You can't spell 'electronics' without 'elect': The time for online democracy has come
- Reference: 1604314814
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/02/electronic_voting/
- Source link:
It has certainly had what looks like a very uneven history, with a handful of pilot projects usually leading to fairly stern analysis saying it's not fit to scale. No independent paper trail, no recounts, an immediate susceptibility to wholesale fraud: sticking paper in boxes has all that and more in its favour. Democracy is too precious to risk on such a flaky idea.
That all sounds fine, until you look at the state of non-electronic democracy right now. Tomorrow, the most powerful democratic state in the world goes to vote, and it is a chaotic, corrupt, incomprehensible mess.
The US presidential election is based on ideas dating from before the invention of the telegraph or railways, when communication across the nation was difficult and time-consuming. Fifty-two different states with fifty-two different voting systems feed into an electoral college designed in the days of slavery.
[1]
People line up during first day of early voting in the 2020 presidential election in Arlington, Virginia. Residents there have voiced concern over [2]voter suppression despite recent legal tweaks making it easier to vote in the state
Last time, as it usually does, the Republican party lost the popular vote and won the presidency; it has spent much of the time since trying very hard to suppress the votes of people it doesn't like.
That's before a pandemic which thrives on people travelling and mixing in public venues with others, and a President who has said he won't accept the result unless he wins. A secure, verifiable system would negate that nonsense.
There is a tiny dribble of [3]e-voting in America , but in the 2016 elections only 100,000 such votes were cast. If the US had a single electronic voting system across the country, with access for those without the right personal technology, and it was reliable, trustworthy, and efficient, then democracy would be much better served. No wonder there's such strong pressure against it.
So, can online voting ever be reliable, trustworthy, and efficient? Can you prove a vote has been cast by a properly registered voter, that this is the only vote they cast, that malware hasn't interfered on client or server, that fraud isn't being committed by bribed system managers, that the communications infrastructure hasn't been compromised by powerful enemies?
Hell yes. For a start, a single electronic voting system can be multiple independent voting systems: the concept of three independently designed systems checking on each other has been standard in aviation for decades. You think blockchain voting is vulnerable? Fine, add end-to-end encrypted and verified old fashioned client/server. You think backdoors are a bad idea? So does everyone – open source the lot.
How about denial of service? What if on election day, all the servers go down in a hail of packets, and everything is choked off? That would be bad. But such attacks are finite, they get nullified over time as their source and nature are identified and blocks set in place. In any case, there doesn't have to be one election day. There can be an election week, or a month, or an election that terminates when a certain number of votes have been cast, or local voting to large numbers of independent servers who amalgamate their votes later, or whatever. You don't have to model electronic voting on systems that were designed before the telephone was invented. A new government has to be decided on by the end of the last one's term, and everything else is up for grabs.
But the best answer to anyone saying "it can't work" is to show it working. There is a long-standing and effective [4]electronic national voting system already in use in Estonia .
It has been going in one form or another since 2001, and in the pre-pandemic 2019 parliamentary elections nearly 44 per cent of votes were cast using it. It's had its controversies and security concerns, and remains very actively discussed, but in many regards it looks much as one might hope. The election server code is open and on GitHub, the voting protocols are open and anyone can write a client. There are constant calls for improvement, including through multiple independent parallel systems, and there is independent auditing. It's not perfect, but it works.
That's the thing about electronic voting: we have lots of technologies that can be applied to it and lots of ways of verifying the system, and all have some imperfections. But give the system strong principled design rules, a framework of legal protection, the sort of continuous adversarial testing that the wiser corporates employ, and you have a system that improves itself. We know how to use a DevOps-style approach to testing, deployment, instrumentation, and automated compliance checking. It works.
I started out thinking electronic voting was a very bad idea, and it certainly can be. But I've watched the internet grow over the decades and the nature of software, security, distributed systems, and process-based engineering grow with it. With political will, a commitment to doing things right and to keeping the voting public in the loop and engaged with the debates, we can and should follow Estonia's lead.
And with electronic voting in place, there are lots of good questions about how it could be used to increase participation in democracy. Not the madness of constant referendums, but certainly the possibility of building in new checks and balances to the power of the state – if there had been a national stop button available in the UK, it would have been pressed several times in the past year alone. And tell me that we couldn't do better with an app than the House of Lords.
