WA Election To Try Online Voting 304
AuMatar writes "According to the Seattle Times, the King Conservation District is going to allow online voting to combat chronic low turnouts. You can already view the voting portal. As a citizen of WA seriously concerned with politics, anything that completely removes a paper trail like this scares me. Luckily, this is probably the least important election in the state. I wonder if anyone will hack the election so 300% of voters vote for Firefly or Stephen Colbert or something."
Why the emphasis on turnout? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course if one examines the other policies supported by the "make it easier to vote" groups, one quickly realizes that they
want a larger number of poorly informed voters.
Re:Why the emphasis on turnout? (Score:5, Insightful)
High turnout means more people have consented to be ruled. Low turnout means they've withheld their consent. It has a direct bearing on the legitimacy of the government.
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Many people just want to live their lives, not run someone else's...
Which fully supports the GP's position. Voting is a form of political action, i.e. a way to run other people's lives, or at least to decide how they will be run. If you do not want to run other people's lives then you have no realistic choice other than to abstain, and thus withhold your consent.
Showing up to vote because you're angry at the government is self-destructive. The best way to undermine a government is to render it irrelevant, so just ignore it as much as possible and learn to interact with othe
Re:Why the emphasis on turnout? (Score:4, Insightful)
First, the train of "logic" in your first paragraph is derailed before it starts: a valid way to avoid controlling other people's lives is to vote for candidates who also don't want to control other peoples' lives, and will help get government out of said lives. (It is Libertarian philosophy in a nutshell, after all.) The last part of that sentence also does not make any sense, because by refusing to vote for those who want to reduce government, you are abdicating responsibility and giving government, by default, to those who do want control.
Therefore, showing up to vote out of angry is not self-destructive, because there are plenty of "smaller government" candidates to vote for these days, if only people would do so.
Here is another piece of real world for you: if you try to make government "irrelevant" by ignoring it, you will end up getting trodden into the mud by all the jackboots.
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When the average turn out for an election is less than 1% of the eligible voters, turn out becomes very important. Also, if the election were handled the way that typical elections were and mailed out to registered voters, I'd tend to agree with you. But in this case it's a sort of secret handshake deal because the state doesn't handle the election.
Imagine the worst person you know with a PC... (Score:4, Informative)
From the article:
When Washington, D.C., tested an open-source electronic voting system intended for armed-forces members last year, a team of University of Michigan computer scientists hacked in and altered votes.
Each time a vote was cast, the hackers left a "calling card" on the screen, played the Michigan fight song and secretly changed the latest vote — until election officials shut down the site after two days.
"This obviously doesn't go a long way in building public confidence," Election Trust Managing Partner John Bodin said of the incident. But that shouldn't tarnish a "trusted" industry leader like Scytl, he said.
On another note:
Here is a Berkeley paper that looked at a voting system by Scytl used in Florida: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/scytl-odbp.pdf [berkeley.edu]
They we're mixed in their findings (jump to the conclusion if your just browsing...)
I know fraud happens with paper, I know this saves money, but I'm still skeptical.
From the FAQ after the second link in TFA:
Q: How does the King CD eVoting platform provide end-to-end online balloting security?
A: Secured by Scytl USA, this solution provides end-to-end security. Votes are encrypted and
digitally signed by voters in the voters' voting devices (e.g., PCs) before they are cast. The private
key to decrypt the votes is divided in shares which are distributed to the King CD Electoral Board
(community stakeholders) before the election begins. The private key is destroyed in this process
and do not exist during the election. At the end of the election, the King CD Electoral Board
members have to meet to reconstruct the private key and decrypt the votes.
Encryption is a good start... really I have mixed feelings about this too. Any thoughts on this encryption anyone? - I would love to hear from someone with industry experience.
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and it was all like beep! beep beep! and it at my vote.
And it was a really good vote, too.
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And it was a really good vote, too.
I guess that is why it beeped 3 times, right?
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Question though... what happens if for what ever reason the private keys are lost/corrupted?
