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I don't understand why a bank's website is secure enough to transfer hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I can't cast a single vote online.

coolspot 7y ago
Because casting votes online makes it easy to start voting market where you get perks for voting in desired direction.
- jedieaston 7y ago
  I could just as easily start a system right now where I'll send you $15 to get a absentee ballot, vote how I want, and take a picture of it with some kind of unique identifier (post it note with your username on it, for example) before mailing it in. It's possible that a much lower price would even work too, since if you were going to vote my way anyway, you'd do it for free. So I only have to convince the voters on the other side (and hope the electoral college doesn't override my proxy votes).
  - klank 7y ago
    What you describe is considered election fraud and is illegal in the US. see 18 U.S. Code § 597: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597
  - Klathmon 7y ago
    That technique leaves quite a lot of evidence around. Not only do you need every voter you buy the vote from to never speak up about it, but you also need to somehow hide all the mailing of absentee ballots, hide where you mail them back from, and your money needs to be clean and untraceable to yourself. AND all of that needs to happen right around election time. But hacking an electronic machine can be done by a few people making changes to a warehouse of voting machines by impersonating a janitor 2 years before the election. And that's not hypothetical, 100% of voting machines that have been in the hands of hackers have been exploited to change votes. I myself used to sneak into the room where they kept the voting machines in my high school when I was younger. "online" voting is even easier to hack. You could attack the users by buying a botnet and have it submit or change the votes on the client machines before they cast them, you could attack the servers via things like evil maid attacks on the server hardware, "normal" exploits on their software to gain access to the systems, even just paying the sysadmin that maintains it a few hundred million dollars to look the other way for a few days.
  - coolspot 7y ago
    Absentee ballot or any other real-world interaction dramatically increases price per vote and risks. With electronic vote, both reward and verification can be done in untraceable way. Basically you could sell your credentials for Monero on some Onion site and vote will be done on your behalf. Low risk for both parties and plausable deniability for seller (OMG, I was hacked!!!).
  - johnchristopher 7y ago
    I have been playing with that idea, as some kind of activist political stunt but I am pretty sure my country has limitations in place to prevent/forbid the selling of vote.
  - usrusr 7y ago
    Which is exactly the reason why absentee voting should be an exception. Every single person who takes an absentee ballot purely out of convenience is hurting democracy, even if only very slightly. And it's not just plain out vote buying, there are also various forms of soft, even unintended coercion that encroach on a voter who votes outside of the enforced privacy of a booth. If it was possible to run statistics on this I'm quite sure that there would be statistical evidence of spouses voting more alike when voting at home than when voting alone in the booth.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Try it. They'll defraud you by overriding the vote in person.
Klathmon 7y ago
Because one can buy you a nice yacht, but the other can buy control over the most powerful military in the world, the stakes are just significantly larger for an election. The reward provides a sort of ceiling on how much time and money can be spent on trying to break a system. Even if you could get access to a few billion dollars by somehow "hacking" a bank and get away with it, that means that you'd only be spending up to a few billion to do it, and you may spend a few years to plan, but not much more. But trying to "hack an election"? I would be shocked if there weren't multiple countries spending billions of dollars across literally decades of time trying to find the best way to influence and hack elections in other countries. Do you really think that ANY software is secure enough to withstand a team of a few thousand of some of the most talented developers money can buy working full time for decades on trying to break it? Because that's the kind of threats that elections face. And if that election happens at all on the internet, the adversaries can be literally anywhere in the world and still attack it. There are also auxiliary reasons why electronic voting isn't ideal. It removes the ability for the average person to validate the security of their election themselves without a software engineering degree (in a paper election anyone can go watch the locked ballot box all day to ensure there is no tampering, and they can count along with everyone else at the end of the day). It introduces accessibility issues, it adds unnecessary bottlenecks and dependencies (there have been countless stories of there not being enough voting machines or them breaking down causing lines to get multiple hours long and in many cases prevent people from being able to vote before polls close. There's even evidence this has been done on purpose to sway elections by preventing people in some areas from voting as much as people in others), and it's really expensive! And what are the benefits to electronic voting? slightly faster counting? (you can get results in minutes instead of hours...)
- joshuaheard 7y ago
  You have identified many problems that need to be addressed. I hope eventually the security problems will be worked out. It seems to me that online voting is a natural evolution and would certainly be more convenient for voters like myself used to doing everything online.
the_snooze 7y ago
The security and privacy requirements are much tougher with voting. In banking, the people involved know who's doing what. Voting has to be completely private to prevent voter intimidation. Banking can be insured and transactions reversed. Elections can't.
johnchristopher 7y ago
Because just outside the voting booth there are actual people watching after your safety and making sure you aren't coming into the booth with a gun on your head or any other kinds of means of coercion. Also, each candidates can make sure the others aren't messing up with the process. A bank has no way to know in real time if you are being forced to transfer hundred of thousands of dollars or not.
nokcha 7y ago
Because elections have strict secrecy requirements that bank transactions don't. Once you cast your ballot, it can longer be associated with you. So if someone hacks the election equipment to alter the ballots, there is no way for you to find out that your ballot was altered or to reverse the alteration. In contrast, fraudulent bank transactions are routinely discovered and reversed.
gnulinux 7y ago
If it's going to make you feel better, your bank's website isn't as secure as you think too; it's not bulletproof.
fg6hr 7y ago
Why does everyone downvote this comment? Imagine this is master Yoda is asking a naive looking question to make you think. USA is ruled by laws, not people. The laws can serve as a veil between those who set them and those who follow them. Online voting enables the SkyNet plot: laws are voted for online, but it's AI who casts them.

