At some point in the near future we will all be voting online, but before that happens Americans need to be able to trust such a system. We already know that no one in our government can protect their own emails much less ours. Nor can they protect the personal data we give to the various government agencies. People don’t trust electronic voting machines and for good reason, so how will they ever come to trust online voting or voting via smartphone? At some point they’ll have to, but how can we be sure there won’t be voter fraud?
Not long ago, we were discussing this at our think tank and one member noted: “When you create a system that works entirely online, you do open the possibility for hacking. Which is a very big issue, especially with the hacker group called “Anonymous” that has been very good at what they do. The only solution I would have for this is to create a system with too many firewalls and security decryption soft anyone without government level access to get through.”
Well, I completely agree with the hacking problem and our National Security forces would surely put in a back-door to follow the mindsets of targets or people of interest, or foreign spies in our midst, thus, the hackers would have a way in of course. The problem with government access is that at some point one would have to surrender all trust to the government and in human history that has usually turned into a disaster for the sovereign individual.
Right now we trust government to keep us safe, protect our borders, and now our health, none of which they seem to be able to do very well, and yet, we are to trust the government more, with our personal information, thoughts and supposed freedoms, as those very freedoms are being removed? Quite the challenge I guess, how would you build such a multi-layered firewall system and encryption scheme for smart-phone voting?
Ah, now that is the 50 billion dollar question which is about how much the government will spend to build such a secure system whether it works or not. That last comment comes from the dismal failure of the ObamaCare website that they spend over 100 million dollars to build and it was easily hackable by a 12-year old – not too promising in promoting trust in government run online systems.
So there are two big issues here:
1.) Trust,
2.) Security
It appears we aren’t there yet, although I’d say we are very close on number two and we have enough smart people to get that right if we keep the lobbyists out of the process of bidding and implementation. The trust part, well, that might be a while. Think on this.
https://youtu.be/jq-Kd0A5joI
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