[LINK] Estonia to hold online elections

[Craig Sanders]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 01:38:40PM +1100, Rick Welykochy wrote:
> Sandra Henderson wrote:
> 
> >http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6161005.html
> >"The Baltic state of Estonia plans to become the world's first
> >country to allow voting in a national parliamentary election via the
> >[...]
>
> Goodbye to a secret ballot. There are no guarantees that absolutely
> no-one in the system (election officials, gummint employees, even
> police and pollies) will look at who voted for whom.

that's the unsolvable problem with internet voting.

you can have anonymity, OR you can prevent people from either voting
multiple times or selling their vote. you can't have both.

with anonymous voting, there's no way to stop someone voting multple
times.

if you're willing to sacrifice the secret ballot, you can stop people
voting more than once - but there's no way to maintain secret/anonymous
voting (at least, not in any way that the *voter* can be 100% confident
that their vote is secret).

if you try to achieve both by giving out anonymous one-use voting
tokens then you open up the prospect of wide-scale vote-buying or
vote-coercion. a vote buyer/extorter just has to demand the victim hand
over their token and then use it themselves.

depending on the nature of the token, it may also open up the
possibility of vote forgery by guessing the token's ID number. trivial
to script - guess a number, try to vote with it, repeat. this not only
forges a vote, it disenfranchises the legitimate holder of the guessed
token.

> That aside, what about an audit and paper trail, two of the big
> problems associated with e-voting machines in polling booths?

i don't see any compelling reason to switch to electronic voting
machines in a voting booth, let alone internet voting. the benefits are
minimal and the risks (to democracy) are huge.

our manual vote counting system is fast enough, and (unlike e-voting
terminals) has enough eyes scrutinising it at all levels that vote fraud
is a) minimal/negligible and b) easily detected.

> I also wonder how easy it would be to conterfeit a vote.

electronically? easy. it's just bits in memory. bits are easy to
manipulate. far easier than paper and people.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>

How to Raise Your I.Q. by Eating Gifted Children
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