Finally, what if instead of one country trying to disrupt another's elections, it provided them? What if a safe, secure, and verifiable election could be gifted to people in authoritarian states, out of reach of their governments? That's a whole new level of hard – but I'd vote for it.
Believing in democracy means reinventing it faster than the bastards can break it, and in our new distributed technologies we have the tools to do just that. ®
Get our [5]Tech Resources
[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/10/30/shutterstock_early_voting.jpg
[2] https://www.wtkr.com/election-2020/voters-worry-about-voter-suppression-despite-recent-legislative-changes
[3] https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/internet-voting.aspx
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Bought votes?
One thing I've never seen a solution to when e-voting is mentioned is how you handle the problem of vote buying, that is how to maintain the secrecy of the ballot.
Say I'm siting in a bar, moaning that it's waste of time voting, they're all the same, none of them will give me more money. Someone sits down beside me and offers me $100 to vote for their candidate. With traditional voting in a curtained cubicle they have no way to be sure that I stayed bought, and didn't just take their money & vote for someone else, but if they produce a tablet & have me enter the vote while they watch (or fill in a paper form which they take & post) they know for sure that they've bought a vote. Are there any e-vote solutions that address that?
The obvious response is "it would cost too much to be worthwhile", but that isn't necessarily true. In Theresa May's 2017 UK election fiasco, 97 seats were won by a 5% margin or less, 16 seats were won with majorities of < 200, just a few hundred votes going the other way could have completely changed the composition of parliament.
Re: Bought votes?
That's the fault of the FPTP voting system. If the UK used a representative voting system like most of the rest of Europe do, then you don't end up with just a few hundred votes having a massive impact on the outcome, while on the flip side, millions of votes serving no purpose whatsoever.
Re: Bought votes?
No, you end up with a permanently hung parliament, and every vote ends up like the Brexit ones at the end of the T.May omnishambles. PR just makes minority parties like the DUP or LibDems into Kingmakers, where they have an influence out of all proportion to their share of the vote.
Re: Bought votes?
Rubbish. If that was the case, how did the SNP end in with a majority in 2011 for example. It's up to the parties to come up with an offer that enough people will vote for, not rig the system so they get to be in charge on little more than one third of the votes as happened, for example, in 2015 and 2005.
If someone wants to pay me £100 for my vote, I'll take their money as, given where I live, my vote is worthless.
Re: Bought votes?
"Bought votes?
We'd be lucky to have parties try and buy our votes electronically or otherwise because after about 1,000 votes bought, at least 1 person would come forth or be caught bragging about it and the corruption would be exposed. So, an electronic voting system that can be audited in seconds by anyone? Sure, whatever makes it easier but sadly, regardless if the election is corrupt or not rest assured that the corrupt will still take seat.
2,000 years ago at least 50% of the people (the poor) couldn't feasibly physically vote because they'd have to obtain a carriage and ride it for hundreds of miles each way for days, is it really any more feasible today? I'm not sure if electronic voting would be a "cure all", but it would surely nuke the entire reasoning of congress (bye house, bye senate)... baby steps.
Re: Bought votes?
One thing I've never seen a solution to when e-voting is mentioned is how you handle the problem of vote buying
In a similar way that Google handles AdWords!? Auction the digital votes off in The Market, of course!!
Google, FaceBook, et. cetera. they have those digital avatars of us all, which supposedly knows us much better than we know ourselves, so is it not much more efficient if those avatars could join political parties and vote on "the issues"? I think it is!
I think that politcal parties (and other commercial interests) would pay well to get sets of nice, segmented, digital voters - even if it was as a subscription service - VAAS!!
Re: Bought votes?
The American election would be much fairer and more efficent if the presidency was just put out to tender. The same people would get in but all the $Bn would go to the treasury instead of to facebook and billboard owners
I just want to point out that all of the issues you point to with Manual Voting in the US are nothing to do with Manual Voting itself, and are entirely down to US Politics. In no other country where Manual Voting takes place are there the massive lines that are seen in the US, nor the Problems with counting, and other issues. Look at India, over a billion people, at least half of which can vote, and they dont queue for more then 30 minutes. Same in Australia, Germany, even in the UK.
