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US's First Internet Votes To Be Cast This Friday
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Oct 22, 2008 03:44 PM
from the but-counting-commences-thursday dept.
from the but-counting-commences-thursday dept.
longacre writes "If you thought online voting in America was a distant pipe dream (nightmare?), think again: the nation's first Internet-based voting system goes online this Friday, just days after the release of the Damning Report On Sequoia E-Voting Machine Security we discussed yesterday. In the first real world run of the Okaloosa Distance Ballot Piloting (ODBP) test program, election officials from Okaloosa County, Florida have set up kiosks in Germany, the UK and Japan where 600-700 absentee voters — mostly military personnel — are expected to cast ballots. Security experts still have many questions, of course, particularly on the potential for interception of voting data while it travels across oceans (via 'secure VPN'), the security of the kiosks ('hardened laptops' with no hard drives and other sensitive components disabled) and the security of the three data centers (one of which is itself housed overseas, in Barcelona, Spain), not to mention the fact that Florida doesn't exactly have a stellar record when it comes to vote counting. Florida's Dept. of State also has a fairly detailed outline of ODBP's components and processes [PDF]."
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U.S. Supreme Court Issues Election Ruling 438 comments
Well, the United States Supreme Court has given their "ruling" concerning the Florida Supreme Court. They've asked for more information fromthe Florida Supreme Court. Update: 12/04 06:01 PM by H : You can read the the actual ruling as well. Update: 12/04 07:59 PM by H :Thanks to Mr. Sturkel for this much better analysis: "In today's posting of the Supreme Court ruling on the Florida ballot
case you state that the Supreme Court over turned the Florida State
Supreme Court case on manual recounts; this is incorrect. The High Court
"set aside" the case, not over turned it which is two different things.
In setting aside the case the Supreme Court asked the Florida Supreme
Court to re-examine the case and to explain and clarify further the
basis of their ruling, In a nutshell, The Supreme Court wants to know
why the Florida Supreme Court did what they did before issuing a final
ruling on the case."
[+]
Politics: Damning Report On Sequoia E-Voting Machine Security 200 comments
TechDirt notes the publication of the New Jersey voting machine study, the attempted suppression of which we have been discussing for a while now. The paper that the Princeton and Lehigh University researchers are releasing, as permitted by the Court, is "the same as the Court's redacted version, but with a few introductory paragraphs about the court case, Gusciora v. Corzine." What's new is the release of a 90-minute evidentiary video — the researchers have asked the court for permission to release a shorter version that hits the high points, as the high-res video is about 1 GB in size. See TechDirt's article for the report's executive summary listing eight ways the AVC Advantage 9.00 voting machine can be subverted.
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And if they get 500 votes for Ron Paul ... (Score:5, Funny)
... they'll claim it's a crack even if they were legit. (Does the system accept write-ins?)
Now if they get 500+ votes for Mitnick...
Re:And if they get 500 votes for Ron Paul ... (Score:4, Insightful)
BAD IDEA.
Which? Ron Paul, or Mitnick?
The Internet balloting is primarily servicemen. If there is a way for them to legitimately vote for Ron Paul (either he's on the ballot or there is a way to write him in) they MIGHT get some large number of LEGITIMATE votes for him.
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WTF?!?? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can internet voting be both guaranteed "secret" - as in "can't tie the user to the choice of candidate", and at the same time ensure that individuals (never mind bots) aren't casting more than one vote?
Re:WTF?!?? (Score:5, Informative)
Using encryption, exactly what you asked for can be done.
I suggest you start your reading by looking at blind signatures.
Of course, it won't be implemented correctly, but e-voting is mathematically possible.
Parent
Re:WTF?!?? (Score:5, Informative)
More specifically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems [wikipedia.org]
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Not an Encryption Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Not an Encryption Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:WTF?!?? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:WTF?!?? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:WTF?!?? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:WTF?!?? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, let's look at how a traditional absentee ballot works:
To begin with, you have a list of eligible voters and some way of identifying each of them. This is easy enough to duplicate with public keys, passwords, whatever.
The ballot itself consists of an inner part, containing the actual selections, and an outer part, containing the voter's ID. The inner part is sealed, and remains that way until the ID portion has been stripped away.
The same thing can be done with encryption. Create the digital equivalent of an anonymous ballot, indicating your preferred candidates. Encrypt that ballot (with a "salt" value to ensure uniqueness) with the public key designated for the purpose. Sign the encrypted ballot with your own public key and submit it.
When the voting authorities receive your ballot they simply validate the signature and store it for later use, still in its encrypted and IDed form. If you change your mind, or the original ballot was submitted under duress, etc., you can submit a new ballot later or show up in person on the day of the vote, and the old ballot will be discarded unopened.
When it's time to count the votes -- after deleting the obsolete ballots of anyone who showed up in person -- the ID information is discarded (permanently) and the raw ballots are decrypted and counted. The tricky part is ensuring the complete destruction, or at least disassociation, of the ID data, but that's just a matter of developing the proper policies. The same concern applies regarding current absentee ballots.
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First? (Score:5, Funny)
How do we know that Internet voting hasn't already occurred, if we can't see Diebold's source code?
Re:First? (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that government officials are even considering internet voting, e-voting, early voting, or any other changes to voting show how much they want to control people and absolutely remove the concept of a government elected (and deriving it's powers) from the populace via representative government chosen accurately and freely.
