UK Voters Want To Vote Online 288
InternetVoting writes "A recent UK research survey by NTL:Telewest Business found that nearly half of the younger respondents would be more likely to vote online. This year the UK government has authorized 13 local election pilots including Internet voting. ntl:Telewest Business estimates 10 million UK households have broadband and 4,789 local libraries offer public access. In the US political parties are beginning to test the Internet voting waters with the Michigan Democratic Party to offer Internet voting in their 2008 Presidential Caucus. There were some notable differences in generational interest: 'The YouGov poll of almost 2,300 people, carried out on behalf of NTL:Telewest's business unit, found that younger voters were even more positive about the idea of alternatives to the trusty ballot box. 57 per cent of 18-34 year olds liked the idea of evoting, but only a third of the over 55s were as keen.' Given security and privacy concerns in the states, how likely is this to appeal to US voters? "
bah (Score:3, Insightful)
Scariest shit i have heard in ages (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:bah (Score:3, Insightful)
I won't even bother to mention the potential for abuse or security problems. That stuff is just garuanteed with this sort of scheme.
Anonymity requires a physical ballot. (Score:4, Insightful)
Conduct elections online, and you open the process up to massive abuse where anonymity effectively become nullified.
For audits and recounts, computer forensics aren't nearly up to the abilities of traditional forensics. Physical ballots are why the Florida 2000 problems were so readily apparent.
Having computers print out physical (human-readable) ballots is fine. But trying to make an electronic "ballot" work anonymously is sheer stupidity.
There is a good reason to retain the voting booth. (Score:5, Insightful)
Computer voting = StupidByDesign (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll say it again: Computer voting is Stupid By Design.
Re:If it were more open... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If it were more open... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:bah (Score:3, Insightful)
I deem that highly dangerous (Score:3, Insightful)
How much more interesting would it be to change his vote cast to a party you deem more desirable than the one that he actually wanted to pick?
Democracy is too valuable a thing to hand it to a machine. Money, fine. Business, ok. But not politics.
Brilliant (Score:4, Insightful)
Really bad intference here (Score:5, Insightful)
It just means they admit there are times they might vote online when they wouldn't bother to go to the polls. It doesn't mean they think that online voting is better, or as good.
I've missed a couple elections over the last two decades. They were local elections for offices where I didn't think there was much difference between the candidates, and I was scheduled for business travel. It wasn't worth it to reschedule my trip or get an abstentee ballot. If we voted on line, I'd have voted remotely and I suppose I wouldn't have missed any elections.
So technically, this article would count me as ready to "embrace" online voting, even though I'd fight the idea tooth an nail if it ever came up. If it was the only way to vote, I'd vote that way. I might, over the course of my life, vote in a half dozen elections that I would otherwise have skipped because they weren't important for me. However, I'd never trust any election result again, including the ones that are important to me.
They'll never do that (Score:3, Insightful)
Presidental elections are mandatory here, and by custom the first thing the new president does is declare a general amnesty for all those who didn't come to vote. It would be a farce anyway.
Re:bah (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be very careful making statements like this, even if it is jest. I don't think anyone's vote should be discounted for any reason. Slippery slope indeed...
Re:bah (Score:3, Insightful)
This is mildly humorous, but every other class of disenfranchised voter has been until they weren't.
Re:What difference does it make (Score:3, Insightful)
I predict a landslide.
Re:Paid for votes? (Score:2, Insightful)
TLF
Re:bah (Score:2, Insightful)
Are they f**kin nuts!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
NO NO NO (Score:2, Insightful)
Now I know that there will be lots of geeks immediately thinking of technical feasibility and a system architecture seems to want to start drawing itself in my head too. But this is just one thing you never want to make "more efficient".
Why? Because YOU CANNOT TRUST GOVERNMENT. You simply cannot. The framers of the US constitution understood that concept very well (really the anti-federalists more so but whatever). We have documentation that is quite explicit on this point. It's not being patriotic to hand your power over to a faceless system that will naturally want to preserve itself; that's being idiotic. Liberty is something that needs to be guarded and protected very diligently because there will always be someone willing to take away if you let them and once that happens you may never get it back. The right and the left in the US never address the fact the the 2nd Amendment to the US Consistution (well regulated militia, bear arms) was not put there so citizens could protect themselves from break-ins, thieves or highwaymen. It is so they can protect themselves from the government.