If all it takes is disrupting the keys to prevent a specific district from having their votes counted, it could be quite damning. Even if they spread the key over every single district in the state, if any one of those key shares is corrupted/damaged/losts, would it not prevent the reading of any of the votes?
Seems like given such a system, there is almost absolutely a back door of some kind. Having an entire state l
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Generally the scheme is designed such that you don't need all of the pieces to recover a working private key. They use a variant of erasure code [wikipedia.org] to divide the key into N pieces, where any M pieces (M < N) are sufficient to reconstruct the original data. (This is the same technique used for forward error correction on CDs and DVDs, in the Tahoe-LAFS distributed filesystem, and in many other protocols. A ratio of eight pieces required out of ten generated is typical, allowing recovery with up to two lost p
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This has been solved before take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing [wikipedia.org]
There are other solutions such as a public ceremony attended by the candidates where a backup of the private keys, on a flash drive, is dropped into a tub of quick epoxy, dropped into a dumpster full of cement, dropped down an abandoned mine shaft, covered with 1000 feet of gravel, capped with reinforced concrete, etc etc until everyone is satisfied but it is theoretically too expensive to easily steal.
Personally, I'd launch a flash drive to the moon. If anyone ever fetches it, send the next to Mars. You
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Encryption is a good start... really I have mixed feelings about this too. Any thoughts on this encryption anyone? - I would love to hear from someone with industry experience.
What does encryption accomplish, in this case, other than to help make sure the vote isn't altered in transit between the voter's machine and the server? That sort of vote-by-vote interference would be a very ineffective way to throw an election.
It's like bank fraud - while obviously you want your banking sessions to go through SSL, people still manage to steal credit cards by the millions due to server hacks, idiot bankers who carry customer data home on unencrypted laptops, etc.
When it comes to online vot
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What does encryption accomplish, in this case, other than to help make sure the vote isn't altered in transit between the voter's machine and the server? That sort of vote-by-vote interference would be a very ineffective way to throw an election.
When I was young and poor the voting site at the dorm had multi-hour lines out the door and most of the machines don't work. Now that I'm old(er) and relatively wealthy and living in the appropriate area, oddly enough the voting site never has more than 5 minutes of waiting and all the machines work.
Oldest trick in the book. So the T-1 to the poor persons voting district will have a BER of about 1e-3, awwww too bad, and the T-1 to my voting district will have a BER around 1e-12. What a surprise!
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I have no doubt that the decision was made by non-technical people, and at best they were advised by IT managers (who, in my experience, tend to talk a good game with non-techie folks but really don't have anywhere near the requisite knowledge to be the sole technical advisors in this role).
Thus is life. I mean once they had the risk tracking system in place and the 8 documents and signatures on it... well the plan is invincible. Plus with all the risk mitigation activities in place nothing could possibly go wrong. (And if it did well there is a plan to reduce the blame!)
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My semi-educated guess here is that any sort of proprietary encryption protocol is more open to attack than a well-known publicly documented system, because once it becomes a valuable target (and public voting mechanisms are definitely high value targets) its security-by-obscurity goes away rapidly. Once security-by-obscurity is gone, then the proprietary algorithm is at a significant disadvantage just because there were fewer White Hats looking for bugs.
In other words, I won't support any proprietary proto
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by destroyed I think they meant splitted.
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If the private key was actually destroyed, then it cannot be recovered in the timeframe of an election unless the system itself is flawed. Someone needs to read a book [schneier.com].
That was what jumped out at me as well. If the election managers can "reconstruct" a supposed private key - how is that key considered secure? The WHOLE POINT of a private key is supposed to be that you - and ONLY you - have the ability to access it.
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If the private key was actually destroyed, then it cannot be recovered in the timeframe of an election unless the system itself is flawed. Someone needs to read a book [schneier.com].
That was what jumped out at me as well. If the election managers can "reconstruct" a supposed private key - how is that key considered secure? The WHOLE POINT of a private key is supposed to be that you - and ONLY you - have the ability to access it.