US Politics have made the problems in the US - onerous ID requirements designed to suppress certain sections of the voting population; reducing the number of locations where voting can take place; voting taking place during the week instead of on weekends or holidays, such that those who are working and cannot get time off cannot vote. All of these are byproducts of US Politics, and nothing to do with Manual Voting.
And I'm afraid, your suggestion of Electronic Voting, wouldnt fix any of those problems. Those without electrical devices (the elderly and poor for example) would automatically be excluded (voter suppression once more). ID requirements would likey remain and would probably require you to either visit or send off those details to some government department, not making it any easier for the sections of society currently suppressed by such measures to vote. Additional requirements would likely be added so as to continue to suppress certain sections of society, if Electronic Voting took off. Time frames for voting would be closely controlled to limit voting by those deemed undesirable by the ruling party. I'm sure you can come up with further voter suppression techniques that could be used to continue to suppress "undesirable "voters.
Before Electronic Voting will make the US more democratic, you would have to fix US politics first - gerrymandering, the electoral college, that all 50 state have different voting rules - these are all failures of US Politics. The choice of Manual Voting or Electronic Voting will fix none of those.
Manual Voting works. It's proven throughout the West for a 100 years and more, that's why it's used. I'm glad Estonia are using Electronic Voting and works for them. But all it would take is one large failure, a hack, a changed election result, and confidence in that system will fall. Manual Voting requires an entirely corrupt system in order to fail, and by the time you've already reached that stage, (hello Belarus), the voting system, whether Electronic or Manual, is not going to fix anything. Plus it is easier to film bags of corrupt paper votes being carried into distribution centres, then to see a single changed value in a million lines of code.
I know which one i trust...
Manual Voting requires an entirely corrupt system in order to fail, and by the time you've already reached that stage, (hello Belarus), the voting system, whether Electronic or Manual, is not going to fix anything.
Malaysia also says hi...
Nazi Germany
In her memoir of Nazi Germany "The Past is Myself" Christable Bielenberg recounts that her husband was a teller at one of the referenda about Jewish rights. He personally counted that 99% of the paper ballots were against curtailing the rights of Jews (one even managed to write 'lick my a*%e' on the paper). When there result was announced by the NAZI party, it was 99% in favour of the proposal. But a at least the opposition knew the people were overwhelmingly against the NAZIs as it was a paper ballot.
The only way to trust an electronic ballot is for the (encrypted) vote to be formally accepted before it is read (i.e. decrypted) so the voter gets a receipt signed with the Returning Officer's private key, before providing their deciphering key, and all votes should be published with the relevant deciphering key so everyone can validate every vote. The problem, as the OP points out is that you can then tell how everyone voted and voter intimidation or bribery can affect the outcome.
As for foreign countries organising voting, that would probably constitute an act of war. Look at how Spain considered the Catalonian 'independence' ballot. (Oh, so we in the UK / USA / EU, don't like the Russian government, so how about WE organise a general election for the Duma?)
While I agree with your post on the whole (with upvote), I want to address "onerous ID requirements".
It appears that just about ANY requirement seems onerous to some.
I don't see a basic gov't-issued photo ID requirement as particularly onerous, especially when so many day-to-business also require it (e.g.: banking, age verification for tobacco/alcohol, certain prescription meds).
What-if example: If I knew my next door neighbor's name and address, without gov't-issued photo proof (and assuming the poll worker didn't have personal knowledge of my neighbor) there would be nothing stopping me from stealing his vote. And again a few hours later (different poll worker) for the neighbor on the other side. (And finally my own, via absentee.) If said neighbors go to vote after me, they would be rejected unless they had proof. If they did, the false-pretense ballots could be tracked down and subtracted from the automated count.
If trying to get our population ID'd is a problem, then it sounds like the ID system itself needs help, and unfortunately the speculative solutions (e.g.: implanted palm chip with name, birthdate, location day after birth) have even greater issues on multiple fronts.
(Caveat: No one checked a photo ID for me to do an absentee ballot this year. An online voting system could actually be designed more secure in this regard, in that I'd have to enter some unique data from my ID, rather than merely "matching" signatures from application to ballot envelope.)
