Category Archives: internet voting

Boing boing explains.

Slate explores.

LA Times:

As secretary of state, I want to expand on this success and explore the possibility of one day not just registering online, but in fact voting online,” [State Sen. Leland] Yee said in a statement. “If we can safely pay our bills via the Internet and board an airplane with a smartphone, we should be able to securely and easily vote electronically as well.”

I explain in Chapter 6 of The Voting Wars why such thinking is misguided and dangerous.

Pam Fessler blogs for NPR.

The News Hour reports.

Scroll down.  Ron Rivest said at the conference that internet voting is like a “safe cigarette.”

Mitch Trachtenberg sends along the following comments on William Kelleher’s rebuttal to David Jefferson’s recent paper on security issues with Internet voting:

Here.

In the course of writing The Voting Wars, and particularly the topic on voting technology, I encountered a number of readers who thought that Internet voting should be no harder to set up securely than online banking.  My research told me differently, but there was no good, succinct source making this point.  I am pleased therefore that David Jefferson has prepared the attached short paper making this point in a very convincing way.  His work begins:

There is widespread pressure around the country today for the introduction of some form of Internet voting in public elections that would allow people to vote online, all electronically, from their own personal computers or mobile devices. Proponents argue that Internet voting would offer greater speed and convenience, particularly for overseas and military voters and, in fact, any voters allowed to vote that way.

However, computer and network security experts are virtually unanimous in pointing out that online voting is an exceedingly dangerous threat to the integrity of U.S. elections. There is no way with current technology to guarantee that the security, privacy, and transparency requirements for elections can all be met with any security technology in the foreseeable future. Anyone from a disaffected misfit individual to a national intelligence agency can remotely attack an online election, modifying or filtering ballots in ways that are undetectable and uncorrectable of just disrupting the election and creating havoc. There are a host of such attacks that can be used singly or in combination. In the cyber security world today almost all of the advantages are with attackers, and any of these attacks can result in the wrong persons being elected, or initiatives wrongly passed or rejected.

Nonetheless, the proponents point to the fact that millions of people regularly bank and shop online every day without apparent problems,. They note that an online voting transaction resembles an ecommerce transaction, at least superficially. You connect your browser to the appropriate site, authenticate yourself, make your choices with the mouse, click on a final confirmation button, and you are done! All of the potential attacks alluded above apply equally to shopping and banking services, so what is the difference? People ask, quite naturally, “If it is safe to do my banking and shopping online, why can’t I vote online?” This is a very fair question, and it deserves a careful, thorough answer because the reasons are not obvious. Unfortunately it requires substantial development to explain fully. But in brief, our answer is in two-parts:

1. It is not actually “safe” to conduct ecommerce transactions online. It is in fact very risky, moreso every day, and essentially all those risks apply equally to online voting transactions.
2. The technical security, privacy, and transparency requirements for voting are structurally different from, and much more stringent than, those for ecommerce transactions. Even if ecommerce transactions were safe, the security technology underpinning them would not suffice for voting. In particular, the security and privacy requirements for voting are unique and in tension in a way that has no analog in the ecommerce world.

Read the whole thing.