No. To protect voting, don't use software. Everyone needs to be able to _understand_ as well as be able to verify that they successfully voted.
Besides the issues with what software the machine is actually running, most people cannot comprehend or understand that software - even if it is open source. That is not acceptable for an open democratic society, or to sustaining it.
In this particular situation it should not be necessary to rely on an expert to explain whether the vote counting mechanism is reliable. This only adds to the problem of unreliable or scheming officials - it doesn't improve anything in terms of transparency.
Just have the electronic system return a clearly labeled ballot to the voter, which would be verified and turned in before leaving. A physical count can be used to confirm the electronic count or vice-versa (physical counting has vulnerabilities too).
Voting with paper does not scale. You can't make people vote everyday for example, which is required if you'd like to implement direct democracy.
On the other hand, with direct democracy, the stakes are lower for each vote. So there is less incentive to manipulate the vote. So it makes sense to use e-voting for direct democracy.
In the end the voting mechanism in democracy is not really about precision, it's more about getting an acceptable outcome for all the parties
I like the model where you vote electronically and you can see (through a clear material) that the machine prints out a copy of your votes and drops them into a bin.
You can throw cryptographic verification on top of that if you like.
That's silly. Do you need to use paper and pencil to do banking? If we as a society and individually can trust our money to technology then why not voting?
Having a merkle tree and voting from your device instead of a polling station is not just more convenient - it's more secure too. Everyone can verify their vote was counted!!
And right now? Right now we have a government database of who voted for what. That's crazy.
Electronic voting is a bad idea and I'd be suspicious on anyone trying to promote it.
How can you know that even if the source code for the voting machine is open, the voting machine is running the exact same source code? How can you know nobody has tampered the code the instance is running?
I'm glad my country is still running on paper ballots and glad we require voter ID.
Transparent voting boxes, ballots in envelopes, manual redundant counting done by people, usually voter who were nicely asked if they can come help back in the evening. That's what we use in France, you get the official result a few hours after the closing of the voting stations.
The whole process is watchable, from the sealing of the box the morning to the count in the end and parties send observers in random stations to check nothing fishy happens.
An official log book is open for anyone to notice if they feel something fishy happened (you were not allowed to vote, the counting was unfair, etc...)
Oh, and make voting day a holiday, or just put it on Sundays.
I used to wonder how US could not even get that last part right, but then I understood that a whole party thinks it is in its interest to have less voters.
The vote processing chain is lengthy, it is inevitable that a computer system will be inserted somewhere in that chain. Right now the push is to have these systems right at the front, facing the voter, but that isn't the only time the votes are processed electronically.
In my district we vote by coloring in little circles with a #2 pencil, we then feed that directly into an electronic machine that tallies the results for my district. While the paper I handled is stored in the machine, I am sure that the results are transmitted to the next link in the chain through some computer system.
With so many links in the chain, it's my opinion that it's unreasonable to expect them all to be processed by people. It won't scale and I'm not convinced that it's that much safer anyway. It would be my preference that the pieces of the system that perform this processing are backed with open source software.
At the very least, if there is a case where tampering is suspected, officials of the court can compare the software on the machine with the software in the repository. This would prove in a clear and straightforward manner that tampering has occurred.
As painful as it is, I think we all need to trust the state, to some degree, to do the jobs that are the responsibility of the state. Once the votes have been tallied for a district, isn't it possible to tamper with them as they are transmitted up the chain to the next link in the processing? Or when regions of the state send their votes up to whatever the next link might be? I think that is possible, the best we can hope for is to push for as much transparency as possible and hope that, if it comes to it, we have enough data to detect such tampering.
Where is the good old Anonymous when we need them?
We need a high-profile hack of some local elections to drive that point home. Something done completely for teh lulz, leading to a result so absurd the elections would have to be redone.
> the voting machine is running the exact same source code?
Or the processor is trustworthy ? Many voting machines are using old processors, such as 68000, and it would not be too hard to emulate a a rogue processor that will have a different behavior, whatever the source code is.
You can also change the behavior of the voting machine at a certain time, or in certain conditions (such as detecting a voting session has started)
The problem is not that voting machines are vulnerable to one or two attacks. There are thousands of ways of compromising them.
