Discussion on:

Why you can't vote online in the U.S. election

There is enough fraud going on as is. Do you want more?

Just yesterday the mayor of a 60,000+ population city in Massachusetts was confronted with the fact they may have a few thousand illegal immigrants voting this week because of lax city and state voter registration laws.

You only have to look at any news site on any given day to see yet again, ANOTHER hacker job to know that this is a uber-bad idea. Very good (and obvious) points!

As HI said "Are you nuts?"!!!!! I've been working in the computer field for 30 years and there is no way I think current systems are secure enough for online voting and I'm skeptical that they ever can be made secure enough. You mentioned other things you do online but all of those are open and subject to audit. You can openly make corrections if you find a problem. Your vote, one of the fundamental rights you have as a citizen, is supposedly secret. Online voting or electronic voting machines at the polling places are an anathema to our democracy. Too many citizens have no chance of understanding what's going on with them and it undermines trust in the elections results.

riverat1, I concur. No one who uses online banking has ever lost and money or been hacked due to fraud, right? lol

I'm only surprised that republicans haven't yet pushed this idea. Nothing they like better than a corrupt voting process. After corrupting the votes in Florida and Ohio in 2000 and 2004, I assume they would be ready, willing and able to corrupt any on-line voting system, almost immediately after it began.

The ACORN people who registered the entire roster of the Dallas Cowboys to vote in Chicago, and who registered Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and who "sat at home and filled out fake voter registrations while smoking dope", and all the dead people who vote for Democrats when you're talking about voter fraud.

I LOL every time they are brought up. It's been over 2 years since they went out of business but even when they were in business they never did any of those things you said. A few people they hired did and ACORN reported them to the authorities and provided evidence of their fraud. The biggest thing ACORN was guilty of was registering (legal) voters that the R's didn't want voting.

which is registering as many people as they can, many times each, and also trying to get illegals registered and bringing them to the polls. ACORN, may not be using the same name as they had, but, the same people are still actively pursuing their fraudulent voting tactics. And, in fact, ACORN is an organization which the democrats will not let die, because, those frauds and many others, are what the democrats depend on in order to win a lot of elections.

The Bush II administration made it a point of emphasis for the US Attorneys to seek out voter fraud such as you allege. They found practically none. Voter fraud is just not common enough to be much of an issue.

There's been similar idiocy coming from both sides in past elections.

who can't seem to win any election without depending on voter fraud to take them over the top.

Democrats state that having to show that you-are-who-you-say-you-are and eligible to vote is discriminatory and unconstitutional, so it seems they're in favor of Internet voting. Hey, just create an online poll and use that ... sheesh.

How do we maintain security for voting by mail, like in Oregon, or absentee ballots in every state? Seems to me that if we can accept those methods of voting, we can certainly accept voting by computer. With all the current technologies, we can't figure out how to make a secure voting method. Come on folks, get with the program. Spending 3 and a half hours last week voting early was not my idea of a fruitful activity. Next time, I'm voting absentee.

In Oregon we receive our ballots 2-3 weeks before the election. We fill out our ballot, insert it into a secrecy envelope then insert that into an outer envelope with our name on it that we have to sign. When the ballot is received by the county clerk the signature on the outer envelope is compared to the signature on our voter registration and if they match then the secrecy envelope is separated from the outer envelope and put in the pile to be opened in a separate process to later be counted. If the signature doesn't match well enough they will let you know and give you a chance to confirm you signed the envelope. If you're worried about security in the US Mail you can deliver your ballot to the county clerk's office personally. I do that just because it's conveniently only about 5 blocks from my house on my way to work.

The difference between Oregon's vote by mail and online voting is that we fill out a paper ballot that can be recounted if necessary. In online voting there isn't any physical record of your vote, it's all electronic. Even if you make a printout of your ballot at home there is no way it can be used by elections officials to confirm anything.

They went to electronic voting to save money! I think we should go back to the way Oregon and Arizona early voting is (we do the same for early voting). I can find a million other ways to reduce costs in government!

The vote is way to important to not spend the money to do it right.

How goofy. Please stop the BS. The existing old school way of voting still only exist for one reason- to save 2 party system. Of course online voting makes great sense. The whole fraud argument is as old as dirt. The existing system is disabling and all about USA Inc. Just like so many other apps, the online experience of voting is far superior to the old school experience and is already in use and proven to be GREAT. All you naysayers, stop your stagnant idiot ridden thinking. Wake up! It is absolutely ludicrous to think otherwise. The US arcane voting system will be replaced soon!!! Get on board! Be part of the solution.

vulnerable to hacking. Any computer can be hacked, therefore online banking and credit card transactions should not and cannot be done online. End of discussion!

Oops. Billions of them happen successfully, without hacking, every year. But online voting is impossible. What's the difference? Government. Few of us (especially in IT) trust government to pull something like that off without a physical, old-school paper trail to back it up.

Simply answer: a voting token. Private companies (lots of them- in competition with each other) can easily create secure systems which establish voter identity and authenticity for a specific election. The token can be bought at any time before the election, and part of the transaction is the reception by govt. of a secure, encrypted counter-token which will anonymously validate and tabulate the person's vote. On or sometime before election day the voter goes online with the token and uses it to vote. (The token itself is not the vote; it is the wrapper around the vote.) The process could also include an encrypted (think 2D barcode) receipt which could be used later for a recount (just scan it back in and reconnect with it's counter-token).

