32 States Offer Online Voting, But Experts Warn It Isn't Secure (bostonglobe.com) 182
Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes: According to the Washington Post, 32 states have implemented some form of online voting for the 2016 U.S. presidential election -- even though multiple experts warn that internet voting is not secure. In many cases, the online voting options are for absentee ballots, overseas citizens or military members deployed overseas. According to Verified Voting, "voted ballots sent via Internet simply cannot be made secure and make easy and inviting targets for attackers ranging from lone hackers to foreign governments seeking to undermine US elections."
And yet 39% of this year's likely voters said they'd choose to vote online if given the option, according a new article in the Boston Globe, noting that "All 50 states and D.C. send ballots to overseas voters electronically," with Alabama even allowing them to actually cast their ballots through a special web site. "Security is exponentially increased over any other kind of voting because each ballot, as well as the electronic ballot box, has military-grade encryption," argues the founder of the software company that assures the site's security. "She also claims that Web voting is more accurate," reports the Boston Globe. "No more hanging chads or marks on a paper ballot that may be difficult to interpret. Web systems can also save money and can be upgraded or reconfigured as laws change..."
And yet 39% of this year's likely voters said they'd choose to vote online if given the option, according a new article in the Boston Globe, noting that "All 50 states and D.C. send ballots to overseas voters electronically," with Alabama even allowing them to actually cast their ballots through a special web site. "Security is exponentially increased over any other kind of voting because each ballot, as well as the electronic ballot box, has military-grade encryption," argues the founder of the software company that assures the site's security. "She also claims that Web voting is more accurate," reports the Boston Globe. "No more hanging chads or marks on a paper ballot that may be difficult to interpret. Web systems can also save money and can be upgraded or reconfigured as laws change..."
Threats (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Threats (Score:5, Insightful)
Its much easier to fake or deanonymize an online vote (undetected) than to do the same with a paper trail based vote.
Voting is one of the areas where I beliveve no computer technology should be used. Computers should be devices that serve us, not devices we use to chose our leaders with.
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What if we force the creation of a public/private key pair with a ridiculous key length as a prerequisite for voting online? Perhaps, attach it to the state ID/driver's license which you would need to go to the DMV to get (only the public key would be embedded in the card and the private key would be send certified mail to you on a flash drive with instructions to keep it safe).
Obviously, all communications encrypted with this key would be readable by you and the government.
If you see more than one vote sho
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With this system it would be trivial for the government to deanonymize the vote. What should e.g. a government employed worker do, vote for his boss, knowing that he knows whom to vote for, or vote for someone else, whom he'd much more prefer to see.
Also, there is this problem with endpoint security... Computers today are very very insecure. The only really secure computers these days are perhaps chromebooks.
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Correct me if I am wrong, but don't many states require a valid government issued ID in order to vote currently?
I know that nothing perfectly ties a particular vote with a particular person, but the government has the time of day that you showed up and also knows when certain votes are entered into the system. If the terminals are electronic, even better. So, while they may not have a perfect correlation, they have a pretty good guess.
But, yeah, I see your point. It would seem to be an insurmountable proble
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I know that nothing perfectly ties a particular vote with a particular person, but the government has the time of day that you showed up and also knows when certain votes are entered into the system. If the terminals are electronic, even better. So, while they may not have a perfect correlation, they have a pretty good guess.
One of the reasons I am against electric voting terminals :)
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But in that case they only get the public key which is almost useless to them.
Sure, they could encrypt stuff using it, but only you and the government (having the private key) can decrypt it. Worst case I can think of is that the keys would be used to spoof identification in various ways. But that is already the case if they steal your ID.
Call for hackers (Score:2)
The only way to nip this dreadful idea in the bud is for a serious hack to occur that proves it is insecure. Thus the system reporting a billion votes cast for Abraham Lincoln would probably do the job...
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Also with postal voting. Note that I don't intend this as support for online voting: instead, postal voting should be restricted to people who cannot vote in person.
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When election day is a holiday or held on a weekend, this is a legitimate argument, but a huge percentage of the population can say with credibility that working makes it unfeasible for them to vote.
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This has been the case with me all my life. Voting days are ALWAYS weekdays and held during WORKING hours....