Lots of dancing around to avoid using "technical terms". Go google for "Shamir's Secret Sharing" or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing [wikipedia.org]
I am about 99% certain the Shamir in SSS and the Shamir in RSA are the same Shamir but I'm too lazy to look it up and it doesn't really prove anything other than SSS was designed by a smart guy (then again, most broken systems were also designed by smart guys).
Or more generally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing [wikipedia.org]
Anyway, "apt-get install ssss" on a mo
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Even sans SSSS I would expect that, for SSS to be effective security, you'd need some way to initially validate the participants - and for a public election I can't see that happening. The voters probably just need to sign in with their last name, street address, and maybe some number off their voter ID card, the latter of which is probably very predictable if you (the hacker) already have the name and street address, which would be trivial.
It all comes down to the old maxim about a chain only being as stro
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If I can just hack someones desktop and get whatever their credentials are, then the encryption really doesn't matter any more.
Where the title leads this...
Imagine the worst person you know with a PC...
For those particular users, well they already are infected even before the voting process starts...
Good point.
Click voting, like Facebook...! (Score:5, Insightful)
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So rather than politically engaged voters who care, travelling their voting station to cast a ballot, we can now encourage everyone to click vote, based on who has the best style, a trustworthy face and catchy slogans!
Unfortunately 'those who care' don't necessarily make more informed decisions than those who don't. Probably the best solution is mandatory voting which other countries have implemented, which prevents highly motivated minoritys from dominating the political landscape.
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Personally, I think that the right to vote should actually be a privilege to vote given to those who know what they are voting for/against. How about having a quick exam before the test to about out what candidates positions are, then allowing you to vote? (Ever listen to t
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What you're failing to grasp is that this particular position isn't handled the way that literally every other issue is handled here. We're an absentee ballot state for 100% of the other issues, but in this case you have to go to one specific voting location on a particular day, and neither the day nor the election are advertised.
I'm pretty politically engaged myself, but I was voting for a decade before I'd even heard of that particular election.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, this is just a horrible idea.
You just cannot reliably determine anyone's identity online.
There are some functions of government that can already be accessed online, like paying taxes. But that's not a problem since no one besides the taxpayer would want to voluntarily contribute money, so there is little incentive for someone to falsify their identity for that. There is huge incentive for people to participate in a free process (voting) that determines the policy course of states and nations.
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But that's not a problem since no one besides the taxpayer would want to voluntarily contribute money, so there is little incentive for someone to falsify their identity for that.
I could turn it into a problem easily enough: Electronically submit a tax return for somebody who's due for a large refund. Change the place the refund is sent to go to an account I own rather than an account my target owns. I'd actually be somewhat surprised if there haven't been crooked tax preparers trying this exact maneuver.
The reasons that doesn't work have nothing to do with verifying identity online (which you correctly identify as being damn near impossible), and a lot to do with banks being smart
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I wouldn't be so sure. The Electoral Reform Society in the UK conducts ballots for private organisations, for example leadership votes in political parties and unions. Twice now I've voted in one of their elections and they have a simple and elegant solution, based around snail mailing two login codes to anyone eligible to vote that can only be used once. The login codes both match, and one can't be used without the other, and it's only valid for the person casting the vote.
Again, it works remarkably well.
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It doesn't matter how secure the actual voting is, it's the counting that is the problem. In any democratic system, it has to be transparent, anyone has to be able to monitor the counting process, that's simply not possible with electronic voting. Not to mention that the process you mentioned makes it dead easy for votes to be bought, or stolen by threat of force. It makes it easy for a dominant life-partner to force his/her partner to vote for a specific party. It endangers the whole principle of electorat
You know what's even worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's even worse is if you actually can determine someone's identity online, even if it's not 100% reliable. Because then someone somewhere can determine how people voted and all kind of shit will hit the fan.
But even a 100% perfect, secure, open source, pure gold, RMS-approved online voting system will have a fundamental flaw: people will be able to vote from a location (e.g. home) where others can see how they vote. This will enable criminal organizations to buy votes with money or threats and check that people actually vote the way they want.
