Ask Slashdot: Should I Fight Against Online Voting In Our Municipality? 190
RobinH writes: Our small-ish municipality (between 10,000 to 15,000 in population) has recently decided to switch to online voting. I should note that they were previously doing voting-by-mail. I have significant reservations about online voting, particularly the possibility of vote-selling and the general lack of voter secrecy, not to mention the possible lack of computer security. However, it's only a municipal election, and apparently a lot of municipalities around here are already doing online voting. I'm not sure if the rank-and-file citizens care, or if they would listen to my concerns. Should I bother speaking up, or should I ignore it since municipal elections are not that important anyway?
Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Example (Score:2, Interesting)
Verified Voting New Mexoc was started in a Municipality of 17,000 people, and the first action was to persuade the town council that the vote they had taken months earlier to purchase electronic voting systems be rescinded. that's actually quite a difficult thing for a politician to do-- admit they made a poor decision. But it's easier to do if you are not a full time politician in a small municipality.
that decision let us take it state wide and persuade other County clerks to hesitate. It got us meeting
Re:Yes (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much that. [bbc.com] Even Norway tossed it after trials, we looked at it here in Ontario gave it a go at 33 municipalities, garbage. Same with phone voting, garbage.
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Pretty much that. [bbc.com] Even Norway tossed it after trials
fyi, that bbc article was utter nonsense, just plain wrong in almost every aspect:
http://www.regjeringen.no/en/d... [regjeringen.no]
whence slashdot polls? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Should I fight against online voting in our municipality?
- Yes
- Confusingly also yes
- No
- Very no
- Cowboy Neal is my "straight ticket"
same as vote by mail (Score:5, Insightful)
no secrecy? - check
i can sell my vote? - check
Re:same as vote by mail (Score:5, Informative)
Oregon has had vote-by-mail for about two decades. Opponents suggested vote selling and other vote frauds would occur. Every investigation into these things since then has shown only an incredibly tiny amount of abuse. Vote-by-mail works very very well in Oregon.
The problem with online voting lies in other issues, like the lack of a paper trail for recounts, fraudulent logins, and the potential for wholesale fraud with software/malware manipulations. These are real potential issues, but don't suck vote-by-mail into the argument. Mail voting works. Oregon gets a high turnout in even minor elections because it is so painless, and that is a very good thing. Democracy is alive and well in Oregon, largely due to vote-by-mail.
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Or how about one we ready about daily in the news? I.e., what if the voting system is breached?
We can't keep financial information safe, what's to say we can keep voting information safe?
Let's forget about manipulations for now - that's going to be way too easy and obvious. Let's consider the fact that hackers break int
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Actually if you look at voter participation in Oregon, its not much different then other states.
All you achieve in any system of voting that is not in-person is a high chance of fraud.
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Diebold dumped the vote counts to an un-encrypted excel file for fuck's sake. Evidence? GO fuck yourself. Read the Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast (sp?)
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Actually Oregon was getting high turnout decades before they switched to vote-by-mail. There was one study which showed that Oregon got increased turnout from vote-by-mail, but a more recent study was unable to replicate that [sagepub.com]. It showed that Oregon's increased turnout was due to a "novelty effect", but it has since disappeared (except for a very small effect in some small special elections).
Furthermore, Oregon's anti-fraud measures are inadequate (e.g., the handwriting analysis isn't done by fully trained
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What bullshit. That lady was high and basically doodling if your read the follow ups. It was not some high level fraud perpetrated on the masses by the Illuminati.
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What bullshit. That lady was high and basically doodling if your read the follow ups. It was not some high level fraud perpetrated on the masses by the Illuminati.
I live in Clackamas County. She wasn't doodling, she was tampering. On ballots where the voter had not voted for any candidate, this woman marked the ballot for the Republican candidate. She acted alone, she didn't affect the outcome of anything, and she was caught. However, she should never have had an opportunity to tamper with the ballots, so while this was not a high level fraud, there was some high level incompetence going on.
Somebody screwed up and should at a minimum be fired for allowing this to
Re:same as vote by mail... NOT! (Score:2)
One advantage of vote-by-mail is that any large-scale fraud (enough to tip an election) takes quite a bit resources and people
One advantage of on-line voting is that minimal resource and people (e.g., as small as one person) can likely perpetrate such an action.