The only answer to this is that cryptography specialists do not have any answer to a secure electronic voting not involving a physical element (a bulletin, a receipt, etc.). This means that there is no THEORETICAL solution.
There are attempts to create an end-to-end auditable voting systems. Where you don't have to trust the organizers or machinery to not trick you, and you can validate that your vote was counted correctly.
Sadly, as far as I know, none is without issues (older systems were found to have various problems, and newer stuff is still bleeding edge that wasn't yet reviewed thoroughly).
I agree with you entirely. There is no absolute way that we know of to truly know the code running is the exact code on GitHub. You can fake that it is in many ways, I don't see people running shell commands on the software before and after they vote to make sure it's the correct software. Even IF that software remains uncompromised, who owns the database? Who stops them from-
Why use a voting machine at all? Isn't the main point of having a polling location simply so you can verify your identity? If we could come up with a system that allowed one's identity to be verified online, or by postal service, then do we really need thousands of machines collecting the votes. Couldn't it be centralized to a handful of more easily audited systems?
My country doesn't require voter ID at all, other than confirming a few details and most studies here has shown that requiring ID didn't cut down on fraud.
For me it's important that the barrier to voting is as low as possible, and we don't have a governement issued ID that is free.
I'd rather say it's a good idea but it also is a technical problem that is not yet convincingly solved. It is clear though that open source by itself is not a solution, for the very reason you mention (how can one be sure about what code is running on a machine one doesn't own?).
That being said, from times to times articles show up about someone who claimed to have invented a viable solution. So we should not diss the idea and keep an open mind. Eventually someone will find a solution.
I agree, you'd need a way to verify every machine is running the the open source software. The risk are too great you'll fail and the rewards for anyone that can hack the machines too great.
To say a machine hasn't been hacked is trying to prove a negative.
Every time we vote, there is more talk about the burned ballots, unopened chests, uncounted votes and fraud concerning votes being collected from neighboring countries posing as people from my nation.
So yeah. Doesn't really matter whether it's electronic or not.
This is plain bullshit. Opensource gives no guarantee that the vote won't be altered by whoever runs the machine.
What we need is a zero-knowledge proof: we need the entire voting dataset to be publicly downloadable and some kind of checksumming so that, while maintaining anonimity, I can 1)check that my vote is the same 2)run whole the counting in a blink on my PC.
I think this make a lot of sense. I'm not sure a checksumming method that can indicate tampering can be devised, but my hope would be that by making the data publicly available for every stage of the processing pipeline, auditors or interested parties might be able to detect fraud.
First and foremost, use paper ballots. Before anything else. The paper ballots are the System of Record. If ever in doubt about downstream results, paper ballots can be hand-counted. (Additionally, use paper voter rolls. Mark registered voters when they vote, and track any same-day registrations on paper. The exact number of ballots cast can be extracted from the voter rolls.)
Second, never allow paper ballots to be handled by just one person, or by only members of one party - whether blank or used. Require that members of at least two political parties be present any time the ballots are physically touched.
Third, if using machines to read the ballots (ScanTron, etc), conduct spot counts of random machines, to make sure the machine results match the paper ballots. Conduct spot counts of entire polling stations randomly to make sure result totals match voter roll totals. Although this isn't 100% certain, it doesn't take a lot of spot checks to detect any sort of large-scale fraud effort.
Do these things, and it's exceedingly difficult to do statistically meaningful vote fraud, because we have a high degree of trust in the paper ballots and their surrounding process. From there, you can use automatic ballot reading and tallying to get fast results - the vote counting/tallying automation is derived data, not the System of Record.
A child can understand paper ballots and why they work.
There are probably less than a hundred people in the world who can understand an electronic voting system at every level down to and including the silicon.
Paper ballots (the kind with marks read optically, not the ridiculous punch cards at the center of the Florida 2000 debacle) are easy to use and understand with a very low error rate and keep a paper trail, being the actual ballots.
I don't understand why anyone other than the companies who sell e-voting machines actually want electronic voting.
You have to hang out with election administrators to grok that. Their motivations are not the same as the voters. Their election night prayer is "Please God, don't let this election be close."
They want certainty more than any thing else. For decades, computers were regarded as more accurate, impartial, certain than human tabulators.
Second factor is appropriations. Elections are big money. And like all industrires, there's a revolving door between government and industry.