The only people who can vote under this set up are people who have vacation/sick leave... Which most working people don't have.
I believe that there are laws requiring employers to allow time off for voting... but those are not enforced whatsoever in my experience. Good luck fighting that one being a working poor person...
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This has been the case with me all my life. Voting days are ALWAYS weekdays and held during WORKING hours....
Where I live polls open at 6:30 a.m. and close at 7:30 p.m.. If your working hours are longer than that, I hope you're raking in a lot of overtime.
(In fact, my employer has a policy of allowing one hour of paid, excused leave for voting... but only if your scheduled work hours mean you can't vote without taking time off. Since almost nobody ever gets mandatory overtime (employer couldn't afford that), nobody ever qualifies for the "excused leave." Nice gimmick: they get to claim they're doing their pat
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Even if one's working hours aren't that long, the combination of work hours and commuting make that schedule impossible for some voters.
I think the polls should be open for 24 hours. And in national elections those should be the SAME 24 hours (real time, not local clock time) everywhere to eliminate the problem of the vote in states that vote late being influenced by the results in states where the voting ends early. 9pm Eastern sounds good to me; in most cases (except for really close ones like Bush v Gore
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My State is 100% vote by mail, and we don't have this as a problem.
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It is also impossible for an online ballot to be a "secret ballot".
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Not true. You can prevent coercion by designing it like this:
Now, in theory, somebody could hover over you from the moment you cast your vote until the polls close, but in practice, that doesn't scale. Instead, most vote coercion merely requires showing proof of voting. Because the rules above preclude proving that a given vote was the last vote
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So does mail-in voting. That doesn't stop basically every state from allowing it. Some people just can't physically reach a polling station.
Current threat, future threats [Re:Threats] (Score:2)
Security is not the current political attack point. Instead, it is voter disqualification
Voter disqualification may be the current attack point, but it's not a good idea to open up new attack points.
Voting privacy and voting security [Re:Threats] (Score:2)
That's true for in-person voting at the polling place, but all the states allow absentee ballots, which are sent in by mail. Absentee ballots are not protected by the safeguards you mention. In most states, you don't need a reason to vote by mail; in many states (including mine), people are actually encouraged to vote by mail. But voting by mail has no safeguards to protect anonymity.
As always, security and convenience are a trade-off. My personal preference would be to slide that trade-off toward securit
Online Voting (Score:2, Interesting)
If this can be made to work, then we no longer need a congress. Everyone can vote directly on every issue.
Re:Online Voting (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be direct rule, as opposed to a representative democracy. Some may think that is better, I do not.
Our current system of representatives was intentionally chosen by the framers of the US constitution and many of the much-vaulted checks and balances in the US government require separate elected bodies with dissimilar election schedules and dissimilar constituents. They called direct democracy "the Tyranny of the majority"
Direct voting means that 51% of the electorate can vote for incredibly unfair laws targeting the 49%. Representative democracy means that representatives are elected who vye with each other to get laws passed. Compromises are usually necessary and passions of the moment fade before laws wind their way through the system.
Certain values of Gridlock and dysfunction are a feature of US democracy. We actually really don't want to change that.
Re: Online Voting (Score:2, Interesting)
no, there is nothing that says a direct voting system must follow majority vote...just like now Congress needs more than a majority vote to over ride a presidential veto....
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Yeah well, if government prioritized education then this statement wouldn't make sense. But see, what government doesn't want are educated people. They want to continue to justify their actions by being able to say "Look at those poor unwashed masses... I am doing what's best for them."
Politicians are completely onboard with the circus of misdirection and grandstanding.
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"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." -- Winston Churchill
Good thing we're aiming for a Republic.
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Elected officials are paid to sit and read lengthy documents that get passed into law, and even they don't do it.
How many of the direct public do you think are going to read a multi-hundred page document and have the understanding of the legalese to cast an informed vote on it?
Direct democracy works if you're in a small village. Hell just look at Brexit and the number of Google searches from within the UK on "what is the EU" AFTER the voting deadline had finished.
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Elected officials are paid to sit and read lengthy documents that get passed into law, and even they don't do it.
How many of the direct public do you think are going to read a multi-hundred page document and have the understanding of the legalese to cast an informed vote on it?
