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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

#271

Post by creata »

topspin wrote: post #231
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Australia, as far as I know, doesn't require voters to show identity documents, and they seem to take election integrity very seriously.

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

#272

Post by hackyhacky »

chrisco255 wrote: post #226
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.

Politicians just use those accusations as cover for conducting fraud or enabling the conditions that they inherently benefit from. There's no reason to not use paper, ID checks, and same-day accounting.

> There's no reason to not use paper, ID checks, and same-day accounting.

Sure there is. ID checks make it impossible for people who don't have government-issued ID to vote, which is a lot of people; and furthermore ID checks don't actually improve election security. Same-day counting is impossible if you are going to count all mail-in votes that were sent before the deadline.

To be clear, I'm not saying that politicians aren't agitating for conditions that benefit them. That's there job. But I also believe in supporting access to voting and fair elections, and at least some of the politicians' arguments help achieve those ends.

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

#274

Post by vineyardmike »

zug_zug wrote: post #249
golem14 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"...

Such a weird argument. I've never met anybody with a sledgehammer threatening votes. Feels like a willfully absurd excuse to avoid having an audit trail in elections.

I agree with the other comment about dictators and similar threatening voters, but at a mundane level: domestic violence.

People do, in fact, threaten or coerce their spouse and that extends to voting.

Being able to audit from a secure counting room and being able to produce an always-available-online permanent record is different.

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

#275

Post by testing22321 »

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"...

Australia has very strict laws about who can be near a polling place, and certainly nobody can be inside other than the few certified officials running the show.

Guy with sledgehammer is at least a block waylay, and everyone knows that everyone votes, by law.

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

#276

Post by notpushkin »

pdpi wrote: post #253
zug_zug wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a weird argument. I've never met anybody with a sledgehammer threatening votes. Feels like a willfully absurd excuse to avoid having an audit trail in elections.

Then you haven’t lived under a dictatorship. It might not be a sledgehammer, but breaking voter secrecy and pressuring people to vote the “right” way is very much a thing.

This. In Russia, employees of all sorts of organisations are “encouraged” to vote for a particular candidate or party (not always the ruling party, though it doesn’t really matter for different reasons I won’t get into).

As far as I know, these votes have gone mostly unchecked before electronic voting, but after that, they’ve started voting straight from the workplace computers. There were, of course, a lot of straight-up falsifications as well.

That said, our pen-on-paper voting isn’t too legit either :’)

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

#277

Post by hackyhacky »

derektank wrote: post #248
elbasti wrote: post #149

Voting is not a monolithic process. It's actually a combination of 3 things: - How votes are cast - How votes are counted - How votes are custodied In order for an election to be trusted, all three steps must be transparent and auditable. Electronic voting makes all three steps almost absolutely opaque. Here's how Mexico solves this. We may have many problems, but "people trust the vote count" is not one of them: 1.…

If you’re willing to do away with the secret ballot, you can eliminate a lot of the need for transparency in the mechanics. If people are able to check their own vote for discrepancies and speak to others to confirm their validity, you only really need to confirm that the final vote count is tabulated correctly (which again, is relatively easy to independently verify).

> If you’re willing to do away with the secret ballot

We're not willing to do that. No modern democracy has public ballots. The reason is simple: secret ballots make it effectively impossible to buy votes, as there's no way to prove how any person actually voted.

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

#278

Post by MarkusQ »

rexpop wrote: post #7
pokstad wrote: post #2

While we’re on it, I don’t want the internet on my stove or car either.

We're actually not on that subject.

It's as close to on-topic as most of the other comments.

"The internet isn't secure enough to trust for voting" could be generalized to

"The internet isn't secure enough to trust for _____" just a reasonably as it could be to

"______ isn't secure enough to trust for voting" as most of the other commenters have chosen to do.

The fact that one of the generalizations is more popular doesn't make the other wrong, and addressing both (as, say, the GP or people talking about internet banking do) adds both depth and breadth to the discussion.

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

#279

Post by godelski »

zamadatix wrote: post #247
badestrand wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some do think so, but there is also a material difference in needing to be intimidated at the time of the vote being cast vs any point in the future as well.

I think the bigger concern is that mail in ballots lead to fake ballots being submitted. Though I've seen no convincing evidence of this happening at any meaningful scale and the arguments seem unconvincing since you don't get a ballot unless verified with a state ID and your ballot has a unique ID associated with your name, preventing a double spend.

Personally, my concern is that with mail in ballots some nutjob that believes there's ballot stuffing can set fire to the ballotbox and even though they're caught it's a major inconvenience to get a replacement ballot and the websites that show your ballot is received take days to update.

But I still love mail in voting. My state sends a candidate brochure with it and I can take my time to actually look up all those random candidates' policies. It takes me hours to actually fill out my ballot but that's a feature, not a bug (there's nothing preventing you from along party lines but frankly I'd be happier without parties)

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

#280

Post by casey2 »

If half the points here were true than internet banking and ecommerce would have already failed. Does the current system prevent fake votes? Did old banking and commerce prevent more fraud?

Here is the thing you are missing. With Internet voting we can have votes way more often. Limiting the damage caused by fraud. Yeah you could have malware on your phone that changes your inputs to a sandboxed voting app, and the malware also tracks your real votes so when you request an audit it shows you what you actually voted for. In reality that is extremely difficult to pull off over a long period of time.

I don't care about any of the names on the list, as far as I'm concerned they are missing the forest for the trees.

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