Why Don't We Hear About Internet Voting For The US? Germany Will Have It By 2006

[shifrbv]

Saw that Germany will be getting internet voting for national elections by 2006.

Germany Looks To Internet Voting

Why isn't this being mentioned in the US? Especially with the horrible fallacies of the last election and the low voter turnout. There are already impressive algorithms in place (such as ecliptic curves) which make many of the security issues moot.

So why don't we hear about this in the US? Could it be because politicians might be afraid of what would happen if alot of young folks started voting on the internet?

 

[Elledan]

It's easier to cheat with those old, obsolete machines which are currently used for the ballots

 

[CrazyHelloDeli]

Its also easier to claim that the old punch card ballots are to confusing and voters didnt know what they were doing

 

[Aenygma]

<< Its also easier to claim that the old punch card ballots are to confusing and voters didnt know what they were doing >>




LOL

 

[Viper GTS]

It's easier to cheat with those old, obsolete machines which are currently used for the ballots

Maybe, but it only allows cheating on a very small scale.

Viper GTS

 

[viewton]

Al Gore, the inventor of the internet, has stopped creating new ideas for the web, and is now at home eating 50 twinkies a day. until he gets out of this funk, we won't get internet voting

 

[Linflas]

<< It's easier to cheat with those old, obsolete machines which are currently used for the ballots >>


How do I know who is actually casting the vote if it is done on the internet. ID numbers and passwords are meaningless since people can be convinced to sell/compromise them. I will put up with the inconvenience of going to a polling place rather than open the election system to wholesale fraud.

 

[Carbo]

Internet voting is a disaster waiting to happen. The potential for voter fraud is without bounds. Voting is a hard fought privilege that we, sadly, have taken for granted. If someone is unwilling to put up with some inconveniences to cast their vote, then stay home and watch Orca.

 

[DefRef]

Internet voting would just bring results determined by the best hackers or whoever wanted to jimmy the system. Since there would be no proof in the form of a PHYSICAL ballot (not even a hanging chad!), who could contest the &quot;official&quot; results?

The Germans gave us Hitler and TWO World Wars. I think we can do without any more of their bright ideas.

 

[IJump]

I can see it now: Internet Voting
Anandtech thread:
Poll: Poll: Who wil lbe the next president?

 

[shifrbv]

I'm amazed at the amount of technical ignorance on this board concerning the possibility of internet voting. There are many states which have been sited for making it difficult for people to vote. In fact, many states make it difficult for people to do alot of things which are required by law. Anyone ever spent a whole day at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles before? Yet if you look, many states are already starting to get these types of services online, such as BMV. Yet we continue to hear about bogus &quot;security&quot; issues with internet voting. We can't even register to vote online in this country. I guess it's just the average American's stupidity when it comes to understanding algorithms and the basic tenets of solid programming that are letting the US slip further and further behind.

Internet voting would just bring results determined by the best hackers or whoever wanted to jimmy the system. Since there would be no proof in the form of a PHYSICAL ballot (not even a hanging chad!), who could contest the &quot;official&quot; results?

In my state, we already have electronic touchscreen voting machines. As far as I know, these electronic machines could have been rigged the last election, but I believe that they weren't. I had no PHYSICAL ballot last time I voted. Who's to say some poll worker couldn't just stand at the screen and vote a repeated number of times when the lines were gone? Because people aren't given any type of verification when they cast their vote, someone could potentially do this. Yet I don't hear any outcry over this. Also, there are a number of algorithms which have yet to be broken (ecliptic curve among them). Some of the best programming applications use it for security and it has not been broken even to this day.

I will put up with the inconvenience of going to a polling place rather than open the election system to wholesale fraud.

Internet voting is a disaster waiting to happen. The potential for voter fraud is without bounds.

Again more ignorance. And like our current system isn't wrought with fraud! I would have been more comfortable using the internet to cast my ballot last election than being in say some of the counties down in Florida. Doesn't anyone find it interesting that we can trade stocks on the internet, do banking on the internet, even get licenses and license plates on the internet, yet we can't register to vote on the internet and we can't vote on the internet. People who say there are security issues obviously know nothing about the high level programming which has been used to implement financial systems online and the security they entail. We've seen stores broken into on the net, but I would challenge anyone to show me where a bank, brokerage firm, or online license branch has been compromised. You won't be able to do it, because it hasn't happened.

