Good or Bad?
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One of the closest contests in US history
Florida was the pivotal state
Neither Democrat Al Gore nor Republican
George W. Bush had a majority of votes in the
Electorial College.
After a Florida recount the vote was:
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Bush: 2,912,790
Gore: 2,912,253
Difference of 437 votes
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Hanging chad
Butterfly ballot
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Stylus used to punch a hole in the ballot next to
the candidate’s name
Sometimes the stylus didn’t punch the hole
cleanly, leaving a tiny piece of the card hanging
on the ballot
This was referred to as the “hanging chad”
The automatic vote tabulators typically would
not count the ballots with hanging chad
A manual recount had to identify ballots with
hanging chad that should have been counted
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Votes may have mistakenly punched a hole for
Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan instead
of for Democratic candidate Al Gore
This confusion may have cost Al Gore the
election
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Many states replaced paper-based systems with
direct recording electronic voting machines. These
systems were not connected to a network
Others have suggested that voting be conducted
via the Internet
Used in 2000 Alaska Republican Presidential preference
poll
 Used in 2000 Arizona Democratic Presidential primary
 United Kingdom has used on-line voting in local elections
since 2001.
 Estonia is first country to vote online in local and national
elections
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Let’s weigh the benefits vs. risks of online
voting in a presidential election
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People who can’t get to the polls could vote
from home
Votes could be counted more quickly
No issues with hanging chad or erasures
Cost less
Eliminate risk of having physical votes
tampered with
Over voting for too many candidates could
easily be prevented
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Gives an unfair advantage to those who are
financially better off. What about the Digital
Divide?
The system that authenticates the the voter
also records the ballot. Some fear loss of
privacy.
Chance of vote selling is increased since the
person selling their vote can now be monitored.
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A server hosing an election would be an
obvious target of a DDoS attack.
Security depends upon the security of the
home computers
Virus could change a person’s vote
Backdoor Trojan could allow a person’s vote to
be observed by an outsider
Attacker could fool voter into connecting to a
phony site to vote and steal the voter’s
credentials
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Utilitarian analysis adds up the positive and negative outcomes to
determine whether online voting is a good action or not
Consider the possible outcome, the value of the outcome on each affected
person, and the number of people affected
One benefit – people would not have to travel to polling place and wait in
line. Estimate that about one hour is spent in voting
Average salary in US is $18 per hour
About 50% of adult Americans vote
Time savings would be worth about $9 for every adult
DDoS may prevent voters from casting their votes
There is potential for great harm if will of voters is not followed
This potential harm is reduced because a) probability of DDoS attack is
low, b) probability of DDoS attack being successful is low, and c)
probability of a DDoS attack changing the outcome of an election is low.
These probabilities may vary considerably from one expert to another, so
this evaluation can tip one way or the other
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Focus is on the importance in the will of each
voter being reflected in that voter’s ballot
Integrity of each ballot is paramount
Eliminating paper records in order to save time
and money or boosting voter turnout is wrong
from this perspective
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A web-based system would make it much easier
for hacker to taint the process on a wide scale
A web-based system would have no paper record
to verify the intent of the voter
Online elections have already been tampered with
Any election system that relies on the security of
personal computers managed by ordinary citizens
will be vulnerable to fraud
Lots of interest on Internet for OnLine Voting. See
http://eballot.votenet.com/