Direct democracy works if you're in a small village. Hell just look at Brexit and the number of Google searches from within the UK on "what is the EU" AFTER the voting deadline had finished.
Good point.
A good example of this is the so-called "Obamacare".
Most people have no idea what is in that bill. They don't even know the name of the actual bill.
(it's not "The Affordable Care Act", it's the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act")
It is unreasonable to expect the any person of any social class to spend the week or month necessary to read and understand just this one bill before voting on it.
And the PPACA is pretty much jargon-free; it's just that there's a lot in it.
Now imagine people try
Who needs elections (Score:2, Funny)
just put up a Facebook page and see who gets the more Like. Problem solved.
It's not like it really matters anymore. Politicians are entertainers nowadays, not decision makers.
That will never work (Score:3)
Because then you only get votes from people that are stupid enough to use Facebook.
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just put up a Facebook page and see who gets the more Like.
Actually, it would be fairly amusing to set up Slashdot polls on Congress votes instead. Kinda sorta like a "Shadow Congress". Subsidies for bow and arrow manufactures in Oregon? No thanks. Support for aardvark ranchers in Arkansas? No, we'll skip on that one as well.
A plan to drop Cowboy Neal into North Korea with an H-bomb instead of a parachute on his back? That one works!
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How about riding an H-bomb, swinging a cowboy hat around above his head with his right hand, and yelling "Yee-haw!" all the way down?
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Entertainers with access to nuclear weapons.
They aim to please.
Quibbling (Score:3)
From TFA: "But experts in computer security maintain that nothing sent over the Internet is secure."
While I agree with the point he's trying to make about the issues with existing online voting systems, this hyperbolic statement is clearly wrong.
It's certainly possible to make Internet voting at least as secure as paper ballots. Heck, it could be made significantly more secure than my state's vote by mail program (which is the only way to vote in Washington state). The problem is, making it secure would also make it extremely inconvenient for each voter, as well as expensive to the state in terms of both money and manpower... so that's not going to happen.
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it could be made significantly more secure than my state's vote by mail program (which is the only way to vote in Washington state).
I'm sorry to hear that Washington state has already thrown away their elections. I'm sure every single mailed in vote is actually cast by the intended person and not by one person in the household "helping" or by churches rounding up the elderly to "help", or nursing home "helpers", etc.
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I'm sure every single mailed in vote is actually cast by the intended person and not by one person in the household "helping" or by churches rounding up the elderly to "help", or nursing home "helpers", etc.
That would be one-ballot-at-a-time election stealing. I'm not terribly worried about that; it would take such a massive program to alter 50,000 votes that way that this wouldn't be an effective way to steal an election. It's changing the entire count that I worry about.
Few elections are ever decided by ones and twos of votes. It's wholesale changing that is the problem.
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Massive? I could do that from my basement in a couple of weeks... though my credit cards might get maxed out to do so.
A couple of years ago I discovered a rather easy to exploit series of vulnerabilities in the Washington system which could be used by an individual to quickly sway a small election in a short period of time, or by a campaign or PAC backed group to sway a statewide one
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Just write a thesis on voting measures and counter-measures. Last time I looked, academics don't get locked up for attacking hypothetical voting regeimes even if they happened to be based on real world scenarios.
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That is the backup option (even though I'm more than a decade out from academia)... unfortunately it too comes with a great deal of risk. A read through state law alone gives me the impression that widely disseminating the info, even in such a hypothetical, totally not connected with any particular state would still leave me liable should someone ever use the method.
Yes, it is unlikely that they'd come after me unless I actually opted to illicitly print & vote 5k ballots from my basement over a weekend.
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e pluribus [Re:Quibbling] (Score:2)
That was 129 votes, a bit more than "ones and two's".
So, yes-- a gubernatorial election twelve years ago was decided by a little more than 100 votes, and it's "among the closest political races in United States election history." I think that pretty much demonstrates my case: even here, voting fraud at the ones and two at a time level isn't what we need to worry about; it takes voting fraud on a much larger scale to swing an election. And you can count on most elections not being that close.
https://en.wikip [wikipedia.org]
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I'm sure every single mailed in vote is actually cast by the intended person and not by one person in the household "helping" or by churches rounding up the elderly to "help", or nursing home "helpers", etc.
