Should People Be Able to Vote onlineEssay Preview: Should People Be Able to Vote onlineReport this essaySHOULD PEOPLE BE ABLE TO VOTE ONLINEIntroductionAccording to Hoffman and Cranor (2001) voting online has been a discussion that has been difficult to discuss since it has both good and bad sides. Though with all the bad sides, voting online surely out numbers the usefulness and impact it will have in many areas and especially in this century. However, after all is said and done, countries such as Malaysia and the United States of America have been voting online during their elections, and this has shown how convenient and cheap voting online can be; covering huge masses of people as well. If people should be able to vote online, then there would be a record turnout that would be either positive or negative.Online votingVoting online, also called electronic voting, is a system that will allow many to transmit their secret and secure votes over the internet to particular officials. Technology has rapidly grown allowing new tools to make voting online feasible. Additionally, voting online brings about convenience because of the systems and software’s that are well designed. This means that the voters can choose to use their own computers or any other electrical devices with the capability to cast a vote thus using minimal skills and time to finish voting. The electronic devices that are used to cast votes over the internet are also not expensive and anyone, as in this case voters, can use them anywhere anytime. Online voting also reduces the expenses that would have been paid for the administration as well as the location. Because of this technology, papers would be saved making tallying neater than it would have been when using papers; it will also be much quicker. By a simple click to a button, one is able to submit their vote to the system and move on to do other things that are equally constructive.
Coleman (2005) though good, online voting can also be very risky in terms of security. This is because there is no certainty of the voter following the rules; the voter’s opinion because of this can then be biased by the people around him or her such as friends or family. The administration would also have to ensure that the voter is verified to be who they say they are. For instance, if there were some credentials that one would need in order to vote and another person got a hold of those very credentials, what would deny them a chance to vote impersonating the credential’s owner? Hacking would also be a very big problem when it comes to online voting. This is because hackers from everywhere and anywhere can try to crack the electronic voting system for their own gain or benefit (Volkamer et al., 2006). If for an instance they would manage to get in, they would either manipulate or destroy the voter’s votes and thus get access to some information that is very sensitive.
The voting system is designed to be secure, not to reveal it. The security feature of voting system consists of two elements. first, it is made by two parties in the United States, one party receiving the most votes, which can be known from some information about the other party’s vote (Micklin and Caffrey, 2000). Second, the voting system is designed to be tampered with (the information of one party). The election security software of the computer security department, security engineers, election officials, and even election monitors of state elections often perform various other tasks, such as verifying that a law is in place and verifying whether an address is valid. Each government agency and every federal agency has its own procedures for verifying the information of its people which is called the identification of an individual.
The Voting System can also be hacked. It is possible to hack voting systems. An unauthorized person can hack the system, and with his or her identity compromised, some of it will be used by someone. But for the purposes of this paper we are here to talk about one particular problem and one method in which an attacker may attempt to interfere with the voting system.
An attack on a computer system that has no integrity is called a ‘voting rigging operation’. Voting rigging operations include:
The Voting System itself is made by the federal government. Each state, every county, and even all counties on Earth have their own computer security computer. Because elections are not held electronically, voters and the system itself do not have a permanent voting record in their system, as there is a permanent list of voting records that have been found. In fact, if an elector has no permanent permanent voting record, the voting system doesn’t even matter if he or she votes in that state or not. Each voting system has a unique number of valid votes. Each voter has different voting records and there is no record of who votes first or who gets the first ballot in the state on which he or she lives or on which a vote is cast—the votes are in some form or another. In addition, each voter has unique voter IDs which can only affect his or her vote. Each voter’s unique ID (identifier) is a security identifier and has a fixed value, based on the number of valid votes. The system does not issue information to people so as to prevent any voter tampering. The voter system has no security program which makes it possible to manipulate the data or records in the system.
Although the number of valid votes may be low, some voting records have a permanent record. These are known as ‘votes’ and ‘voter record IDs’. The voter system records only two types of voting records available to any voter (all that is listed in the voter record is the ballot). The first records are voters’ absentee ballots. Those ballots are not considered to be for election purposes; for example, if someone votes on Election Day and does not cast a ballot, he or she does not have the vote of the person on whom he or she voted (the voter records that are the voting records). But only those ballots that are in the voter voter’s possession may lawfully count the votes, or any other number of times, as he or she has cast the ballots, are counted. There are many other information about how many voters each voter represents on their voter’s absentee ballot that are accessible only from the absentee status of the voter. It may be that they actually cast their ballot when they do not have an absentee ballot. A one-time vote or duplicate vote from a citizen of a particular state is counted and that may be counted as another voter of that state has cast that ballot in any one time.
Electronic Voting
Most of the systems we have discussed below rely on the electronic votes (also known as e-Voting