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Why can't we vote online

S

Suspicious-Teach8788

Lifer
http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/11/3479170/why-cant-you-vote-online-elections-us

Interesting article.

There are several requirements of voting hi lighted in this article:

- secrecy (so people can't find out how you voted)
- privacy (so people can't stand over your shoulder at the ballot box and coerce you)
- accountability (so votes can be verified as authentic), uniqueness (so people can only vote once)
- accuracy (so votes are recorded correctly)

The thing is mail in voting works just like online voting. Secrecy and privacy go out the window because you can fill out your mail in ballot anywhere. You could do it at the park just like if online voting was allowed and you voted on your iPad while sitting on a park bench.

As for accountability, how hard is this? You can't inject cash into online banking. You can't create fake transactions that give you $1 million in your investment account all of a sudden, how hard is it to make sure people vote once? Authentic transactions are made 24/7. All of a sudden it's a challenge with voting?

Accuracy. Are you saying you can't record a vote correctly? How do our forum polls work? Do they break down all the time? I don't know.

The fact that we human beings trust our financial savings like credit cards, banking, investments, with online transactions means that important things are being done online. We also file taxes online, fill out important official documents online, sign job acceptance offers, apply for jobs, etc.

The biggest technical challenge, Dill says, is the "trusted platform problem." Since remote internet voting would occur on the home computers or mobile devices of voters, those machines would need to be secure enough to reliably transmit a vote that couldn't be tampered with. "Most schemes want to be convenient so they have people voting on uncontrolled personal computers," Dill says. "Those are subject to the usual problems of viruses, or other malware." He notes that many PCs are part of botnets, and that "malware could conceivably be used to steal votes." And even if the transmission of the vote is protected with cryptography en route to its destination, Dill says that personal devices are still vulnerable: "if you intercept the vote at the voter's keyboard there's not a lot the voter can do about it," he says. "I'm not just worried about external hackers here: when you're talking about the stakes of US elections — control of the government — the incentive for people to steal an election are really large." Dill says malware could be installed by someone with access to a voting machine, like a programmer who writes apps for smartphones.
Click to expand...
I mean is this really a huge issue? Do we worry about my Paypal transactions being intercepted and redirected to some other address? Do I worry about my emails being intercepted? I mean WTF? Everytime I click Confirm at my Vanguard account do I think my money is going to some shady hacker? How is voting now so much more difficult to secure?

I see that it could be challenging making sure it's all secure and logins don't get compromised, or whatever. I can see that being difficult, but without a doubt this is something implementable. But if you always compare to mail in voting, I don't see how mail in voting offers ANY security given someone can steal your mail, someone can fill out your ballot for you, etc etc. It's JUST as bad if not worse than online voting.
 
why can't we vote with our tv remote?
what does it matter anymore? its all rigged.
back to paper and counted live on camera, i say
 
I only vote for important stuff online such as the hottest pony and don't want to get any nasty political sites in my browser history.
 
I'm pretty sure altering the results of a presidential election is a much bigger and higher value target than your measly checking account or your paltry tax refund.

The fact is that there are many fraudulent transactions that take place, and many take quite some time to correct. Just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Personally, I would much rather have pen and paper voting than the current voting machines. There are many problems with the current machines, if the government can't be trusted to contract out properly functioning machines I highly doubt they can be trusted to build a properly functioning online voting system.
 
If I can't trust paypal to keep people from stealing my money, why should I trust the election board to not steal my vote?
 
The nice thing about the current voting method is that it's cumbersome and widely fragmented. Lots and lots of places to vote scattered everywhere. Each place has to tally votes and report the totals up the line to the next biggest place - voting precinct to county to state.

And it takes a lot of effort to run an election. That's why they are coordinated - elections for local, county, state offices all take place at the same time. Many, many people involved. That is a huge deterrent to fixing elections. Each voting precinct fills out forms to report vote totals, signed by overseers from both parties.