That would be one-ballot-at-a-time election stealing. I'm not terribly worried about that; it would take such a massive program to alter 50,000 votes that way that this wouldn't be an effective way to steal an election. It's changing the entire count that I worry about.
Few elections are ever decided by ones and twos of votes. It's wholesale changing that is the problem.
In this case the worry is not so much one individual stealing an election, but entire categories of the population being denied their right to vote freely due to social factors.
Computers can cheat a million times per second (Score:2)
> It's certainly possible to make Internet voting at least as secure as paper ballots.
I've been involved in computer security for 20 years. Before that, I did physical security, lockingsmith work. Before that, I was a professional magician. I could cheat a paper ballot. Might use a bit of sleight of hand.
I could also cheat an internet ballot, and very easily put a FOR loop around to run the cheat a million times. That's the big difference with networked computer systems vs physical systems. You can ro
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As a professional magician, were you more amazed by how the tricks worked mechanically, or by the very fact that people are too stupid to live and will simply not notice what they're looking *right* *at* if it's out of the ordinary?
There's a routine where you perform a recorded magic trick while changing a bunch of shit on the stage. People watching the video don't notice the changes (they happen off-screen). When it's brought up and a replay is shown, people will then become fascinated with the blatant
Attention deficit disorder ruins magic (Score:2)
I really like the second video you linked to, where you count the number of times the players pass the ball. I saw that for the first time a few months ago - maybe you linked it from another post, or maybe I encountered it elsewhere.
> As a professional magician, were you more amazed by how the tricks worked mechanically, or by the very fact that people are too stupid to live and will simply not notice what they're looking *right* *at* if it's out of the ordinary?
As you may know, the mechanical working of
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Yeah ADHD does weird things. I've been trying to fix mine--I dropped all medication 15 years ago, and have recently become rather annoyed that my past 4 years of effort have consisted of piling up things I should do and then watching Twitch or just staring at a wall to avoid bothering--and have been... somewhat hyper-focused on ADHD study. That complicates things; I'm going to try to get a Modafinil prescription from a doctor now, and uh. Patient walks in asking for drugs, seems well-informed. Spinning
Walking past bouncers, magic already happened (Score:2)
The Scott Adams thing reminds me of what I do sometimes. Something I can't quite describe about giving off the vibe that you belong there. I used to do lighting and sound for bands on the weekends, and sometimes I DJ. I've made it a bit of a game to just walk right past the bouncer without *telling* them that I'm with the band. Everybody else is paying the cover charge, I just walk right by like it doesn't apply to me (because it doesn't). 95% of the time the bouncer doesn't challenge me. If they make
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What worked for me was to very humbly ASK the doctor about my preferred medication, to not seem overly confident that I wanted that specific medication. "I was reading about ABC and sounded interesting because XYZ. Would it be worth trying ABC, do you think?"
Has its own hazards. I started building my interactions with people on the platform of always dealing honestly, which I find can almost compensate for being an asshole about it. If the doctor says no or tries to put me on amphetamines, I'm going to have a problem; I don't *want* adderall, it's going to cause side-effects I'm not willing to tolerate, and I'm not going to be able to just spin another line of bullshit to cover for "it's not working exactly the way I want" even though it isn't. Spending the
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From TFA: "But experts in computer security maintain that nothing sent over the Internet is secure."
While I agree with the point he's trying to make about the issues with existing online voting systems, this hyperbolic statement is clearly wrong.
It's certainly possible to make Internet voting at least as secure as paper ballots.
You're mistaken on both points. The only things we know how to make somewhat secure are things that are not secret. For instance when you buy something online the store knows what you bought, provides you with the means to prove what you bought, and the bank knows your identity, that of the store and the amount of the transaction. Even so you're not protected from a store taking your money and never shipping the product. But at least, all this data can be used to prove the existence of the transaction and r
The sky is falling...again (Score:2)
Sheesh!
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Voting systems require:
Everyone to have unique credentials (yep, banks have this).
Everyone to be identified before issuing credentials (yep, banks have this)
Everyone to have AT MOST one credential (Er... nope).