Two people can keep a secret (if one of them is dead). This is the difference.
Re: (Score:2)
Voting at it's core is about people participating in their government, as such voting should be about the people not just about the votes. So work to make it more of a social activity.
Make sure voting occurs on the weekend.
Get anyone running for the election to provide volunteers to help run election booths and do the vote counting this of course in conjunction with paid neutral electoral officers.
Incorporate charity bake sales, cookie sales, sausage sizzles etc. at electoral booths as part of the soc
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You can easily have secrecy in a vote by mail scene by using two envelopes. The outer one contains both your proof of ID and the inner envelope, and the inner envelope contains your vote and no markings. The whole package arrives at the election office, the outer envelope is opened, your ID is checked against a list, and the inner envelope is put to the ballot box unopened. Once all votes have been cast, the ballot box is shuffled, the now anonymous inner envelopes are opened and the vot
Speak up, or be silent forever. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have any reservations, then speak up. Even if it gets implemented, you can give input an steer it towards some middle ground that cover some of your concerns.
Use the Facebook page ... (Score:2)
... if y'all don't have one, then you need to make a page. If on line is how y'all are going to vote, then Facebook would be a great way to discuss the irrelevant issues that you have.
Plus y'all can all Friend-up for Farmville2 [coolchaser.com].
I would add two concerns to yours:
- Does every eligible voter have an Internet connection
- What's the system cost vs current cost?
You should encourage it (Score:2)
You're right, the municipal elections aren't as important as the presidential election, but the more systems out there doing online voting, the more people will try and hack them.
I'd rather someone discovers a mayor was fraudulently elected than a president.
Municipal elections are *more* important (Score:5, Insightful)
Municipal elections aren't less important than the Presidential election. On a per-vote basis, they're much more important. Your vote makes much more difference in a local election. The choice you make are much more likely to have a real impact on your community.
The problem with municipal elections is that it's much harder to learn who to vote for. You have to do real work to figure out who the candidates are and what they stand for.
Note: I'm an elected municipal official, so my opinion is a bit biased here.
Re: (Score:2)
The fallout in terms of damage is far less. You could have a dickhead running a town. When you find out the election was hacked you can throw him in jail.
At least they won't have control of the military.
For online voting to succeed, it needs to be ironed out first.
Better to do it in a situation where the damage is lower.
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They may not be more important, but they are more relevant to your life, and more likely to be affected by your vote.
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I'd disagree to your first part: there's not much difference between one President and another when you come right down to it; they are heavily restricted in their actions by policy makers. Plus, your municipal vote for the president has almost no effect on the result, compared to municipal elections where one interest group can sway the entire outcome. Mayors and aldermen have huge amounts of leeway, and their decisions affect your life directly.
I'd rather someone discovers a president was fraudulently e
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I'm not talking about the power of a single vote.
I'm talking about the security of a voting system.
Better to trial it in a situation where there is less potential damage.
Get the concerns addresssed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Online voting can not be fixed... or do you mean fix it as in stand as a candidate and rig the vote.
Paper ballots is not a broken system and does not need to be replaced.
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Given the history of government, expect the voting mechanism to be bought from a company which has little transparency, and little interest in fixing problems.
The history a voting machines in the US is a history of fraud and probable fraud. If you switch to an on-line voting system, expect it to be vulnerable to fraudulent voting and difficult to check. And illegal to validate. ("That's our proprietary code your'e trying to inspect!")
Do not support it. Were it an open system, I'd be cautiously supportiv
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What's there to fix? There are at least two critical issues that no computer software can fix.
1. Confidentiality, it's impossible to prove there's no shadow system recording who voted for what. In paper elections I pick my ballot and fold it so nobody can see what I vote for, the election officials register my vote as used and stamp it and then I put it in the ballot box. It's practically impossible to track which paper slip is mine beyond that point so barring hidden cameras in the booth my anonymity is no
Vote Selling? (Score:2)
I've never understood the problem with vote selling. I mean, I think it poorly serves the people selling their votes, but if the most important issue to them is who will give them $10, why isn't that a valid choice? All sorts of people make voting decisions based on their expected personal economic outcomes, and this doesn't seem any different to me.
