Why Don't We Vote Online in Elections? - TLDR Explains
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- Опубліковано 25 тра 2019
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Voting can be complicated a time consuming, and having your say in an election can take its toll. That's why many have discussed taking voting online to make engaging in democracy quicker and easier. However, Estonia is the only country to take it super seriously, using online i-voting in every election for the last 14 years. We discuss why Estonia uses it, and why other countries have been so cautious to follow in their footsteps.
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" You have to have trust in the political system" Well that rules out the UK ever having this.
Nicholas Castleton LOL
Well said
I doubt Americans can trust their government either. I (barely) trust mine today, but who knows who will be elected next, and then...
I dont want this
The U.S. most emphatically cannot trust its political system, not only at the federal level but even at the local level. Leaving aside numerous attempts to disenfranchise voters, at one time many of our e-voting machines wouldn't even register votes for Democratic candidates. (I wouldn't be surprised to learn that these "defective" machines were never fixed, and simply restricted to Democrat-leaning districts.) At this point the only procedure I'd trust is one that produced a paper ballot. (My district has paper ballots, being majority white. Yes, I went there.) Even then I'm not convinced a bunch of paper ballots might not get "lost" or "disqualified" if elections don't go the "right" way.
Note: Apologies to all of our North Korean viewers, we accidentally included the entire Korean peninsula in the South Korea graphic. This was entirely accidental and we will ensure to correct our North and South Korea graphics.
No one from North Korea can watch this, UA-cam is banned.
If they ARE watching it, they are criminals and show report to the nearest reeducation camp IMMEDIATELY.
@@impressionQ Please report to your nearest police station and submit to reeducation. You dissident.
@@kellscorner1130 Please don't joke about that. This is happening to actual people. It's not a joke.
@@kellscorner1130 Wow, is it not obvious that they were being sarcastic? Of course they don't have any North Korean viewers, that's the joke! r/woosh
I'm pretty sure you meant "Apologies to all of our Best Korean viewers..."
"I'm sure such a system like this could never be abused" - Putin
"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." Sun Tzu
We already know i-voting can (and has been) rigged. At this point, the old adage is true: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, well I guess I must like it.
No major powers would want to hack an Estonian election.
**Laughs in Russian**
*Laughs in 2007 cyberattack* *
why would Russia even bother? if they want Estonia to do something they can just shut down the gas pipeline mid winter.
In Russian... or in American, remember that Estonia is another NATO-slave.
sirBrouwer Blocking a pipe line would antagonise the Estonian people. Meanwhile influencing elections is far less likely to antagonise people because even if you do get caught, its has less of a direct effect on peoples lives than having gas cut off.
@@LuisAldamiz Indeed. Estonia, like most of Eastern Europe is a lawful part of the Russian empire.
I HIGHLY encourage everyone to see Computerphile's video on online voting, featuring Tom Scott. It's funny, scary, and eye opening.
Do you have the link?
It's mainly about Electronic voting with voting machines, but the problems are mostly the same.
@@danielsimon5178 indeed, the problems with internet voting are worse.
He also went through why internet voting is worse.
Link please someone?
This channel is exactly what is needed in the modern day. An informative, easy to understand medium that appeals to young people, giving them an informed opinion on UK politics
It's pretty weird that you comment this on a video teporting about the estonian voting system though. xD
*reporting
You are right! UK needed this channel before the Brexit referendum!
Jean Luc Piccard True 😂, I thought it was about time to praise this channel tho
@Johan Abdullah Holm Why just Europeans? It is interesting for all countries.
As a cyber security student I can see this abused. There's always gonna be someone somewhere that can beat the system
People can beat the system as it stands
>As a cyber security *student*
Hah....that's cute. You really think you know what you are talking about. You are right though, yes, it can (and already has been) abused like crazy.
@@tygonmaster what was the point of your comment?
@@user-ei7ed6zy9k What's the point of yours?
You literally agreed with my point.... after trying to downplay my credibility. judging by the fact that this is the second video in a row you replied to my comment, I'll assume you're just an obsessed liberal
You're literally working harder than the MPs that literally decide the fate of Brexit
Welcome to politics, where doing your job well is second to bribes, circlejerking, and idiocy.
*L i t T e R a l L y*
I literally agree that that is literally what he is literally doing.
please have mercy for the ESL who lacks vocabulary its shit enough learning English
Yo 10:22 didn't know South Korea took over North Korea
Any day now!
He just predicted the future!
You are right, pretty big mistake!
Both Korea's claim to own all of Korea.
@Arthur Jenoudet what is that beautiful place in your profile photo?
I am an Estonian and I think that the best side of I-voting is the fact that I can vote from abroad. I was doing an Erasmus+ project in Turkey during this spring's parliamentary elections and thanks to this I was able to vote from my home with no difficulties whatsoever.
I was friends with a bunch of Erasmus students. I always think of them fondly ^.^
Mailing paper ballots is a thing that exists.
I was also able to vote in those same elections. I'm a Russian bot that infiltrated the computer of one of the many people who coded the website. All I did was change a couple of lines of code. Now me and my friends in Russia can vote as many times as we like on your internet voting system. Thanks Estonia.
I think anyone will agree on the accessibility benefits of I-voting.
It's just that the security vulnerabilities seem to highly outweigh these benefits.
Generally speaking, "easy of use" and "security" tend to be diametrically opposed in the world of cyber security.
It'd be ideal if one could do their internet banking anywhere, even over public WiFi.
However, doing so opens up a plethora of security vulnerabilities; For example a Man-in-the-middle-attack via WiFi spoofing.
