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Out With E-Voting, In With M-Voting

Posted by Zonk on Fri Sep 28, 2007 04:22 PM
from the has-to-be-safer-than-diebold dept.
The Internet Communications Government Politics
InternetVoting writes "The ever technology forward nation sometimes known as 'E-stonia' after recently performing the world's first national Internet election are already leaving e-voting behind. Estonia is now considering voting from mobile phones using SIM cards as identification, dubbed 'm-voting.' From the article: 'Mobile ID is more convenient in that one does not have to attach a special ID card reader to one's computer. A cell phone performs the functions of an ID card and card reader at one and the same time.'"
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[+] Politics: The World's First National Internet Election 297 comments
InternetVoting writes "Expanding on the limited 2005 Internet voting pilot successes, the small European nation of Estonia will become the first country to allow voting in a national parliamentary election via the Internet. Fresh off the news of France's successful primary election using Internet voting and the announcement of 12 new UK election pilots, is Europe leaving the U.S. behind?"
Submission: Out With E-Voting, In With M-Voting by InternetVoting (809563)
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Out With E-Voting, In With M-Voting 50 Comments More /

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  • How about this... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cap'nPedro (987782) <legendof...jonnie@@@googlemail...com> on Friday September 28 2007, @04:24PM (#20788219)
    I have 8 sim cards.

    Does that mean I get 8 votes?
    • I suppose they could tie each SIM back to an individual, and thus eliminate this problem. ...only I don't think they'd have that kind of coordination.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by spykemail (983593)
        Instead of rigging the election the old fashioned way they could just hire a bunch of pickpockets.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            So only Republicans attempt to deny people their vote? How about the sons of a Democrat Congresswoman and a Democrat Mayor [usatoday.com] slashing the tires of vans rented by Republicans for their get out the vote effort? Oh... and triangulation? That was Dick Morris' technique for Bill Clinton, not a Republican idea. I'm also intrigued about this notion where Republicans suddenly control the police where large numbers of blacks live... those areas (known as cities) are almost always controlled by Democrats, on both the l
            • Omission is not equal to declaration. Yes, democrats are likely to do things also. However, after the Florida fiasco, maybe republicans should feel a little shame and shut the hell up.
    • Yes, and you can vote as many times you wish! (1 euro/sms + tax)
    • > I have 8 sim cards.
      >Does that mean I get 8 votes?

      "I have a spectrum analyzer.
      It means that even if you only had one SIM card, you still get a knock on the door after midnight."
      - FSB.

    • Clearly, to implement this you'd have to register your SIM card in your phone. I presume that this would be a verifiable process. If you had more than 1 SIM cards, the only ones that would be cleared to have votes from that card accepted would be ones which had a unique voter registered with them.

      The fact that SIM cards would have to be registered with the government carries with it some degree of invasion of privacy. However, as long as the government allows people to own SIM cards that weren't regist

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by alfa2omega (1093251)
      No it does not!

      m-ID is a technology that ties the national ID card with the SIM. This mean You can have only one valid m-ID AFAIK.
      Just a little info about it http://id.ee/?id=10995 [id.ee].

      PS! m-ID is allot better than the usual ID card as its always with you and does not need any special hardware :)

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by sheehaje (240093)
      Hmmm... An interesting way to do something is using a phone with a camera to do some sort of biometrics. Take a picture of the face, or eye, or a finger print. Would be some cool software to work on. Have the actually camera be initiated by a server to take the picture. Of course, this is big brother talking, but biometrics in conjunction with a SIM card would probably be more secure against ballot stuffing than going to your local voting poll site.
  • I'm reminded of voting in the MaxHeadroom world where viewers tune to the channel of their candidate at voting time.
     
    But seriously, this seems like a well intended idea with an amazing amount of problems. The most obvious is that the phone company's computers and networking gear have many places to intercept the record of how you voted.
    • > I'm reminded of voting in the MaxHeadroom world where viewers tune to the channel of their candidate at voting time.