Want a real life example? Paypal. No doubt they can be hacked, but they haven't been, at least not on any major scale. How do we know? They still exit...

To reverse the challenge: can show-up-with-ID-mark-the-paper voting be hacked? Ahh... 'nuff said.

The fundamental difference between online banking and credit card transactions and voting is that voting is supposed to be secret. There is no way to confirm the transaction after the fact other than the final aggregated vote count. Online financial transactions are not secret and you can openly correct mistakes.

Are often the hardest for people to grasp.

Anything done online should never be considered secret.

And yes Clear, PayPal can deny it, but it has been hacked. Every hacking claim these guys have made has turned out to be true. Even if it takes a few months for the victims to admit it.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/world/paypal-symantec-reportedly-hacked-on-guy-fawkes-day-311454.html

There are too many ways to hack into computers to make them safe for voting. There are secure methods of connecting computers but that implies that the computers are secure and not infected with a trojan that can snoop for connections to a secure ports and substitute the information.

These things can be done by fairly low level black hat hackers. Anonymous is a bit more sophisticated. Beyond Anonymous there are the state sponsered hackers who can create a campaign that is both difficult to detect and to stop.

The last thing we in the US need is another reason to doubt the legitimacy of people elected.

"The token can be bought at any time before the election, and part of the transaction is the reception by govt. of a secure, encrypted counter-token which will anonymously validate and tabulate the person's vote."

If voters have to buy or purchase their token, then they will not vote! End of Discussion...

I'm with you. Except I beleive we don't really have a choice anymore. After Al Gore and the Florida recount. Just Google "who owns the electronic voting machines for elections in the USA" and read up a bit. We "almost" have no choice as to who runs for the higher offices anymore, due to the amount of political funding from big business. They choose, groom and fund the individuals they want in office. They own the machines that count the votes and the paper trails for verification are being eliminated. You people get all in a tissy when election times come around. Like you really have a choice?. Oh sorry! You do have a choice BAD & WORSE than bad!

when it comes to fraud, it's not coming by way of the machines being hacked. It's coming from the many who vote early and often, and the illegals who shouldn't be voting, and the dead people who seem to get out of their graves only during election seasons to go and vote.

When it comes to who "owns the machines", you are one of those who bought into the lies of the democrats, where they need for people to believe that, it's the other guys who are attempting to steal the elections, but meanwhile, the democrats are using every trick in the fraud books in order to try to steal as many elections as they can. Getting you to look the other way, by claiming that, big business and republicans and the owners of the machines, are doing the fraud. Some people, including YOU, are easily misled. And so, with people like you around, the crooks who steal elections, will continue doing so, knowing that you have their backs.

Come on adornoe, if ballots are being cast by dead people it shouldn't be that hard to prove. After all there is a public list of everyone who voted. I challenge you to prove any dead person (who didn't die between the time they cast their legal vote and election day) voted.

I don't really care who owns the voting machines because they should be outright banned. As far as I can see there is far more fraud in the form of election fraud from the R's side than the D's side. Voter fraud is practically nonexistent. Only 10 cases have been prosecuted since 2000 and half of those were spouses trying votes in their recently dead spouse's name. I guess that's how dead people vote.

Here in Michigan a young voter went into the voting booth with his cell phone. He pushed the Obama button, but Romney was checked. He decided to record it and every time he pushed to Obama button Romney was checked. He finally got it to work by pushing the Obama button in a different place (not dead center) and Obama was finally checked.

I always force the machine to use extra-large print. That makes the check boxes quite large.

Spoken as someone who has voted in just about every election I've been allowed to in the last ten years, voting in person is waaaaay more fun! I voted by e-mail this year and it was horrid and boring, and I had to sign a waiver that my vote and ballot is not secret. Plus, I can completely imagine the way it could be easily abused, like the vote-by-mail system is already now, where they could just request thousands of absentee ballots for folks who have moved or died. Never again. If I'm still living in Madrid or anywhere else in the world, I'd rather have the NJ Election Commission pay the shipping.

Interesting example of how we get polarized with only 2 options and the conversation turns ugly. It's ironic that we are also talking about something as fundamental to our unity as human beings and our hope for democracy. If we really wanted to make voting simple and encourage all who are eligible to vote, we would have secure electronic voting already. The inertia of existing systems, especially the 2-party lock on politics, is being dragged kicking and screaming into the future. Check out kingofdemocracy.com.

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(or anybodys vote) would be more important than Your bank account or medical records. Yet You trust online banking with Your money but not online voting with Your vote. I sense a loss of proportions in this discussion.

I sense you don't understand what voting really means. Yes each individual vote is just a small part of the whole picture but in aggregate it's one of the primary ways "We the People" express our wishes and it can make a tremendous difference to the way things go. If you place more value on your bank account than you do your civic rights/duties then I'd say your proportions are out of whack.

The wonderfully young and idealistic writers for SmartPlanet seem to have little experience in the real world, nor a comprehensive view of what already exists. Barack Obama won his second presidential election in a row in the early vote count, in some cases weeks before "election day". There are already US states that have online voting, and many have early voting and mail-in ballots with few restrictions. Modern electronic voting machines may be as susceptible as home computers, or moreso due to their homogeneity. We are of the mistaken notion that all votes are counted, even paper ones. Recounts never show the same result as the original. Voting is inexact, but fears of alternate methods are usually based on mythologies about technologies, or nostalgia for certain forms, not on their usefulness.