Group items tagged

Scenario: The article I am analyzing focuses upon the disadvantages brought about by electronic voting. The article attempts to convince the reader that there are absolutely no advantages to e-voting when compared to traditional voting, and the chance of fraud is much higher in e-voting than it is in traditional voting. The article does give credit to the fact that traditional voting, especially in the US, can also be prone to acts of fraud and corruption, however, he seems to be inclined towards this being less likely than the possibility presented by e-voting. Social/ethical issues: The social and ethical issues that show up in this article are primarily security and reliability. The writer clearly does not seem to believe that the e-voting system is too secure, as he often states that there are many ways in which the e-voting system can be cheated and violated. He believes that e-voting often generates results that do not match up with the predicted results from the votes cast. He also does not seem to comfortable with the idea of fully trusting a machine to measure and calculate the result of the votes, as he seems to favor the idea of votes being manually counted and recorded by poll workers. IT systems: E-voting often takes place on a particular website or on a private network which specific voting computers are connected to. Here, voters can verify their identification before proceeding to cast a vote. After the vote is cast, the information is sent to a central server where it is stored and constantly recalculated by the system for an updated vote count. Stakeholders: Regionally, everyone is a stakeholder in electronic voting. All individuals in the particular area are effected by the results of a large-scale electronic vote, as these are usually to decide governmental leaders/officials. Local businesses might be the most impacted stakeholders, because they are heavily effected by the policies and laws that could be passed by the new official,

Situation: With countries such as the UK and India already implementing e-voting as their main method of voting for their desired candidates, it is hard not to see that e-Voting is slowly taking the concept of voting for elections, to a new front. Social and Ethical Significance: The article brings to us the example of the 2003 elections in the UK and how e-Voting "failed to make an impact to the people." That was moreover, because there were many people who didn't own a smart device/laptop, and a few didn't even know what the internet was, yet. The Issue with e-Voting then was that it hadn't made the impact because it wasn't the primary method of communication yet. Online voting has been trialled all over the world now, in hopes that it may be implemented in the future. However, developers have claimed that they see major amounts of issues with the softwares and networks/servers that are online. They claim that the reliability and security standards are very hard to meet, when it comes to e-voting systems. Furthermore, they have stated that th requirements are very tough and too high to be met, unlike other transactions. "Online banking suffers problems but refunds are possible after checking your bank statement. You can't 'refund' a vote and 'vote statements' can't be provided to check your vote was correctly recorded as that would enable vote selling and coercion." Stakeholders: Candidates - If the servers are mendled with by a virus or hacker, the results of the ballot could potentially be rigged and the candidate would lose his/her chances of winning the elections. Voters - If the servers are mendled with by a virus or hacker, the voter's vote can potentially be changed, and as a result, the voter feels a loss of security.

In New Zealand, numerous security and privacy issues of their e-voting system couldn't be addressed in time for the elections so they scrapped the plan. 2 stakeholders: The people running for elections and the people voting. The turnout of the elections would decide which person running would end up as the local president/prime minister which would also affect the people who voted during the elections. 2 social/ethical issues: If the issues with the e-voting systems weren't fixed by the time of the election, there could have been risks of hacking into the system and purposely altering the votes to go the way of one of the people running in the election. If it wasn't purposeful, there may have been accidents occurring with the system which would cause some votes to be miscounted or counted as invalid which would make it unfair. Possible solution: To help with the security risks, they can implement firewalls and password protection to prevent hackers from accessing the voting system.

Scenario: Different US states are taking different approaches to voting. Maryland is enforces paper voting, with some digital use by scanning a copy of each vote to have on record. On the other extreme, Utah Republicans are embracing technology by having everyone vote over the Internet. Social Ethical Issues: Security: James Evans, Utah GOP Chairman, thinks "the risks associated with Internet voting aren't worse than the current system". Learning Curve: Maryland bought new machines for voting and there was some concern about people being confused when using them. IT Systems: Optical scanner for a digital record of votes Electronic Voting Machines Internet Stakeholders: Voters - Do they care about the convenience of online voting or the more reliable security of paper voting? State - Depending on what method of voting, time and money will be used more or saved. Applications to Specified Scenario: The article questions why there is so much concern with voting electronically when we already do so many important things online. We do our banking and buying online, giving out personal information, so why not elections? The article answers, "e-commerce expects and is comfortable with a certain level of fraud. Our electoral process, however, has zero tolerance for fraud". With banking and e-commerce, the costs aren't as high as with elections. Any risks also outweigh the benefits. Elections have also historically never been electronic until now. So there is a certain security and assurance that comes from the traditional paper ballot votes.

The company that ran Swindon's 2002 e-voting pilot is sued amidst allegations of flaws in its software.

The company that ran Swindon's 2002 e-voting pilot is sued amidst allegations of flaws in its software. ____________________________________________________________ In this article, the author describes how an employee of a voting software company was fired because he was going to expose the flaws of the software. This shows that some software is not reliable, and in fact easy to hack. The one that Daniel Spillane worked for obviously had integrity problems. It also shows that no one is trustworthy of software malfunctions, even employees of the company.