>It appears that just about ANY requirement seems onerous to some.
Yes. Exactly that. As any technologist will tell you, requirements should always be matched to the challenge they are intended to solve. If one posits that you are attempting to combat electoral fraud, it is rational to look at the actual amounts of electoral fraud taking place.
Even the most cursory of examinations will very quickly lead you to the conclusion that the answer is as-good-as-zero, therefore any requirement intended to combat electoral fraud is a requirement without basis in fact. Therefore what you're proposing is a serious and concrete barrier-to-entry to a process otherwise deemed to be a near-fundamental human right.
Which is exactly why ID requirements are perennially and exclusively proposed by right-wing hate factories who are solely concerned with voter suppression and not electoral integrity.
"While I agree with your post on the whole (with upvote), I want to address "onerous ID requirements".
It appears that just about ANY requirement seems onerous to some."
Any ID that costs anything is too onerous.
And that cost isn't limited to financial cost. What government issued ID does everyone have?
>What government issued ID does everyone have?
And is accepted?
It says "Martin L King" on your driving license, but "Martin Luther King Jnr" on your birth certificate = you don't get to vote
Note to Register: please ask Mr/Ms iglethal to write for you in future.
The basic issues are understanding and trust. Nearly everyone can understand paper ballots, there are simply understood checks and process to verify the results. Ordinary people can and do help verify paper ballot processes as election observers. For example, the political parties will often have people counting the numbers of voters entering each polling station , hence getting a check on total votes cast by area (no missing boxes); the overall count is public and witnessed by the parties and by the general public and so on. Also it is a good thing that members of the public volunteer to sit all day in the polling station or work at the counts, being an essential part of democracy. It is much healthier that participation in democracy means more than clicking.
99% plus of us will never understand cryptographic methods in IT or be able to verify that they have worked . It is an invitation to conspiracy theories. And if you say - what about online banking: I can verify electronic banking transactions by looking at my bank balance, and I trust on-line banking that far. I can't verify if my electronic vote and everyone else's has arrived correctly.
As Iglethal and others have noted, electronic voting doesn't address the real problems in existing electoral systems (eg in UK - first past the post vs proportional, what the 2nd chamber is for etc ). Paper balloting can even be extremely fast - in UK general elections some areas have declared a result less than 1 hour after the polling stations closing.
It's a point worth expanding. The number of people who are then able to observe and check elections is vastly reduced to those with a grasp of the security involved and ways of circumventing it. This would apply to local party workers or international election observers.
A quick exercise: Let's assume 90% of people are capable of understanding paper based voting and 0.1% of them are actually interested in having a look. My finger in the air indicates that less than 1% of people are capable of understanding electronic voting and the same proportion, 0.1%, are actually interested. That's a large difference in the pool of people you have that can bring some trust to the election result.
Electoral System
The electoral system used for British general elections is not FPTP, it is plurality. The candidate in the constituency with the most votes wins. No post to be first past. That is the French system, where the candidate with 50%+1 of votes cast is elected, with a second round, normally between the top two candidates, where no one got past the post in the first round. The system used in Scotland, with a mix of constituencies and regional seats balances the need to have a local MSP with broad proportionality. It was designed to prevent/make very unlikely any government being from a single party but has delivered a majority once (and on current polling will do so again next year).
Electronic voting is a solution to a problem that doesnt really exist. Building a complicated system used once in four or five years isnt worth it. These issues were covered very well in The Stainless Steel Rat for President.
Also
I would also remark that a typical US election will have a lot of offices on one ballot. In Washington, DC, this can mean council member for one's ward, two at-large council members, non-voting delegate to Congress, shadow representative to congress, advisory neighborhood commissioner, a couple of school board members.
If anything, this is simpler than in many places, since we don't have a state legislature (bicameral everywhere but I think Nebraska) a governor, or county commissioners. All this slows down voting as well as tabulation.
In a few places, I guess, one can still vote a straight party ticket with the same effort as voting for one office; but I've voted in three jurisdictions over forty-odd years without seeing that.
Tech implementation is only first step.
You could make a technologically superb system, formally verified, open source, audited by dozens of teams and pen-tested by anyone hoping to snag a huge bug bounty.... But would these measures convince the man on the street?