Everyone to have a credential which can be proved to have been used only once (Er... possibly, some of the banking stuff can only be spent "once").
Everyone to have votes that can be verified throughout the process (some of this, but nowhere near the same level of assurance).
The problem is not any of t
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Even if online banking was secure (which it isn't), the difference still is that online banking TRACKS each of your activities, and that if it it indeed was hacked (e.g. you clicked a wrong link and installed malware), you will find out soon enough. But with voting, the situation is terribly different.
First, its done in secret, noone knows what you voted, even if you told everyone what you will vote, in the booth noone can look over your shoulder. Banking is the exact opposite, the bank knows each of your t
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Banks aren't secure [Re:The sky is falling...again (Score:2)
Here we go again, with the "it isn't secure, and we're gonna hack the election" conspiracy. Funny how our entire banking system is online and secure enough, yet voting isn't.
But it isn't. Bank fraud happens all the time. When it happens, you show the paper trail, and the bank verifies it and gives you your money back. They accept the loss as the cost of doing business. How do you get your vote back?
Here is David Pogue's comment in Scientific American (www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-will-we-be-able-to-vote-online/ [scientificamerican.com]):
Voter, not ballot, not secure (Score:3)
The problem isn't so much that the ballot itself isn't secure, it's that the authentication of the voter isn't reliable so the identity of whoever cast the ballot isn't secure. The only ways to make that authentication reliable involve encoding the identity of the voter into the cast ballot, which blows away the whole idea of secret ballots so nobody can confirm how you voted.
It's possible to do it, but you'd need a) a state-issued smartcard with a unique key-pair assigned to that specific individual capable of encrypting and signing arbitrary blocks of data, and b) a front-end system that'd accept the voter-signed ballot, verify the signature and contents, strip the voter's signature and replace it with one from the election authority, and this system would have to be trusted not to record anything tying voter identities to ballots and verifiable so that anybody could confirm that not only was the system actually trustable but that the running software was generated from the verified code. That's a non-trivial system to set up.
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That wouldn't actually solve anything because you're still relying on the box you set up to tally the votes it actually got instead of creating its own result. Maybe it's easier to understand all the problems if we examine a hypothetical reverse election fraud. Let's assume that you go to vote for president and you actually vote for Trump. But when the votes are tallied and there's zero votes for Jill Stein in your voting district, you go out and publicly claim "Hey this election is a fraud, I voted for Jil
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it's that the authentication of the voter isn't reliable
Given your votes are cast anonymously and many states don't have ID laws I don't see this as any worse than the system in place now.
Mind you I find the entire lack of ID thing amusing. The fact that people can get through their lives without a valid form of ID is very foreign to me, as is the concept that some people would be disenfranchised by requiring ID. How expensive or difficult could it be?
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Blockchains do nothing to help with this problem. The only way to ensure that no one else other than the voter can see the vote is to implant an LCD panel inside the voter's eyeball and require the voter to close his/her eyes before showing the vote info....
The problem of ensuring that only the voter's computer can see the vote is a trivial one and does not require a blockchain or anything like it. You just give the voter a unique identifier, hash the ballot using the voter's unique identifier as a nonce
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Citizen voting has at least two requirements:
- the ballot of a voter is secret
- voters must vote only once, so voters must be authenticated and vote must be recorded.
So far I am not aware of a blockchain based system that garantees both.
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There is a technology called blockchain nowadays. It's the only way to make online voting secure. Votes can be recorded into a blockchain in a way that no one else than the voter can see what the vote was and the record is unchangeable.
First, if only the voter can see what the vote is, then the government obviously cannot tally the votes, making the election impossible. Fortunately blockchains don't work like that: the transactions are public since the nodes must verify that they are valid.
Second, the voter must not be able to prove how he voted otherwise that opens the door to vote selling and coercion.
Third, voting must be restricted to citizens of age which implies that the government must maintain a list of the public keys of regi
The worst possible thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to end democracy in America once and for all? Then sure, go ahead and move all voting to electronic systems.
Doing so, you eliminate any real citizen oversight — you don't need all those election observers and volunteer pollsters anymore, so that's thousands of people who no longer count ballots, or supervise the machines that scan paper ballots now. Less oversight makes it easier to rig the system — something that's much less plausible now, because we have so many people involved.
