Why electronic voting isn't secure, but may be safe enough | The Guardian - 1 views
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Varjavand Contractor on 13 Apr 16Situation: 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.