How do you overcome the belief that data bits zipping around wires are somehow ephemeral, when bits of paper seem more tangible?
I'm not saying its impossible, but it seems at least a big a hurdle as the technical side.
Re: Tech implementation is only first step.
>How do you overcome the belief that data bits zipping around wires are somehow ephemeral, when bits of paper seem more tangible?
Well you'll face something of a challenge here, given that pieces of paper are in fact tangible and bits zipping around wires are in fact ephemeral.
Why it won't happen anytime soon
You started by stating the obvious: "If the US had a single electronic voting system across the country, with access for those without the right personal technology, and it was reliable, trustworthy, and efficient, then democracy would be much better served. No wonder there's such strong pressure against it. "
Re: Why it won't happen anytime soon
If you represent the majority then it's in your interests to hold free and fair elections and count all the votes. Otherwise its in your interests to bypass those security devices and suppress votes.
Article's author hypothesizes a perfect system in a perfect world that simply does not exist.
There isn't a safeguard you can make, that cannot be unmade.
You can make a server with blockchain, and verifiable, and Kemp will have it wiped before you get to check those blockchains. His political appointee appeals court judge will declare that wipe legal, his political Secretary of State can cancel mail-in ballots because they are too auditable and sue counties for making voting easy. Your blockchain won't ever get run.
Students don't vote for you? No problem, simply declare student id invalid for voting! Your system just makes that easier to block their votes. No legal challenge possible, because the machine rejected the chance to even vote.
Old people vote for you? No problem, declare being old the only valid reason to get a mail-in ballot! And being young a reason to use these dodgy machines!
Putin kills US troops in Afganistan, and Trump rushes to defend.... Putin. Well then, better block mail-in ballots from soldiers received from Afghanistan. Their ballots will arrive late, and Kavanaugh 'owes you a favor though', so he won't mind blocking those late ballots from being counted.
Re: Why it won't happen anytime soon
I have to disagree with your first sentence. If you represent the majority then it's in your interests to make changes to the voting system which will tend to ensure you stay in power, even when you no longer represent the majority. Or to refuse changes to the voting system which would make it less likely for you to stay in power.
Most politicians appear to be more interested in staying in power, rather than representing the electorate.
Re: Why it won't happen anytime soon
I think it's now a statistical fact that in in the USA demographics mean one party should win forever.
The other side can only win by 'strategic' use of boundaries, the electoral college and discouraging certain voters.
Unfortunately this article falls apart on one, crucial premise in the second paragraph.
>That all sounds fine, until you look at the state of non-electronic democracy right now.
The hugely relevant facts that are missing here are manifold. Most notably you need to be clear you're talking strictly about US democracy: there are plenty of other western democracies not plagued by industrialised, partisan voter suppression and gerrymandering that don't suffer the same consequent issues. More immediately, you must be aware that the overwhelming majority of US ballots are in fact already cast electronically. In the last presidential round near-enough 100% of votes were cast in jurisdictions using either direct-entry or optical-scan ballots. Yes these may have physical backups, but they are at their core e-Voting systems, so your whole premise is invalid unless you want to work to explore why _your_ e-Voting proposal is superior to the ones what we've got.
Fundamentally if you replaced those half a dozen broken, shit systems we've got today a hundred, shiny, tech-bro endorsed hypersolutions, the end result would be a hundred new ways for the vote to be suppressed and hijacked. Your proposal is the worst of all worlds.
And from there, frankly, we're off to the deep end:
>Last time, as it usually does, the Republican party lost the popular vote and won the presidency
In all of US partisan electoral history, this has happened exactly four times, and frankly I think you're going to struggle to be taken seriously if you think a result from 1888 should be entered into an argument concerning electronic voting. Likewise I don't see how you're connecting the dots from voting reform to fixing the electoral college. Stick to facts, not hyperbole.