Just leave this one alone. We can have all the conveniences in the world thanks to technology, but people will just have to deal with the tremendous inconvenience of getting off their asses and going out and manually voting sometimes.
Neutral Third Party (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:bah (Score:3, Insightful)
That being said, however, I don't think there could be enough security to lock things down to set up such a system in the US, so, I'd rather not go for it at this time. Testing the waters, though, is a good idea at this time, especially in the caucuses where it isn't directly electing anyone into office.
Re:bah (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Consider this before you *bah* (Score:4, Insightful)
The current mechanism of voting in the UK is:
1. You walk into a small booth, about the size of a telephone box. It's completely open on one side, but the other sides consist of a sheet of board about 7' high.
2. You draw a cross next to the name of the person you want to vote for.
3. You fold your ballot paper once and place it in a locked metal box in the middle of the room.
It would be trivially easy to print out information similar to what you describe and pin it up inside the booth. I suspect the reason why they don't is because if the slightest piece of information that gets put up is wrong, or perhaps somehow unfair to a specific party, then the wronged party would have kittens.
This isn't a problem which can be solved by adding "... on the Internet!" to the voting procedure. About the most detail they'd be likely to provide would be a link to the party website.
Re:How likely? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not broken, but there are degrees of brokenness.
The big advantage with paper ballots is that it's very hard to make a substantial change to the outcome without it being pretty damn obvious to even the most lacksidaisical of officials. The same is simply not true of the "magic black box" which the computerised voting systems in common use are.
Security of the vote? (Score:3, Insightful)
One major reason to have polling places is to attempt to guarantee a situation where a voter can go into a little room and cast his ballot without any threat and with deniability. There's nobody in the booth with him ensuring that he's voted the way he's been told or paid to vote.
Allowing people to vote from wherever they want MAY still grant anonymity, but we'll never be sure of the circumstances behind the vote. There could be a man with a gun or a checkbook watching the ballot being cast.
Even if all of the engineering and political challenges are overcome, this sort of voting has more fundamental issues that may not be solvable.
Where is the secrecy of vote. (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's say I want to force/pay 1000 people to vote for me. With online voting I can setup a private "voting office" and watch carefully if they really vote for me.
Or my boss can force me to vote for his favorite candidate for example. Someone can tell his whole family to vote what he wants to.
This is not possible with the current voting system, where I vote alone, in a secured area.
Online voting will make possible not only for the government or some powerfull people to track a vote, but for everyone who has some influence on the voter.
Re:If it were more open... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a cliche, but you know the expression about "one bad apple". Perhaps you think I have a somewhat cynical and downbeat view of humanity; well, I probably do, but that's not the problem here. Put simply, there only need to be a relatively small percentage of corrupt, selfish people (basically those with psychopathic or simply selfish behaviour) to subvert and exploit any system which relies on an overly idealistic view of humanity. The "bad apples".
Until the human race fundamentally changes, these people will always be with us, and I certainly don't intend letting them destroy things.
Re:What is the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Here in France we are in presidential elections right now. Politics used to say that French were not interested in politics because we had a very low participation rate in 2002, that voting was to hard, that people weren't educated enough to understand how important it was to go voting. Never, ever, they wondered if it could be because French felt that political parties had no interesting propositions to make. This year, nothing changed in the way of voting, but we broke participation records. Only thing that changed : some candidates are 20 years younger than those in 2002. They bring more interesting ideas.
When people vote has a chance to change something, they'll go voting. Period.
A Bad Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
For every reason that people oppose electronic voting, this is much worse. The machines aren't even visible to the voter, there is no paper trail at all. It's a black box, but there isn't even a box visible to the voter. You have no idea if your vote was counted correctly.
Securing the system will be very hard, with tons of people trying to hack it, and being able to do so anonymously and from anywhere in the world.
People will have to get some kind of password to vote, and will have to register, and at least the former can't be done on the internet. This eliminates the purpose of online voting. I guess you could send everyone a password, though.
It will open new doors for corruption. There will be no secret ballot at all, and selling your vote will be incredibly easy. As will voter coercion.
And last, it has no great benefit. If someone is too lazy and/or apathetic to go to the polls to vote, they don't need to be voting.
Re:bah (Score:4, Insightful)
What we're concerned with is, among other ways, someone hacking into the servers and fixing the results. Then there is DDosing the servers and other things. I'm not yet willing to trust voting computers being hooked up to the internet just yet. Dedicated networks, yes. General internet, no.