It's also unclear to me how putting the election online makes vote selling easier. If anything I'd expect that would make it harder, as you have to try harder t
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Not so much vote selling as *coerced* vote selling. As in, "Vote for Joe Blow or you will not have a job the day after election day."
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How precicely is this tracked? Are they forced to cast their votes on premesis? In which case I'd be sure to carry a tape recorder for discussions of this 'coercion' and sue their fucking asses into oblivion. Remember, technology works two ways.
Regardless of how much you've been indoctronated into thinking corporations are above the law and blah blah, sue them with good cause and see your justice system work. There are laws to protect you. Stop bitching and throwing your arms up in the air every time you th
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Except if you take the tape recorder you go to jail for making the recording (depending on state law) and there's no evidence to charge them with.
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I'm pretty sure there's precicely 0 laws in place that makes it illegal to record criminal actions by a person or person's in public or in their private residence, but by all means dig one up and prove me wrong.
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Twelve states have wiretapping laws (which apply even for face to face conversations) that require all parties consent to a recording when they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. More have requirements that all parties be informed of the recording, but I'm having trouble finding out exactly how many.
Re: (Score:2)
Vote selling leads to corruption.
Suppose a person is for example willing to spend $100,000 to obtain 10000 votes, in order to win an election. The only reason this person would do that is to 'earn' that money back, with a handsome profit. The only way that works is via corruption.
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Suppose a person is for example willing to spend $100,000 to obtain 10000 votes, in order to win an election
That's what happens today, except it is spent on TV ads, direct mail, paid media placements and talking heads. Paying people for their votes directly would probably be cheaper for everyone involved except the advertising and PR firms who reap a windfall each election cycle.
I don't actually like the idea of buying votes - I think accepting money for a vote is fundamentally prostituting your most basic civic rights. But that's a choice and I don't see why prostitution isn't legalized, either. I guess my point
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As one person said, it isn't exactly the buying of votes that's the problem, it's coerced voting that's the problem. If you let people prove their vote in a way that would let people buy votes, they can also be forced to prove it to keep their job or avoid having their kneecaps broken.
A chance to work for doing it right (Score:5, Insightful)
You have an opportunity to help make your town a case study for doing it rightâ"which might result in a decision to avoid online voting. You can advocate on security/vote integrity issues by raising awareness of the complexities. Make a strong push for requiring vendors that don't hide their products' inner workings from their customers. Talk about the importance of being able to audit the vote.
The big questions everyone should answer before making a decision are "what do we gain?" and "what do we lose?" I think people often forget the latter.
Yes. Defenitely. (Score:3)
Ann election must be free, equal, and secure. To ensure equality, the count must be repeatable for everyone. Online voting vor any voting machine does not provide that feature. The German supreme court ruled that voting machines do not allow real democratic elections.
And it is not a good argument that voting machines or online voting is faster. Fast and convenient is not the core concerns for democracy. The above criteria are.
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The German supreme court ruled that any election mechanism must provide accountability in a form that is verifiable without special knowledge. The voting machines in use did not provide this feature. Other implementations combine electronic voting with a paper trail and would be acceptable. In fact we've been using paper ballots in combination with a barcode scanner to count complex elections. We can't verify the software (which is a glorified Excel sheet that allows for manual corrections anyway), but we c
Re: (Score:2)
Ann election must be free, equal, and secure. To ensure equality, the count must be repeatable for everyone. Online voting vor any voting machine does not provide that feature.
citation needed. also you could tell us about the last time you repeated a count for paper votes. there are indeed methods to perform verifiable counting electronically, you just don't know about them. the tricky part here is "for everyone" as in "without any specialist knowledge on the subject" (quoting the very same ruling you wrongly cited, see below). fair enough. however, you actually *do* need some specific knowledge to repeat and validate a count on paper, at least you need to be able to read and cou
What's changed? (Score:2)
Your two primary worries are vote selling and voter secrecy, neither of which are guaranteed by mail in ballots. The real concern is wholesale fraud: no paper trail means a "miscount" is undetectable and untraceable. The fact that your municipality is almost certainly using COTS software is actually a plus in this case, even more so if the software is being operated by an outside third party; they're unlikely to have a horse in the race and be tempted to sway the results.
