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posted by LaminatorX on Friday March 13 2015, @10:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the massively-multiplayer-online-real-power-game dept.

Computer scientist David Jefferson at Lawrence Livermore National Labs has some critical things to say about the concept of voting online:

Contrary to popular belief, the fundamental security risks and privacy problems of Internet voting are too great to allow it to be used for public elections, and those problems will not be resolved any time soon, according to David Jefferson, who has studied the issue for more than 15 years.

Jefferson, a computer scientist in the Lawrence Livermore’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing, discussed his findings in a recent Computation Seminar Series presentation, entitled “Intractable Security Risks of Internet Voting.” His study of Internet voting issues is independent of his Lawrence Livermore research work.

Nonetheless, he reminded the audience that “election security is a part of national security,” noting that this is a primary reason he is so passionate about this issue. “I am both a technical expert on this subject and an activist,” Jefferson emphasized in his introductory remarks. “Election security is an aspect of national security and must be treated as such.”

https://www.llnl.gov/news/security-risks-and-privacy-issues-are-too-great-moving-ballot-box-internet

 
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  • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday March 13 2015, @12:29PM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Friday March 13 2015, @12:29PM (#157230) Journal

    So, how do you empower every average-gifted guy to verify the whole chain? Could I go in, verify the voting machine from the keyboard to the last internal transistor in each chip, the software byte-by-byte, the compiler used to compile the software, and so on? I don't think so. And therefore with this system the election would not be transparent, therefore not democratic.

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday March 13 2015, @12:58PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 13 2015, @12:58PM (#157237) Journal

    So, how do you empower every average-gifted guy to verify the whole chain?

    You will note that end-to-end auditable voting [wikipedia.org] does not use off-the-shelf hardware.
    No, you'll never be able to vote from the couch using your own Android tablet, this is not possible (t's possible but too risky to be used in election)
    But this doesn't mean the ballots can't be recorded/centralized/mirrored/tallied over internet.

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    • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday March 13 2015, @01:26PM

      by q.kontinuum (532) on Friday March 13 2015, @01:26PM (#157251) Journal

      Obviously, but that's not the point. Custom-hardware also couldn't be reviewed by joe-average and would therefore be open for manipulation by the service-provider, programmer, administrator, chip-designer, ... .

      More to the point is the mentioned paper-trail, which - if I understood correctly - could do basically the same as the current manual election process in parallel to the electronic election. That way we would have the results faster, but anyone interested could organize a re-count to verify the results for a specific region. But to me, this raises the question if it wouldn't be easier to use some pattern-recognition to count the votes later.

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      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday March 13 2015, @08:06PM

        by frojack (1554) on Friday March 13 2015, @08:06PM (#157427) Journal

        "Results faster" are part of the problem.

        Making every election a media event has introduced so much pressure for quick access to tallies that I some times wonder if that pressure doesn't compromise the issue rather than shed light on it.

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