Europeans Venturing To Vote Online
from the hanging-chad dept
While here in the US we still worry about “pregnant” and “hanging” chads, over in Europe they’re already experimenting with online voting procedures. There are, clearly, a number of issues that are raised by online voting. Mainly, the worries are that people will vote multiple times, or that results will be tampered with. There are ways to minimize both of those risks, but that creates other problems. As Ron Rivest points out in the article, the more difficult they make it for hackers to gain access to the system, the less auditability there is for the votes as well. If you want to make everyone completely anonymous, and make it neaerly impossible for someone to understand the raw data, then it’s just as difficult to go back and make sure the votes were counted correctly. Update: It seems that we’re so afraid of what the Europeans might be doing with online voting that we’re sending Americans over there to warn folks of the dangers.