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The fact that your municipality is almost certainly using COTS software is actually a plus in this case, even more so if the software is being operated by an outside third party; they're unlikely to have a horse in the race and be tempted to sway the results.
Walden O'Dell, the head of Diebold Election Systems, was a top fund-raiser for George Bush in 2004. He wrote in a fund-raising memo that "he was committed "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President." He did. [amazon.com]
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It'd be hard to make an online system any worse than our current paper system.
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There's many many people who don't own a computer so they use ones they can access in other places.
And they do that today with things like online banking. How many attacks are done that target these people? Oh, only a handful every year. Not enough to sway an election, not like crates of votes being inser
Volunteer to be an Election Judge (Score:2)
Most elections rely on citizens who run the election who aren't government employees. I say 'volunteer', but most municipaliies will pay you for your time (including any training time).
I was a 'Chief Judge' for 4 years of my town, and actually had a lot of say in how the election was run -- based on complaints about previous elections, I ended up designing the ballots, having them printed, considered if it was worth getting mechanical voting machines as hand-me-down from the county (would've done it, if we
Don't wait for an issue to become a national one (Score:2)
The best way to fight these things is on the local level. It's tough to convince 10 million people why it is wrong. Much easier to convince 10,000 neighbors. By the time a state or country wants to implement this, it is too late.
No (Score:2)
As with many other forms of voting where there's no physical ballot, the biggest problem is that there is no actual recount if there's been any problem.
You'll just get the same exact result with each recount.
Many years ago we had huge mechanical voting machines. It wasn't commonly known, but poll workers knew that those machines could lock up and lose all their totals with no way of recovering the lost votes. Rumor had it that this was more likely to occur in black neighborhoods.
BTW, the only elections that
Re: (Score:2)
hand filled ballots are counted electronically anyways; give it up, it's whatever the 'puter says
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In the case of a *recount*, hand filled ballots can be (and usually are) hand counted.
Hand filled ballots can be *audited* against the machine totals.
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no, look it up for your state. Usually recount is done by machines for a certain difference, and only by hand below some small difference. In a rigged election, there will not be that small difference.
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In a rigged election, it will be that small difference. Close elections are the ones that get rigged.
True - it varies from state to state. In general it's either recanvass (re-run the machine count) or recount (count by hand)
Georgia:
O.C.G.A. 21-2-493
O.C.G.A. 21-2-495
IANAL!
Here's what it looks like to me if there's a problem or close (1%) election
If it's paper ballots, then recounts are done with representatives of affected candidates present. The ballots are read aloud in front of the candidates (and othe
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a rigger knows they have to NOT have a "small difference", that is why I maintain machines already control elections. control the machine, control the election.
not important? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Municipal elections are what most politicians use to launch their careers for state and federal offices. They're generally pretty cheap, so ambitious wannabes use them to build name recognition. Then when they run for those more powerful positions, the donors and voters say "oh yeah, that guy" and give them money/votes. It's how the moral-majority types took over the Republican Party in the 1980s, and it's how the libertea-baggers are trying to take it over from them today. So in that sense, local election
Re: (Score:2)
So apparently some crybaby "libertarian" modded this down for exercising free speech?
Get Involved (Score:3)
Local very important. More working-age voters. (Score:3)
I'd agree with others who have said local elections are very important. My local fire, police, schools, roads, and job opportunities are more important to me than whatever Washington did today.
I think you've missed the largest difference that online voting might make. Retired people are over-represented in local elections because they take the time to vote, more often than working-age people do. Online voting might make that more balanced or even swing the other way. Retirement age people also have the majority of the money and therefore influence through political donations.
Along the same lines, traditional voting methods mean only people who care enough to take the time to vote do so. (Unless a politician has a pizza party on the voting bus and pays each voter $10 to get on board.) Online voting, if it takes just a few seconds, MIGHT increase the number of votes by people who can't be bothered to take a few minutes to get involved. That could be good or bad. Personally, I think that if you don't know the name of the incumbent, you probably aren't informed enough to make an informed vote and I'd prefer you choose not to vote that time around. I'd hope that everyone gets informed, but if someone isn't interested enough to know what's on the ballot ahead of time, I don't see a need to encourage them to vote anyway.
