Comments on: Allow the Oscars to explain why we should never, ever e-vote in a national election

By: Mitchell Glaser

Mitchell Glaser — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 03:05:00 +0000

What can you verify in the current voting system? Nothing.

By: Shinkuhadoken

Shinkuhadoken — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 01:17:00 +0000

You can verify that your money was stolen out of your bank account or that you never received the product you purchased online, and you can make sure something will be done about it.

But how would you know your vote was never counted or that someone else managed to get their vote counted a million times? Or that the party you didn’t vote for isn’t keeping a blacklist of people who didn’t vote for them, and giving this information to your employer, who will then fire you for not voting “correctly.”

By: C W

C W — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:44:00 +0000

We’re talking sub-McDonalds public schools lowest bidder hamburgers, not gastropub.

By: Petzl

Petzl — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:44:00 +0000

I’m sure all the people who are most vociferously objecting to e-voting also never buy things online or access their bank accounts online.

If you aren’t going to trust the internet for e-voting, you should never, ever trust it for e-commerce.

By: C W

C W — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:41:00 +0000

That’s a really dumb criticism. Vote in a public library or coffeeshop if you’ll be “forced to explain”.

Granted, I’m not a fan of online voting. Vote-by-mail as practiced in WA is still more secure for me.

By: C W

C W — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:17:00 +0000

The Academy are likely to be much less liberal than the rest of Hollywood, but yeah.

By: Boundegar

Boundegar — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 23:31:00 +0000

There was cryptographically secure, auditable software available for voting machines. Certain politicians prevented its use.

By: Boundegar

Boundegar — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 23:28:00 +0000

Well, they’re some of the same accounts on several blogs, including this one.

By: Jardine

Jardine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 23:15:00 +0000

I think we all know that if you could vote from home, Cory would be standing over you with a hockey stick while wearing a goalie mask, making sure you vote the right way.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 23:11:00 +0000

I’d rate the risk of coercion at a polling place as higher than the risk of coercion in my home.

By: MrJM

MrJM — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:31:00 +0000

Breaking: Organization notorious for doing things wrong does a thing wrong. More as this story develops...

By: Simon Pribec

Simon Pribec — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:19:00 +0000

Well, not botnets, but compromised computers/backdoors in general. I mean, you can get some awfully gunked up home PCs where people would be voting from.

By: Mitchell Glaser

Mitchell Glaser — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:14:00 +0000

Sounds like it’s baby-with-the-bathwater time at BoingBoing. Just because these notoriously inept people couldn’t do evoting right is no reason to reject the concept. In-person voting isn’t so hot either – looking at the 50 thousand or so disenfranchised presidential voters in Florida alone.

Representative government is my nominee for the biggest boil on the body politic, and the obvious counterweight for it evoting. So let’s get to work – it can’t be harder than finding the Higg’s, m’kay?

By: EH

EH — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:10:00 +0000

Next thing you know, everybody’s required to work until midnight on election day.

By: EH

EH — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:08:00 +0000

Hollywood is composed entirely of liberal extremists, who are the people who were concerned about Diebold machines. Duh.

By: Taavet Ropp

Taavet Ropp — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:04:00 +0000

How would those politicians equip them botnets with valid eIDs?

By: Simon Pribec

Simon Pribec — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:55:00 +0000

I’ve seen a few people calling out at protests here for implentation of direct democracy via internet voting. As a casual follower of the hacker mindset I just can’t trust the concept. Amongst the ideas I get are politicians buying botnets to vote for them.

By: BuelahMan

BuelahMan — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:43:00 +0000

Apples to apples? Or apples to moon rocks?

By: Scott Frazer

Scott Frazer — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:42:00 +0000

McDonald’s makes crappy hamburgers. Clearly this demonstrates that no one should make a hamburger ever.

By: Florian Braun

Florian Braun — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:36:00 +0000

I voted online in the most recent Swiss election/poll, was no trouble at all.

Granted they have a partially online system where they mail you a ballot with a code that you can then use online but still.

By: Martyn Drake

Martyn Drake — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:34:00 +0000

Having worked in high budget VFX post-production for Hollywood studios – they really, really, really, REALLY do not understand technology. From asking me to redact emails through to providing kit that’s obsolete, and reference DVDs that can’t be played back on Linux workstations (legally) – it was a farce.

And then there was the time on a very big budget film when the accounts department and the director was given far more bandwidth than that VFX department when shuttling data back and forth between the studios and vendors.

Given that this latest escapade has massively failed – as has previous attempts at the Academy to protect screeners by introducing a new proprietary disc format especially for them, I can’t say I’m surprised.

Can’t wait for Hollywood to go back to nitro cellulose film. Goodbye eyebrows!

By: Taavet Ropp

Taavet Ropp — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:29:00 +0000

In the era of cameraphones, your view on polling booth privacy demonstrably doesn’t hold water.

As for the risk of coercion, check out what Estonia did: you can vote online as many times as you’d like, but only the last vote given will enter the electronic “ballot box” on election day. Vote once with your boss peeking over your shoulder, vote once with your spouse peeking over your shoulder, vote one last time in private.

By: Steven Bishop

Steven Bishop — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:21:00 +0000

Brazil has been using their own e-voting machines on local and national elections for years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil#The_Brazilian_voting_machines

But the MPAA has a crap process, so let’s never speak of this again.

By: Jardine

Jardine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:14:00 +0000

Even if there was a way to solve the problem of making sure your vote is counted properly, there’s still the issue of coercion with electronic voting. It’s the same issue that exists with mail-in ballots. With a ballot box setup, you go to your booth and fill out your ballot without anyone else there to see how you’re voting. If your boss or spouse or whoever asks you how you voted, you can tell them anything you want and they have no way to know. But if you have to fill out your ballot at a computer or on a piece of paper without enforced privacy, there’s an opportunity for someone to verify that you filled it out how they want you to fill it out.

By: Mace Moneta

Mace Moneta — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:03:00 +0000

Just to clarify: people confuse online voting with online polling; the two have no relationship.

There is open source, cryptographically secure, peer-reviewed, online voting software available from multiple sources. The problem comes up when someone, like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, thinks that this is easy, and hacks together some crap code instead of using the available products.

By: Jardine

Jardine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:02:00 +0000

How do you know those are the same people?

By: jandrese

jandrese — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Just because the octogenarians that run the MPAA can’t figure out technology, we should never try to use technology again?

By: Matthew Bergman

Matthew Bergman — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:57:00 +0000

That’s beyond inept implementation Why can easily do voting online and make it as secure as anything else.

By: Boundegar

Boundegar — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:56:00 +0000

It’s amazing to me the same people who think the Diebold voting machines were rigged or hacked seem perfectly happy with the idea of voting online.