And as far as the selling of information, what keeps government employees currently from selling the information they have? My friend works as a contactor for the government and has access to almost all of the military financial information. He could potentially sell this but why doesn't he? He doesn't because it is a federal crime with extremely stiff penalties. These types of laws are the same type that keep people from giving away free license plates to their relatives, overlooking unpaid taxes by their friends and relatives, etc. The same could be implemented with internet voting.

 

[Raspewtin]

shifrbv, good point. if internet is safe enough for banking, it should be able to be made safe for voting. I think the reason it has not been done yet is b/c states pay for voting, not fed (correct me if i am wrong) since state budgets are tight, usually voting relating stuff is way at the bottom on the list (except this year of course ) Fed will not do anything in this regard b/c they don't want to spend money and they don't want to step on any toes. They could do a lot without spending much money to improve voter turnout but I don't think they care about that.

 

[Linflas]

There is a fundemental difference between banking on the internet and voting on the internet. It is in my best interest to closely guard my account information and not allow others access to it. This is not necessarily so with voting. The problems in Florida were not fraud rather they were proceedural errors compounded by an extremely close election. I can see wholesale vote selling going on with internet voting since there would be 0 control to ensure that the person legally entitled to cast a vote is the one actually casting it. You may say this is already possible with the current system with things like rounding up folks and paying them to go vote a certain way. The thing is that you really have no control who they actually pull the lever for once they enter a polling place. With internet voting you would no longer have this safeguard. I may not agree with you on this shifrbv but I am hardly &quot;technically ignorant&quot;. I suggest focusing on the issue and not our supposed ignorance. For what it is worth our DMV is a very easy entity to deal with. They have made great strides in getting me in and out as quickly as possible and have moved functions to the internet that can be done through that avenue. It is rare that I can praise a government service but in the case of our DMV that praise is deserved.

 

[slipperyslope]

To prevent people from selling this info for someone to vote for them just link their userid and password to a bank account or something else that they would not want to give out to another person.

Jim

 

[Helpless]

>The problems in Florida were not fraud rather they were proceedural errors compounded by an extremely close election<


...not to mention the fact that a school teacher in NJ passed out copies of the ballot to his 5th grade class and told them to vote for Gore, which 100% were able to do correctly. Given the SNAFU in Florida, I don't think many of the voters in Dade country could/should be voting on the internet...

 

[Raspewtin]

i don't think the security is that great at most polling places. the problems of voter fraud are not that specific to the platform of the Internet (they are problems already). as for making sure the person who votes is the actual person, they can't do that now. Since there is no proposed mechanism, it's way too premature to judge the security of such a system. To judge the safety of Internet voting by evaluating the Internet as a whole is kind of premature.

 

[Linflas]

<< To prevent people from selling this info for someone to vote for them just link their userid and password to a bank account or something else that they would not want to give out to another person.

Jim >>


Interesting idea but I cannot see how this could be done without giving that information to some government entity. I doubt many people would willingly do that just for the convenience of casting a vote from home once a year. Also I doubt financial institutions would want to deal with the additional cost to them of such a system.

 

[slipperyslope]

I would have no problem supplying a credit card number to the government if I can vote via the internet. A credit card doesn't have any information about me that the goverment couldn't get via a credit report.

Jim

P.S. With online company's these days, I trust the government 10x more than I do companies like Amazon.

 

[slipperyslope]

Another thought, the people that do not or cannot supply a credit card to the government could still show up at the poll to vote. People would just have to decide if they were going to vote online or at the poll. That way people that want to take advantage of voting on the internet could. Why keep everyone from doing something just because some people don't want to.

Jim

 

[classy]

That should never come to pass. To easy to commit fraud. Let them continue to come out and vote, like we have since the existence of our country. This is one thing that should never change.

 

[mk52]

yeah lets just leave it the way it is since it works soo well, which the last election showed clearly.
The number of people who vote has also been decreasing for the last couple of years. In ten years the US might end up with a voter turn out in the low 30%.

its amazing how conservative and thick headed some people on this board are.

-MeliK

 

[shifrbv]

For the naysayers on here, if you voted in the last election with &quot;touch screens&quot; like I did, they are also capable of producing the same fraudulent results as you have said that internet voting will produce. Yet there is one distinct difference, they are already in use.

