Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

Internet voting is untenable from a security perspective. An election is orders of magnitude more complicated than most online transactions, because your vote is just as important to me as my vote.

Whereas filing your taxes online is a one way transaction between you and the government, voting is one big symmetrical transaction between every member of the electorate. This makes it really tricky from a security perspective.

The reason that internet voting is worse than postal voting is the slowness of messing around with paper, the same reason which people tout as a positive. You cant change a million postal votes in a under millisecond from thousands of miles away. Think of the postal service as hash iteration.

For (lots) more info, see the following Google tech talk, "Electronic and Internet Voting (The Threat of Internet Voting in Public Elections)" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GjmRwfkRXY

It's MUCH more difficult than banking or taxes. Not only must your vote be secure and counted; it must be anonymous! Not even you should be able to prove to anyone else who you voted for and there must be no audit trail that could tie an individual vote to a person.

Doesn't bitcoin solve this problem?

No, bitcoin is "pseudonymous", transactions are public. It's not necessarily easily linked to your real identity (hence the pseudonymity), but with today's profiling tech, is that any guarantee?

No, bitcoin has an unencrypted audit trail.

Good luck issuing every voter with a keypair safely.

That's the ideal, but in reality even normal pencil voting can be hacked since it is pretty simple to take a picture of your ballot with a smartphone. Then you can prove whom you voted for.

How would a picture of a ballot prove that it was your ballot, that the picture hadn't been doctored, and that the ballot hadn't been doctored?

I don't think that's very salient. You could raise analogous objections for Internet-based voting weaknesses, or most information leaks in general.

Only if the Internet-voting based system is very carefully designed. It's rather difficult to verify that your vote was counting in a way that doesn't also prove who you voted for.

There are some papers describing systems to do this that seems like they could work. But they're pretty complex.

I vote by mail as required by my state. I could show anyone my ballot after filling it out but before mailing it.

Sure, you could get a dozen ballots and convince every candidate they owe you a bribe -- so long as you only mail one in!

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