Since yesterday, 700,000 French living abroad are voting to elect their representatives at the national parliament. This year, they have the choice to cast their vote through Internet instead of going to their embassy or consulate.
The system led to harsh criticism including:
- Witnesses don’t have access to the source code of the application (it was requested by Pirate Party candidates)
- Voting requires to downgrade your Java installation to version 6.
- HTTPS is not mandatory, allowing phishing
- Servers hosting the website are located in Spain
- And many more…
All of those points are mere details. Let me be clear about those : we don’t care! We don’t give one single f*** about them!
Of course, those details are the proof of the complete amateurism and technological illiteracy of the current political elite but it doesn’t matter. Even if everything was perfect, the only thing to remember is that a single provider company will decide alone the value of 700,000 votes.
Let me repeat that : one private company will decide the value of 700,000 votes.
It’s not a possibility, it’s a fact ! A true indisputable fact !
Of course, the company might decide that the value of the votes given to the French administration should be the one sent by the voters. It might be. Or it might be not. There’s no way to know or to verify it. 700,000 votes will be decided by one person. That’s as simple as that.
Lot of people will think that I’m talking about a post-apocalyptic scenario, a future we should try to avoid. It is not. It is a fact which is happening right now in one of the most influential democracies. The result of this vote will have absolutely no democratical value !
I repeat : the result will have no value at all. By chance, it might be related to the opinion of the population but there’s no way to verify it.
Would it be better if the company was replaced by the French administration, if all the code was opensource[1], if the website was compatible with all systems ? No, it would not change the fundamental problem.
Is going to the embassy an option ? Not even that. Because the private provider will give to the French administration a list of people who didn’t vote by Internet. They have the power to cast your vote and to remove you from this list, preventing you to access your embassy.
Let’s summarize that in one sentence : the result that will be published for 700,000 French voters will have not value at all. Not a single little value. Everything else is only a detail.
PS : it should also be noted that 700,000 private political opinions will be given to a private company. Cross your fingers…
This text is available in French on Facebook, Google+ and Diaspora. Please use the social networks to share this with all your French contacts. Copy/paste, adapt the text without giving me credits but, please, spread the word!
Picture by g.rohs
Note
[1] How can you prove that the code you received is the one running on the server?
The France gives 700,000 blank votes to one private company by Lionel Dricot, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium License.
Even with a vote 100% public with no private companies at all, this would have no value since the secret should not be respected inside the family.
After Amnesty International, in Belgium one women out of 4 is victim of violence from the husband. There are no way of speaking of free vote for them in the setting of the vote by internet.
Pourquoi le texte en français n’est que sur les réseaux dit sociaux.
Pourquoi empêcher les français ne lisant pas l’anglais de lire ta prose sur un internet libre.
Très dommage …
Suppose if you did not have this option of online voting. So you go and press a button on a voting machine or put a paper in a ballot box. How would you know that the machines or boxes are not being altered?
Hi Lionel,
Disclaimer: I used to work for a spin-off of a Spanish e-voting company- which might be the company you are talking about.
There exist mathematical methods which can make voting secure and non-manipulable- even more than traditional voting methods.
As you might know, public-key cryptography gives us tools that allow, for instance, to create digital signatures which have properties such as authentication (it can be proved that the document was produced by someone who knew the private key), integrity (the message has not been tampered with) and non-repudiation (the person signing the message cannot deny having done so).
These techniques can be applied, and in short, you can devise a scheme where each voter can verify that his/her vote has been accounted for, while preserving his/her anonimity.
Whether this French election will use a secure voting scheme which can be validated is a different matter, but I wanted to point out that having a private company do the voting is not synonym with not having an accountable election (and you don’t even need to open source the whole process- just the verification mechanism).
(of course, the voters’ computers could be tampered with, someone could hack the system, etc.- but these are not related to the election being run by a private company. And other voting schemes might not be any safer, really).
Regards,
Álex
(I read your blog through Planet GNOME- if you want to reply please do so by email)
même remarque que menthe à l’eau, comment je fait un liens vers la version française depuis mon blog du coup ?
Menthe à l’eau, Martoni > Diaspora est entièrement libre, le lien est utilisable directement (de même que le lien G+ qui est lisible sans avoir de compte)
@Debarshi Ray : You can witness the whole process. Usually, each party send witnesses in every voting location. You can see that the box is empty at the start of the day, you can stay with the box and be there when the box is opened and ensure that the results of that box are well counted. At least, that how it works in my country.