I wrote a similar comment before reading yours, which is better! :)
Relevant Tom Scott
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
Advantages of hand-marked, paper ballots
1. They are a legal document, voter-marked, expressing their intent
2. They are visually verifiable
3. They are robust and can be stored for years, if need be
4. They are both machine and hand countable, as many times as necessary
5. They are inexpensive to create
6. They are not "hackable", at least much harder to hack
Contrast the above with "electronic voting machines", which require maintenance, storage between elections, setup and testing, and have been shown to be less than reliable, due to all the things that happen to digital hardware. Then, there's the code that runs (or doesn't) on them. And the "now you see it, now you don't" totals (were they correct in the first place?).
Paper ballots have a lot going for them, while the only thing going for EVMs is the bottom line of the companies that make, maintain and program them.
I would propose that with so much riding on the outcome of elections nowadays, the KISS principle applies here. Paper ballots also have the advantage of being tangible...if you have 1000 voters, you know what the pile of ballots should look like.
Re: Advantages of hand-marked, paper ballots
I think a hybrid system has some chance of working.
Basically, enter your selections on a computer. Ballot is printed (works well with first past the post systems, not so much the Australian Senate Ballot paper). Printed paper is available for perusal and verification. If it checks out, punter clicks "ok" and paper ballot goes in to sealed ballot box. Pnuematic tubes and all that, clear, so it can be seen to go in by said punter.
Upon clicking "ok", the electronic ballot is registered. Printed paper means that the there can be a recount in case of suspected fraud or tampering. There is still the possibility for manual, postal, ballots Special ballot papers for the blind and visually impaired.
Discrepancies *should* be in the low single digits per polling place. Except for the human factor of course.
Goddam it, if we want to then the flunkies could even organise so that each ticket has a qr code the punters could scan so that the whole lot is pre-selected, then the above mentioned steps take place.
Re: Advantages of hand-marked, paper ballots
> Basically, enter your selections on a computer.
Failed at the first hurdle. The rest is meaningless.
Re: Advantages of hand-marked, paper ballots
Since this is a printed ballot, not a hand complete one, I can easily print off replacement ballots and swap them for the ones you printed.
I do not need people to sit with pen and paper and fill in the ballots by hand to make them plausible, so you've made it far easier for me, the hypothetical attacker, to attack your election. One man and a printer can run off tens or hundreds of thousands of ballots, I don't need 100-1000 people included in the attack plot anymore.
The pen and paper election system is tried and trusted and worked for decades, the electronic ones have been ridiculously backdoored.
Look at the Kemp election, he ran his own election, oversaw his own count, oversaw his own equipment, oversaw his own servers, it had no paper trail, when the servers went to be checked, he'd already had them wiped.
That election should have been voided, you don't destroy evidence if you have nothing to hide. Kemp clearly had something to hide.
Electronic voting has zero benefit.
Not even the "blind can use it" bullshit, they cannot read the screen, the braille ballot could at least be touched! They cannot read the audit paper trail either, even on machines that have one. They just add new attack vectors.
Re: Advantages of hand-marked, paper ballots
Never said the punter has it. Can be displayed behind glass. That was the point about using clear mechanics. Often used in lottery draws to help ... transparency.
Plenty of hard writing type fonts available, ballots can be stuffed, no matter what.
Re: Advantages of hand-marked, paper ballots
"6. They are not "hackable", at least much harder to hack"
As usual, the humans in the loop (voter, counters, etc.) are the easiest pieces to hack.
Pithy comeback aside, there is one major vulnerability: absentee ballots. Ballots kept in semi-secured spaces -- clerks offices, polling places, locked storage -- are less likely to be "hacked", but one must admit that ballots that go through the mail (either/both direction(s)) have a greater risk of being stolen, tampered, etc.
Yet despite that risk, I believe it's secure enough to use for my vote. It worked this year and I may stick with it. I'll even show ID to my mail carrier if necessary to receive the ballot (if only the USPS had Amazon's/UPS's/Fedex's tech to verify deliveries).
Re: Advantages of hand-marked, paper ballots
The meatsacks are easier to "hack" one-on-one perhaps but it does not scale well at all. However if you hack the hard/software once, you can hack them all. This scales in a way that meatsack fiddling does not.
Missing ballots, again, does not scale well. It can become obvious that things are missing and recounts/revotes taken. If you hack the hard/software no vote is missing, you simply alter it to what you want. This is much harder to spot.
That said, mail voting is the most likely form of meat-space voting to be fiddled with; often in places of multiple occupancy where one person can collect the ballots and vote on them all. This happens in some communities more than others.