Now let's say they convince people that online voting is "secure". They want to do online voting to cut government costs. It will save billions across the country! And now that it's so simple, we don't need to have all the elections at the same time. In fact, we can have a 6-week "voting period" where you can vote whenever you want.

Where are the votes counted? In some machine, somewhere. Does anyone see lower-level totals? No. We only know what the computer says.

What is easier to fix - hundreds and hundreds of totals from precincts all across the place, or one total?

Frankly, online voting would be the gateway to election fraud on an unprecedented scale, and even though there would be suspicions, nothing could ever be proved. The software that was in the machine yesterday could be different today, when they decide to investigate if anything was fishy.

I would never be convinced that online voting would be secure enough to trust it.

I don't care about convenience for the voter. I don't care that it would be cheaper to do it online. I do care that the current system is impossible to fix for any major election, and an online system - given the magnitude of the stakes involved - would inevitably be fixed.
 
kranky said:
The nice thing about the current voting method is that it's cumbersome and widely fragmented. Lots and lots of places to vote scattered everywhere. Each place has to tally votes and report the totals up the line to the next biggest place - voting precinct to county to state.

And it takes a lot of effort to run an election. That's why they are coordinated - elections for local, county, state offices all take place at the same time. Many, many people involved. That is a huge deterrent to fixing elections. Each voting precinct fills out forms to report vote totals, signed by overseers from both parties.

Now let's say they convince people that online voting is "secure". They want to do online voting to cut government costs. It will save billions across the country! And now that it's so simple, we don't need to have all the elections at the same time. In fact, we can have a 6-week "voting period" where you can vote whenever you want.

Where are the votes counted? In some machine, somewhere. Does anyone see lower-level totals? No. We only know what the computer says.

What is easier to fix - hundreds and hundreds of totals from precincts all across the place, or one total?

Frankly, online voting would be the gateway to election fraud on an unprecedented scale, and even though there would be suspicions, nothing could ever be proved. The software that was in the machine yesterday could be different today, when they decide to investigate if anything was fishy.

I would never be convinced that online voting would be secure enough to trust it.

I don't care about convenience for the voter. I don't care that it would be cheaper to do it online. I do care that the current system is impossible to fix for any major election, and an online system - given the magnitude of the stakes involved - would inevitably be fixed.
Click to expand...

you don't need to fix the votes when both the candidates are the same.
 
I feel like if you work to establish a fraud-proof system like a national ID system or whatever to vote online, then voting online would be possible.

But to say that voting has to always be done in person is stupid. We moved on from analog TVs. It's not like we left people in the dust.
 
MAD-Magazine-Obama-Romney-Tale-of-the-Tape-1.jpg
 
kranky said:
Frankly, online voting would be the gateway to election fraud on an unprecedented scale, and even though there would be suspicions, nothing could ever be proved. The software that was in the machine yesterday could be different today, when they decide to investigate if anything was fishy.
Click to expand...

there may be solutions to this. a distributed system might work, where you have a network of machines mimicking the current structure. or perhaps something like the bitcoin network where votes are cryptographically verified by the network as a whole, and any one person can access the transactions and verify them.
 
I always wondered this too. Would make things so much simpler for everyone if it was online. As long as it's secure and there is some kind of piece of ID required that identifies a single person (so you can't vote more than once) then it could be safe. Could also have some measures in place to ensure stats can't be manipulated. Basically have multiple people/servers/organizations compute the same raw stats. They should all come up with the same result, if not, then it means one of those orgs is tampering, then there would be some huge fine or something.
 
Newbian said:
That is until a bronie becomes the president after 4chan rigs it. 😛
Click to expand...
I don't think you'd get a brony in office. You'd instead get one of the ponies themselves as the elected official, likely with 9001% of the popular vote. 😀
 
I think all voting should be mandatory, and called in, mailed in, or done in person non-electronically.

Doing it online with the current state of personal computing would be insane.
 
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