We have all sorts of voter fraud, deception, dead people voting, and tampering with a voting system based on paper ballots which could be shoved in a box and counted in front of witnesses, and a solution is to shove MORE of the mechanisms of voting into the shadows? Having the algorithms and technology being used hidden from any eyes and oversight? I'm not talking the "source code" that's shown to people, but what's actually installed on the box. Stuffing 2 paper ballots instead of 1 by a person adds slightly little to the total votes, and to manipulate the vote successfully requires a large number of people, duplicate voters, bussing around people from location to location, etc., which decreases the ability to hide a secret collusion to at least a small degree. To change it so one person can change thousands of votes with a simple UPDATE statement or any other security violation technique required, is a much worse proposition.
This clearly shows to me that both political parties are doing absolutely as much work as possible in order to remove control from the electorate and transfer it to a political class, on the basis that they all support these types of systems and do nothing to secure true votes from the people (with the possibility of it being at the expense of their own power).
I'd like to think that there is a secret altruistic reason for doing this, such as an acknowledgement that when a government falls towards democracy it will inevitably destroy itself and transform into a dictatorship or tiny ruling political class (like an apartheid government). I'd like to think this is a secret attempt to control the voting to a level that would prevent the American republic from falling to a real democracy and mob rule, however this would require me to expect a lot more from the people in government than is possible, including intentions to preserve freedom, altruism, and politicians not spending millions of dollars for a job that pays little and expects bigger quiet "payoffs".
I think the reality is that we've already passed that point, and this is a move straight to a dictatorial style of government, and controlling the vote is, as always, necessary to move to a single party system (to remove any choice by the citizens).
There is no vote-safe electronic/internet voting technology that could be implemented safely and absolutely be correct and not subject to manipulation. Anyone telling you it is possible has an agenda, knows nothing about politics and elections, or is thinking purely in a tiny technology box and not the abuses or security issues of such as system. The only possible way it COULD work would not be electronic voting; it would be electronic creation of the paper ballot for purposes of removing hanging chads, validating that the person didn't vote for two different people for a particular job (which disqualifies a vote currently) , which is printed out and verified by the voter in a human readable form (I voted for "SMITH" for president, yes, that's what I picked), and then submitted to be counted by humans for humans.
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security is irrelevant. (Score:5, Insightful)
electronic voting is not bad because of either real or imagined security issues. That is totally irrelevant.
Electronic voting is bad because the procedure can not be verified by any layman. That should be the first requirement for any voting procedure.
Paper ballot procedures are easy to verify and anybody can do it. Simply keep an eye on the ballot box from the initial sealing of the box until the actual voting.
With electronic voting that is not possible. A paper trail comes close, but voters can screw that up by not putting there tag in the box, or any other random piece of paper in its place.
Bottom line: voting is about TRUST in the procedure first, the actual results second.
It's probably better... (Score:4, Informative)
... than the alternative [defenselink.mil]
Rick the Vote! (Score:4, Funny)
libertarian (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything that speeds up voting encourages greater participation. Our present voting system originated in the dark ages. The fastest communication was by horse, it took several days for a horse to get from one side of the USA to the other, or about 2 months by boat to get from UK to Australia.
If the internet had existed in the time of the founding fathers, I feel sure they would have used it to give the people greater oversight of the legislative process.
Re:libertarian (Score:5, Insightful)
If banks can securely (with ~ 99.999% security) transfer thousands of dollars online, then the technology exists to securely permit voting online.
No, you miss an important difference between dollars and votes.
If a dollar is lost, it can be replaced by another dollar so banks figure in a loss rate and charge for it somehow.
A vote is unique, secret, and anonymous so if a vote is lost, it cannot simply be replaced by another (because you don't know what the vote was). In addition, a vote should be verifiable, e.g. there needs to be some way to check that the voting method worked (e.g. with a recount).
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Re:libertarian (Score:4, Informative)
Two things; a) banks can't. Fraud is a serious problem.
More importantly; b) banks get to try again. Most electronic cash transfers have two ends. It's in the interest of each one to check it goes right. If one end is committing fraud then the other end will complain. You can then reverse the transaction (if you have correctly identified the parties) or at least take security measures so it doesn't happen in future.
Voting is different. In order to avoid vote buying it has to happen in secret and for the most part if you can check your own vote you can also show someone else how you voted. This is much harder than securing most financial transactions.
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Pipe dream? (Score:4, Funny)
So I guess now it's a tube dream.
Or possibly a series of tube dreams.
Remember the disclaimers that apply (Score:5, Funny)
1. Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
2. This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls.
3. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Internet voting is stupid and unneeded. (Score:5, Insightful)
Absentee ballots via the US mail work just fine... This is just smoke an mirrors to make people think there has been progress in fixing the American balloting system..
Re:First (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
var publicMediaInstance = new publicMediaObject();
while (publicMediaInstance.areTheyWhining() == true)
{
myVoteInstance.vote(youknowwho);
}
Re:Cost Effective? (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't really the costs of the voting at issue here. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, overseas ballots somehow got held up in the mail and even though the postmark was before the deadline, the state already tabulated the votes and didn't want to count the late arriving ones. Most of the over seas ballots are military personnel and for whatever reason, if it is no fault of their own, anyone potentially in harms way should have their votes counted.
So no, the cost isn't as important as counting the votes of the military and civilians in the immediate areas of the military personnel. In the 2000 elections, it actually took a lawsuit to get the voted counted. In 2004, they brought up the results of the 2000 lawsuits to for the count. This wasn't isolated to Florida either and the mail wasn't all held up in the same places. It had more to do with the increased volume of mail then any conspiracy but the result was people who probably should have their vote counted the most (it could literally be life and death for them), ended up almost not having it counted at all. This is an attempt to avoid that situation.
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