" is basically that every vote that is correctly placed in time should be counted, and as many people as possible should have access to voting. Mail…

> voter turnout

Make voting mandatory and on public holiday. Problem solved.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#234

Post by mmooss »

piou wrote: post #59
gpt5 wrote: post #5

The most important feature of public elections is trust. Efficiency is one of the least important feature. When we moved away from paper voting with public oversight of counting to electronic voting we significantly deteriorated trust, we made it significantly easier for a hostile government to fake votes, all for marginal improvements in efficiency which don't actually matter. Moving to internet voting will further…

The majority of the U.S. votes on paper: https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/ . Most of the rest of the country votes using Ballot Marking Devices that produce paper ballots; less than 5% of the population lives somewhere where the only or default choice is electronic voting.

The issue is that the paper ballots are counted electronically. There may be a paper version for double-checking the vote, but it's rarely used. The vote relies almost entirely on electronic technology.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#235

Post by firesteelrain »

Brybry wrote: post #61
maxerickson wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US overwhelmingly uses paper voting (often paired with electronic tabulation). We can't "move back", it's where we are. Electronic tabulation introduces little risk when the ballots are paper.

Yep, I believe Louisiana is the only US state that does electronic voting without a paper trail. [1] And not all paper systems are good either. I'm sure everyone remembers the disaster that was the punch card system used by Florida in the 2000 election... [1] https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_equipment_by_state

Florida basically now uses scan tron technology. Color in a circle and when done you turn it over and the ballot is scanned right in front of you.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#236

Post by baggy_trough »

defrost wrote: post #182
robomartin wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the wrong perspective. The minute votes go into the mail system there is no way to know just how many mail-in votes might be subject to fraud. In other words, your characterization has no basis in evidence. Note that I am not asserting that massive fraud has been committed anywhere. That statement would be as impossible to support with evidence as yours. The only thing you can state with absolute certainty is…

> There's absolutely nothing to prevent me from filling out all eight of them as I see fit and mailing them. Nothing. Just as there is nothing to prevent a person threatening or physically coercing 8 members of their household to vote as they direct. This is hard to scale up into the hundreds. WRT mail-in ballots, these are common place in Australia. You post in a provided envelope to the AEC address, that outer enve…

> Just as there is nothing to prevent a person threatening or physically coercing 8 members of their household to vote as they direct.

You are wrong. In person voting in the sanctity of the private voting booth prevents this.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#237

Post by badestrand »

golem14 wrote: post #142
ggm wrote: post #3

I live in an economy where people vote with pencils on paper in cardboard booths and at scalable cost, it just works. Obviously the cost also has to scale linearly for the 200+m voter economies, and time becomes a factor, but for community acceptance I still think paper and pen/pencil beats machine hands down. (this is Australia. we have compulsory attendance at voting booths for eligible citizens, you can spoil your…

The problem, as I understand it, is that if you can prove to yourself that your vote was counted right, you can also prove it to the guy with the sledgehammer next to you saying "it would be a shame if something happened to your family, so prove how you voted"...

By that logic we have to get rid of mail-in voting as well because there could always be a sledgehammer guy standing next to someone in their own home.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#238

Post by JanisErdmanis »

> It’s difficult to make an E2E-VIV checking app that’s both trustworthy and receipt-free. The best solutions known allow checking only of votes that will be discarded, and casting of votes that haven’t been checked; this is highly counterintuitive for most voters!

Actually, Benaloh's challenge also does not offer receipt freeness. The adversarial strategy in such a model is to outsource the challenger itself in a hash function which decides whether to accept or discard the vote. It may look impractical at first, but one can build an app that could do that efficiently.

It can be said that all existing end-to-end verifiable remote e-voting systems compromise individual verifiability when reconciling it with receipt-freeness by introducing an assumption about the hardware-based protection of voters' secrets. If they leak or are predetermined by a corrupt vendor implementation, the malware on the voter's client can manipulate the vote at submission, and the adversary later fakes verification for the voter by exploiting that knowledge.

Still, I believe it's a solvable problem which needs more attention. Bingo evoting system is almost there, for instance, with verifiably random generated trackers, but needs a voting booth with a Bingo machine taken at home.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#239

Post by toast0 »

robomartin wrote: post #155
boredatoms wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re less worried about a low-scale low impact fraud my many people that is unlikely to alter results, than a systematic mass fraud by few people who can choose a result

That's the wrong perspective. The minute votes go into the mail system there is no way to know just how many mail-in votes might be subject to fraud. In other words, your characterization has no basis in evidence. Note that I am not asserting that massive fraud has been committed anywhere. That statement would be as impossible to support with evidence as yours. The only thing you can state with absolute certainty is…

> There's also nothing to prevent bad actors from destroying ballots in large quantities.

Around here (WA state), you can check to see if your ballot was received and accepted. If a bad actor destroys ballots in large quantities on their way to voters, many voters will notice and complain. If a bad actor destroys ballots in large quantities on their way to to the counting facility, some voters are likely to notice and complain.

Same goes if you return ballots for other people. Either the actual voter notices their ballot is missing or the vote counters notice they got two ballots from the same voter or a larger than usual number of bad signatures.

Is it foolproof? No. And there's usually no established procedure to cure a tampered election, either. But large scale tampering is likely to leave signs. And small scale tampering would only rarely make a difference in results.

In person voting might be more secure, but it takes a lot more people, and if you want an ID requirement, you need to figure out how to make ID acheivable for all the voters or it's really just a tool to disenfranchise people who have trouble getting ID. In the US, there is no blanket ID requirement, so there are a lot of eligible voters without ID.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#240

Post by firesteelrain »

mmooss wrote: post #234
piou wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of the U.S. votes on paper: https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/ . Most of the rest of the country votes using Ballot Marking Devices that produce paper ballots; less than 5% of the population lives somewhere where the only or default choice is electronic voting.

The issue is that the paper ballots are counted electronically. There may be a paper version for double-checking the vote, but it's rarely used. The vote relies almost entirely on electronic technology.

There are many state-mandated post-election audits that involve random selection of ballots or precincts. There are state statutes and procedures that require a post-election audit of ballots after every election. These audits are designed to verify that voting equipment and tabulations operated correctly and that reported totals are accurate
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