@alex : First of all, there is currently no method that can make the vote secret and non manipulable. It has been proven (like academicaly proven) that there’s no way to guarantee the result of an election *and* the secrecy of the vote. One exclude another. (unfortunatly this paper is in French but I’m sure there could be other: http://www.di.ens.fr/~fouque/pub/wo… )
Everything else is pure marketing bullshit given by e-voting provider. I’ve met a responsible of one e-voting company once and I was completely astonished by how cynical he was (not knowing I was against e-voting). E-voting provider earn money when then can sell their solution. As such, you can’t trust anything they are saying (just like you can’t trust a car vendor when he says that this car was only used one year by a old woman).
In your comment, you are basically arguing that a non-secret vote can be held (because, yes, if a voter can verify his own vote then the vote is not secret anymore. It is just a bit hidden but the voter might be forced to show for who he voted and, most importantly, the system administrator knows the vote for everybody).
Like I said several times: if we want to debate about whether or not the secrecy of the vote is still needed, then fine. Let’s debate about that openly and make sure that everyone understand the debate.
But don’t just skip the secrecy only because it would not allow e-voting.
@Debarshi Ray : the french electoral code is very clear, mandate transparent ballot boxes and require that said box not be left unattended, the count being done in polling station by scrutineer, volunteers, etc.
The whole process is rigorous, and my less prone to error and fraud than an online voting system.
It should be noted that the same Spanish company is the one that operated the NDP leadership vote for Canada New Democratic Party, and that the system was victim of the large scale DDoS making voting impossible for several hours. Way to go.
@alex :
You cannot guarantee by *technical* ways the secret of the vote with respect to people who are physically in the same room as the voter.
You can even less guarantee the secret with respect to people that have moral or physical influence on the voter in *real* live.
By the way, this comment applies to the postal vote almost as well as the internet vote.
The only way to ensure a free and secret vote is to force people to move themselves to the public place where the vote is organised.
@alex : Using key pairs mechanism does not imply security.
In this particular case, using key pair mechanism does not prove that the vote belong to a specific person but only that it belongs to a person having access to the private key. This is indeed very different considering that the mechanism alongside with the password used to generate the key pair are sent to citizens by mail in clear text. Thus lowering all the security mechanism to the confidentiality of a clear text message.
By the way I agree with Ploom that we can talk about removing the secrecy of the vote but we can’t remove it secretly because of technical matter.
Anyway, as a French citizen living in Argentina, I refused to use this system and will vote by mandate with the old school paper mechanism that I know a lot of people will be controling during the whole process.
Cest moi où le vote par Internet est une totale aberration démocratique ??!
Les gens sont allé voter à 88%
Ils n’ont pas besoin de rester enfermé chez eux pour donner leur opinion!
Il faut interdire le vote en ligne!
@Gros Robert : Donc selon toi l’avis des gens dans l’incapacité de se rendre à un bureau de vote a moins de valeur que ceux pouvant le faire ?
Je ne suis pas d’accord pour dire qu’il faille interdire à tout prix le vote en ligne.
Le problème du système actuel est qu’il s’agit ni plus ni moins que d’une procuration de masse dont le bénéficiaire de la procuration est imposé (la société controllant la plateforme de vote).
Si l’on imposait à 70000 personnes de faire une procuration à une unique entreprise, cela provoquerait certainement un scandale monstrueux. C’est malheureusement ce qu’il vient de se passer mais de manière déguisée.
Well, while the concerns you rise are serious, your conclusion is a clear exaggeration.
The honest and dispassionate conclusion should be that the risk that the results are fake is not zero (which is a serious concern).
BUT
You can obviously not conclude that the risk is 100%. Considering the event that the results match exactly the intended vote, it has also a non zero probability. The real question should be, given an insecure voting system, what is the probability for fraud / no fraud. Can you prove it will be more than 0.001% / 99.999% ?
In the country where I live, there was less than 50% participation for president election, mostly because the embassy is far away. I tend to think that the results were not a completely true representation. I expect the electronic vote to slightly improve the situation, in fact.
Yet I still agree with your concerns.
Il faut revoir vos sources, c’est 130 000 votes, pas 700 000. Tous les français de l’étranger ne sont pas électoralement kamikazes. Par exemple pour ma part, je vais aller voter dans un vrai bureau, avec des vrais fonctionnaire de France. Et pourtant, je n’habite pas en France…
@Ricounet :
Un des arguments de Ploum est justement que même votre vote dépendait du bon vouloir de l’entreprise privée. En effet si elle avait dit que vous aviez déjà voté, vous n’auriez pas pu voter «pour de vrai», et n’aviez aucun moyen de réclamer. Une entreprise privée avait le pouvoir (sinon le droit) de vous empêcher de voter.