Just a Theory

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How Does One Protect Online Ballot Box Stuffing?

I need to set up an online voting system. It needs to be more robust than a simple polling system, in order, primarily, to prevent ballot box stuffing. Of course I realize that it’s impossible to prevent ballot box stuffing by a determined individual, but what I want to prevent is scripted attacks and denial of service attacks. The features I’ve come up with so far to prevent attacks are:

  • Require site registration. You must be a registered user of the site in order to vote in an election, and of course, you can vote only once.
  • Ignore votes when cookies are disabled, although make it look like a successful submission.
  • Update result statistics periodically, rather than after every vote. This will make it difficult for an exploiter to tell if his votes are being counted.
  • Use a CAPTCHA to prevent scripted voting.
  • Send a new digest hidden in every request that must be sent back and checked against a server-side session in order to prevent “curl” attacks.
  • Log IP addresses for all votes. These can be checked later if ballot box stuffing is suspected (though we’ll have to ignore it if many users are behind a proxy server).

Of course someone behind a well-known proxy server who wants to repeatedly create a new user account using different email addresses and deleting his cookies before every vote could do some ballot box stuffing, but I think that the above features will minimize the risk. But I’m sure I’m forgetting things. What other steps should I take?

Leave a comment to let me know.

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