This is of course a wildly different scenario, but a the same principle holds for electoral voting.
Estonia has a seemingly very competent and robust system, however, they still have to use a myriad of third party infrastructure, programming languages, hardware and the like.
With each step of added complexity one opens more possible vulnerabilities one needs to safeguard.
I just graduated with a Masters in Cybersecurity and my thesis was about having the U.S. use a system similar to Estonia. In the U.S., each individual State manages elections (local and federal). There are about a dozen states with smaller populations than Estonia. What if Vermont, New Hampshire, and a couple of other smaller states tried it? Should it go well, more states will likely adopt it, bit by bit. Here in Spain, one political party uses a blockchain online solution for internal voting and policy making. Several political parties in the U.S. have used it at times for internal voting, too.
Moreover, with paper ballots, many more people touch the ballots which means more chances for error or manipulation. Counting mail-in ballots weeks after the election causes politicians to put the election results in question. In any case, I think by 2030, most countries will offer some kind of "i-voting" as the younger generations take over. My 2¢...
I disagree that introducing I-voting would swing the vote to the youth. You simply allow an extra way in which you can vote, opening up the voting process to more people who are already eligible to vote. If anything, the current system favours the elderly who don't need to take time off work.
Yeah and saying it would 'unfairly' swing the vote to the youth is kind of ironic in that it would be allowing more people to vote, better representing the nation's views..
@@Venetii_ And lets not forget the youth voter turnout is always the lowest in any election. It's a pretty weak argument to throw out there in the first place.
Yeah, and the youth is primarily composed of confounded lazy morons, so assuming they'll vote even if all they need to do is swipe at their phone a few times is a stretch.
No need to take time off voting stations are open on several days and from like 0800 to 2100 hours. No person works that long. It is illegal to work those hours even with OT. It is even possible to vote in a different municipality if the election serves the same end goal (e.a. National elections but not local elections). Or someone else can vote on your behalf with your written permission and some other criteria which must be fulfilled. Problem solved.
In Switzerland, IVoting was aborted due to security issues. It depends on how politicians classify the safety threats. At least elections wouldn't have to be postponed due to the glue on the envelopes not sticking well enough. (Austria 2016)
I mean all voting is vulnerable to security issues. from bribing voters to simply intimidating anyone who goes near the ballot. Even postal votes can be lost in the post or damaged.
The real question is are the security issues greater than the type of voting currently used? Or is it a politicially motivated argument to push away younger voters in favour of the older ones?
@@Madhattersinjeans - The likelihood of major problems in a transparent box system is negligible. Voter buying is just too expensive to make a significant difference, postal voting is indeed a potential problem, that's why some countries just do not allow it at all (for example Greece: you must always vote in person).
@@Madhattersinjeans I'd argue it's easier to have one person run a script that hacks i-voting than it is to manipulate multiple polling stations that have observers from each party present.
There are challenges with any voting system and people will try to find a way around any "safe guard" that you try to enforce. In the 1950's to 60's the Chicago area was one of the worst locations for dead voters casting votes, then the "hanging chads" where the worn out voting machines would fail to properly punch out holes for computerized reading of the votes, then time and time again publicized hacking of e-voting machines to show how easy they could be programmed to alter votes then wipe their evidence of existing on the machine, then the missing and lost mail in ballots being found in dumps. In the US, e-voting machines and mail in ballots are at the greatest risk of tampering or not being counted (in some states they have options to not count mail in ballots if the vote results have little likelihood of being significantly altered).
@@chriscohlmeyer4735 - Or having a common name such as Michael Jackson or Maria Rodriguez. 3 million voters (mostly from black and latino minorities) were prevented from voting under "suspicion of double voting" just because of that reason of having a name that other people also have in other states. The whole US "democracy" thing is a total fiasco: we don't even know the amount of abstention because the filters aiming to prevent voting are massive, we know it's at least 50%, i.e. at least one of every two adult citizens can't or won't vote. This is a massive vote against the system but nobody bothers mentioning how broke the US "democracy" is (has been for quite a long time but getting even worse).
Blockchains are not sufficient to make sure that votes are anonymous. They would even make it much easier to track who voted for what. It would go without saying that each entry into the blockchain would need to provide something unique about the voter to ensure the same voter couldn't vote multiple times in an election or make sure only the voter's last vote would count. If someone were to force the voter to vote a certain way, they could have a way to make sure the vote sticks and that the person voted like they wanted. In a paper ballot election, the fact that a person is alone in a room with no external surveillance makes such methods much harder and infeasible. If the identifier were re-used in later elections, like if it's based a identity card, the voting habits of that same person could be tracked through multiple elections.
Not even this. The phrase "the security of blockchain" is an immediate red flag for the whole idea. If you can take over a voting system just by accruing a probabilistic amount of power/stake in the system, then it's really not secure, because it won't protect against attacks from nation-states which is precisely what needs to be protected against.
It's a nice idea, but it's shown that _it can_ be hacked which is a major concern. Given the option would you want to straight up change the results of an election in UK, US, France, Germany, Canada, China, Russia, Korea? (esp. if you were an opposing government)
However in countries like Estonia, which are
-small
-fairly neutral politcally / relatively low-profile
-fairly ahead technologically
-prone to poor weather
then it could work
I think that several of these criteria are either irrelevant or don’t require online voting:
- There’s no reason why small countries should have better chances of succeeding with online voting. Indeed, since distances to a polling station, all other things being equal, is likely to be shorter in a small than in a large country, the correlation is probably the opposite. If by small/large you refer to population size that’s only slightly less irrelevant since you can simply employ more ballot officers from a large population (India being the most extreme example).
