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Using the Internet To Subvert Democracy
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Apr 29, 2009 12:43 AM
from the you-thought-diebold-was-bad dept.
from the you-thought-diebold-was-bad dept.
david_adams writes "All the recent talk about various polls and elections being pranked or hijacked, serious and silly alike, prompted me to write an article about the technical realities behind online polling, and the political fallout of ever becoming subject to online voting for serious elections. Even if we were to be able to limit voting to legitimate, legal voters, the realities of social networking and the rise of Internet-based movements would dramatically alter the political landscape if online voting were to become commonplace."
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Your Rights Online: Is Arizona's Internet Voting System Safe Enough? 171 comments
JMcCloy writes "Kevin Poulsen, senior editor at Wired News, asks readers 'Is internet voting safe?' and has a poll at the end of the article. So far, 32% responding actually think that internet voting is worth it, risks and all. It is scary how easily people can be persuaded to trust a system that is so vulnerable." The system described, used in Arizona in last year's election process, isn't just checking a box and clicking a button, but Poulsen lays out some scenarios by which it could be subverted.
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Dumb article. (Score:5, Informative)
Stupid article - a transparent attempt to get his friend a new bicycle. I strongly urge everyone to go to the Kona website [konaworld.com] and vote for the Tanuki (if you don't understand why, RTFA).
Oh, and TFA states: That's why no country practices direct democracy. Wrong [geschichte-schweiz.ch]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Doesn't your suggestion to vote the opposite essentially represent the exact same behavior?
People should be encouraged to vote their minds, not vote how you think they should vote.
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Doesn't your suggestion to vote the opposite essentially represent the exact same behavior?
No - it shows how an attempt to subvert a vote like this can itself be subverted in an unexpected manner.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which makes the outcome of the vote fair?
No. What on earth made you think it did?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which makes the outcome of the vote fair?
No. What on earth made you think it did?
That was exactly my point.
Re:Dumb article. (Score:5, Insightful)
I like how it says that internet based movements would alter the political landscape (translation: people would be heard again) but the article is "Using the Internet to Subvert Democracy."
Since when was Democracy redefined to, "What the rich and powerful want?"
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
(translation: Internet people would be heard for the first time)
And considering the types of subcultures the Internet puts out (ahem: 4chan) I'm not sure that's a good thing.
Re:Dumb article. (Score:4, Insightful)
What is really odd about your statement, you use sub as in subculture but I think you don't really know what it means, in light of the way you used it. So the new internet democracy, people as individuals have the opportunity to have a voice, and collections of people ie. all of the various subcultures of the overall culture of that particular societal group will be able to share their thoughts within that subculture as well as within society as a whole.
So 4chan, or the Republicans, or the Klu Klux Klan or Bankers or Corporate Executives or Religious Fundamentalists or any of the other subcultures which express views which substantially diverge from the average, more reasonable and moral view of the general populace, will have a voice, however they will not be able to inflate that voice through violence or by paying for a much louder voice and effectively silencing the majority as they have done for the last couple of hundred years.
So the internet age is, the age of "a government of the people, by the people and for the people" and not as a platitude but as a developing reality.
Parent
Re:Dumb article. (Score:4, Informative)
Quote [historyguide.org]: "The citizens of any given polis were an elite group of people — slaves, peasants, women and resident aliens were not part of the body of citizens."
Any attempt of 'change' would indeed disturb the process of finding the roots again.
CC.
Parent
Federalist #10 (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Dumb article. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I would say that that has always been the real definition of democracy. The definition of democracy that most people describe is completely different out of necessity, because it's a piece of propaganda that the masses need to believe. The "bewildered herd" needs to be managed, because they're too dumb to know what's good for them. That's been a central theme of elite political theory for a very long time (see, for example, the writings of Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, Reinhold Niebuhr). Even when the US was founded, James Madison was quite clear [yale.edu] about what the purpose of the senate should be:
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
> Since when was Democracy redefined to, "What the rich and powerful want?"
Since universal suffrage.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Right now voting stands on 1587 total votes, 44% for the Tanuki and 45% for the Cadabra.
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The United States has limited direct democracy in the form of ballot-paper propositions [wikipedia.org].
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Missing option? (Score:2, Funny)
CowboyNeal
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Ron Paul!
(This is referring to how Ron Paul supporters would in the year leading up to the election, for lack of a better term, "flash mob" any online poll that had Ron Paul as a choice and spam votes for Ron Paul. It didn't really matter what the poll was, it could have been "Who would you like to see devoured by a pack of dingos?", as long as Ron Paul was an option they'd be there spamming for him.)