Re: Advantages of hand-marked, paper ballots
>As usual, the humans in the loop (voter, counters, etc.) are the easiest pieces to hack.
This isn't even remotely true. Convincing other people to engage in illegal activity on your behalf or hoodwinking people to do so without realising it is actually really quite hard. Most people are fundamentally decent. Most people working in a public service capacity will embrace the oversight necessary to verify that they are doing their jobs correctly. Fooling everyone in that network of cross-oversight is a near-insurmountable feat of corruption.
All it takes to compromise an electronic voting system is a couple of million dollars and some skilled APT types with the means to do so, and that scales infinitely and probably near-undetectably.
To compromise a voting system based on people means compromising the polling place staff. And the polling place watchers. And your departments of state. And their legislative oversight. And the courts. And the press. And then doing that again and again in every jurisdiction. And at that point you don't need to hijack the election because you're already running a dictatorial state.
Re: Advantages of hand-marked, paper ballots
>compromising the polling place staff. And the polling place watchers. And your departments of state. And their legislative oversight. And the courts
In the USA these are often political posts. It's hard to get your head around a system where the returning officer is a political appointment by the incumbent party.
Not an argument for e-voting
This is not an argument for e-voting, but one for reforming the USAian electoral system.
E-voting is simply too wide-open for abuse to be used for anything serious. Electing the captain of your golf club? Fine. The ruler of your nation? No way!
Using IT to help with the count is fine, but at the end of the day it needs to be meat-sacks and paper counts as corrupting that simply doesn't scale well and by the time you have a conspiracy large enough to affect a country, said conspiracy will collapse under its own weight.
The author handwaves away far too many problems. For example: How does F/OSS voting software help when the hardware is crippled by an exploit in IME? How do you verify that the F/OSS software you think is running, is actually running in an unaltered state and hasn't been rootkited into oblivion? You don't, not with any certainty anyway, not unless to are prepared to disassemble the machine, check every chip, scan the drives and check every byte and only then begin the count. Rinse and repeat for every single link in the chain. That doesn't sound like an improvement to me.
E-voting is a horrifically bad idea and should never be used as part of a serious democratic process. I really wish people would stop pushing it.
arguments for e-voting
The only reason e-voting works in Estonia is that
a.) people (have to) have ID cards;
b.) the cards are designed for use in electronic voting;
and
c.) everyone there is honest.
I don't know whether the smaller size of the country has anything to do with it.
Re: arguments for e-voting
But does it work in Estonia?
To verify an election, *everyone* should be able to verify *everything*.
Anyone can verify a paper ballot.
Anyone can follow the ballot box to the counting station and verify the transit.
Anyone can watch and verify the counting of that ballot.
Anyone and everyone.
How would everyone verify all that in Estonia?
That's the core problem with these electronic voting systems, they require you trust small numbers of people. Instead of being a large difficult to attack system, with lots of eye, you've made it a much smaller system to attack with far fewer bad actors needed to attack it.
"everyone there is honest."
No, the Russian laundromat runs through Estonia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank_money_laundering_scandal
"The Danske Bank money laundering scandal arose in 2017-2018 around €200 billion of suspicious transactions that flowed from Estonian, Russian, Latvian and other sources through the Estonia-based bank branch of Denmark-based Danske Bank from 2007 to 2015"
"One of the Magnitsky's stolen Hermitage Capital Management subsidiaries, Diron Trade LLP assisted in $5.8 billion in money laundering transfers between Swedbank's Baltic subsidiaries and Danske Bank during 6 months in 2010 and 2011 according to SVT.[11] During that time, Aivars Bergers, a board member of Latvia's leading pro-Russian party Harmony and one of its largest financiers, received EUR 270,000 from Diron Trade LLP and Murova Systems LLP, a company which has a Great Britain postal box and is associated with the Azerbaijani Laundromat in which $2.9 billion was money laundered through Danske Bank's Estonia branch"
https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate
Re: arguments for e-voting
c.) everyone there is honest.
... Money Laundering is an honest business?
Re: arguments for e-voting
>Money Laundering is an honest business?
Certainly, if you can't trust your fence - who can you trust ?