- Political neutrality or attempts to keep a low foreign policy profile is no safeguard against potential foreign intervention - and Estonia is a “frontline state” within NATO with recent historical disputes with Russia.
- Sure, a certain level of technology is necessary and in Estonia, online voting is coupled with a high degree of other online public sector (self) services. However, I doubt that the technical aspects are really an important barrier in terms of implementing such a system, considering the other kinds of online (self) services offered in even fairly poor countries and the proliferation of smart phones.
- Prone to poor weather aka the accessibility/convenience argument is actually not a particularly strong one for online voting since similar results can be achieved by a combination of early voting (either in person or by mail) and mobile polling stations (well known in countries with long traditions of their citizens being abroad, wether in a merchant marine, expats or at foreign missions).
I consider the greatest weakness of such a “pure” online voting system to be twofold:
1) The lack of a “paper trail” which is more difficult to tamper with from outside (classic methods of cheating such as ballot stuffing are mainly conducted by insiders). Now, I doubt that massive manipulation of online voting would be likely, as it would immediately raise suspicions. However, even relatively small manipulations could tip close elections or either push extreme fringe parties over an electoral threshold or otherwise help them gain more than their fair share of the vote/seats.
2) The far greater threat against the secrecy of the ballot. This is extremely problematic in terms of both external actors getting access to voting records and the possibility of internal government surveillance. And yes, there are historical precedents for this, such as clearly illegal (as in being in clear, if secret, contravention of the law) registration and surveillance of various left wing political party members for entirely legal and ordinary political work during the Cold War. This happened even in such a small and otherwise democratic state as Denmark.
@@DebatingWombat
Great point about Estonia being next to Russia, even if i seems fairly neutral, natural geography alone makes a potential target
Voting by mail is also a good way to avoid poor weather and yes potentially.
And yes the secrecy of the ballot is of paramount importance
"Might maybe swing the vote unfairly towards the youth vote"
Yeah, it would be so unfair if too many young people voted, only old people can be trusted to vote the right way!
_the right way™_
There is not just a hacking problem: If the final vote at the deadline is not guaranteed to be secret, this makes it possible for people to sell their votes for money. Estonia is a very innovative country, but the E-Vote system is a horrible idea.
You can vote multiple times, latest overriding the previous ones. And the physical voting, which happens after i-voting is already closed, overriding electronic vote. So if you are coerced into voting by someone, you can always change it later either in private, or voting the old fashion way
@@netiturtle but what if the voter is not being forced, but is co-operating aka vote selling. That is as great a risk as voter intimidation.
@@aritakalo8011 vote selling is possible with any voting system
@@netiturtle not with proof. How is the buyer to know the seller is honest. In paper ballot voting the vote is cast in seclusion (at extreme with all recording means removed, as in Italy where Mafia started asking people to camera photo the filled ballot). Any extra markings? Vote is voided.
In remote internet voting the buyer can be present and observe vote being cost. It is easy to hand over the E-ID and thus prevent repeat cast. Egually easy (with aid of the seller) is to verify person stayed away from voting station for election day.
Yes in any system one can sell vote. In internet voting it is just magnitudes more secure for the buyer on the delivery of the service.
In paper ballot secret vote securing the confidence of delivery is hard. Thus reducing the incentive to buy votes greatly.
As the Italy case shows, this isn't a hypothetical. Vote buying happens. Heck it might happen constantly in Estonia. nobody just knows since the voting doesn't happen in controlled environment where one can spot the signs.
There might be a stadium full audience behind the I-Voter watching what vote they cast and still the Estonian election officials would bee none the wiser.
@@aritakalo8011 Only in a situation where voter is kidnapped etc to prevent re-vote or physical vote, would i-vote be less "secret". You however are describing a situation where voter is willing to sell the vote. A willing seller can take a snapshot of the paper, activity which cant be monitored due to need for secrecy, stadium full of audience sitting just outside the voting box would be none the wiser.
If anything, its easier for the seller to "scam" the buyer, show the i-vote and then either re-vote or give his vote on paper. Again, assuming he/she is not kidnapped
I wish you wouldn't have that dead silence at the start of the vids. I keep making the mistake of turning volume right up. 😂
Love your / the teams work regsurdless
Have to wonder if you should be allowed to vote if the learning curve is so steep for you.lmao
I actually appreciated the absence of the usual 1-minute "before we start"-marketing introduction. This aggressive pushing of all their media platforms make me want to subscribe *less* .
Good video TLDR News. I do have a correction to make though: your South Korea with shoes-character contains the entire Korean peninsula.
Daniel Bolstad maybe that’s a little political message 🤔😅 Germany has done it in the past and hopefully Korea will achieve the same one day.
Jonas Gillmann There will be nuclear war before a United Korea lol
Daniël yes, pretty big mistake!
JayJay5244 North Korea will never use their nuclear weapons. They know they’ll be whipped out within minutes if they were to do so. They’re not dumb. They only need them as a threat because otherwise they would’ve likely been invaded already. I believe they’ll unite one day even if that’s 20, 30 or heck even 50 years from now
@@jonasgillmann Even without nukes, N-Korea has a really big army and a lot of rockets, ready to destroy Seoul in minutes. Unlikely anybody will invade.