Hard to Follow (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you really think that if the during the 2008 presidential election, Stephen Colbert was on the ballot, he would get something other than a minority of the vote?
Or that 66% [msn.com] of a randomly selected cross section of msnbc viewers would pick Ron Paul as the "most convincing candidate"?
it's just taken the Internet increasing the flow of information for us to realize this.
That is exactly the problem. Online polls are only really representative of people who get news and information from the Internet, which is a minority of people.
Elections and online voting. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Elections and online voting. (Score:5, Funny)
Until computers are granted suffrage they ought not be trusted to count votes.
Parent
Re:Elections and online voting. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
THAT is what they were trying to prove.
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They were trying to prove that people want to be heard, that people want to make a lasting impact in the world. And that people more often than not don't even know what they're for, against or at all.
Go out in the streets with a friend who lugs some large camera around and pose as some sort of "opinion asker" for a local TV station. Ask random strangers whether they have heterosexual friends, or whether they are heterosexual. And be surprised of the answers.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They were trying to prove that people want to be heard, that people want to make a lasting impact in the world. And that people more often than not don't even know what they're for, against or at all.
That's a contradictory set of goals, purposes, and expectations...and nothing new, in fact, desire, or concept....nothing new at all.
Go out in the streets with a friend who lugs some large camera around and pose as some sort of "opinion asker" for a local TV station. Ask random strangers whether they have heterosexual friends, or whether they are heterosexual. And be surprised of the answers.
Don't try this in Boston if your camera has LED's. It could get ugly for you as a "terrorist".(sarcastic joke implied here)
Also, don't be surprised by how many times you get punched in the face and kicked in the 'nads in places like Oklahoma;-)...if you are lucky. (no sarcasm/troll/flamebait intended...too many times I have witnessed some 'crazy shit' here)
On the other hand, y
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, what?
Suffrage is not an archaic word and everyone, I mean everyone, should have learned about the suffragettes and the struggle to get women the vote. It just proves people are idiots, sorry.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Whatever the justification for not knowing the meaning of the word "sufferage", the *point* is that people are signing a petition for something they know nothing about. Same thing as the pranks you see every so often when people ask to sign a petition banning the chemical di-hydrogen monoxide.
Re:Elections and online voting. (Score:5, Insightful)
Computers have no practical place in elections unless there is a paper trail to verify the count.
To the point: Computers' place in elections should be solely to produce a clean, unambiguously marked, human readable, machine countable paper ballot, and the subsequent counting thereof.
Parent
Robustness (Score:5, Interesting)
Changing democratic preferences is not a subversion of democracy. Many would argue it would make for a more robust democracy.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. The original story makes it sound like a deviation from the current would be bad. I think pretty much anything would be better. In particular, more actual substance ... more discussion ... more grouping of people of similar interests. This isn't "subversion". It's just discussion. God forbid people actually have a fucking clue what they're voting on before the fact ...
Polls != Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Democracy is the force of the majority over the minority. It doesn't matter if you have elections or not.. that's just a formality.
Re:Polls != Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."
~ Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States
Parent
Re:Polls != Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
He's right, democracy stinks. That's why many people past and present prefer the alternative of ruling the mob, where one percent of the people take away the rights of the other ninety-nine.
Parent
Re:Polls != Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
from heinlein:
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A quote that's often led to the comparison that democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for lunch.
The more accurate comparison would be two poor men and a rich man, deciding who foots the bill.
The 51% of Jefferson's quote, or the majority in its trite examples, are not the wolves. They are the sheep. In a country like America, it is the poor, (the not-wealthy) who will always be in the majority. That's the nature of capitalism.
So it's not about 51% taking away the rights of 49%. It's about the 7
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
-- Benjamin Franklin
Re:Polls != Democracy (Score:5, Interesting)
That's just a facet of first-past-the-post democracies.
There are actually democracies where it's virtually impossible to get a majority.
Americans...
Parent
Re:Polls != Democracy (Score:4, Informative)
Can't really talk about the other countries, but in New Zealand the biggest downfall seems to happen when the major parties are closely matched and have to form coalitions with the minors for trade offs. This appears to be both a benefit and a disadvantage, depending on who you agree on at the time.
Parent
Luddite alert (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if you could transport that vote 100% of the time securely and accurately you still have a huge problem. The problem with any system where you can vote in plain sight of other people will lead to all sorts of complications. Mainly the creation of a new market, the votes market. People will probably buy votes. Even if its not enough to change an election it is still going to be considered far more important to ensure this isn't happening than to let people vote from home.