Peter G. Neumann, principal scientist at the Computer Science Lab at SRI International in Menlo Park, chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery Committee on Computers and Public Policy and author of a book called &quot;Computer-Related Risks,&quot; among many other distinctions describes touch-screen systems as &quot;disasters waiting to happen -- with enormous opportunities for fraud and accidents that are very difficult to detect and almost impossible to rectify.&quot;

&quot;It is essential to elections that there be an alternative method for independently verifying that the votes cast correspond to the totals reported. Since I (as well as many 12-year-olds) can write programs that accept one input value, record a different one and report yet another, computer systems can be no more trusted to provide their own verification than can a fox guarding the hen house. Which means they could in principle be manipulated by code hidden in the machine by a malicious programmer.&quot;

Neumann wrote that &quot;it is impossible to verify that such hidden code is not present&quot; because &quot;voting system vendors do not provide their code internals for inspection, claiming trade-secret protection.&quot;

Think about that next time you vote with a touch screen system.

 

[Carbo]

<< like our current system isn't wrought with fraud! >>

Shifrbv, now that you've cast a wide net about our current system, how about a factual example of &quot;wrought with fraud!&quot;
If, in fact, that is the case, your solution seems to be to repair it with much the same. The fact that no bank or brokerage house has been infiltrated by some cracker doesn't guarantee that it won't happen. It will............remember Barings Bank and the rogue futures trader, Nicholas Leeson. Did ANYONE ever think it possible that an individual could singlehandedly bring down one of the oldest, most established and respected financial institutions in the world?
After the fact, sure, all the Monday morning quarterbacks were pointing fingers and saying, &quot;I told you so.&quot; It's only money, however. A fraudulent presidential election, on the other hand, has a hell of a lot more significance and repurcussions than ol' Barings. I'm not willing to risk it. Vote NO on internet voting.............but do it at your local polling place.

 

[Linflas]

<< yeah lets just leave it the way it is since it works soo well, which the last election showed clearly.
The number of people who vote has also been decreasing for the last couple of years. In ten years the US might end up with a voter turn out in the low 30%.

its amazing how conservative and thick headed some people on this board are.

-MeliK >>


If 50% of the people trust those of us that vote to make their decision for them because they are too lazy to get off their butts and go vote in a polling place so be it. If it goes to 70% not voting so much the better, just means my vote counts more. I have no idea how touch screens work but I do know that the way the voting machines work in my precinct is that they keep counts of how many people enter the polling place, they do identify that I am who I say I am, then allow me to vote. The people manning the polling place do balance checks every 15 minutes to ensure the voting machine totals balance with the number of people casting votes in it. If not they will take the machine offline and not use it. There is obviously room for small error but nothing is perfect.

 

[Helpless]

>>yeah lets just leave it the way it is since it works soo well, which the last election showed clearly.<<


It doesn't? Do we not have a president? Allow me to bore you with a hypothetical:


When we vote for elected officials, we are, in a sense, granting them the authority to represent us and look out for our interests, thus representative government. They, in turn, become our ?agent,? which is where the term ?principle agent? problem stems from. In any event, let?s assume something for a minute. Assume that each and every registered Democrat lives in either New York or California (which takes no stretch of the imagination). Let?s further assume that 51% of Americans are registered Democrats, living in either New York or California, and the other 49% are ?others? spread across the rest of the country. Now, let?s throw away the Electoral College for a moment and return to the Tuesday after the first Monday in November 2000. We go to the polls. Voting party lines, the citizenry from NY and CA vote for Gore, the rest of the country votes for Bush. Al Gore is president (god bless the spotted owls). Under your system, with the absence of the Electoral College, Al Gore is president, yet represents only a fraction of the country. Granted, the majority of voters are represented, but not the country. What about the people of rural North Dakota? Kansas? Utah? Virginia? (Fill in the rest of the states at your leisure). What about them? The fact of the matter remains that politicians would focus all of their efforts (and money) to NY and CA, never visiting North Dakota, Kansas, Utah, or Virginia. Why would they? They don?t count, remember? The only people who would count live in the most populous states, as they would receive all the political attention, pork spending, social programs, etc, etc?people is Mississippi---Nada.

Now let?s replace our 'bunk' system by reestablishing the Electoral College. Let?s go to the polls again. This time, the results are quite different. Al Gore receives a couple hundred thousand votes more than ?W,? thus winning the popular vote. However, Al Gore only won the majority of votes in a handful of ?blue states,? let?s say eight. ?W? won votes in every other state, and if deemed the winner, would become an ?agent? representing the people who occupy more than 80% of the landmass in America?So, should NY, Mass, and CA receive all the representation, or should the other states who have smaller populations receive their ?fair shake? at representation?



I am sorry to see so many disgruntled voters out there, but the &quot;Chads&quot; have spoken.