Example of abuse of the postal voting system. Worked in an area of Asian Pakistani were a young (meaning not mentally mature) 17 year old came in bragging about how he had voted. I told him he couldn't have because only 17 years old. He then explained that his Father had set up postal voting for the family as soon as it started and always voted on behalf of his wife (the lads Mother) because she was not interested in politics as she could not speak or understand English. His Father had died but the postal vote for his Mother still came and now also his eldest sister who was 18 near 19 years old. Because of tradition this immature 17 year old was now considered the 'man of the house' so his Mother gave him her voteing card and when his sister refused to give him hers the Mother had stepped in and forced her daughter to hand over her voting rights to the younger brotger. So the boy was 1. Under age to vote. 2. Voted illegally. 3 voted twice. This was not seen by him as illegal when I said it was because "its tradtion in pakistani families that 'men' rule the house and make these devisionsd" I was told.
Pakistani family or not, that mother was irresponsible and broke the law wilfully. If her husband is not around the decision of casting votes is down to her whether she likes it or not, or even her daughter who would legally be able to vote on her mothers behalf if the mother wasnt capable for some reason.
Tradition or not that is really sexist behaviour. The mother is saying that the younger underage brother is more mature thinker and better than his adult sister. I don't mean to shit on other cultures, but there's a difference between harmless tradition and blatant harmful sexism. It's saying to the sister 'No matter how old you are, all your decisions have to go through either your father or brother and even husband if you get one.'
I feel so sad for the sister who essentially had her vote taken away by her own brother and her mother forced her to. :(
@@JustAnotherPerson4U I agree with everything you say but that's the world they live in within the UK! Partly because of tradition which includes sexisum, higher-archy also because of getoisum of societies and also because people don't speak or read English therefore don't know their rights so taken advantage of ! But the story is 100% true and not the only one I know of!
There's not only the problem of hacking, there's also anonymity questions. With pen & paper votes you can be anonymous. There's only a record that you voted, not who you voted for. With any kind of electronic voting (and particularly Internet voting) there the capability to track your vote.
Also with i-voting you can't verify that the person who voted did it freely and not under someone's supervision.
@@MK-je7kz as the video said... You can vote multiple times.. if they watch you vote.. just vote that and change it after. What I have a problem is that the hacking is possible. They don't see but what happens if it is already done without their knowledge???
@@MuiKaHo What makes you think that a person who supervises someone's voting, would let them keep their voting card for re-voting?
@@MK-je7kz you would literally have to kidnap the person for a week (it's not a voting card, it's an id card)
That's a lot of effort and risk for one vote!
@@MK-je7kz There are always some risks in every election method, but the risks must be managed. You can buy votes in paper election. A method to manage that risk is to forbid taking any photos. This doesn't entirely mitigate the risk, as you can't guarantee 100% that no photos were taken. At least not without intruding heavily on the voters privacy (which would be another huge problem for fair voting).
So in i-voting there obviously is a risk of a violent boss or family member in coercing someone to vote in a particular way. The option to change vote afterwards is a way to manage that risk. It doesn't eliminate the risk entirely, but does considerably lower it.
There is no way to guarantee a 100% risk free election and thus there has to be a consideration, what types of risks are acceptable and how much must they be managed to be acceptable. In the case of coercion with i-voting, there simply isn't enough reported cases to consider it too much of a risk. If coercion in i-voting would be taking place in a wide scale, it would be an actual problem, but in this case in reality, we are not seeing it as a major issue. Were things to change and new data emerge about this being a serious and often occuring situation, I'm sure the electoral comittee, politicians and society in general would take a different approach and consider the risk too big. But so far this is just a theoretical risk with a low or very low chance of occurring and isn't therefore a reason enough to stop i-voting.
7:25 "there is no super power which would want to interfere in Estonia's voting"
Causally forgets Russia
To be fair, if Russia cared enough to interfere then they probably would, regardless of online voting.
And the USA, which is the actual master of NATO and the Internet.
Russia is no super power, they are a nuclear power with GDP smaller than Italy. Do we call Italy super power now?
Samuel Watson People voting for populist/pro Russia parties vote traditionally and people voting for center-liberal/liberal/social democrates vote using i-voting, so...
@@666Tomato666 Russia is not an economic superpower anymore but it still is from a military/intelligence/espionage point of view.
The quick and short answer to your titled question is: digital WHATEVER can be hacked.
We don't vote electronically because it's a stupid idea that puts way too much complication and way too many vulnerabilities into something that is pretty well secured now.
>Something that is pretty well secured now.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA....you really think that, huh?
Physical systems can be subverted too though. It is perfectly legitimate to state that no system, including I-voting, can ever be 100% secure, but it would be foolish to act as if paper ballots are somehow more secure.
@@Megalomaniakaal Pysical systems have a major advantage when scaling your attack. The more votes you want to change the bigger your investment has to be. Not true for electronic voting.
@@StaStestiStoStu Yes, but who other than major forces would bother with any of it anyways. Besides for the paper ballots it's only worth attacking the counting stations, just as with the Estonian I-voting you have to get physical access to the counting server. Again, I'm not claiming one is somehow more secure than the other, rather that I wouldn't trust either one over the other.
@@Megalomaniakaal We don't know who might bother because we don't know how costly it is. It might be researchers like they did in 2014 to prove a point, it might be a bored kid from his desk because he just want to have fun. The code of the voting server is online, so in case there is a vulnerability there people will try to exploit it. With the paper voting we have some understanding of who might bother because we can somehow estimate the costs.
I greatly enjoyed this video. I would love to see TLDR take on more interviews in the future especially in the UK.
I do think this is one of the best videos that have been put on the channel. It was very informative and interesting.
Great video! Keep up the great work! I love this channel! One of my new favorites!!
Everyone go and see Tom Scotts video on this topic!
Exactly. Online voting is stupid.
This channel is honestly so great. Making high quality, unbiased, informative videos that are completely unparalleled on UA-cam at the moment. Well done lads keep up the good work!
