Please read the two articles below and discuss the questions.
Fundamental security problems aren’t solved, computing experts warn.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506741/why-you-cant-vote-online/
Estonian Elections 2011
Link
Questions:
1. Would you like to be able to vote
online in elections? Please explain why or why not.
2. Do you think voter turnout would
increase if online voting was possible? Is more people voting
something worth pursuing? How do you feel about mandatory voting with
sanctions when you fail to vote?
3. Is online voting adding unnecessary
complexity or can it simplify the process of voting and counting
votes?
4. Does the Estonian example convince you
that securing electronic voting in general elections is possible?
5. What other areas of e-Government would
you like to see being improved in Poland?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWhat about securing voter computers? Should that be the responsibility of the voters? Take online banking for example, it's your money and your risk. In elections however the risk of a large scale fraud may ruin the outcome of elections for everyone. In fact the state must guarantee "free and fair" elections. Is that even possible with voter owned personal computers?
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteI agree, that online voting may increase the number of voters. I also understand the security concerns, however I also know, that the traditional way of voting may also be vulnerable to frauds - all it takes is the right people in the right places. I am not sure which type of "attack" is easier to perform...By the way I was surprised by the information about the compulsory voting in some countries. I don't believe that this is the best solution and, to be honest, I don't like the idea at all. How do they prevent the forced people from casting a vote which is not valid, while preserving the privacy of voters.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it matters if the vote is valid, so you can go and cast a blank vote like people used to do in the old days under communism. For most people it's not about boycotting the elections, they just can't be bothered to do their duty as citizens.
DeleteI had seen only positives of electronic voting until I read presented articles – so I would like to thank for widening my point of view.
ReplyDeleteOf course I may vote online. Why? Because it should be more comfortable than going to a polling station especially during bad weather.
In my opinion online voting should increase turnout, but we should rather tend to wiser elections instead of increasing statistics. WiT showed a better method for increasing statistics.
For the third question I propose ask Estonians. More seriously – counting votes should be easier but preparing computer systems for this kind of voting seems to be harder than now.
Existence of an Estonian system convinced me that is possible to secure an Internet voting, but I am not feel a specialist in this area. I suppose that introducing electronic voting should be more a political, psychological and financial problem than a technical one.
On the fifth question I answer that I would like to lose less time for carrying papers between different kind of offices.
The article is a little US-centric when they are presenting the difficulties in securing elections. In Poland, at least we have identity cards which could play a role in the system (as they've done in Estonia). This is not the case in the US, where they don't have a national ID card (which many people are against there for reasons that have to do with personal freedom and distrust of the government - fearing the whole "let me see your papers!" situation).
DeleteYou rise a good point about the 'wiser' elections. Perhaps it would be too easy to vote over the Internet, taking away from the seriousness of elections and turning them into something like a popularity contest.
I checked and discovered that Estonians have electronic identity cards and they are leaders of world digitization (http://www.web.gov.pl/reportaze/270_881.html - excuse me for a polish article). So there is a big gap between them and us. But now we have ministry of digitization and very talented students so we will catch up Estonians quickly ;-).
DeleteI think that introducing such modern solutions in Estonia is easier than in Poland or in the U.S. because Estonia is a small country so scale of potential problems is incomparable.
Voting online could be really helpful and increase number of votes - especially from disabled peoples / with social fobia etc. I think, that personal serial number combined with some online verification method could be a reasonable way to deal with a problem. It's important to remember, that technology is changing our lives and face or voice recognition will play an important role as a security check. According to last question - our money is still not allocated for these solutions that we really need.
ReplyDelete1. Would you like to be able to vote online in elections? Please explain why or why not.
ReplyDeleteYes, I’m lazy person so it would be great to be able to vote from home. But I’m not convinced it’s possible to achieve proper security.
2. Do you think voter turnout would increase if online voting was possible? Is more people voting something worth pursuing? How do you feel about mandatory voting with sanctions when you fail to vote?
I know that in few countries there is mandatory voting, but I think in Poland it is not so good idea. People forced to vote could just vote for anyone without checking what this candidate will do for us.
3. Is online voting adding unnecessary complexity or can it simplify the process of voting and counting votes?
It could greatly simplify process of counting, but I can imagine that after first election with e-voting all candidates who lose will complain about it and there will be another traditional election.
I’m also concern about possibility of DOS attacks on voting server.
4. Does the Estonian example convince you that securing electronic voting in general elections is possible?
I’m sure it’s possible until we all have personal ID with our digital certificate and smart card readers for everyone to use it at home.
5. What other areas of e-Government would you like to see being improved in Poland?
Almost everything could be improved. We should be able to get any kind of concession or certificate using our home computer or at least do all the necessary “paper work” and just go to office to sign papers prepared by officer.
