Election nowadays is a completely different story from decades ago. Everything from campaign advertisements to polling analysis is all going digital. Voting process is not an acceptation. From the very first voting machine in 1920, voting machine was designed to fight voting fraud. Now, many parts of the country use electronic voting machines. However, whenever things going electronic, there is the concern about security. It is for sure harder to hack a voting machine than to tamper the old phone voting system, but it is not an impossible task. Here is a youtube video showing how to hack a voting machine.
Nowadays, voting machine is not the only concern people have
in this brand new century.
Everything in our life is going electronic in a blink of eyes. Information security on electronic
devices becomes more and more important.
However, security is not a new problem specific to electronic
devices. It is also possible to
hack old paper or phone system. Electronic
information is easy to carry, store, change and copy, which also make it easy
to still and interference. From
this point of view, electronic seems made information unsecured. On the other hand, instead of pills of
papers, small electronic chips also made information smaller and easier to
guard in the physical world. So
did electronic bring better or worse of security?
This is such a tricky topic. I am not entirely sure how I feel about electronic voting. Mostly because I am not quite sure how secure it will actually be. It seem these days people can hack into anything so why would they not be able to hack into voting machines? On election day I read quite a few articles about the problems many cities were having with their electronic machines, for example in one city (I can't recall which one right now) machines were counting votes for Obama as votes for Romney. Things like this make me quite wary of the evolution of the voting process. But on the other hand, the amount of paper we go through in order to vote is ridiculous and wasteful.
ReplyDeleteI agree with The Social Shutter blogger that electronic voting is extremely error prone. I think that computers and the internet are excellent technology but they also are easily hacked, distorted or can simply mess up or break. I think that the paper form of voting will likely stay for some time as most American's are wary about the dangers of electronic voting. Yet, I think there can also be some level of error in paper voting. Increasing studies of technology may be able to discover a new system that can reduce paper waste and decrease chances of error in voting. In addition, it would make election results known much quicker.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, the major basic flaw with electronic voting machines is the fact that they are produced by privately owned companies. Every individual or company has their own incentives and desires, as we learned from the Diebold voting machine company. How can it be legal or accepted that the owner of a company that plays such a large role in the results of national and local elections can promise certain results? That seems so sketchy and so scary. It's not reasonable to ask the nation to revert back to completely paper-based voting or to other, non-electronic methods because these all hold room for error as well. I think the only legitimate answer in our modern times is to have the federal government play a larger oversight role in election procedures. Maybe even create a bureau that designs and produces the voting machines to take away the inherent personal goals of owners of the private companies that currently do this job. Something really needs to change here, and fast.
ReplyDeleteI think voting online or by machines is extremely risky. What if the the votes get doubled, the software goes down, loses votes, takes away votes? All without having any documentation on papers? We could lose so many potential votes. Accuracy is the most important thing in counting votes and electronical voting may not correctly reflect the intent of each voter.
ReplyDeleteWhen researching, I found these examples of cases where such voting methods failed:
In Fairfax County, Virginia in 2003, a programming error in the electronic-voting machines caused them to mysteriously subtract 100 votes from one candidate's totals.
In a 2003 election in Boone County, Iowa the electronic vote-counting equipment showed that more than 140,000 votes had been cast in the municipal elections, even though only half of the county's 50,000 residents were eligible to vote.
In San Bernardino County, California in 2001, a programming error caused the computer to look for votes in the wrong portion of the ballot in 33 local elections, which meant that no votes registered on those ballots for that election. A recount was done by hand.
And who could forget the situation in Florida in 2000, when an electronic voting machine gave Al Gore a final vote count of negative 16,022 votes.
As I previously mentioned on another blog, I figured that security would be the biggest impediment to online voting systems, but I think there is already enough technology out there that would allow some sense of security. As long as we update our voting systems, be the electronic or not there will always exist the potential. But by continuously modernizing (even if it means in electronic forms) we can keep hackers on their toes and keep them one step behind us.
ReplyDeleteI think iris or eye technology could be used simply using a build-in camera on a computer. A person would log into the site using their full name and social security number (SSN), and have their eye scanned and the vote is cast! This would allow for only a single SSN to be used and prevent for fraud given that your iris signature would be unique. For those without access to a computer or not having all the necessary hardware can simply go to voting stations as usual and use computers provided there. As it is I’m sure that voting information and results is transmitted via online networks so the threat of hacking should not be any greater then it is today.