See Tom Scott's video on this
@TheLazy0ne links don't work, search for "Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile
"
But do note that he talks about E-voting ... which has little to nothing todo with the topic at hand. Ie. there is a reason why Estonia does not have E-voting and no plans to ever have one. It's just too dumb to even try. IMHO.
@@googlepask7551 I-voting is E-voting over the internet so most of the problems apply
I suppose you also think Jon Snow and Daenerys are unrelated
@@matejlieskovsky9625 No, it is not. The attack surfaces are fundamentally different - so are their purposes and implementations. Thous two are not the same. If you are not aware of that, as you seem to indicate, then you don't know what you are talking about - act accordingly. Also, one of them (E-voting) is unusable in practice as it has way too many inherently unsolvable issues concerning already pre-existing threats. A no-go from the start.
9:05 she obviously missed the democratic republic (freedom class) 101 class in school.
"You need to have trust in the political system"
The problem with I-voting is not the lack of trust in the bureaucracy that runs political system, but instead the fact that you now have to trust the system wouldn't be hacked and the results manipulated. You have to put faith in a system that can be hacked by anyone in the world. That's in a much larger contrast to paper ballots which is a lot harder to rig.
As they briefly mention at the end, Blockchain may be a possible solution. It works by basically everyone involved having a digital ledger on their device (this is built into the voting system/app). So when a vote is cast it's noted in everyone's ledger. So if someone were to tamper with a vote, they would mismatch.
No, “blockchain” does not solve any of the problems of e-voting. It was designed for Bitcoin and it “works” for that niche somewhat, but voting has a very different set of problems.
@@hikari_no_yume hey, can you detail them or link me to a resource for it? I'd be really interested to find out more.
I don't know of a good single resource to point to. I can say that the blockchain basically only solves one problem (how to have a somewhat functional banking system where nobody is trusted and make it hard to attack), and it does that in the most horrendously inefficient way (wasting ever-increasing amounts of electricity). Voting is a different problem. For example, it is acceptable for a cryptocurrency system to have everything be public. But for voting, the secret ballot is incredibly important. There is also the issue that in a cryptocurrency system, it is not important to control who can access it and to prevent them having multiple identities, but for a voting system that is also incredibly important, so that each person only has one vote. The only solution to that is a central authority, and if you have a central authority then you do not need a distributed blockchain system, it is completely pointless.
@@hikari_no_yume thanks for the info. I'll look further into it
Physical voting: attacks scale very badly. Relatively easy to audit.
Electronic voting: attacks are zeroth-order; it's roughly as hard to change one vote as a thousand votes. Hard to audit.
"Swing the vote unfairly towards the youth-vote", how is that unfair though? They have the right to vote don't they? If elderly people are not voting, that's nobody but their own fault is it?
Also, the youth are the ones that's going to inherit this planet. Maybe that's not so bad a thing after all?
yeah, people that will have to live the longest with the results of the vote having a bigger say, as a social group, is the morally right thing to do
@@666Tomato666 totally agree, I mean why give them a vote at all? Clearly people that have worked their whole lives and contributed massively to our society should have no say in how its run.
@@matthewrichard9626 _because_ they have been contributing to the society their whole lives, they voted multiple times already, they have already shaped it, so they effectively have far more say how it is run now
and I didn't say "no say", I said "less say"
@@666Tomato666 let's create a system where one person's voice is literally worth less than another's. What a beautiful world that would be. I mean everytime that happens in history it works out so well. Clearly the morally right thing to do too.
@@matthewrichard9626 "person's voice is literally worth less than another's"
again, I said no such thing
reading comprehension, do you use it?
How didn't I know you were in Estonia? I would have loved to see you guys!
"You need to have a basic trust in your political system"
NO! Voting is in most cases set up on distrust. We assume we don't trust the system so how are we going to make sure that we can still trust the results?
Also saving your the id of the voter with his vote is a bad idea, it means that their vote can be sold. They say they don't, but you can also vote multiple times and only the last vote will count. The only way that can work if there is some way to know what they voted previously.
ID cards are used to make sure each person only casts one vote but it doesn't compromise anonymity. You can keep track of which ID cards voted without being able to know who that card belongs to.
@@aspuzling Well, an ID car works by tying the card number to your personal identity..... So if the ID card works as an ID card they always know which person an certain card identifies.
Love your videos! Keep up the good work
Great quality of video guys!
This is a great video. Thank you!
So even after it got hacked they still use it?
Surprised me too!
The system itself wasn't hacked. Someone claimed they hacked a replica in a lab. There were reasons not to trust that claim.
The reasons for not trusting the security research were politically motivated. The Estonian system is weak at several points and a sufficiently sophisticated attacker (what country neighbours Estonia and might have an interest in its elections?) could alter them untraceably if done right.
@ugh The security research itself was politically motivated. The people doing it weren't as independent or unbiased as they claimed and their hypothetical security flaws were either less severe than they claimed or had been already accounted for.
I've read the research. The researchers are not from Estonia and so do not have an Estonian political bias, and are noted security researchers in their field outside Estonia. The only truth to accusations of bias is that they did present their research with an Estonian political party which doesn't support e-voting, but their research is independent and not tainted by that.
The flaws they point out are very much valid. Some of them are indeed somewhat mitigated by the design, but the fundamental weaknesses they point out have not been fixed.
NSW in Australia recently introduced i-voting for the state election held earlier this year
What?! How did I not know about this? Now I have to wait like another 4 years to try it out.