The point (Score:2)
"Should I bother speaking up...?"
If you are asking that question you have really misunderstood the point of elections.
Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Local elections are the only ones that are important. The national system is so rigged that nothing individuals can do will make a difference.
However, be aware that local elections are the next target of corporate types. In the past two years, the Koch brothers have spent millions on school board elections, and not in the areas in which they live.
If you do get involved locally, be prepared to make a real fuss, and make sure you don't get busted for pot or beat your wife. In fact, don't even allow yourself to get into a situation where you can be framed for a pot bust. People have tried to get involved in local politics and have had their lives destroyed for their trouble.
And if you try to fight what has been cynically referred to as "election reform", be prepared for death threats.
Yes, perhaps. But your arguments suck! (Score:2)
So online votes can be bought?
Offline votes can't?
NO (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Slight increase? When the bad guys are in charge it can lead to rampant and uncontrolled fraud. Would that necessarily happen in this case? Maybe not this year. Maybe not next year. But can you guarantee what is going on in 10, 20 or 50 years? Democracy is too precious to fool around with. You should consider it as dangerous as the nuclear launch codes. There may not be many nuclear disasters, but boy oh boy does it screw up everything when there is.
Re: (Score:2)
You have that backwards, it's a slight increase in voter participation for a significant increase in the possibilities for fraud.
Absolutely (Score:4, Interesting)
I have read a few mumblings about the dangers online voting but nobody substantial has come out and said that online voting is a clear and present danger to democracy. In Canada we had someone (never conclusively identified) who robocalled a bunch of people who were probably going to vote for one of the parties and tell them that it was "Elections Canada calling and that their voting station had been moved to a location far far away." The result was that many voters either didn't bother to vote or went far far away only to find out that they were in the wrong place and had to go way back to vote, again presumably this reduced number of voters. This was a clear and presumably effective law breaking cheat. If the person(s) behind this could have hacked an online voting system I am 100% sure that they would have. As the robocall thing turned into an actual scandal whereas a harder to detect hack would not only reduce their risk but also increasetheir chances of success to basically 100%.
I can consider myself to be somewhat expert in computer security but my simple explanation is twofold. Facebook, Google, major banks, companies like target, etc have all been solidly hacked; so how can some proprietary publicly untested system be so magically secure? Secondly how would anyone know that an election had been "adjusted" unless someone's cat bob wins with 99% the election will have results that surprise some people; just like pretty much every election.
And most importantly, anyone who wins through some sort of hacking will pretty much have failed the good citizen test at that point.
In Halifax, Nova Scotia the two main reasons given for the online voting were: to increase voter participation, and to reduce costs. Participation was basically at the same anaemic levels of the past; and nobody in their right mind would sacrifice the security of our democracy to save a few bucks. On top of that the election results were unusually slow to come in anyway, and I don't understand the money saving as they have just as many traditional polling stations as ever. The electronic voting does cost a bundle, plus I really hope the city is spending money auditing it which should be some serious auditing thus costing even more. Plus the extensive education campaign couldn't have been free. So if it somehow magically cost less than it would just be accounting magic, not reality.
On a personal opinion level, the reason for the anaemic participation levels is that government doesn't listen to us. We throw one set of bums out and the next bunch act identically to the last. If they genuinely wanted participation we would have referendums to approve the council "decisions". The voting would be fast and furious on a fair number of issues.
Lastly from what I have read, ever single different electronic voting system that security researchers have ever gotten their hands on has easily and completely been hacked. Often in many many different ways. The voting technology companies almost always have a similar line. "That was a previous model and our present systems have been proven to be 100% secure." yet they said that the easily hacked system had been totally secure when it had been released.
So if you figure out a way to have a ground swell political movement that shuts down your local online voting please PM me and I will try that here.
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It can't. Not if you are trying to create a secure system spanning the whole country with millions of users that have no idea about security. That's just like trying to sell a program that opens a window on the screen with single checkbox "turn security on" promising to secure your system against every imaginable threat. Sorry. Such thing does not exist. If you see it, it is a scam.