Questions:
ReplyDelete1. Would you like to be able to vote online in elections? Please explain why or why not.
I may repeat myself but I would love to. Reasons ? I think they are obvious, you don't have to waste time, you gain more confidentiality and you can do it almost everywhere.
2. Do you think voter turnout would increase if online voting was possible? Is more people voting something worth pursuing? How do you feel about mandatory voting with sanctions when you fail to vote?
Sanctions could be interesting idea but I think it might cause to much problems because there are obvious reasons which would withhold some part of society from voting which should have been taken into consideration while making such law, and here start trouble because we wold need to define all those...
3. Is online voting adding unnecessary complexity or can it simplify the process of voting and counting votes?
Simplify + all the reasons from point one. I don't see any complexity in online voting when taking into consideration current level of technology advancement.
4. Does the Estonian example convince you that securing electronic voting in general elections is possible?
I think I don't need Estonian to be convinced :)
5. What other areas of e-Government would you like to see being improved in Poland?
I think the key is electronic signature, after popularizing this I think everything else what be really piece of cake... including online voting.
1. I find the idea of online voting a great thing. E-voting would help people to save time and allow voting if they would not be able to get to the actual voting venue.
ReplyDelete2. Yes, I do think that more people would vote if this would be possible. Some of us are just plain lazy and do not want to leave our homes and spend time and energy to vote; they live by the motto "Why should I care? My one vote will not change anything!".
As for the next question, I've never heard about the possibility of voting becoming mandatory, and I do not think that this would lead to anything good. I think that voting should be treated as a privilege, not as something that you must do, and it's up to the person whether they want to benefit from this privilege or not.
3. I don't think that we could give a simple answer to that question. On one hand this would significantly reduce the amount of manual tasks connected with the process of counting votes. On the other hand though, it would require a team dedicated to administrate and support such a system. So reducing process complexity in one area would lead to an increase in another.
4. I think that every system can be hacked, you just need sufficient time and/or resources to do so. Maybe the ones that could break it in this example don't see enough benefits for themselves in doing so, and in taking the risk.
5. That would be a long list! But the one that I would like the most is the public health care system (eg. being able to register for doctor's appointments online).
Spend a few minutes researching online voting and you'll find out that the answer to that question is fairly complicated. But for the most part the biggest hurdle standing in the way of casting our votes on the Internet has to do with security concerns.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest obstacle to voting on the Internet is the security problem, The fact is that right now the security threats on the Internet are getting worse, not better. Before we can allow people to vote on computers we have to make sure people are in control of their own computers.
There are two major concerns when it comes to security: the vulnerabilities of voters' personal computers, and the vulnerabilities of the servers and backend systems that would power the online voting infrastructure and host the websites for particular jurisdictions.
The fears on the server side concern hackers. The biggest fears there revolve around servers and sites being redirected to fake sites, thus causing a vote to go to the wrong place and thus leading to inaccurate tallying. But the security of those systems are easier to control than citizens' computers.
The hardest problem to solve is what happens at a person's computer. The dream is to be able to vote at work or at home or wherever the computer is, but the vote can be intercepted at the keyboard, Suppose you have a virus at your computer and it sends a different vote. There is no link between the recorded vote and the ballot. We don't know how to secure every PC in the country. Antivirus software does a good job but not good enough.
The fear is that software could capture the vote and direct people to false websites that might look like real voting sites, but are instead false sites. There is also the issue of keeping votes anonymous.
You can do a lot of things online: registrations, applications, etc. It is much faster and easier. Will soon be so in Poland :)
1. Would you like to be able to vote online in elections? Please explain why or why not.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely yes. I also agree that there is huge field of things that can go wrong.
I think that online voting is an inevitable future.
Technical problems can be fixed and it is only a matter of time and money.
The problem how to guarantee anonymity can also be solved. Voting in the traditional way can also be vulnerable to lose some or event whole anonymity. You must show ID to receive the voting card. Are you sure that this is not monitored and then used to correlate with the filled voting cards?
2. Do you think voter turnout would increase if online voting was possible?
This might increase the number of people voting. Quite often the weather has a huge impact on voting results, so could have online voting.
Is more people voting something worth pursuing? How do you feel about mandatory voting with sanctions when you fail to vote?
Mandatory voting is a difficult topic. Sometimes it is hard close to impossible to distinguish the right people to put your vote on just by reading some “marketing materials” prepared by their PR consultants. I do not know.
3. Is online voting adding unnecessary complexity or can it simplify the process of voting and counting votes?
Well designed and properly implemented it should simplify the process.