What if a safe, secure, and verifiable election could be gifted to people in authoritarian states
It would of course be an utter irrelevance, in the same way that an authoritarian state holding an "alternative" electronic election in a western democracy would be. And safe, secure, and unverifiable elections are the norm these days in authoritarian states, you only need to control one tiny piece of the whole system to rig the whole thing.
Seriously, is that article worth reading? I stopped at "That all sounds fine, until you look at the state of non-electronic democracy right now."
Conflating "the US" with "democracy" is silly enough for all the quirks they have there (only 2 candidates? The one with less votes can win? WTF?), it's even stupider considering how much electronics they already use there.
My democracy is fully handcrafted, I'm free to be a small cog and participate to help counting, and the person with most votes win.
So lay down the wide brush, and go help fix the US issues rather than inventing global problems so Google can swoop in with its "solutions".
"So, can online voting ever be reliable, trustworthy, and efficient?"
Reliable if someone can find a way to write software that's not full of exploitable bugs; trustworthy is someone can find a way to define "trustworthy" and inform those who write the software. Efficient is another thing altogether. The current state of play is not inefficient - it's disastrously fragile and corruptible. Those are the faults we should be addressing. For example, it's fine to talk about blockchain to support integrity, but if the code that implements the blockchain stinks you're not gaining anything much.
There's plenty of history (including current events) of corruption and tampering with paper ballots, but they've largely been successful because they're simple, so challenges to them tend to be obvious and therefore relatively easy to protect against. The complexity and invisible working of electronic voting systems makes protecting them much harder generically, quite apart from the appalling quality of most of the offerings to date.
Counting problems
"Fifty-two different states ..."
Trump's election strategy revealed. He's going to create two new states by executive order. Each with 300 electoral votes.
A single system across the US
" ...If the US had a single electronic voting system across the country ..." Uncle Putin would only need to crack ONE password!
Re: A single system across the US
Let me guess.... 1...2...3...4. ?
No, no, no. Thats too easy - I've got it - Maga2020. Ha Numbers and a capital! That's security!
I'm quite sure that there is a way of securing e-voting. As posited in the article, it probably has something to do with voting between independent platforms including an immutable blockchain for integrity and auditing, perhaps a basic database server (with lots of auditing & rate-limiting for things like big inserts or improbably fast inserts) with emerging technologies like the [1]Privacy Pass protocol that [2]Cloudflare is trialling , which is itself based on paper-based absentee voting. A variant could prove identity was verified and a vote cast without actually revealing the vote or identity. But this all needs to come from a supervised polling booth to prevent literal vote-buying or coerced voting by gangs of blackshirts or abusive partners.
And if you're running polling stations anyway, you might as well use paper. Sure, e-voting might make the count quicker, but paper isn't that slow to count. In most of Europe, counting stations can deliver a result overnight. The USA has it's own bizarre problems whereby they can run weeks of early voting, yet counts can take days to return and be validated. In the meantime, candidates "Claim victory" in a way entirely foreign to the rest of the civilised world (where the returning officer damn well tells the candidates who has won, not the other way around!). In 2000 it took till December 12th for the US Election to be decided - by the Supreme Court no less.
There is no reason States should not be able to aggregate results from local counts within 24hours and have a definitive result.
The insane Electoral College system then of course needs scrapping so that the actual winner of the vote becomes the President.
[1] https://privacypass.github.io/
[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass/
The insane Electoral College system then of course needs scrapping so that the actual winner of the vote becomes the President.
1) That would mean that 90% of the Area of the USA would never, ever, have enough votes to be represented. The East and West coasts combined would have all the votes.
2) The US president has far too much power, thus making his/her election (personal health, eating habits, personal pecadillos, crooked-ness and mental stability) almost the only thing that really matters!
The real problem being "2". If the position of US president was a more restricted and ceremonial role, like in, say, Belgium, nobody would even remember that there was such a thing as an Electoral College involved.
Making the president God-Emporer while all of the "Checks & Balances" sucking their thumbs, with no checking and no balancing, raises the stakes (and the requirements on the presidents super-human nature) to clearly unsustainable levels - Right Now, It just takes ONE Failure and we are Done!
April 1 today?