      Ah, Episode 2.3, Grossberg's Return [maxheadroom.com]!

      Cheviot (CEO): "Murray... Carter! What the devil is going on here? A false story mounted on flimsy evidence, my top reporter exposed as a shyster, a senior producer accused of criminal incompetence, and a major politician publicly accusing this network of character assassination... good grief!"

      Although I was thinking of Episode 1.6, Blanks [maxheadroom.com]...

      Car

    • Forget about trying to figure out if you are voting for the opposition party or not.... what about intercepting those votes and getting them changed on the way to being counted?

      Checksums can help to detect some interceptions and modifications.... but that is only a partial and imperfect solution. Other cryptographic techniques can be used for both preventing people from finding out what your ballot has been cast as, or to modify your vote. Even that has some strong limitations and would prove to be imposs

  • Tried this in the UK (Score:5, Funny)

    by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Friday September 28 2007, @04:33PM (#20788317) Homepage Journal
    We tried this in the UK, but for some reason the votes were still being counted 3 hours after the results were announced.
  • "The ever technology forward nation sometimes known as 'E-stonia' after recently performing the world's first national Internet election are already leaving e-voting behind.

    Are? The nation are blah blah blah...? That can't be right.
  • A major problem with both mVoting and voting over the internet is that the 'secret ballot' is sacrificed. It becomes very easy for this create problems like the US had in the 1800s.

    For example, your boss can tell you to vote while he is watching. If you don't vote
    the way that he wants he will fire you.

    For this reason I am against internet voting and mVoting.

    • Re:no secret ballot = vote buying and coercion (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Zarhan (415465) on Friday September 28 2007, @04:41PM (#20788395)
      For example, your boss can tell you to vote while he is watching. If you don't vote the way that he wants he will fire you. ...and in Estonia, this is solved by allowing you to change your vote as many times as you wish until the election day, and on that day you can still drop traditional ballot which overrides the e-vote.

      http://www.vvk.ee/elektr/docs/Yldkirjeldus-eng.pdf [www.vvk.ee] has description of their system. Considering the confidentiality aspects, read especially pages 9 and 13.

    • A major problem with both mVoting and voting over the internet is that the 'secret ballot' is sacrificed. It becomes very easy for this create problems like the US had in the 1800s.

      While that is a very good point, there is something even more basic.

      Estonia is now considering voting from mobile phones using SIM cards as identification, dubbed 'm-voting.'

      Did you catch that? A mobile phone. As it stands, people in the states think that requiring a photo ID (obtainable for free everywhere) as being an

    • > For example, your boss can tell you to vote while he is watching. If you don't vote
      > the way that he wants he will fire you.

      Your boss can always force you to take a picture of your traditional voting process to prove what you have voted for. Traditional voting is not more secure than internet voting.
      • I've seen corporations where an executive sends an email to the whole company encouraging ppl to vote a certain way
         
        I've worked at a major hospital network where the 'advocacy' office would email everyone before elections urging us to all vote for all Democrats because they were more likely to boost Medicare/Medicaid spending. The emails would go on to talk about the organization budget in general and heavily imply there may be layoffs if there wasn't more revenue coming soon.
  • Your address is verified when you receive the ballot, you can take your time looking up all the ballot measures in the voter's pamphlet, and it's convenient. It's as secure as an absentee ballot, and if you really wanted security, it's easier to get poll watchers from every campaign to one central location than to every precinct in the state.
  • Yes! Just what we need, voting that is dependent on the level of infrastructure you pay to support, causes brain cancer, lowers your sperm count and your IQ! As if the conspiracy theorists don't have enough to talk about already. So, do people with cheap unreliable cell phones petition to have government provided cell phones in order to ensure the reliability of their voting? Or, how about petitioning that the radio towers in their region aren't reliable so therefore the vote was flawed and biased again
  • It is really quite ironic that among the people who have most taken the message of the late economist Milton Friedman [wikipedia.org] to heart are the people of Estonia (formerly a totalitarian socialist state) and they are now reaping the benefits of forward thinking and sound economic and government policies. There have been hurdles and difficulties to overcome along the way...yes, but compared to some other European countries, were the flawed remnants of socialist ideas persist like three day old fish, Estonia is moving
  • Premium text messages costs apply typically $.99 per vote
    Can vote upto 10 times
    Premiums may be used to defend your candidate against solicitation charges.

