Online Voting

I'm not saying it is impossible to find out how someone voted. I am saying it is incredibly difficult and time consuming. In a GE anyone wishing to do so would have to thumb through tens of thousands of ballot papers post count, even assuming they could get access to them. Can you think of a reason ( apart from possible fraud) where this would be worth doing?

Keep paper voting.

It doesn't entirely prevent fraud, tampering and interference, but it significantly increases the scale of the effort required to cheat an election.

I simply do not see any way in which electronic voting with current technology could ever provide the same levels of surety that the election results were genuine.

I think we can close the thread.

I've been building websites for decades, I've got a house full of network-connected tech and I do almost everything online. I wouldn't be in favour of online voting.

Voting has a paradox that other online services don't. For things like online banking or HMRC services, you want to establish that a person is who they claim to be. There are good, robust and secure ways of doing that nowadays.

The problem is, voting is supposed to be anonymous so you can't use any of those methods.

You would have to start with an identity layer that establishes that you really are a person who is eligible to vote, which then lets in you access a voting layer that is then anonymous. It's one thing doing that in real life but on a globally accessible network, between those two steps is a whole world of vulnerabilities.

If you're Ivan the spy with a British passport, you can legitimately get past the first system and you have everything you need to invite your chums to access the second system.

The other thing is that you are trusting the Government to keep those layers separate. It would be absolutely trivial to track somebody from the identity layer to their vote. It's difficult to believe that trust wouldn't be betrayed, either through incompetence or malice.

The worst case and if it was implemented really badly, is that once you've proven your eligibility, you are given the key to the voting system and you can pass that key on to anyone.

Yeah it's probably cheaper, easier and more effective to do that because social media companies don't really have much incentive to give a st. As long as it keeps people clicking on their ads, they're not going to spend too much effort combatting it.

I wonder how many Pistonheads accounts have been set up to do it...

I believe they are only invoked (for want of a better word) should it be possible to impact the outcome. If there is a 10,000 vote margin and 10 tendered votes, they are binned. If they could make a difference then looking for the questionable begins (or maybe that only happens after the tender votes are checked to see if it could make a difference to the outcome. I’m not sure).

Spot on analysis.

I'll also add on insider threat. Someone is going to have access to the infrastructure, to the databases, to the code. It's a far less time consuming and resource intensive task to tell a database to update 10 million rows to show The Rabid Racists Party recieved the vote, rather than the Loony Leftist Blob Party. Much more so than having people erase pencil markings on 10 million ballot papers. It also only requires one person with the right access, rather than thousands in the right places all over the country.

It would be a case of toeing the line.

Excellent point. I guess you'd have to use Blockchain journaling, or similar - it just becomes unfathomably complicated and as the poster above said, it just takes the ignorant blokes in the pub, or foreign state shill to start suggesting its bent, along with the wrong party getting in, and we end up with unrest.

Explaining that it's impossible because of highly technical reasons is not going to convince the layman.

And there might be a bug, anyway (see: Horizon scandal)

Awful Idea. Keep voting away from silicon.