when you stop to think about it it is amazing how much of our lives has moved
online you can work a full-time job trade hundreds of thousands of dollars
worth of stocks and even meet your soulmate all without getting out of bed
but one of the things we still can't do over the internet is vote and i'm not
talking about twitter polls but like real voting for things like the
president or mayor and coroner but why
we have a multi-trillion dollar digital economy
that's managed online so what's so difficult about running an election
without having to drag everyone out to a polling station well unsurprisingly one
big issue is security online voting is subject to the same vulnerabilities as
shopping over the internet but the concerns are actually more severe think
about what happens if an attacker steals your credit card info when you try to
buy something it's obviously not ideal
but thanks to fraud protection algorithms and redundant record keeping
such incidents can often be resolved and you can get your money back
but this is more challenging when it comes to voting not only are records
kept by election authorities usually quite a bit thinner but in close
elections even a few incidents of an attacker changing votes could alter the
results of the entire election where the outcome at least theoretically affects
everyone who voted the stakes simply aren't that high when someone's credit
card number gets stolen also reliably tying a ballot to an
individual voter undermines the secret ballot system which is used by most
democracies to help ensure that neither the government nor anyone else can
intimidate voters or seek retribution against someone for voting a certain way
although jurisdictions that allow voting by mail or absentee voting try to tackle
this issue by using two envelopes to keep the votes and the voters separate
detecting fraud in an online election may be more likely to require tying a
ballot back to an actual voter if irregularities arise in order to verify
who a specific person actually voted for so if we'd want to avoid this we'd have
to come up with some new ways to fairly keep track of votes without compromising
privacy too much but even if we do come up with such a system simply identifying
who's actually eligible to vote through a browser could be difficult
many places are currently grappling with just how much identification a potential
voter should have to show when they register to vote or cast a ballot and
moving elections online throws another wrinkle into the system
although you could ask each person for something like a national id number
before voting there still isn't much of a way that the authorities can know that
you didn't sell your vote or just allow a different person to vote in your place
biometrics have been suggested as a solution but that could prove to be very
costly but okay Linus can't someone just go into a
physical polling place and give someone else's name and fraudulently cast a vote
anyway well yes they could but studies have
shown that in-person voter fraud in developed countries is fairly uncommon
partly because it's difficult to find a bunch of people that are willing to
participate in such a scheme and get them to go to the polls to cheat the
system by comparison online it would be
a lot easier for one person running a botnet to achieve the same results which
i guess leads us perfectly to another obstacle even if you had a super secure voting
infrastructure and a population that's dedicated to upholding the integrity of
their elections there's no guarantee that individual users wouldn't have vote
altering malware on their home pcs
plenty of voters have a very limited grasp of technology and probably
wouldn't be able to tell if their computer had been made part of a botnet
or if they'd fallen victim to a phishing email that would redirect them to a site
that would submit altered votes throw in the possibility of widespread
computer errors as we've seen with electronic voting machines and these are
ones that aren't even directly connected to the internet plus government-run
servers trying to accommodate a massive amount of traffic on election day
and it isn't that surprising that most places haven't jumped on the online
voting hype train such as it is but this isn't to say
though that we will never figure out a good way to conduct elections online for
example estonia is well known for holding its elections over the internet
with its citizens using special national id cards and readers to vote from home
their government also says it keeps a close eye on proceedings to ensure
fairness but would this system work in a much larger
country a research study also indicated that estonia's system is still vulnerable to
outside attacks so the jury's kind of still out on this one
and i don't expect it to rapidly catch on in other places anytime soon
if we can figure it out online voting promises to not only save time and
improve accuracy but also encourage more people to participate in civic life
until then though i guess we'll just have to put up with standing in line on
election day to get our i voted sticker so we can walk around with a sense of
unwarranted self-importance afterwards
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