    Gonna be tough to read that at the bottom of the cell phone screen but there's always a price to pay...
  • how can one be sure WHO actually votes here?
  • Just voted in Norway. All paper and apparently manual counting. This surprised me since USA have used punch cards for at least a quarter century, and now is mostly electronic.

    And BTW, a lot of cheating and errors with the old way, so maybe we should not demand perfection for the electronic systems.
  • DDoSed the entire country of Estonia because they moved a stupid World War II era statue [theregister.com] (ehem, i mean dearly important statue, dear any Russian hackers reading this comment), what Estonia is going to get from this scheme is Lenin being elected their next president, coming in second place will be Ivan Drago from Rocky IV, and coming in third place will be Boris Badenov from Rocky and Bullwinkle

    voting should be on paper. even mechanical voting is too susceptible to tampering. electronic voting? cell phone voting? are you kidding? yes, simple paper ballots can be messed with too, but anything more technological than simple paper ballots merely introduces more attack vectors... orders of magnitude more attack vectors the more unnecessarily technofetishized you get, such as with electronic voting

    democracy is too important and voting is really striaghtforward. there is no need to make it more complicated than scribble a mark on a piece of paper and dropping it in a box, especially when you risk the generla public losing confidence in their own government. all countries, no matter how technophilic and rich, should vote with paper ballots

    stupid, bad idea Estonia

  • Does it ever bother anyone that in Canada and the US Presidents and PM's tend to be lawyers? Have you noticed a lot of the house, senate, etc.. are also lawyers? Notice as well that so many laws come out that benefit no one except lawyers? Maybe we should try biasing society away from electing people who a vested interest in making things complicated. Maybe we should try voting in ore Science related professionals and engineers. Look at other major nations, China's run by a PHD engineer, Russia is run by a
  • "We're going to give all our votes to some guy you've never met, who will count them with nobody else watching, and whose answers we will trust completely. You'll never see the original votes again, but if you want a recount he'll be happy to tell you the same numbers twice."

    "What! That's outrageous! Why the possibilities for corruption are so..."

    "The guy will use a computer."

    "Oh, well, that's okay then."

  • Since when did democracy need to be convenient? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blubadger (988507) on Friday September 28 2007, @06:30PM (#20789547)

    I'm serious. We know from experiments in Estonia and Switzerland and elsewhere that e-voting is convenient. M-voting will probably be even more so.

    We also know that there are fundamental, perhaps irremediable problems with voting electronically and remotely. In particular:

    • Security: In a complex system, the potential for undetected fraud multiplies exponentially
    • Transparency: The right of the voter to check how a poll is conducted is somewhat compromised by a need to understand source code (this reached court in Switzerland)
    • Identity: It's obvious and also applies to postal voting, but how do you know who is really voting on that remote device?

    Is democracy like shopping on Amazon, to be judged by its convenience and efficiency? Or is it something more important, and precious, than that?

    I think that if people take democracy seriously, they should slow down and ask these questions a bit more. If it means a few more years of voting the boring manual way, perhaps that will be for good reasons.

  • No thanks. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mmcuh (1088773) on Saturday September 29 2007, @01:01AM (#20791635)

    Internet and mobile phone voting in the EU, where the data retention directive [wikipedia.org] will soon be implemented in every member state allowing unprecedented charting and tracing of everyone's internet and phone communications? No thank you. I'll step behind the curtain in the ballot office, put my vote in the anonymous envelope and watch the people behind the desk drop it in the box, just like in all previous elections.

