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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

#151

The article talks about being “receipt free” as a required feature of any electronic voting system. Fine. But by that standard, in a world where someone can bring their phone or AI glasses into the voting booth to record the whole voting process, how can any voting system be deemed secure? Anyone can show anyone else how they voted.

It's not about showing how you apparently voted, it's about not being able to prove it.

You can record a picture of a ballot and then spoil it and things like that.

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

#152
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.

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Even the most cursory research into mail-in voting shows a number of safeguards designed into the process; one summary can be found at https://responsivegov.org/research/why-mail-ballots-are-secu.... Instances of mail based voting fraud are extremely rare despite the extremely high motivation of some actors (such as the current US federal leadership) to find any evidence to the contrary.

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

#153
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Do you have a citation for voting by mail being demonstrable problematic? None of the things you describe are even true. We’ve been voting by mail in Oregon for decades and the demonstrated instances of voter fraud are effectively zero. The Heritage Foundation, which is opposed to vote by mail, has a great list here: https://electionfraud.heritage.org/search?state=OR . I encourage you to click the ‘Read’ tab to see t…

Citations aren’t necessary when the incentives for fraud are so great and the means of executing fraud so easy. It’s not demonstrably problematic, it’s inevitably problematic.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really is the best way to do it. Scantron gives fast results and you get a paper physical record which shows the actual ballot exactly as it was presented to the voter along with what their vote was.

How many people spend time making their selections on the computer, then compare every single selection on the print out? Deniers could say the computer randomly prints votes to skew in certain candidate/party direction knowing not everyone would catch it. all it would take is one person saying their printed ballot does not match their specific selection, and the whole thing would become chaos.

The person you replied to is talking about ballots that are just on paper, filled in with a pen, and scanned. So there's no computer making printouts.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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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 that mail-in ballots can be subject to manipulation and that this manipulation can reach enough scale to affect results in elections where the margin is so narrow that a few hundred or a few thousand votes can determine who wins.

Simple example: We receive eight ballots. There's absolutely nothing to prevent me from filling out all eight of them as I see fit and mailing them. Nothing.

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

Again, do not mischaracterize my statements here. I am not asserting that any of this has happened. I am saying that mail-in ballots enable potentially serious manipulation and are insecure.

This is like saying that short passwords are insecure. Lots of people use them safely and never get hacked. We all know they are unsafe. The fact that they might not be insecure enough for the general public to understand the issue (because you don't have news every day showing how many thousands of people are getting hurt) is immaterial. The truth of the matter is independent of the perceived consequences. Short passwords are insecure. Mail-in ballots are insecure.

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

#156
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Do you have a citation for voting by mail being demonstrable problematic? None of the things you describe are even true. We’ve been voting by mail in Oregon for decades and the demonstrated instances of voter fraud are effectively zero. The Heritage Foundation, which is opposed to vote by mail, has a great list here: https://electionfraud.heritage.org/search?state=OR . I encourage you to click the ‘Read’ tab to see t…

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

#157
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…

Are there places that don't do paper voting in the US? Ballots are still paper everywhere I've voted (mail in ballots, electronic ballots with printouts, filling in bubbles, etc. It's always been paper).

Also, even with paper ballots hand counted people aren't suddenly going to trust elections, at least not some people I know. I had someone say that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants voted in the last election. That obviously didn't happen and there's already controls to stop that from happening but that didn't stop them from believing it. It's one of the issues with the conspiratorial thinking, it's durable even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very. Every voter is guaranteed a booth nearby ( https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/5/8/an-election-booth... Also https://www.reuters.com/world/india/family-remote-himalayas-...

As a kid living in Vicksburg MS in the late 80s, this is what irked me about in person voting. We lived in county but in a fairly dense suburban area with some biggish apartments nearby (SFH was mostly white, the apartments were mostly black). Our polling site was way out in the boonies, somewhere you could never get to without driving for 45 minutes...I was shocked when my dad took me with him. There was really no g…

Yep. Physical voting places are great, but they're also an easy target for voter suppression. There should be a requirement that there be a nearby polling location, we should also have multiple days to vote there and employers should be required to give every one of their employees at least one of those days off.

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

#159

If we can’t create a secure online voting system why do we use it for passports, banking, medical records, drivers licenses, criminal and law record keeping. This is just an attempt at control using the majority of cases that most websites and applications are insecure. If enough effort and time is invested of course we can create a fairly robust and secure voting system.

Because the security requirements of those systems are completely different from voting.

Voting is a uniquely hard process, where most kinds of validation are actually attacks.

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

#160

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.…

>Elections like this can be gamed, but the gaming becomes an exercise in coercing people to vote counter to their preference, not "hacking" the system.

If that's gaming the system, what even is the point of voting?

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