- The class break. With e-voting, there's the possibility that a small group of people could modify a large number of geographically disparate machines.
- The technological sophistication needed to understand the hacks. Boards of Elections and state assemblies don't have the the ability to intelligently discuss attacks against e-voting, let alone detect them.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Secure and Easy Internet Voting
Giampiero E. G. Beroggi
"Secure and Easy Internet Voting"
IEEE Computer
Volume 41 Number 2, February 2008
This is one of those articles that inadvertently provides examples of why computerized computing is a bad idea.
Starting with the second paragraph, where Beroggi says "One reason for the delay in implementing more technologically sophisticated voting methods is the computer science community's almost unanimous wariness of Internet-based elections." Rather than addressing this, he goes on to list putative advantages of e-voting, and then starts the third paragraph "Fortunately, in light of these strong advantages, more countries are beginning to consider e-voting...." He has listed advantages, and just dismissed the computing community's reservations by simply not mentioning them.
Is electronic voting really scarier than other methods? I think so. Any of a number of people can trot out problems with any voting technology, including paper. But I have yet to see an e-voting advocate address either of the following two problems except to say that computer security professionals are too obsessed with unlikely events. Of course, many popular, oft-successful attacks initially seemed unlikely, especially to non-security people. This is what scares me when I hear political scientists say it's safe, or usability experts say that if we address the usability issues, e-voting will be fine. If we address usability issues, the accuracy of unhacked machines is improved.
Anyhow, the two issues:
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