The only way to prevent this is to force people to vote in only one location, the fucking voting booth, where they can and must cast their vote in secret. So even if criminals pay someone to vote for a certain candidate, they will never be certain that he/she actually voted for that candidate.
Any type of remote voting is fundamentally flawed. It's not about the implementation details, it's the basic concept that cannot work.
And, yes, this is an actual and real problem: when Italy tried remote voting by mail for Italians abroad in 2008, criminals literally went home-to-home to bribe and threaten people and collect votes. Everyone knows this, but still the Mafia got their candidate elected (Nicola Di Girolamo, for the record). Yes politics in Italy are shitty for a number of other reasons, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make life harder for criminals, here and elsewhere.
The people that cast 300% of the votes for Colbert with high-tech hacks are the least of anyone's problem. The criminals that move 1% of the votes with low-tech bribes to voters will destroy your democracy.
Anonymous will see this as a challenge. (Score:2)
Change my name and move to Washington. (Score:2)
Maybe I should change my name to Tom Dobbs and move to Washington.
Of course I would never tell anyone to hack the voting system, no matter how many "hack me" stickers have been put on the back of the machines.
WA as in Western Australia? (Score:3)
How about a little context in the post about which WA we are talking about...
Re:WA as in Western Australia? (Score:4, Funny)
It's the one most likely to contain the "Seattle Times" newspaper.
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Which is contained precisely nowhere in the headline. I made the same mistake, particularly as Australia seems to be a bit more gung-ho about its voting policies than the US.
on line voteing can lead to you boss forcing you t (Score:3)
on line voteing can lead to you boss forcing you to vote his way and he can stand right over you as you vote.
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Unfortunately, I can't think of anything that you couldn't also use quite efficiently for the various voter discouragement/vote misdirection tricks that are commonly deployed to suppress polli
Online voting and a paper trail (Score:2)
Does online voting necessarily preclude a paper trail, or is there an electronic equivalent of a paper trail? What you want is something independent of the vote counting machines, which can be reasonably secured to prevent tampering, can be used at a later date to perform a recount if necessary, and which doesn't allow anyone to prove which way an individual voted (in order to ensure the secrecy of the ballot). I don't think you can do this with paper with an online ballot; you can't, for example, have peop
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Even if users print out a paper copy, how can we know if it was intercepted and tampered with before it went to the printer?
The ONLY solution to this that has any security whatsoever is a ZTIC-like device that unlocks with a PIN, and hooks up to the user's computer. This way, the user votes and confirms on the ZTIC, and the only thing the computer sees is the encryption transaction passing through.
Domestic Accountability (Score:2)
The company's software appears to be from Scytl, a company based in Barcelona, Spain.
Would anyone consider it a national security issue that public elections be held with technology either openly and freely available for review or at the very least, controlled by entities with not just a domestic presence, but a domestic registration?
I don't think I'd be okay with the 2000 election "hanging chad" ballots being counted in India, because they might have been the more cost-effective solution. Isn't it okay to
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However, I'm not at all sure that nationalism is an effective mechanism for advancing that concern(it might simply be orthogonal, it might actually be negative, by bringing the electoral system under the control of an entity with a strong domestic agenda.., or it might be positive; by bringing the electoral system under domestic scrutiny).
Nationalism, per se, is (I think) irrelevant
Postal vostes bad, online even worse (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO, postal votes should be reserved for those who can't get to the polling station because of some disability or travel. The problem with postal votes is that, for a family, or anywhere that has a shared postal address, you simply don't know who is completing the ballots and returning them.
I expect that there are many households where the head of the household collects all the postal ballots, completes them, and then instructs the family member to sign (or simply forges a signature).
Online voting has the same problem, plus many others.
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IMHO, postal votes should be reserved for those who can't get to the polling station because of some disability or travel. The problem with postal votes is that, for a family, or anywhere that has a shared postal address, you simply don't know who is completing the ballots and returning them.
Oregon has universal vote-by-mail, and it works very well. Plus, it pretty much eliminates vote caging.
Well, why shouldn't the Russian mafia... (Score:2)
...control "conservation" in King County?
