Forum Post: New Net Hijack Highlights Madness of Internet Voting
Posted 10 years ago on Dec. 15, 2013, 10:28 p.m. EST by GirlFriday
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This content is user submitted and not an official statement
We've discussed, many times over the years, the madness of Internet Voting schemes. Today we've got yet another piece of disturbing evidence that underscores why such a scheme for American democracy would be nothing short of insane.
The BRAD BLOG has highlighted how easily Internet elections can be hacked by all sorts of nefarious folks (perhaps most disturbingly, without the knowledge of election officials); how various experiments in Internet Voting have proved disastrous (Hello, Canada! Hello, Honolulu! Hello, Oscars!); and how it is simply impossible to do a true pilot test of any such Internet Voting schemes in advance, since the most dangerous tactics that bad guys might throw at an Internet-based election in order to game it are actually illegal. Because of that, good guy "white hat hackers" wouldn't be able to use those same techniques to test the security of any Internet Voting scheme before it was actually put into use in a live election.
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Ummmm I do not think that that necessarily follows. It would depend on issues and the voting trend as compared to public sentiment ( IMO ). As seen today that the government is not following majority feeling on plenty of issues - you need not have to search - it is obvious.
This could easily be said of our current voting systems - let alone internet voting.
I agree.
I don't believe this is true. There are many ways Internet Voting could be implemented using technology. One way could be using distributed systems like Bitcoin uses. A Bitcoin is just a unique hash. The history is kept with the hash and since it's distributed, there are many copies of said hash and history. This makes it near impossible to hijack for a hacker. He would have to change all versions of the file. If voters each had a unique hash to identify them, then they could vote and the results would be distributed to many systems. Some private, some public. This would keep their anonymity, and a hacker could not change all the various repositories at once. With paper voting, you have one box with the votes. With a distributed system, you could have 1000 boxes kept on various computers. Every voter could have a copy of all the votes in US if he or she wanted. Such a distributed system is key to security. Hackers become dangerous when there is only one copy of the data. If they change that, then it cannot be cross referenced. Once voting is done, algorithms could be used to cross reference the repositories to see if any were changed.