In France, a Showcase of What Can Go Wrong With Online Voting 177
Bruce66423 submits a report from The Independent, writing that "a French primary election is made the stuff of farce after journalists defeat the 'secure' election system." From the article: An 'online-primary,' claimed as 'fraud-proof' and 'ultra secure,' has turned out to be vulnerable to multiple and fake voting. The four-day election has also the exposed the poisonous divisions created within the centre-right Union Pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) by the law permitting gay marriage which took effect last week. ... What was already shaping up as a tense and close election was thrown into utter confusion at the weekend. Journalists from the news site Metronews proved that it was easy to breach the allegedly strict security of the election and vote several times using different names."
Storm in a teacup (Score:5, Informative)
A few facts :
OK, so electronic ballots are proved to be less "secure" than paper ballots, again. The UMP is proved to be technologically illiterate, again. Yawn.
Re:Oxymoron? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Designed Poorly (Score:4, Informative)
Yes it can.
Estonia has a smardcard-based ID card that can be used for authentication and digital signatures (two different keys). The latter is legally as good as your handwritten one which means you can build all sorts of services on top of that, elections are just one of them. The vote is encrypted with the public key of the current election, signed with the ID card and sent to a central server. Later, the double votes are removed according to the list of people who voted on the election day (so if you were forced to vote for someone and your ID card taken away, you can just grab your passport and go vote again using the "old" method), votes are separated from the signed container, moved to a physically different machine, decrypted and counted. Anyone can go and see how all the process is done.
See http://www.vvk.ee/voting-methods-in-estonia/engindex/reports-about-internet-voting-in-estonia/ [www.vvk.ee] for details.
Re:Working as planned (Score:5, Informative)
I like this system. Each vote costs €3 and you can vote as often as you like. In other countries money buys you access, influence and power but we pretend that everyone is equal. France sweeps away the hypocrisy and makes it explicit: mo' money, mo' votes.
This election is not ran by the French Republic, it is ran by one political party in city of Paris, to decide what candidate they will have for next Paris mayor. It does not reflect France position on electronic voting.
Re:Hate group (Score:2, Informative)
Napoleon Bonaparte was a hell of a lot worse than Sarkozy,
Napoleon wasn't President, he was Emperor
(You don't vote for Emperors)
Re:Working as planned (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Working as planned (Score:5, Informative)
The official republic electronic voting system (reserved for consulate registered voters so far) has never been breached (that is known of). I have some reservations about e-voting (for lack of accountability and falsifiability by the random citizen), but being weak and easy to compromise doesn't seem to be the most important problem for the particular implementation. However, it is hard to use, and I know many voters that gave up voting because it was to difficult to have the voting system to work on their computer.
UMP (which is conservative right party) is reckoned for hiring the worst people to do any sort of techno job and ridicule themselves in dub-songs when trying to be cool on facebook. That would be just another milestone in their long history of hiring the nephew of some big shot, because he "knows computer", for 100k euros of public funds.
Moreover, the paper ballot vote at the last UMP president election also got seriously rigged. There was a 2 month period where the two prominent candidates claimed victory (and it seems that the one that cheated the most is still the ongoing president of the party... ). So in some sense, a weak system is not a bug, for the elections of this party, it's a feature.