Voting needs to happen on paper. Technology can improve our lives the other 363 or so days out of the year, but when it's an election at stake, I want a paper ballot for each and every person who votes. I want a tangible record, no matter how expensive it might be. A paper ballot is not entirely flawless and there are other kinds of fraud that can happen. But I'd prefer the startlingly low incidence of those kinds of issues because this is the only way we can be sure that other, more pernicious, less obvious or even provable types of fraud cannot and are not happening. Electronic voting should be illegal.
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If done right, you can have public scrutiny over e-voting as well.
1) Open source everything from code to protocols to procedures.
2) Have both public and commercial security assurance performed on everything.
3) Sign all software, both voter and server side. Use integrity checks everywhere.
4) Deploy physical tamper evidence on all servers and systems.
5) Perform admin tasks only under public scrutiny. There will be enough nerd
Re:The worst possible thing (Score:4, Informative)
1) Open source everything from code to protocols to procedures.
Open-source is useless if you have no way to verify that it is the code being used on the computers on election day.
2) Have both public and commercial security assurance performed on everything.
Elections serve to peacefully overthrow the powers in place. So, as far as elections are concerned the government must never be trusted. So letting the government pick a select few to perform the security checks is no guarantee at all. Furthermore security audits are useless if they don't audit the software and hardware that is actually used on election day. But while it's possible to let a handful of people perform very basic checks on these up to election day, it is impossible to let the voters do so. In other words the voters have no way to verify anything.
3) Sign all software, both voter and server side. Use integrity checks everywhere.
Sign all software, including the signing software. Audit the compiler too, and the compiler's compiler (at the assembly level, not the source level), the operating system, the drivers, etc. If you skip any step it's all for nothing.
Of course on election day you must also verify that the computer is actually running the official software and not just software designed to print the official cryptographic checksums. So start election day by pulling out the hard-drive, putting it in a computer that you trust, and verifying its content with your software. Of course the observer next to you cannot trust your computer and software and thus will need to make the same checks using his own hardware and software, giving him an opportunity to hack the content of the drive after you have checked it.
4) Deploy physical tamper evidence on all servers and systems.
Which is moot due to the point above. Also seals are pretty easy to replace, particularly by the entity that stands the most to gain from a rigged election: the government. Finally seals make denial-of-service attacks trivial: just break the seal. Once someone points out the seal has been broken the computer and software must be thrown away and rebuilt from scratch, delaying the election.
5) Perform admin tasks only under public scrutiny. There will be enough nerds and enthusiasts who WILL gather to find flaws in your procedures and opsec; use them wisely.
Yay, everyone can see the admin typing ls and the expected result being displayed in the terminal. Just ignore the fact that there's a 3G card hidden inside the computer and hacker reconfiguring things remotely. Public scrutiny means nothing.
I have been on duty as an observer on electronic voting in my home country.
You've had the wool pulled over your eyes.
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Exactly. Basically, you want voting to be as labor-intensive as reasonably possible. More labor means more people observing the system and making sure it's being run correctly and fairly. More people means more stability.
I would add the corollary which is that a more labor intensive process makes it necessary to bribe more people to successfully rig the election. This drives up the cost but also the risks: as the saying goes, once three people share a secret it's no longer a secret.
I wonder (Score:2)
I wonder, do those sites include ga.js? Probably they do.
Voting for candidates should be in person, period. (Score:2)
For our "Representative" democracy, as many others are saying, electronic voting simply makes no sense. Too easy for coercion, too hard for identity confirmation, etc.
However, a "teledemocracy" system makes sense in the form of a national referendum, or maybe more like a national conversation about specific issues. It could pull some issues back into the realm of direct democracy. Probably not for everything, and probably not all at once, but having a serious system (unlike previous attempts which were l
Any fraud possible from electronic voting is nothi (Score:2)
Any fraud possible from electronic voting is nothing compared to the fraud possible with the current paper system. Paper votes can easily be lost or rendered unreadable. And many states don't require any sort of ID to vote, making it possible for the dead to vote.