Good job guys
Really great vid
That spherical triangle thing behind Dr. Nyman-Metcalf... 😍
Geodisic construction, as used in Wellington bombers that could return half shot up
10:22 FINALLY SHOES
but wait did TLDR see through the future why are we unified already
and under south korean flag haha
I mean, both Korea's do politics claim there is only one Korea and they are it
@@llblumire And since North Korea would disappear in a moment without China's support, we know which is the solid claim.
I like the idea. I am not sure if it is there yet, and we need to make sure it is as secure as possible before doing it, though I think it would be worth doing more research into the area to see if it could work out.
4:36 their system is designed not to sacrifice any voter anonymity
4:38 Basically your personal identity features are then separated from you vote and so basically "THERE'S NO WAY TO TIE THEM TOGETHER AFTERWARDS"
5:26 you can vote many times so you can vote again and only one vote obviously counts, only the last vote counts.
Question: How do they invalidate the previous vote if the data is not tied/related together?
There's separate "storage" for vote tallying. Only the last vote by a person (can be either an e-vote or a regular vote) gets anonymized and tallied.
@@sandermikelsaar3531"Only the last vote by a person gets anonymized and tallied." How do they know when it will be the last E-Vote? When it's on paper you only get 1 voting ballot, so that's always the last one. They claim you can change an E-Vote every time you want. How do you know when its someone's last E-Vote?
When you want to declare the last vote invalid, it must be linked to personal details because you must know what the citizen has voted before. You want to send a message to the "vote count storage" to tell it "-1" for this party and "+1" for the other party.
Maybe they use a local hash which is stored on the system where the citizen has voted then you could invalidate the vote via that local hash but I see some security problems there (And you can only change you vote on the system you previously voted on).
@@BrutusDunKutus The votes are timestamped.
edit: Online voting takes place before "paper elections", at the end of that election it is checked whether a person has voted in person. If yes, that vote is counted. If no, the last online vote is counted.
@@sandermikelsaar3531 Yes but how do they know its your vote when its anonymized.
@@BrutusDunKutus Its not really anonymized at that stage..
I just came on to say good job on figuring out a more clickable thumbnail. It's a fascinating new science/artform.
I am a networking and security expert. Not one of those super experts, but it is my job.
E-Voting scares me, but I-Voting online terrifies me. Not because it can't be secure, but because there is no way a government would (in my opinion) implement it in a secure fashion.
At 2:30, I love how she makes such a distinction between politicians and people.
I would really like online voting, however 2 things must be true for any serious election: privacy and authenticity.
Loosing privacy means your susceptible to discrimination and extortion.
Loosing authenticity means your susceptible to voting fraud.
With digital systems it's literally impossible to achieve both of them at the same time!
Not even quantum cryptography can change that...
And so is the postal vote at risk.
The voting at polling stations is also vulnerable to intimidation.
No voting system is going to be perfect or flawless.
@@Madhattersinjeans I agree. However in the digital realm it's much simpler to pull off covertly and we should make it as hard as possible for bad guys to succeed.
In German there is a saying: Trust is good, but control is better.
All kinds of online or electronic voting are inherently very dangerous. I vote with pen and paper, and afterwards my vote is counted by several volunteers from my local community, usually I even know some of them. I can also volunteer myself or look them over the shoulder while they do their work. There isn't a more safe and secret voting method on the planet.
Wait, if all the connection of your personal information and the vote is discarded at voting, how can you change your vote later then?
Can u make a video on how you animate
"Dismissed the attack as politically motivated." Really? REALLY? Who would have guessed an attack on a political process is politically motivated. WTF.
Politically-motivated as in for partisan gain.
4:37 That's either a tiny person, or a phone that's more like the size of a computer monitor
Why does it take 3 days to vote? All it does is increase the window in which can be tampered with the votes.
I mean they say that they have it so everyone can get to vote. Sometimes, people have technical troubles, or they have lots of work.
IMO they should give at least half a day off for voting (maybe they do, I don't know) and make the timeframe smaller, but I think that's why it's 3 days.
In spite of Australia fining people for not voting, in some parts of the country voter turnout is still below than 80%. Online voting would clearly help if only Australia's internet speed wasn't so slow.
Digital voting in any form will never be able to replace pen and paper regarding securety.
In the end it’s always: your vote goes in, black box magic happens, somebody you didn’t vote for wins. What now? If nobody even understand the process, how to trust it?
And no, blockchain isn’t a solution at all. At least if you want you vote to stay private.
One of the few actually useful properties of block chain is anonymity without repudiation, actually. If be more concerned about preventing false, additional voters, which seems like it would require a central ledger to prevent anyway, which opens up other avenues of attack. Probably all solvable though, and might be there first actual use for block chain I've heard. (Speculation doesn't count, you can gamble with Monopoly money too)
Simon Buchan Sorry, but there is no anonymity in blockchain technology. The word you are searching for is pseudonymity.
And that is very dangerous regarding voting which should be anonymous.
Also. My mum doesn’t understand it, but she still wants to vote. What should she do? Trust the people who understand?
I would love Italy with shoes but only if Sicily and Sardinia were included!!
correct it in the merchandising possibilities and I am sure Italy will get many more votes!
Virginia used to do e-voting as far as you had a touch-screen computer which then printed off results for each ballot section at the end of the day, however they moved away from that starting in 2014 because of the concerns that the computer could be easily compromised, and also there was no paper ballot trail in case of a recount. So now the state uses a scanned paper ballot in which you mark next to a name or yes/no question, and then insert the completed ballot sheet into a scanner. It reads your ballot, and the paper ballot is stored in case of any future questions indefinitely (meaning even in 500 years, should the ballot papers not decay, one could see the ballots and how people voted).