I predict... (Score:2)
people do banking online, why not voting? (Score:2)
I just don't understand the paranoia.
at the very least, let me vote at any polling location. that kind of convenience might require an ID check so they can pull up my ballot for my location, but if i don't want an ID check, i can go to my regular poling place.
Regarding Voter Turnout (Score:2)
Re:that's an awfully Luddite sentiment for Slashdo (Score:5, Insightful)
I can verify the paper trail myself when I vote. I fill in a black line with a marker and put in a scanning machine. It reads it it then drops it in a tub and I get a receipt with a code on it it. I can go watch them empty the locked tubs and watch a hand recount if it want. I can also watch the locked ballets sitting in a jail cell if I wish (in the case of a recount).
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And there are people in Las Vegas who have built multi-million dollar stage shows out of their ability to confound the exact observation techniques you're relying on.
There is no sleight-of-hand that can solve NP-hard factorisation problems in less time than it takes to compute them.
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And it doesn't matter if one could, if everyone can't. They shouldn't steal your vote if you are watching. But if you don't bother to sit in the voting place all day, watching everything, then you can't verify your vote. There have been plenty of cases of entire ballot boxes being replaced before official counts are made. Not everyone can sit there all day waiting for the vote to be counted. And they shouldn't have to if they can
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True, you can look at a piece of paper in a tub, and maybe even locate it later in life. You can even look in the newspaper and see that some number was later calculated. So Paper to Machine you know, and can recreate. But, did that machines content ever really get looked at? You have no way to track, you have no independent validation path... pure faith from then up. Proper E-Voting ballots could easily be validated they reached the correct server, you could even have multiple servers from independent
proof of vote = selling votes (Score:3)
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Online voting, if it were done right, would give me much more confidence than any number of safeguards you might put on a physical chain of custody.
No, it wouldn't because fewer people would understand how the safeguards in question work. With a "paper trail" verified election, most people can understand how the verification works. Not only that, but most people would be capable of monitoring at least a local election to see whether it was fixed. They probably wouldn't, but they could. With electronic voting (online or otherwise) a much maller group is capable of examining the verification process and determining if it actually verifies anything.
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With electronic voting (online or otherwise) a much maller group is capable of examining the verification process and determining if it actually verifies anything.
I call bullshit. One of my biggest pet peeves is people who assume that if they can't think of something that it's impossible. Want something that everyone can verify? Print out the name of every voter in alphabetical order with their vote next to that. Are you asserting that almost no one can understand the verification process and whether it's valid?
Not that I'm asserting that's the best verification process, but it is a clear one where everyone who can read their own name would be able to verify the
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Not very likely.
That's why all the serious proposals use cryptography to keep the "verifiability" property but keep the data selectively anonymous. Yes, cryptography can do that. A lot of people responding to this post can't seem to wrap their heads around this.
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And what do I care about others knowing how I voted? If you are embarrassed about your politics, then there's something wrong with your opinion about your candidate, or your country is broken.
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The problem with non-anonymous voting isn't people being "embarrassed about [their] politics", but rather the prospect of intimidation. If anyone can see how you voted then your vote may be influenced by how others want you to vote, rather than by how you actually feel. For example, you may feel yourself to be immune to such pressure, but how do you think most people would react if their employer told them (off the record, without any actionable evidence) that those who don't vote for candidate A will recei
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Oddly, 100% of everyone I ask states they voted.
Then you ask odd people.
And what do I care about others knowing how I voted? If you are embarrassed about your politics, then there's something wrong with your opinion about your candidate, or your country is broken.
If you have nothing to hide, why do you care that the cops can enter your home and search it without a warrant or permission? That's the argument you are making here.
I care. I know that one of the first things to happen were open published voting lists to become available is that the local political parties would launch massive calling campaigns. "We see you voted for X last time, here's why you shouldn't next time..."
I hate to point this out, but we don't need published public
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>>>Online voting, if it were done right, would give me much more confidence than any number of safeguards you might put on a physical chain of custody.
Hardly.