"easy" fix for that problem (Score:2)
each polling location is provided with a set number of boxes that are sealed and rigged so that once a ballot is inserted (by the polling machine) it can't be removed.
number of ballot forms is a logged number (number of registered voters+ a reserve to recover from spoiled ballots with one brick being opened at a time and spoiled ballots kept)
when you vote you place your marks and then feed the ballot into a polling machine and it then spits out a ticket with a set of random numbers from a pool (each number
your boss can make you vote at work their way (Score:2)
your boss can make you vote at work their way with on line voteing!
lol (Score:2)
Re:The small amount of fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
This will result in pales in comparison to the amount of enfranchisement it will create. Every time I've seen someone railing against voter fraud it's always been a transparent attempt to keep some kind of "undesirables" from voting. Usually members of the working class.
Bullshit. I only want people voting who put some effort into it. We're continually throwing away our country by trying to turn elections into zero effort by the voter. In my opinion the two worst things in our elections are open primaries and early voting. Show up the day of the election, darken the oval next the candidate you want and feed it into the electronic counter - an unambiguous paper trail will remain. Save early voting to the true absentee and not leave it open to vote harvesting.
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The "effort" test unfairly favors retired seniors who have a lot more time to waste than someone working long hours. It's not a fair measure of actual interest in voting at all.
You do realize (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and only 9% of voters turned out for the Primaries. That's why you get to choose between Fuckface von Clownstick and Wallstreet's Girl.
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I have no idea what you're talking about concerning socialists but I'm happy you put in the effort for your candidate. I have a 20 mile round trip, through two towns, to get to my voting precinct, yet I vote in every election - should I also complain of being disenfranchised by this unusual burden, or be proud that I care enough to put in the effort? The Hillary supporters didn't need to put in as much effort because, as you likely now know, the Democrats with their super delegates had their selection pro
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Democracies by definitinon allow anyone to vote. If anything, taking voting rights away from children and washington DC, and most US protectorates are bad enough.
The informed voter ideal is certainly something worth really looking into, but it is NOT democracy. Read Star-ship troopers and you'll see at least one image of tiered democracy. In at least a few EU countries, you can't vote without spending time in the armed services, even if it's treated more or less a 2 week summer camp.
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Rights: Now only for those deemed worthy by ChickenFat.
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Rights: Now only for those deemed worthy by ChickenFat.
Actually, as defined by the constitution, which does not provide for nor exclude early voting or absentee voting. That's left to the states to define and that's where my opinion should count with my elected representatives.
What's your opinion about felons or foreigners being excluded from voting by most states? The constitution does not expressly forbid felons or foreigners. Who deemed them worthy to be excluded? It wasn't me.
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I only want people voting who put some effort into it.
And whomever gets to define "some effort" wins the elections.
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And whomever gets to define "some effort" wins the elections.
Yes, I realize "effort" is subjective, but dang, the path we're on right now is what has us voting for the worst possible people to hold office. The only effort I'm suggesting is showing up on election day...presumably only those that care enough would make the sacrifice. It would also severely limit the ability to vote harvest over weeks - and by that I mean individuals or groups that round up what can only be called "useful idiots" to cast votes in return for whatever - food, money, a ride, something to
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Because at the time of the founders the word democracy referred primarily to what we now call "direct democracy". the phrase "representative democracy" didn't exist yet, even though it means the same thing as "representative republic".
the founders used a lot of words that refer to the democratic selection of government. words like: self-rule, self-governed, voting, election, etc.
what you are essentially doing is talking about your new car, but refusing to call it a car, saying instead that it is a "motorize
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what you are essentially doing is talking about your new car, but refusing to call it a car, saying instead that it is a "motorized conveyance device".
<Pedantic>I think a better analogy would be: You got a new "motorized conveyance device", which is what they are called now. But you continue to call it a "car" even though the definition of "car" has changed to mean something slightly different.</Pedantic>
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A distinction without a difference. Our president is elected by an electoral influenced by a democratic voting process by which each state defines qualification and only with recent amendments to the constitution, has been further defined but still not specific. The founders put in place the electoral in just such as case as democracy would become idiocracy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - at least for the president. The house originally was our democratically elected branch, with the senate select
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Fuck you, you undemocratic piece of shit. The constitution says nothing about "putting in an effort" or any other such crap. You've proven the original poster's point - that people who complain about those that vote are usually wanting to clear out their notion of undesirable voters (in your case those undesirables that aren't putting in an effort).
