7 years ago
4
E-Voting Refuses to Die Even Though It's Neither Secure nor Secret
In theory, using the internet or e-mail to vote for the U.S. president sounds like a good idea. It would be easier than rushing to the nearest polling station before or after work, and it might pull in notoriously apathetic younger voters already living most of their lives via screens. But in reality these online channels have proved to be terribly insecure, plagued by cyber attacks and malicious software able to penetrate supposedly well-protected financial, medical and even military systems.
Continue Reading
https://www.scientificamerican.com
Join the Discussion
You realize the government wants voting to be insecure and easy to manipulate, right? We have government agencies who can monitor every single citizen's internet communication, and ISPs who are willing to sell their ass to the government and give them any information they want in exchange for money or business privileges. If the government wanted to make e-voting secure it would require a minimal amount of effort.
No, it wouldn't, it really wouldn't. Except in the sense that if you don't use computers to vote, voting would be much more secure. Current computers are just not secure. Not secure at all.
The government is constantly sabotaging and undermining cryptography, which would help make computers secure, because they want to be able to spy on us. If they used 1/10 of the manpower and resources they currently use to spy on billions of innocent people to improve encryption, this problem would not exist.
This is a general gripe I have with the idea of "internet of things". Sure, we can tie everything to computers and the internet now, but do we really want to? Is this really needed? No, and it shouldn't be.
In my opinion, although this would create a precedent and is something very much up for debate, there should be two kinds of internet. One that we know and cherish where anyone is able to roam anonymously, and an internet with high security where one can only log with his ID information and every single action he performs is tracked and readily available to anyone, anywhere, at any time. This latter internet could be used for voting and connecting electronic devices to it.