Secure Net Voting IMPOSSIBLE under Win9x, MacOS... (Score 1)

Votation can blow hype all day, but the reality is that secure internet voting is impossible under any OS that lacks memory protection - such as Win9x, DOS, MacOS - because there's no way to prevent a malicious program (e.g., a virus) from stealing my vote. You can have google-bit key encryption and the most secure server in the world, but you can't keep malicious programs from reading and writing the memory of my voting program/browser to take control of my vote. On Windows NT, Linux, and other real operating systems, this is much less of a problem.

There's still the issue raised by someone else above: you can't detect or prevent vote coercion when you're doing it remotely. Of course you can't do that with absentee ballots either, and coercion hasn't been a big problem (that I've heard of, anyway).

The intersection of democracy and the internet is a whole lot bigger than voting. Decreasing the cost of political communication strengthens and expands our democracy. To paraphrase a comment John Sununu made yesterday, "It's not about voting, it's about bitching." (This does not constitute an personal endorsement of John Sununu's political beliefs. :)

This is what Grassroots.com is all about (and /. for that matter!) The site hasn't launched yet, but it will rock when it does. Keep your browsers peeled.

David Noha