    Any election method where the vote can't be guaranteed to be secret (because you are allowed to vote somewhere where someone can force you to let him watch you do it) or anonymous (because mobile phones and internet connections can not be trusted) is open to abuse.

    • Call me when you can vote by drinking a certain number of beers, lol.

      Ah, bright college days. I remember proposing some very unpopular rules and seeing if I could vote it in at 1 beer, 1 vote.

    • Blevins, who trademarked "pops-right" and invented the "presto-pop" prepackaged ready-to-pop popcorn/oil/aluminum popping pan, for decades ran the "popcorn poll" on presidential races.

      Moviegoers could request their popcorn in a Democrat or Republican styled box. Starting with Truman/Dewey upset election and running for 20 years he successfully predicted the outcome of six consecutive presidential races.

      • Re:This is a terrible idea. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by SatanicPuppy (611928) * <Satanicpuppy@@@gmail...com> on Friday September 28 2007, @04:59PM (#20788581) Journal
        8 years of post secondary education would be pointless...I've known some extremely well educated people I wouldn't want anywhere near the government, and I've known some people who didn't finish high school who wouldn't bother me a bit.

        Likewise "Volunteers" would still be people who really want to exert control over others. This is the big problem already. Anyone who wants to be in charge is going to be suspect. Better to set up a system to pick a random sampling of people from all over and MAKE them serve...That should keep the majority from having any desire to be there at all. Then make all laws have to be renewed every decade, and all new laws need a supermajority to pass, and are subject to ratification in yearly nationwide elections.

        Always amuses me to see how many people correlate education with superiority. I'll side with Heinlein on that one...Better to have military service as a prerequisite for citizenship, because then, at least, the citizens would have to have shown themselves willing put themselves at the service of the country, even to the point of losing their lives, before they could exercise their franchise. Education says nothing about the person so educated.

        • Re:This is a terrible idea. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by king-manic (409855) on Friday September 28 2007, @05:11PM (#20788725)
          Always amuses me to see how many people correlate education with superiority. I'll side with Heinlein on that one...Better to have military service as a prerequisite for citizenship, because then, at least, the citizens would have to have shown themselves willing put themselves at the service of the country, even to the point of losing their lives, before they could exercise their franchise. Education says nothing about the person so educated.

          I'm all for the slashdot moderator political system. The only one who can vote are the politically inactive and in good standing with the community (ie never rand for council, no arrests for any felonies). They're picked at random given 5 votes and the freedom to exercise such a vote as they please. Stating a public opinion that can be linked back to you about a particular vote disqualifies you. You can state such a opinion anonymously.

          It can't be any worse then the current system.

        • Better to set up a system to pick a random sampling of people from all over and MAKE them serve...That should keep the majority from having any desire to be there at all.

          Congratulations! You have been very randomly and ironically selected to participate!

        • If you're referring to Starship Troopers, it wasn't compulsory military service it was compulsory government service, in the book it gives indications that the vast majority of the people who get the vote did so through non military service, or at the very least stuff that wouldn't be a front line grunt, like working for the postal service or some such.

          I also agree that serving the people before you get to lead them is not a bad idea.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Smauler (915644)

          Better to have military service as a prerequisite for citizenship, because then, at least, the citizens would have to have shown themselves willing put themselves at the service of the country

          Wow, what a good idea. You've got to prove that you're willing to be killed for the government of the land you live on. I mean, you can't prove your citizenship by any other means, right?

      • Instead of a representative government, where we periodically vote for representatives and send them to Washington, I suggest a government of the people, by the people, who have cellphones. A government of cell towers situated along superhighways would gather a representative sample of Americans and we can replace our arcane parliamentary procedures with wireless ones, where the power is held by the people, as they drive past particular points on the road.

        Think of how convenient that would be. You could vot
      • Main Problem: NO experience, or education etc would increase a person's dependence on career staffers to give advice. Career staff members could gain enormous power and become targets for corruption.

        ,p> The end-result may not be as free and democratic as you'd like.

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