If I wanted to steal an election, it's easier to flip a few bits and give myself 1 million extra votes, then to move around a couple thousand pounds of paper. Also the latter would probably make me get caught.
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But electronic voting would allow vote verification to be much easier and secure than paper vote methods. That you can't conceive of those methods doesn't mean that they don't exist. I don't trust or believe arguments made on the basis of "I don't understand, therefore it must be impossible." It's silly statements like that which lead
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Sure. Yep. Right.
You've seen how easy it is to hack supposedly "secure" software like Windows, OS X, Linux, Firefox, and so on. I don't know why you believe Voting Software is any different.
As for hand-counting/verifications, newspapers do that all the time. After the Florida election, USE Today, New York Times, and several other newspapers flocked to the scene and hand-counted the ballots, followed by a report to the citizens ("Gore lost because of votes in western R-dominated counties"). Now how would
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"The bits flipped but we don't know because there's no trace of tampering."
Spoken like someone who has never heard of checksums.
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Why not learn something about some of the proposed systems which you're certain you could subvert effortlessly?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting#Cryptographic_verification [wikipedia.org]
Because, as with quantum cryptography and most other security measures, the measure is theoretically perfect and practically irrelevant. You may be able to verify that your vote matches your number, but the system can give several people the same number without any way for them to realise. You may be able to verify perfectly, but that can be used to indimidate you.
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If the paper trail existed, were you likely to get to verify it for yourself?
I personally have only gone and observed the counting process once, when I felt it was wise to make sure there were people watching. In my community, enough people observe the official count that I don't feel obligated to do it every time. I have also once verified my ballot was counted by validating against my stub's serial number.
It is a much different situation between having a paper trail that can be verified by the average citizen observing and an electronic database.
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>Online voting, if it were done right, would give me much more confidence than any number of safeguards you might put on a physical chain of custody.
I agree. Not sure if it's the chain of custody that's the bigger concern or verifying identity.
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It's precisely because Slashdotters know what can go wrong that we are so critical of electronic voting, it has nothing to do with being Luddites. Electronic voting is not at all transparent to regular people, the counting process is not even transparent to those of us with the technical knowledge.
For an election to be transparent and verifiable, there has to be a paper trail and the counting process has to be open for anyone to observe. A machine count alone doesn't cut it, if there is machine counting ele
Luddite? (Score:2)
Online voting means no more secret ballot, unless you have ED-209 DRM hardware. "Please exit the room immediately while your spouse/employee/blackmailee votes. You have fifteen seconds to comply."
And that's a valid solution, but I don't want ED-209 DRM. Does that make me a luddite?
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Perhaps you should read up on the problems with online voting before you make these sorts of comments.
Securing a vote is trivial, as long as you are happy that your ID is attached to the vote.
However this has the problem that you no longer have a secret ballot, apart from potential state sponsored discrimination, you can also be a victim of external intimidation, since others can see how you voted. Vote buying is also possible, since you can now prove how you voted.
If you eliminate any association of your ID from your vote, then you also eliminate you ability to verify that the vote you cast is indeed the vote that was counted.
You need to read up on the Debian voting system and hash functions. Not Condorcet, although thats cool.
Here's the last election tally sheet:
http://www.debian.org/vote/2010/vote_001_tally.txt [debian.org]
Also there is a procedure that you can vote multiple times and only the last counts. That would seem to eliminate all but very last moment intimidation. Which can be eliminated by everyone voting at the same time, more or less. How many can realistically be intimidated by one intimidator?
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Vote buying is also possible, since you can now prove how you voted.
Bullshit. Vote buying is possible today. There are almost no places in the US where you can't vote by mail. So if someone wants to buy your vote, they can just print out your pre-written vote, walk it to you, have you sign it, then they'll mail it for you. So vote tracking wouldn't create a new vector for attack. It's there today. But tracking would fix a lot more problems than it would add.
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We can build one, the problem is we don't trust anyone to actually do the building. With ATMs the builders have a vested interest in making them secure, with voting systems the opposite is more likely to be true.