coolspot 7y ago

Because casting votes online makes it easy to start voting market where you get perks for voting in desired direction.

jedieaston 7y ago
I could just as easily start a system right now where I'll send you $15 to get a absentee ballot, vote how I want, and take a picture of it with some kind of unique identifier (post it note with your username on it, for example) before mailing it in. It's possible that a much lower price would even work too, since if you were going to vote my way anyway, you'd do it for free. So I only have to convince the voters on the other side (and hope the electoral college doesn't override my proxy votes).
- klank 7y ago
  What you describe is considered election fraud and is illegal in the US. see 18 U.S. Code § 597: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597
- Klathmon 7y ago
  That technique leaves quite a lot of evidence around. Not only do you need every voter you buy the vote from to never speak up about it, but you also need to somehow hide all the mailing of absentee ballots, hide where you mail them back from, and your money needs to be clean and untraceable to yourself. AND all of that needs to happen right around election time. But hacking an electronic machine can be done by a few people making changes to a warehouse of voting machines by impersonating a janitor 2 years before the election. And that's not hypothetical, 100% of voting machines that have been in the hands of hackers have been exploited to change votes. I myself used to sneak into the room where they kept the voting machines in my high school when I was younger. "online" voting is even easier to hack. You could attack the users by buying a botnet and have it submit or change the votes on the client machines before they cast them, you could attack the servers via things like evil maid attacks on the server hardware, "normal" exploits on their software to gain access to the systems, even just paying the sysadmin that maintains it a few hundred million dollars to look the other way for a few days.
- coolspot 7y ago
  Absentee ballot or any other real-world interaction dramatically increases price per vote and risks. With electronic vote, both reward and verification can be done in untraceable way. Basically you could sell your credentials for Monero on some Onion site and vote will be done on your behalf. Low risk for both parties and plausable deniability for seller (OMG, I was hacked!!!).
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  I have been playing with that idea, as some kind of activist political stunt but I am pretty sure my country has limitations in place to prevent/forbid the selling of vote.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Which is exactly the reason why absentee voting should be an exception. Every single person who takes an absentee ballot purely out of convenience is hurting democracy, even if only very slightly. And it's not just plain out vote buying, there are also various forms of soft, even unintended coercion that encroach on a voter who votes outside of the enforced privacy of a booth. If it was possible to run statistics on this I'm quite sure that there would be statistical evidence of spouses voting more alike when voting at home than when voting alone in the booth.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Try it. They'll defraud you by overriding the vote in person.

Klathmon 7y ago

Because one can buy you a nice yacht, but the other can buy control over the most powerful military in the world, the stakes are just significantly larger for an election. The reward provides a sort of ceiling on how much time and money can be spent on trying to break a system. Even if you could get access to a few billion dollars by somehow "hacking" a bank and get away with it, that means that you'd only be spending up to a few billion to do it, and you may spend a few years to plan, but not much more. But trying to "hack an election"? I would be shocked if there weren't multiple countries spending billions of dollars across literally decades of time trying to find the best way to influence and hack elections in other countries. Do you really think that ANY software is secure enough to withstand a team of a few thousand of some of the most talented developers money can buy working full time for decades on trying to break it? Because that's the kind of threats that elections face. And if that election happens at all on the internet, the adversaries can be literally anywhere in the world and still attack it. There are also auxiliary reasons why electronic voting isn't ideal. It removes the ability for the average person to validate the security of their election themselves without a software engineering degree (in a paper election anyone can go watch the locked ballot box all day to ensure there is no tampering, and they can count along with everyone else at the end of the day). It introduces accessibility issues, it adds unnecessary bottlenecks and dependencies (there have been countless stories of there not being enough voting machines or them breaking down causing lines to get multiple hours long and in many cases prevent people from being able to vote before polls close. There's even evidence this has been done on purpose to sway elections by preventing people in some areas from voting as much as people in others), and it's really expensive! And what are the benefits to electronic voting? slightly faster counting? (you can get results in minutes instead of hours...)

joshuaheard 7y ago
You have identified many problems that need to be addressed. I hope eventually the security problems will be worked out. It seems to me that online voting is a natural evolution and would certainly be more convenient for voters like myself used to doing everything online.

the_snooze 7y ago

The security and privacy requirements are much tougher with voting. In banking, the people involved know who's doing what. Voting has to be completely private to prevent voter intimidation. Banking can be insured and transactions reversed. Elections can't.

johnchristopher 7y ago

Because just outside the voting booth there are actual people watching after your safety and making sure you aren't coming into the booth with a gun on your head or any other kinds of means of coercion. Also, each candidates can make sure the others aren't messing up with the process. A bank has no way to know in real time if you are being forced to transfer hundred of thousands of dollars or not.

nokcha 7y ago

Because elections have strict secrecy requirements that bank transactions don't. Once you cast your ballot, it can longer be associated with you. So if someone hacks the election equipment to alter the ballots, there is no way for you to find out that your ballot was altered or to reverse the alteration. In contrast, fraudulent bank transactions are routinely discovered and reversed.

gnulinux 7y ago

If it's going to make you feel better, your bank's website isn't as secure as you think too; it's not bulletproof.

fg6hr 7y ago

Why does everyone downvote this comment? Imagine this is master Yoda is asking a naive looking question to make you think. USA is ruled by laws, not people. The laws can serve as a veil between those who set them and those who follow them. Online voting enables the SkyNet plot: laws are voted for online, but it's AI who casts them.