Online voting/fraud

{{#set:thing type=problem}}

About

Online voter fraud is the phenomenon of voter fraud as it applies specifically to online voting techniques. Voter fraud is any situation where an individual voter deliberately causes their vote (i.e. expression of preference) to be counted towards the final vote results in ways that violate the rules under which the voting system is supposed to operate -- typically for the purpose of exercising disproportionate influence over those results.

Voter fraud is actually very rare in traditional voting methods, for reasons which have probably been studied (though I do not have any specific data). My understanding of the reasons why this is are solely speculative at this point, but one obvious conclusion is that the degree of verification done before any individual is allowed to vote means that the required effort is very high even to double one's legitimate vote, while the gain per extra "weight" is very low -- with the bottom line being that effort to influence the vote is best spent elsewhere. (Further data is needed to confirm if this is in fact the case, or if there are other factors which might be considered when designing an online voting system.)

Online voting, however, is particularly vulnerable to voter fraud due to the difficulty -- and in some cases the undesirability -- of verifying identity in online voting situations.

This article is chiefly concerned with methods of minimizing online voter fraud, to the point where we will almost never be uncertain that it was not a factor in the final decision.

Methods

Crude and Intrusive

The obvious, brute-force method of voter fraud prevention (online or off) is to require every voter to identify her/himself using some universally available form of unique identification. We couldn't use credit card or bank account numbers, for instance, because individuals commonly have more than one bank or credit card account, and they are very easy to obtain.

government ID: unsatisfactory

The obvious, essentially "air tight" method of identification would be to require government identification, such as a driver's license or passport. Since a large part of the reason we are even looking into this question involves a goals of local autonomy and decentralization, however, this is less than satisfactory. (Even if it were satisfactory, it would still be relatively easy to fool, since we would only be looking at images of government documents, which are very easy to alter.) This method would also require a privileged class of user with authorization to view those documents and act as gatekeepers. We do not want either of those things, although there are ways to make them accountable and reasonably fair.

street address: half-satisfactory

A less "air tight" but also far less government-dependent method of verification would be to require every voter to furnish a street address, to which a postcard with a password would be mailed. This method is flawed, but would probably produce at least as accurate an approximation of democracy as the system we use now.

Some concerns, and answers to them (where applicable):

• This method would actually cost money -- postage isn't free. We would have to secure funding for postage, not to mention the machinery to print out and mail all those cards.
• What do you do if someone from another address reads the password off your postcard?
  • At some point, two people will be trying to use the same account number and password; this will be detected. At that point, corrective measures can be taken
• What about houses with higher occupancy than we are allowing for? Or houses with lower occupancy, whose occupants register up to the limit just because they can?
  • There are a number of hit-and-miss methods we could use to minimize this. (Going into them doesn't seem worth the time, as I am not really seriously considering this option either; I'm mainly bringing it up to illustrate the issues that arise.)
  • To some extent, how much does this really matter? At most, we have a percentage of our votership getting N times their official voting influence, where N is the maximum number we assume for a house. Are such voters likely to have a specific influence on elections? Can anyone use this discrepancy to influence the system? I don't really see how, especially if we take steps (see previous point) to make it difficult to get away with this.
• Again, this requires a privileged class of user able to access personal information of other users and allow or deny them voting privileges. This isn't a total dealbreaker, but it certainly renders the scheme less than satisfactory if we want a level, peer-to-peer, decentralized structure.

Decentralized and Organic

I'm going to call the method I favor crowdsourced reputation, for lack of a better term. It can be applied to a number of online decision-making processes, but here is how it applies to voting.