At this point, how long before we'll be able to vote using the internet? Figure have people enter their social security number, date of birth, and the 20 digit randomly generated password that gets mailed a month before the election.
Shouldn't this help with that?
Also, internet-based voting doesn't have to mean you're using your own machines, just that you're using the internet to tally the vote. This could mean we have 100x the voting locations that we have now - one at every post office, public library, starbucks, what have you.
And if its 1 address, 1 SSN, 1 password at least the person will need a little bit more info to fix it. If they steal your mail they'll still need to know your date of birth and the social security #. And sure thats possible for 1-2 people, but do you realize how hard it would be to do it on the massive scale?
I mean lets face it, voting is a pain in the ass, you usually end up voting when its rush hour, and you have to wait a long time to cast your vote. Something like 40% of the eligible voters even bother to vote. Shouldn't it be a priority to make voting easier?
Yeah, zombie granny and fluffy's backing of John Kerry basically cancelled out our household vote.
How is this any different from voting using an absentee ballot? Those can be stolen, bought, etc. And I would imagine are less secure than your average secure website. The difference comes when an exploit is found. The worst case for internet voting is very very bad and could scale. The worst case with abseentee ballots - a mailman or election official steals some.
And then somebody could extort you to vote in certain way and remain at your side to make sure you comply...
Extortion and pressure can and is applied at voting locations all over today. My voting location is literally across the street from the Democratic local offices. It makes me very uncomfortable. They always have pollsters doing exit polls and the people in line are almost all Democrats. They are loud, argumentative... It's an all around bad experience. I think voting online would be great assuming someone solves the security problem (OTP through mail, etc, etc).
And for the record I'm currently libertarian. I disagree with this sort of thing happening in neighborhood churches just as much as the VA across the from democratic headquarters. Though personally I've had no problems at churches. Maybe a bit uncomfortable but people were not speaking out and attacking people taking a non-democrat ballot (primaries).
If there is a powerful force that can infiltrate the counting process we need to have it open to the public.
I mean I could understand the point, if the current system was infallible. But its not, so why not make the whole process easier on your average voter?
More importantly, ME! I'm not going to go vote, because I don't feel like standing for an hour in line, just to cast a ballot in a state where the result is already pre-determined because of demographics. I mean if you think about it, your vote only matters if you live in the 4-5 swing states, all others will go Democrat/Republican no matter what you do.
And on further thought, it would be better to use public-key cryptography than plain passwords -- get people to encrypt their vote with their private key -- because then the public keys could be released before the election and it could be verified that there are the same number of keys and registered voters.
This would be dramatically more secure than the current system.