The only drawback, is that as was seen in November of 2017, there was one state legislature seat where the ballots cast were equally split 50/50 down to each individual ballot, save for one. The person who cast that ballot, did an almost entirely Republican selection, except for that one box where they checked both the Democrat and the Republican for the State House of Representatives.
There was a question over whether that person's ballot should count, and for whom they actually intended to vote for.
In the end, the Board of Elections decided that the ballot was intended to be for the Republican (because everything else had been (R)), and so awarded the (R) member the victory. What the person who cast the ballot should have done when they made the mistake, and is clearly posted in every polling station throughout Virginia, is go back to the Registration Desk, turn in the spoiled ballot, and ask for a replacement.
Hey! Great video. I’m from Estonia and always vote online and wanted to give a correction on the 2014 hacking. The researchers hacked a simulation of the Estonian voting system that they themselves created, they never hacked the actual voting system. The release of their findings was very unusual in that they made public claims about the safety just days before an election (and argued that online voting should not be allowed for the coming election, they did not release any details of their findings to anyone (including those running the online voting system), claiming that it could be misused. The usual way to report such issues in the IT sector is to first inform the owner/manager of the system and give them the details of the bug. Going public is generally a last resort when the owner does not take responsibility.
But still it shouldn’t be possible. I can guarantee you that no one can hack a pencil and a piece of paper.
In my home country they tried E-voting, but it was found to be to significant potentially at risk of fraud hence we don’t use it.
You can see the edits of the interview by the fish jumping around in the fish tank.
Hey, greetings from Estonia!
BTW: I recall you premiering a video about our e-citizen programme, and I saved it to my "Watch it later" playlist (to watch it later, obviously), but when it came to it, it was deleted. (Why, if I may ask?)
PS: Online voting is very convenient. We have to be vary of the vulnerabilities, though (as you yourself brought up).
Very clever that they let you change your vote so if your employer forces you to vote for something you can go home and change it later. I really liked that point
The suspense really had me at 6:58
The accent of that professor from Estonia sounded so much like a heavy swedish accent that it was almost scary
And going by her name, she is Swedish with an English-speaking husband...
I checked her LinkedIn. She claims English and Estonian as languages with native or bilingual proficienxcy and Swedish and French as languages with full professional proficiency. On top of that, she claims to have professional working proficiency in Spanish and German.
Weird.
I enjoy your very minimally biased and modestly opinionated news reporting. Refreshing to watch and listen; when for the most part news reading, listening and watching involves working at discarding opinion and bias in order to learn the facts. Please continue to just focus on the details of the events and let us viewers develop our own opinion on these events.
Love the idea
Voter fraud?
100%
Darkwintre I mean, if its compromised, why add 1 fraud vote, just change thousands of votes to who you want
The question is if the risk of online voting being corrupted are greater than the multitude of risks of corruption in person voting. With online voting there can be no voter suppression, long lines to vote, losing your vote in the mail, poll workers misplacing your ballot, voter identification problems, signature matching, voting location mismatch, and dozens of other vulnerabilities. Being able to vote, and then change your mind afterwards is a significant advantage in todays 24 hr news cycle.
I suspect that keeping an eye on one big technical problem is easier than coping with the many corrupting possibilities in the physical world, as well as the possiblity of corruption in electronically tabulating the votes.
The video says, "So how does it work?" Straight away an ad starts playing where a dude is shooting a pink llama piñata. Ah, I say, I see now.
I like how the Australian shoes have a star on them
We're happy having trillions in assets controlled via online banking, yet online voting is too unsafe? It only costs $70 to buy a vote using advertising.
Important reminder: controlled blockchains are not blockchains.
Majority of those i-voting systems are essentially trivial databases with trivial cryptography but have **nothing** to do with blockchains.
P.S. I am actually ready to fight a public debate with anyone on this.
not to mention that blockchains are a solution in a need of a problem
@@666Tomato666 It's pefect to protect from editing in hindsight, to prove which vote was the first, not later than which time etc. It has to be a proper open public blockchain though, i.e. a blockchain backed by a major cryptocurrency
@@DanielVartanov if you watched the video you'd notice that "editing in hindsight" is exactly the reason why the Finnish I-Voting has a sliver of chance of actually working
saying "let's use blockchain" is like the "let's use XML" of the 00's; it solves none of the core problems and only creates new
@@DanielVartanov if you watched the video you'd notice that "editing in hindsight" is exactly the reason why the Finnish I-Voting has a sliver of chance of actually working
saying "let's use blockchain" is like the "let's use XML" of the 00's; it solves none of the core problems and only creates new
@@666Tomato666 Anyway, _real_ blockchain is applicable in i-voting/e-voting but only in solving a very narrow problem (even though solving it well), but I bet all those highly visible i-voting blockchain-based softwares are exactly of the XML sort you have described
Our country has the same kind of ID cards, but most people never bothered to get the card reader, though you can still use that to log in to government systems, but we have a 2FA like system that is linked to our person via our banks so we kind of don't need the smart-ID card function.
Apart from the issues of trust and perceived neutrality of the government institutions handling the voting process there are three security risk access points that must be addressed:
1. The backend infrastructure that handles the process, including the physical network.
2. The process itself as it is occurring in real time.
3. The ID technology used to validate the voter at the beginning of the process.
In my opinion internet and electronic voting will eventually come gradually into the forefront as these issues are handled in a more systematic ways in other parts of an e-government. I currently live in Spain where many of the electronic infrastructure mentioned in the video already exists, (like ID cards with intelligent chips and digital security certificates), but the simple paper system works so well, (I guess the only downside is the tremendous waste of paper), including the mail-in voting process, that as an IT professional I can’t see a justification to actively pursue an E or I voting solution right now.