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The simple reality was that had our system been insecure our pictures of locks and vaults would have still appeased the p
Municipality the world over have a problem (Score:2)
Yes (Score:2)
Our small-ish municipality ... I have significant reservations about online voting ... Should I bother speaking up?
You should do the "right thing". Municipal elections (or at least local, to regional, to state, to federal) is how Bill Clinton got elected. If we (I'm in Arkansas) hadn't voted for him to start with to be the Guv, he never would have gotten his start. (Debateable, but go with me here.)
At best, you're informing them that the emperor has no clothes. They probably don't know; they believe all of the hype and wonderment of Web 3.0 and all. It's all glory and wonder, don't you know? Nothing bad ever happen [youtube.com]
Dump the online voting. (Score:2)
Online voting can be compromised from anywhere in the world. At least voting in person requires people at voting locations, thereby (plausibly) reducing the chance for wide-scale fraud. It's just not worth taking the chance. Open networks, no matter how secure they are designed, will always have vulnerabilities. Most of those vulnerabilities lie within the computer operators (PEBCAK, if you will).
You fail at democracy (Score:2)
or should I ignore it since municipal elections are not that important anyway?
Municipal elections are to national elections as car accidents are to shark attacks: just because something is more "newsy" doesn't mean it's more important. Think about it: which election does your vote affect more, and which result will affect you more? (Hint: it's the one which can pass laws without dragging their mutilated corpses through the House and Senate pork acquisition specialists.) Bonus points: which election can someone accomplish half of a single item from their list of campaign promises (thi
Security and freedom are not convenient (Score:2)
This is a classic case of people valuing convenience over everything else:
* Responsibility
* Anonymity
* Security
* Reliability
* Accountability
* Accuracy
Electronic voting machines and on-line voting severely erode or completely disregard one or more of the above concepts. Voting is part of the democratic process, which equates to freedom. Freedom is neither free nor easy.... neither is security.
Yes, voters need voter-verified paper ballots (Score:2)
Yes, you should object.
Voters can't be sure that there's any evidence of their vote entering the system accurately reflecting their vote without a voter-verified paper ballot. Electronic ballots are easily lost, misrepresented, and useless in a recount. Electronic voting doesn't improve on the problems with voter-verified paper ballots and electronic ballots introduce problems all their own. So this is an area where traditional voter-verified paper ballots are better for the voter and well worth fighting fo
Cryptographic Voting (Score:2)
Ask to implement cryptographic voting. Everyone's votes are published publicly but each encrypted with their own public key so that anyone can download the entire voting results, type in their private key, and make sure that their vote went to the candidates they chose to vote for.
vote by mail (Score:2)
Online voting and vote by mail present essentially identical issues for vote selling. And if you have to sign your name on or inside the envelope containing the vote by mail then it presents exactly the same secret ballot issues as online voting as well. That leaves security. I'd guess your vote by mail system uses photocopies on easily procured papers, yes?
yes (Score:2)
We need to stop finding different mechanisms to all vote on one day and instead allow in-person voting over a longer period, such as a calendar week.
The better question is (Score:2)
Do you really believe that your vote matters?
Your vote does one thing and one thing alone. It legitimizes the current system.
Norway (Score:2)
I recommend reading some of the reports produced after the E-voting trials in Norway:
http://www.ifes.org/Content/Publications/News-in-Brief/2012/June/Speed-Efficiency-and-Compliance-an-Evaluation-of-E-Voting-in-Norway.aspx
As for my point of view (as a former sceptic), I was convinced during the process that the trials were held at a necessary level both with regards to voter and ballot security. The reason for not continuing the trials was "political" - not based on the results from the trials. We had a gen
Cryptography (Score:2)
If they use http://followmyvote.com/ [followmyvote.com], that's a BitShares DAC. It uses open source software with a blockchain, similar to bitcoin, and cryptography to publicly ensure that votes are legitimate.
It would make it an experiment worth pursuing.
Too Epensive (Score:2)
The kind of cryptography you would need to make this safe (as posted earlier) is Public Key. The big problem with that is teaching ALL the voters how to use it. And we aren't even talking about distributing the software or handing out keys: That's easy compared to the training...