VoteBook! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll ignore your sarcasm and raise you total seriousness. The big problem with voting right now is we're pitted against each other in a kind of prisoner's dilemma. But if we really applied social networking (Assuming no fraud for now) we could thrash it among ourselves to organize the nation's voters, where suddenly Democrat, Republican, Tea, Libertarian, & Green ALL find themselves bewildered on the streets as a really honest smart tech president cruises into office.
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This isn't about laziness, this particular position isn't included on the normal ballot because it's paid for by the conservation district itself rather than the state. Consequently there's typically only 1 polling place which is tucked away in a downtown library and doesn't have any signs as to where to vote.
Plus it's voted for on a non-election day and I'd been voting for over a decade before I'd even heard about it.
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as far as the particular election goes, it may be unimportant. But, usually King County is the 800-lb gorilla for state-wide elections...
Washington really should just implement Oregon's vote-by-mail system, as it just simply works. But, instead, they have a half-assed implementation.
Actually in Washington state, I believe what's holding up vote by mail is Pierce County rather than King.
I'm not sure what the resistance is (I live in Pierce). I mean, I personally like the experience of going to the polling place, filling out my ballot, and gabbing with the older folks who volunteer to run the place - but after missing a few elections due to work issues, I signed up for a "permanent absentee" (vote by mail) ballot a couple years ago. It's simple, you can take your time filling it out... a
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Actually in Washington state, I believe what's holding up vote by mail is Pierce County rather than King.
Much (dare I say MOST?) of Washington state votes by mail. There are just a few hold-out counties, usually where some parties *cough* rely on a great deal of highly questionable voting practices.
The biggest single problem with the Vote by Mail system as used in Washington is the ability for unions to buy votes (watch while you vote at home, "lose" $40 bucks in your couch cushions on their way out the door). Some complain that it misses homeless voters as well, but there are provisions made for these in m
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Well, let me know your old address in Oregon.. If your not going to be mailing your ballet in, I'll give you $20 and mail it in for you.
Higher turn out because of ease doesn't necessarily translate into more people voting, even with more votes being turned in.
There is somewhat of a reason why some states check ID. One vote for one person if that person chooses to vote should be more then just an idea. And in some areas, $20 a ballot is good money for something they couldn't care about in the first place...
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my state doesnt even check ID's, and it's one of the most important states for early "leanings" of major elections.
god love walking in, saying your name ONCE, taking a ballot, marking it, and sliding it into an electronic reader.
yeah, a paper trail means it's a better process........
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Low turnouts are good.
It means only people who CARE about the election, and likely did actual research, are casting ballots. The rest are just re-electing the same damn idiot, because they recognize the name - like visiting McDonalds because you're afraid to try something new. (I know - I did the same thing when I was 20 and stupid.)
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... or they are voting because they have been told to vote for a specific candidate by people they idolise, or who claim to have some authority over the people (such as ministers/other people who scare them).
It's clearly a myth that low turn-outs are good. I mean, just think about it for a second. Seriously. It's fucking retarded to claim they are somehow good. Especially for the half-assed reason you just gave.
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Especially when you see countries like Australia where voting is mandatory. 100% voter turn out has put us in a far better position than the US is in.
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Well, yes and no. I've usually found that the reason that vote counts are low in certain elections is that the independent/undecided voters mostly stayed home. The hardline party voters mostly turn out every time.
Thus, elections with low vote counts in the U.S. tend to be basically party-line votes. The higher the voter turnout, the greater the percentage of voters who actually cared enough to study the issues.
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It means only people who CARE about the election, and likely did actual research, are casting ballots
Not necessarily. I know plenty of regular voters who just vote party line without regard to the pros and cons of the individual candidates. One elderly woman I work with was very pleased when she found out she could just cast her vote automatically down party lines. I dare even say *most* of the people I know who vote always vote for one party or the other. Hardly informed votes.
:) To get the most accurate number for ho
I'm also inclined to think higher voter turnout is better because of jelly beans
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if they know they can get rid of
All thats needed for pacification purposes is:
"if they think they can get rid of"
They'll never do it, of course, as most voters consider their political party to be an unalterable demographic, no more so than they could change their race or age. But thinking its possible is good for pacification.