Biggest examples of E-voting is India. In recently concluded (23rd May) parliamentary elections there were 900 Mn eligible voters and 67% of them actually turned out for voting. Doing a video analysis on this topic may help you get a lot of new views and subscribers since you seem to be interesting International expansion beyond UK and Brexit.
- Just a fan from India
I think this is a good idea!
0:49 but where’s Tasmania!? 🤔
But seriously thank you for another fantastic video! I really appreciate your work!
we moved it to turn it into a bridge between the north and south islands of new zealand.
Drakan R ah! What a great use for it!
if lousy weather is a good reason not to go out and vote, then better don't think about voting at all...
Is south korea all of korea on your maps??
Why do you need n. Korea? Not like they have votes lol
BooBooYup They do. More democratic than the US
In the state of Oregon, we have all mail-in voting. That has many of the same benefits that you mentioned in online voting, while being harder to hack. I prefer our voting system to Estonias.
Im not sure I see how it would be any less secure than say internet or mobile banking from your phone
After more than 30 in software research a nd development, and considered an expert,I oppose this idea. Never trust your compter, especially when connected to the net. And that goes double for voting. There is no such thing as a bug and/or hackproof system.
But giving paper to random people is safe? Also... compter...
Wise words ... but surely the same applies to paper ballots which can get 'lost' and 'misplaced' etc. sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately, not to mention "Vote early, vote often!" :-)
A lot safer than doing so by compter.
e-voting and i-voting have their own challenges, like any system. I think using them more and more would push forward to a new way of democracy with much more participation in the decision making, imagine if you could vote on referendums every sunday from your kitchen while having breakfast. A paper vote is not safe at all, it can be tamper, switched, burned, misplaced, whatever. Depending on your country, that stuff may never happen because of strong institutions (probably 10% of the world), and in other places vote manipulation is pretty common.
The main issue for me is still someone being forced in person to vote a certain way. The system needs to be invulnerable to such attacks, and it is not. Someone could easily lock someone's phone (and/or id card reader) up once they're done voting.
Then they need to lock that person up as well to prevent them from voting the usual way. It's much easier to just try to buy votes and much less risky when found out, as robbing someone of their freedom is a much more serious offence.
Thank you guys! How can we do our taxes and bank online but not vote, I recently tried to order my postal vote and it's just a pointless long process. This would truly give people more power.
I could see this system be adopted here in the Netherlands. if you see how much the average person already does almost everything online.
If the goal is to raise voter turnout, an incentive would go further than a cellphone app. Issue voters a receipt for voting that translates into a tax credit. Or make election days holidays and encourage business to shut down for the day.
A national standard for ballots - be they paper or electronic - would also be beneficial. A standard electronic device for voting could lead to voting for several days instead of a few hours. It could also end the habit (in the US) of the news media swaying Western States' late voting with the results or predicted results of East Coast states. And I'm not even going to mention the problems with primary voting.
The idea of i-voting is intriguing, but in the US we need to address current problems with our voting systems before we add a new problem to the mix.
I would love ivoting to be able to vote from wherever. I am an expat and got to go all the way to the consulate to vote. Takes 1h each way
I am a German living abroad and it can be quite difficult to vote. I couldn't vote for European elections because I need to request a postal vote and then get the papers sent to me from Germany but I have been travelling for the last few months and don't have a fixed address where I could receive the documents. Really annoying... and last time there were elections in Germany it took the council too long to send me the papers, I didn't receive them in time! Online voting would be so great! Or at least the option to vote at the embassy?!
Russia can't hack a piece of paper...
This is just a theory but maybe Russia wants us to think that so we won't suspect them
"So, Estonia how do you tackle all the massive security issues regarding something as important as voting?"
Estonia: "Ehh... If someone bothers to hack us we will probably notice..."
Tech savvy countries use pens, paper and ballot boxes for a reason.
Voting on blockchain is more secure than paper ballots. BItcoin has never been hacked since its inception afterall
@Sifra Aprillia Fahira good question. Maybe. They trust their phones, New cars, laptops, and medical devices. Possibly a combination of paper ballots and on chain voting. I think user friendliness would be the biggest hurdle. Try getting your grandparents to use crypto for example. I work in IT and still had a wallet hacked for thousands usd recently as I left a recovery phrase on my evernote account and Russians gained access (used same password as a site that got hacked... My bad)
One of the comments was "we haven't had any problems."
But isn't the HUGE security risk with i-voting that you may not even know you have a problem?
Ivote done right wouldn't be a problem, just have the pen and pepper as last-change-if needed, and some why to know if you have ivoted.
The problem with any kind of voting that doesn't happen in secret in the voting booth (including voting by post and i-voting) is that you can show to others how you voted and get paid for it.
Where I live, you are legally allowed to leave your job for 4 hours to vote. In general, elections are held on Sunday so it doesn't really matter.
I Voting is an awful idea. If you don't believe me watch a video by the youtuber Tom Scott called 'Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile'
And here's me thinking back to that one time one of our big broadcasting companies put presidential candidates' faces on Game of Thrones characters on the election footage so there was a video of our current president riding a big ass dragon...that was what we did with technology 😂
Sounds like an exfcellent solution to me!
Even if it is blatant propaganda by a massive corporation :P
Australians would love not having to wait in line to vote but unfortunately the Internet is too slow here to handle online voting.
I wish my country had internet voting
I am a postal voter so I dont need to do much when I vote. just drop the letters in the post when I am done