Thread: Voting system to avoid election fraud

I may propose voting system which is designed to prevent secret
voting falsifications.
According to this system all voting takes place trough Internet.
There will exist open database in Internet where each voter and his
choice is marked.Every voter would be able to access this database
from any computer anywhere after voting and to check if his choice
is displaying correct.After election results are officially proclaimed,
this database will be printed on hard copies such as CDs and available
to anyone.In order to make voting process still secret there is no names
displayed in a database (with exeption of those who didn`t participate
in votes at all).Instead each person invents it`s own combination of digits
and enters as it`s own password during voting.Naturally voting computer
checks that there would be no the same combination already.
Who likes such type of voting system?

How are you going to verify the qualifications of each voter?

.

Who is allowed to vote in an election? Must the person be a citizen, for example? How do you know somebody didn't register under two identities and therefore vote multiple times? Is the voter dead, like in Chicago style elections?

Who is allowed to vote in an election? Must the person be a citizen, for example? How do you know somebody didn't register under two identities and therefore vote multiple times? Is the voter dead, like in Chicago style elections?

Every adult citizen over 18 years old should be allowed to vote defenetly.
What about identities,probably at the polling stations officials should check everybodies documents
and enter in a database everyone who came to vote so there whould be no multiple identies.
Or if you mean that officials themself could be in connection to multiple people...
Well,in this case it all the same would be difficult to hide beause there will be known total number
of voters and honest voters plus multiple identities will give a higher number of total voters than it
supposed to be.It will quickly show up in open Internet database of elections.It would look like an
open fraud and they will be enforsed to recount votes.

If electronic voting is to be possible: the source-code for the whole system must be non-proprietary & open-source to the whole public to see & should be well documented. Unfortunately, current electronic voting system has proprietary code owned by company which is reluctant to release their code for free.

Electronic voting system sounds simple in theory, but is easy to be hacked & used for malicious intent if the code is not peer reviewed by the public. The code can grow soo complex even their own peer (the development team) can miss any bug or malicious code... so it is important to include more people to check the code: especially the public which is the user of said system.

About the only part of electric vote system I really like is a badly needed a national database to prevents many thousands of voters from casting ballets in several states.

I'd have a receipt and only allow someone to check and change for a minute or so.

Most of the problems with these systems are probably much less than even the good manual systems.

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I like Washington state's vote by mail system. Vote naked!

Electronic voting system sounds simple in theory, but is easy to be hacked & used for malicious intent

I believe that government if they really would want could create computers system which is protected agains any hackers.
In any case the system I proposed is primarily designed to prevent any secret falsifications.If hackers will intrude it will be
quickly find out and will be no more than common hooliganism.Because either choices of people will be displayed incorrect or
there will be more voters in a database than it supposed to be.If government whould want to resort to open fraud what is
the sense to deal with hackers?If not, they will protect it for sure.In some countries municipal elections are conducted electronically.
Is there some known cases of aggravated hacking?

Originally Posted by Stanley514

Electronic voting system sounds simple in theory, but is easy to be hacked & used for malicious intent

I believe that government if they really would want could create computers system which is protected agains any hackers.In any case the system I proposed is primarily designed to prevent any secret falsifications.If hackers will intrude it will bequickly find out and will be no more than common hooliganism.Because either choices of people will be displayed incorrect orthere will be more voters in a database than it supposed to be.If government whould want to resort to open fraud what isthe sense to deal with hackers?If not, they will protect it for sure.In some countries municipal elections are conducted electronically.Is there some known cases of aggravated hacking?

Yes, attack on government system is common. Government website are always a target for vandalize by small time hacker, and rival nation are always try to use the Internet to get access to secret government data. One real example is the case of stuxnet virus which attack Iran's nuclear facility: causing disruption in uranium refining... no one knows who sent it, maybe an independent anonymous hacker who hate Iran, or maybe Israel, or maybe the US... but it is a real case of deliberate virtual warfare on a nation.I'd say: the electronic voting source-code be made public! Do you understand what making public mean? It is to let the code be peer-reviewed by the people... For example: Firefox... do you know that Firefox code is made free to the public and the public can change it as they wish? Same with Google Chrome, and Apache web server system, and MySQL... they are OPEN-SOURCE; it is the nicest thing people ever had.If government don't care about profiting from electronic voting: they make the code public.

But I think you are naive for thinking that we can give all the power to the government (trusting them to make an impenetrable system) and to withold the information about the system just for an excuse of 'security'. You can't do that... corruption can either be due to incompetence and malicious intent, and by making the electronic voting system transparent to the public we can prevent both. That's why I suggest open-source... (the voting system itself is really simple everyone can design one)

I see no benefit to the proposed system. If an individual voter can go into the database and verify how his vote was recorded, then the ballot is not secret. The data is in the database and is available to anyone with access to the database.

You put a lot of faith into the government to control the database, but what if the government is a corrupt regime, which wants to fix the election?

If there are fraudulent voter registrations, your system will not help matters. Sure it could tell if more people voted than were registered, but then what? You have no way of sorting out the bad votes from the good.

I see no benefit to the proposed system. If an individual voter can go into the database and verify how his vote was recorded, then the ballot is not secret. The data is in the database and is available to anyone with access to the database.

The ballot will be relatively secret because each voter will be coded.For example you come to vote to polling
station and after checking your ID you are allowed to proceed to voting computer.You enter any combination of digits
and letters such as Ab74H982LM and computer checks if there is no such combination already.If it`s OK than you proposed
to make a choice from parties to vote.You mark party of your choice and computer accepts it.After that your choice is
displayed in a database such as Ab74H982LM - REPUBLICANS.Except you NOBODY suppose to know that this combiation
of numbers is YOU.

You put a lot of faith into the government to control the database, but what if the government is a corrupt regime, which wants to fix the election?

Dictotoral regimes usually do not conduct votes at all or just will not accept the proposed system.This system is designed for countries which pretend to be civilized or make firs steps in democrasy.And in which governments afraid to be
caught on open fraud.

If there are fraudulent voters registrations, your system will not help matters. Sure it could tell if more people voted than were registered, but then what? You have no way of sorting out the bad votes from the good.

If there will be more voters in the database than it supposed to be,well then at least pople will know exact magnitude of fraud and could apply in court.If votes are conducted in proper way, then multiple voting is not easy.Usually each poling station has predetermined number voters and mark down each voter who came to vote.If there is multiple voters then each particular voting station should detect and know it.Also another methods of fraud prevention may be used.
For examle the databes could be designed in the way that it just does`t suppose to accept suspicious or multiple voters.

I like the basic idea of the OP system and agree with the following:

If electronic voting is to be possible: the source-code for the whole system must be non-proprietary & open-source to the whole public to see & should be well documented.

(But I must point out that in my opinion the highly undemocratic nature of our civilization is not a result of electoral fraud in particular, though more public input on policy should be used. I think money, hierarchy and secrecy, are more of a threat to real democracy than election fraud.)