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King County already has a vote-by-mail system [kingcounty.gov] in place. In fact, the last King County elections were handled entirely by mail [kcls.org].
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Some counties in WA vote exclusively by mail in ballots already
MOST counties in Washington vote by mail. 38 of Washington's 39 counties vote by mail. Pierce County still maintains poll sites.
http://wei.secstate.wa.gov/osos/en/voterinformation/Pages/VotebyMailFAQ.aspx [wa.gov]
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All increased turnout does is increase the accuracy of the portion of the vote one has garnered, it does not constitute a mandate. Yes, I understand that perception is not reality here.
"If there had been a lackadaisical voter turnout, he wouldn't feel bold enough to lead this outrageous assault on workers' rights."
Maybe. We don't know that. 10% of the population turning out and giving him 90% of the vote is different than 90% of the population turning out and giving him 60% of the vote.
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campaigned
on. And by the way, he is only doing this for public employees. Why should public employees be allowed to unionize?
So, basically, politicians who want to do what the voters want are "fascists". You apparently think it is a good idea to use government money to slant elections in the favor of Democrats. I have news for you, we are already in real trouble. Our governments are spending more money than they are receiving in taxe
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"Public sector workers have better job security, better pay, and better benefits than private sector workers."
Could you cite a source for that please? I have always thought that an equivalent, comparable job at a private sector company paid better than one in government. I'm not talking about the "complete compensation package" that includes benefits, only gross pay. My ideas about this could be totally incorrect, they're only impressions I have formed by reading non-empirical sources. You though, purport i
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-04-federal-pay_N.htm [usatoday.com]
Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.
These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The federal pay premium cut across all job categories — white-collar, blue-collar, management, professional, technical and low-skill. In all, 180 jobs paid better average salaries in the federal government; 36 paid better in the private sector.
State government employees had an average salary of $47,231 in 2008, about 5% less than comparable jobs in the private sector. City and county workers earned an average of $43,589, about 2% more than private workers in similar jobs. State and local workers have higher total compensation than private workers when the value of benefits is included.
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In essence, fascism is a lead into socialist just as socialism is a lead into communism.
Re:The proper way to address low turnout... (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously don't know anything about the issue. The problem is that the King Conservation District is in a sort of legal loophole. It has to be funded by the conservation district rather than the state, and isn't ever on the normal ballots that are sent out. Consequently, there's only one polling place for the issue and it's hidden in a back corner of a library.
Consequently, it's the only office I haven't had the chance to vote for since I gained the right well over a decade ago. This isn't about us being progressive or trying to get more voters per se, it's about the thoroughly undemocratic way in which the positions have been filled. In a county with a million or so eligible voters, the elections tend to draw only a few thousand voters in a typical election cycle.
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If we just went back to that, it would eliminate almost all abuses possible with the Internet voting systems. You can't fake a vote from someone that can look up and se
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What about people being forced to vote one way or another? Your employer wants you to vote a certain way. If you have a total open voting system, employers know what employee voted for. Then the employer can act accordingly.
They can do that now. Require that employees hand you their absentee ballot for inspection before they sign it in front of you and you mail it for them. It could be done today. With great ease. Given the fact that it isn't happening, I take assertions that it would happen if allowed to be proof that the speaker hasn't actually paid attention to voting or votes and knows not of what they speak.
This is what the secret ballot is trying to prevent.
Uh no. Go read up on it. The change from open ballots, which this country was founded on, to secret ballots wa
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A)Left
B)Far Left
There, fixed it for ya.
Exactly... the vote WILL be corrupted... (Score:2)
Hacking is the least of the concerns. This DESTROYS the guaranteed secret ballot. What wife or husband will tell their spouse: "no, you can't watch me internet vote"? How many union members or church goers will refuse the offer of their union or church to "help" them vote? How many employees will risk their job when their supervisor quietly expresses a desire to look over his shoulder while casts his ballot from the work computer?
If this becomes the rule, we will no longer have secret ballots in this countr