Well, to be fair, "the Constitution says nothing about" the requirements for suffrage in general. In the early days of the U.S., states restricted voting rights to mostly white male landowners... by your standards, the original Constitution as interpreted by the states who decided who got to vote was profoundly "undemocratic." The phrase "right to vote" never even appeared until the Fourteenth Amendment was passed after the Civil War.
Gradually, over the years, we've added suffrage to other folks, and no
Re:The small amount of fraud (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, and by the way -- if you think that normal U.S. citizens have "the right to vote" today, that's really up to interpretation. For example, you really don't have the right to vote for President of the U.S. You have the right vote in an election, but it's up to your state legislature to decide in what manner the results of your state voting can be tallied to select members of the Electoral College to vote for President on your behalf.
Basically, the Constitution is profoundly undemocratic in sense of "direct democracy." It was designed to have many layers between the votes of the people and the actual officials and laws in the government.
The answer is no (Score:2)
> The question is whether we're going to have a democracy or not.
The answer is no, the US is not a Democracy.
I look forward to discussing with you more after you finish the fifth grade.
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And this is exactly why it will be strongly fought against.
To give a concrete example, in the last presidential elections in Austria the neonazi party FPÖ won in the polling booths, but lost in the postal votes. Their answer to that? Forbid postal voting, of course! Who uses it the most are university students that are away from their hometown, and have very little sympathy for the FPÖ.
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You can take a screen shot or a picture of the screen that shows your vote.
But, what do you do with the picture? I suppose if you're being paid for your vote, that might be a way to verify that you should get paid, but it won't tell you whether your vote is correctly added to the tally.
Still, nothing beats good old paper ballots. Too bad not enough people are demanding it.
Paper ballot with optical scanner seems a good compromise: you can count electronically, but if there's a problem, you have a paper trail.
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Paper ballot with optical scanner seems a good compromise: you can count electronically, but if there's a problem, you have a paper trail.
How do you know that there is a problem, if you haven't made sure that the paper ballots have been under observation from when voters start casting their votes until the votes have been counted? If days or weeks have passed, the ballots could have been tampered with.
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Where I live (Minnesota) ballots are physically secured. You fill out your paper ballot, then feed it into the optical scanner. The scanner reads the ballot, and you see the ballot counter change on the machine. The ballot goes directly into a locked container.
If the scanner has been hacked to report incorrect results, the paper ballots can be used as an audit trail.
I don't know all the steps taken to secure the paper ballots, but I know that both major parties have election judges and observers at prett
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Optical scanner systems have been hacked [youtu.be] already.
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All of the recent "election stealing" has been done by Hillary. BTW, Hillary is a Democrat.
Military encryption reqs are called FIPS 140-2 (Score:2)
Federal purchasing, including DoD (military) is done through an open bid process. The acquiring agency publishes a very detailed requirements document. The encryption requirement normally refers to FIPS 140-2 (FIPS: Federal Information Processing Standard). The standard specifies not only which algorithms, but which implementations are acceptable, so you use a FIPS-certified library. FIPS-140-2 can be found here:
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST... [nist.gov]
Because most companies and standards bodies aren't run by se
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FIPS updated often. Module certified twice /year (Score:2)
There are updates to FIPS 140-2 every few months, as you can see here:
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST... [nist.gov]
Therefore you can easily be *compliant* and up-to-date, no problem.
If you want to be *certified* and up-to-date, the low cost option is to use something like the OpenSSL FIPS Object Module, which is recertified every six months or so. (This is a very restricted subset of OpenSSL). That provides the latest certified encryption.
If you want to also certify the product as a whole, you can do that and batch a
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In 39 states both hillary and trump gets over 100 million votes, and third party candidates wins by over bilion votes.
All hail President Zaphod Beeblebrox!
Strat
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Promises are a bet on the future. But the future may not happen as envisioned at the time the promise was made.
Would it be fair to punish people for not correctly predicting the future?
Do you really want any promise to be applied even if it does not anymore apply to the context it was envisioned?