Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Online voting is unfair because it gives an unfair advantage to those who are finan-
cially better off. It will be easier for people with computers and Internet connections at
home to vote.
The same system that authenticates the voter also records the ballot. This makes it
more difficult to preserve the privacy of the voter.
Online voting increases the opportunities for vote solicitation and vote selling.
Suppose person X agrees to vote for candidate Y in return for getting a payment from
Z. If person X votes from his personal computer, he could allow person Z to watch as he
cast his vote for Y, proving that he fulfilled his end of the bargain. This is much less likely
to occur at an official polling place monitored by election officials.
A Web site hosting an election is an obvious target for a DDoS attack. Unlike
corporate Web sites, which have attracted the attention of teenage hackers, a national
election Web site could attract the attention of foreign governments or terrorists trying
to disrupt the electoral process. What happens if the Web site is unavailable and people
are not able to access it before the election deadline?
If voting is done from home computers, the security of the election depends on the
security of these home computers. The next few paragraphs describe ways in which the
security of home computers could be compromised.
A virus could change a person's vote without that person even suspecting what had
happened. Many people have physical access to other people's computers, giving them
the opportunity to install voter-deceiving applications in the weeks leading up to the
election. Alternatively, a rogue programmer or group of programmers within a software
company could sneak in a vote-tampering virus.
A backdoor Trojan lurking in a voter's computer could allow a person's vote to be
observed by an outsider. A backdoor Trojan could even allow an outsider to cast a ballot
in lieu of the rightful voter.
An attacker could fool a user into thinking he was connected to the vote server
when in actuality he was connected to a phony vote server controlled by the attacker.
For example, the attacker could send an email telling voters to click on a link to reach
the polling site. When voters did so, they would be connected to the phony voting site.
The attacker could ask for the voter's credentials, then use this information to connect
to the real voter site and cast a vote for the candidate(s) desired by the attacker.
UTILITARIAN ANALYSIS
A utilitarian analysis must add up the positive and negative outcomes to determine
whether allowing online voting is a good action to take. Recall from Section 2.7.2 that
not all outcomes have equal weight. We must consider the probability of the outcome,
the value of the outcome on each affected person, and the number of people affected.
Sometimes this calculation is relatively straightforward. For example, one of the
benefits of online voting is that people who vote online would not have to travel to
a polling place and wait in line. Suppose online voting replaced polling places in the
United States. This change would affect about 50 percent of adult Americans (the ones
who actually vote) [91]. We can estimate that the average voter spends about an hour