So maybe we can transport a v
Re:Luddite alert (Score:5, Informative)
I program computers for a living. They are an excellent tool for a lot of things. Totally electronic voting (whether at a polling place or over the Internet) is not a good use for that tool.
Here is a user interface. Push some buttons on it. It is going to send some data somewhere. Did it send the data you thought it would? Did it send it at all? If so, was it properly received at the other end? How would you know? Even if the UI tells you so, it could be saying so incorrectly, by either accident or malice.
Here is a piece of paper with readable language on it. Are the dots in the columns where you wanted your votes to be cast? You can answer that.
Here is a data file with a million entries in it. 35% of those entries are for value A. Change that to 60% with little to no evidence anything was changed. A well-designed script can do that in a blink.
Here are one million pieces of paper, 35% of which are (marked in ink or with punches) for value A. Change that to 60% with little to no evidence any changes were made. Now you've got a laborious and intensive process ahead of you, that aside from the fact that the papers are watched and you are very likely to leave evidence of tampering.
Recognizing a technology's legitimate limitations does not a Luddite make. The Internet is great for informal polls. It is not a good tool for serious ones such as an election where the results must be accurate and verifiable.
Parent
Re:Luddite alert (Score:4, Insightful)
Computer based voting can never be secured to the same point as paper based voting. For a very simple reason: Trust. You would have to trust someone.
Paper has one key feature that a computer can never reach: Anyone literate can use it and verify it. You can read, or at least tell left from right and someone tells you left is Party A and right is Party B, you can recount. Also, should someone try to mess with the ballot, anyone with normal working senses can be a bystander to ensure this won't happen. You can see that someone opens the ballot, a simple (but very, very special) paper slip glued to the lock (aka a seal) can already show whether someone tampered with it.
With computers, you first of all have to trust the maker of the election hardware and software, or at least you have to trust all the auditors, first that they did their job right and second that they're not "in" with the makers. You, Joe Average, cannot test the reliability of the setup. You're no computer expert. And if you are, and even if you're giving the chance to audit the software, you know that you simply cannot ensure to 100% that every single vote will be counted the way it is supposed to be. With paper, no problem. Take the votes and start counting. Anyone can do it.
Tamper proof... is it? I can't tell if the ballot has been opened, I cannot tell whether someone will see who voted which way. Can you? Can Joe?
No matter how you twist and turn it, computer elections cannot be made reliable to the same extent we have today with paper ballots.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
You think that any government sponsored vote tallying system will ever use such complex and costly things as quantum encryption?
RSA has been around for how long again? Do any of them use it...No.
*Hint* No government in the world is going to develop or pay hundred of millions of dollars for an ultra secure hollywood movie style electronic systems that will be used for one day every four years. Especially when there's a perfectly good, proven and cheap way of doing it that's worked over and over for the last
Kind of redundant, isn't it? (Score:2)
Increase voter participation... (Score:2)
If we had a web-enabled voting and polling system that was workable and secure, these 'polls' would be as relevant as the Semaphore, Telegraph, and Pony Express is today competing with the internet. Oh, yeah, with smoke signals for a 'back-up system. Printing presses for extra points.
An easier way to make democracy more effective (Score:4, Interesting)
After the election which took place as normal. Every member of parliament gets a vote that is proportionate to the number of constituents that are eligible to vote.
Everyone who is eligible to vote can change who represents them to any of the sitting MPs, once every 3 moths or so. This takes a vote away from their MP and gives it to the MP they want to have it. (Suggest that libraries are used for this purpose).
This process has the following effects.
1. It does not disenfranchise those who don't want to do more than they already do.
2. It maintains an element of local representation.
3. It makes MPs do what they say they will do, because if they don't people will stop supporting them a lot more quickly.
4. It allows for a far greater degree of representation. Out of the several hundred sitting MPs it is likely that at least one will closely represent your views.
Subvert 'Democracy'?-HahHahHaHooHeeeHah! (Score:3, Funny)
"[all emphasis mine]
Yes!1 Yes!1 Abso-fscking-lutely!1!
Let's put EVERY-FSCKING-THING that determines/influences our political process online!...ASAP!
The only realistic questions become then are:
1. "Should we concentrate on learning Russian, Chinese, or both?" (least pessimistic scenario)
2. Will 'Twitter' [wikipedia.org] take over Congress, and sentient life?(do not confuse the two to your detriment)
3. ???
4.Profit!!!**
What could possibly go wrong???? (Hint: I am learning Russian)
** Can I still post on /. if I voted for CowboyNeal?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They already made a movie [imdb.com] of it.