Yes, we know that there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system, but the Estonians are doing their best to get as far away from perfection as possible. According to the latest news reports, Estonia is working up a system to vote from mobile phones. This follows on their earlier web-based Internet voting. What on earth are they thinking?
Let’s review some basics. The Estonian Internet voting scheme builds on the Estonian national ID card, which is a smartcard. You get the appropriate PCMCIA adapter and you can stick it into your laptop. Then, through some kind of browser plug-in, it can authenticate you to the voting server. No card, no voter impersonation. The Estonian system “avoids” the problem of voter bribery / coercion by allowing the voter to cast as many votes as they want, but only the last one actually counts. As I understand it, a voter may also arrive, on election day, at some sort of official polling place and substitute a paper ballot for their prior electronic ballot.
The threats to this were and are obvious. What if some kind of malware/virus/worm contraption infects your web browser and/or host operating system, waits for you to connect to the election server, and then quietly substitutes its own choices for yours? You would never know that the attack occurred and thus would never think to do anything about it. High tech. Very effective. And, of course, somebody can still watch over your shoulder while you vote. At that point, they just need to keep you from voting again. They could accomplish this by simply having you vote at the last minute, under supervision, or they could “borrow” your ID card until it’s too late to vote again. Low tech. Still effective.
But wait, there’s more! The central database must necessarily have your vote recorded alongside your name in order to allow subsequent votes to invalidate earlier votes. That means they’ve almost certainly got the technical means to deanonymize your vote. Do you trust your government to have a database that says exactly for whom you voted? Even if the vote contents are somehow encrypted, the government has all the necessary key material to decrypt it. (And, an aforementioned compromised host platform could be leaking this data, regardless.)
Okay, what about voting by cellular telephone? A modern cell phone is really no different from a modern web browser. An iPhone is running more-or-less the same OS X and Safari browser that’s featured on Apple’s Mac products. Even non-smart-phones tend to have an environment that’s powerful and general-purpose. There’s every reason to believe that these platforms are every bit as vulnerable to software attacks as we see with Windows systems. Just because hackers aren’t necessarily targeting these systems doesn’t mean they couldn’t. Ultimately, that means that the vulnerabilities of the phone system are exactly the same as the web system. No better. No worse.
Of course, crypto can be done in a much more sophisticated fashion. One Internet voting system, Helios, is quite sophisticated in this fashion, doing end-to-end crypto in JavaScript in your browser. With its auditability, Helios gives you the chance to challenge the entire client/server process to prove that it maintained your vote’s integrity. There’s nothing, however, in Helios to prevent an evil browser from leaking how you voted, thus compromising your anonymity. An evil election server could possibly be prevented from compromising your anonymity, depending on how the decryption keys are managed, but all the above privacy concerns still apply.
Yes, of course, Internet and cell-phone voting have lots of appeal. Vote from anywhere! At any time! If Estonia did more sophisticated cryptography, they could at least have a hope at getting some integrity guarantees (which they appear to be lacking, at present). Estonians have absolutely no privacy guarantees and thus insufficient protection from bribery and coercion. And we haven’t even scratched the surface of denial-of-service attacks. In 2007, Estonia suffered a large, coordinated denial-or-service attack, allegedly at the hands of Russian attackers. I’m reasonably confident that they’re every bit as vulnerable to such attacks today, and cell-phone voting would be no less difficult for resourceful attackers to disrupt.
In short, if you care about voter privacy, to defeat bribery and coercion, then you want voters to vote in a traditional polling place. If you care about denial of service, then you want these polling places to be operable even if the power goes out. If you don’t care about any of that, then consider the alternative. Publish in the newspaper a list of every voter and how they voted, for all the world to see, and give those voters a week to submit any corrections they might desire. If you were absolutely trying to maximize election integrity, nothing would beat it. Of course, if you feel that publishing such data in the newspaper could cause people to be too scared to vote their true preferences, then maybe you should pay more attention to voter privacy.
(More on this from Eric Rescorla’s Educated Guesswork.)
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