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Pretty sure vote selling is possible with in-person voting too...
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That's not how it works. (Score:2)
Nobody pays for votes with money. Not directly at least.
People are paid in deals, jobs, favors - which they get to enjoy AFTER they elect candidate X.
Supply contracts, appointments, sponsorships, various consulting positions... once elected X gets handed a whole ball of strings that can be pulled for people who've been good to X.
Your boss doesn't have to order you to vote for candidate X. Nor does candidate X have to bribe you to get your vote.
Your boss just needs to mention that he/she hopes candidate X wi
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In the booth it is private, also of note this would be the ONLY place you could see the completed ballot to take a picture of it.
Has anyone else notice all the BULLSHIT on this thread is AC?
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That's great, until the same guy walks into the voting booth with 100 different people.
"Sorry, I have a lot of senile relatives to help today..."
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:How about no (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate it when people try to vote against something that makes life easier, out of privacy concern and security...
If you have viruses on your machine, that's your own darn fault, why penalize everybody for your stupidity?
The second half has already been responded to, so I'll tackle this bit.
If you have malware on your machine, that's likely your own fault (most likely through ignorance). Unfortunately, everyone on your network, on your social network, and on the malware's distribution chain is penalized for your stupidity.
So let's back up one level...
Online voting makes life easier, agreed.
Unfortunately, abuse of online voting doesn't just affect the person not using it to vote, but also affects everyone in the municipality.
You can't have it both ways: either the upstream has to think of the privacy and security concerns, or the end operator (citizen) does.
As "online" implies global, it means that unlike mail-in, where abuse is likely limited to people who are actually a part of the municipality plus a few external interested parties, suddenly abuse is open to the entire world, where statistics indicate that a 0.001% of the 7 billion population = 70,000 actors likely to attempt to abuse the system for reason X instead of the 0.15 of a person who is likely to abuse the system for reason X locally.
The main way to ensure best security is to limit scope: only expose a function to the actors that need to access it. "On the Internet" does the inverse.
And that's just one reason it's a bad idea; there are plenty of others. All of them have solutions, but all the solutions are going to run afoul of statistics when you move a system that's been exposed to 15,000 people into an arena where it's exposed to 7 billion people.
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Have it be as an Opt-In program then, where they send you a CD, containing a Live version of a modified Linux distro, putting it in your PC
Is it even possible to make one bootable distro that will allow internet access on every different kind of personal computer out there?
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Don't forget the part where you have them figure out which BIOS they have and which key to hit and what to type/click to put the CD drive first in the boot sequence - perhaps because someone removed it
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Even better : go to the town hall and vote there. They should provide some (hopefully secured) PCs that can be used for voting?
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One can sell your vote, but there is no way for the *buyer* to validate his purchase with show-up-at-the-polls voting.
You can sell your vote and vote anyway you like. The whole *point* of anonymous, in person voting is to prevent coercion.
In contrast to online voting, where your boss says "Login and let me do the voting, or you're fired.".
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I came to say this as well - it is when the number of votes per office is small that your voice as a citizen can be heard loudest. And if the next level up in the hierarchy pays any attention to the municipal offices then, through those officials, an active citizen's voice can potentially be heard more easily on that stage as well.
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totally agree.
besides, if implemented well online voting can be as secure and verifiable as any other method. the real problem is still corruption.
on a higher level, the system is already rigged: if you control the media you simply manipulate the elections as a whole, e.g. in the us there is no need to risk commiting electoral fraud: with things as fox and cbs and an ignorant and acritic majority of the population you can plant any sockpuppet you need.
also works on the local level, completely legal:
http://t [slashdot.org]
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Actually I would be opposed to online voting as well. Sure, it *could* be done securely. Theoretically at least. But it would be considerably more difficult to do so than to create a secure electronic voting booth, and the evidence suggests that the security on those is a joke. By extension I would assume any deployed online voting system would be laughably insecure.
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You should win the election and declare yourself Emperor. After that, the Imperial Senate will no longer be a concern for you.
some logic to this. some logic to this. if nobody will take you seriously about electronic security concerns, pull a weev and elect yourself emperor. then the e-voting systems would go out of fashion really fast!
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