4. Does the Estonian example convince you that securing electronic voting in general elections is possible?
Reading the article about the Estonian example you do not see any hesitation in the sentences spoken by the management of the whole solution.
I did not check later on if there were any disclosures of potential frauds regarding Estonian voting so it might be that all went fine.
It is a small country well suited to perform such experiments there.
5. What other areas of e-Government would you like to see being improved in Poland?
There is a lot of work to be done. There is also some part already accomplished. Take the new data center project at The Ministry of Finance as a good example.
1. Would you like to be able to vote online in elections? Please explain why or why not.
ReplyDeleteSure, I would definitely like to vote online in elections. I just wish that the entire voting law was changed in Poland to a more direct model. I would actually like to see a politician that I've chosen in the government. I feel that right now all I can truly choose is a political party, not my candidate.
2. Do you think voter turnout would increase if online voting was possible? Is more people voting something worth pursuing? How do you feel about mandatory voting with sanctions when you fail to vote?
The world isn't ready for Poles. I think that the safety measures are not in place to protect the integrity of the results. Maybe it would help the young generation get involved in politics, but I'm not sure if they even care about anything other than the end of their nose.
3. Is online voting adding unnecessary complexity or can it simplify the process of voting and counting votes?
It's not the technology, its' the polish law that's faulty. People want to feel that they are choosing their local representative. Counting votes doesn't seem to be a problem in Poland. I think that the weather on the voting day has much more impact than anything else.
4. Does the Estonian example convince you that securing electronic voting in general elections is possible?
Estonia is a small country and quite advanced technologically, while I admire their experience I don't believe that its realistic to implement such solution in Poland.
5. What other areas of e-Government would you like to see being improved in Poland?
Don't even get me started on that! Electronic signatures, exchanging electronic correspondence with courts, IRS forms, healthcare information.... Government offices are awaiting a major change in their staff. Once Digital Natives enter the offices, maybe there will be a chance for e-Government to succeed. I personally know one mayor that has his secretary PRINT the e-mails received by his office. But if I had to pick one or two things that seemed to work I would definitely say electronic registration for preschools and nurseries. Even though the systems died on the day they were launched, I managed to register my kids. So I guess there is a dim light in the tunnel. I'm a definite pessimist when it comes to e-Government in Poland. Maybe in the next century?
1. Would you like to be able to vote on-line in elections? Please explain why or why not.
ReplyDeleteYes, because it is simple and quick. I have only one question, do you think that system would be safe and well protected?
In my opinion if the voting system would be well protected and tested by professionals, I would not have any objection to use it.
2. Do you think voter turnout would increase if on-line voting was possible? Is more people voting something worth pursuing? How do you feel about mandatory voting with sanctions when you fail to vote?
I think it will definitely change the voter age structure. More young people would vote on-line.
If on-line voting would be combined with the current voting system it will increase the number of voters.
3. Is on-line voting adding unnecessary complexity or can it simplify the process of voting and counting votes?
I think it simplifies the voting system. We live in the twenty-first century and we are doing a lot
of things on the Internet. So why do not we have a vote on-line :)?
4. Does the Estonian example convince you that securing electronic voting in general elections is possible?
Yes, why not. I think Poland needs a reformation in this topic.
5. What other areas of e-Government would you like to see being improved in Poland?
The all areas... :) In my opinion in Poland is not bad in this topic.
Of course is not as good as in the West Europe, but we are making progress, a good example of this progress is www.firma.gov.pl/ (Centralna Ewidencja i Informacja o Działalności Gospodarczej)
ReplyDelete1. Would you like to be able to vote online in elections? Please explain why or why not.
Yes If there will be possibility to vote on-line I will use that. For me it is faster and more comfortable than traditional vote
2. Do you think voter turnout would increase if online voting was possible? Is more people voting something worth pursuing? How do you feel about mandatory voting with sanctions when you fail to vote?
I think that will increase the number of people voting. Now a day many young people prefer to use Internet to many other thing like make shopping to meat new people so for them it will be good opportunity for them to give they vote.
3. Is online voting adding unnecessary complexity or can it simplify the process of voting and counting votes?
Everything depends how it will be done if it will be done in property way it should simplify process
4. Does the Estonian example convince you that securing electronic voting in general elections is possible?
Yes it works there fine so it is good example
5. What other areas of e-Government would you like to see being improved in Poland?
There is a lot of area where we should make a lot of work but we are going in goode direction fo example www.firma.gov.pl
It has the future for sure I agree that online voting may increase the number of voters. It is still safe? As you say what about securing voter computers? Nowadays, there is no anonymity online any more, so seriously I would consider give vote via online.
ReplyDelete