Admin also want control. Their impulse is to centralize, simplify. Think of the logistics of running 100s of voting sites, 1,000s of precincts. All the training, people, materials, gear that has to be stored, shuttled around, repaired, etc. Moving to voting computers, reducing head count, moving to central count seemed like a huge win. (But you and I people computer people, we know they just traded problems.)
As someone who is a firm supporter in free software as the best option in every area, this feels like a subversive attack.
Voting software is bound to fail, no bug bounty is big enough to offset the billions that could be made off of hacking an election. It is bound to fail spectacularly, and then for the rest of time people can point at the election and say "the ability to see the source code let this happen."
Well, IMHO a good way to digitize voting would be to give out a USB-drive-like (NFC) device with an option to set a value and lock it in the read-only mode using voter ID.
How it will work:
A person gets this device in the voting center enters/gets his voter ID, does the voting (anonymously), presses the read-only lock and throws it into the bin. After all the voting these device are scanned and voting data is retrieved. A voting database is populated in each center in a transparent way, to prevent tampering (several parties can be allowed to read this data separately and then all data variants can be compared against each other, just in case). After consensus on the voting data, each voting center sends the results for counting. And the voting is completed.
In the end, these devices are reset and the cycle continues.
Well, I'm sure that there must be some problems when voting the aforementioned way. But I guess it could work out, with some modifications.
That sounds a whole lot like paper voting to me...except more expensive and more complicated. What's wrong with giving everyone a pencil and a ballot paper, at the polling station, in place of the NFC device?
Why can't you have everything set up so that when you vote, you get what amounts to a JSON Web Token to be able to later verify that you did in fact vote? You could use the governments publicly available key to verify that your vote reached the central service, and part of the JWT could contain your vote as well as your identifying information (SSN in USA).
Obviously everything could have fancy UIs created for end users so they don't see that really all have is a JWT (maybe a QR code printed out when they vote? And all the info easily human readable?). Verification could be handled by a .gov address and also through manual use of the public key (so other services could be set up to verify votes as well). And internet connectivity wouldn't be a problem as they could just require T1 lines at polling locations (I assume if phones went out across the country the election would be delayed regardless). You could likely tell if someone had stolen the private key (the only way I can think of breaking this system), if you have a service to verify someone's vote, and it doesn't show up there, even though you have a signed JWT containing your vote. That would prove someone had stolen the private key, allowing for a makeup election.
Am I missing something basic of how this would be hackable? I'm one of those who finds it odd that many elections around the world are susceptible to simple human mistakes/purposeful malicious actions when it comes to counting ballots.
Why is it that electronic voting is so vehemently opposed here on HN and by many technologists in general when virtually every other existentially vital system they rely on is run electronically?
The cost of disruption is extremely high for voting, for pretty much everyone.
For other systems, a disruption is just inconvenient for most people. Like if I can't use my credit card for a day, I don't care (of course this may be of more consequence for some people). Same thing with a power outage (and people that need it can have a backup for grid power; how do you have a backup for legitimate governance?).
“R. James Woolsey […] former director of [CIA]. Brian J. Fox, […] develop open-source voting systems” — even if I had no opinion on the matter, it'd seem to me that there's a clear conflict of interest there.
To protect voting, do NOT use software. At all. Open-Source software is no more trustable than paper, and is orders of magnitudes more complex to set up and audit. If you can't explain a 5 years old how it works, your voting approach is not trustable.
1. You don't need to commit widespread election fraud to throw an election if you can predict where a small fraud will matter.
2. Not all election fraud is a miscount of ballots. Throwing out minorities' registrations is also election fraud, and you can't fight that with more-reliable ballots.
3. The best solution might not be a technology solution. Paper ballots make it hard to scale fraud. But that's not enough, since fraud doesn't always need to scale.
4. Early voting and absentee voting need to be taken into considerations and are a growing part of voting in the US.
5. If software systems are used in voting, tallying, or anything connected to election results, the systems should be open to inspection and to pen testing.
Security may not ever be 100% with e-voting systems, but it can be secured enough to where the probability of any hack attempt would have minimal impact on the overall outcome. I can think of several ways to a secure, verified registration could work just off the top of my head. I think the issue is more, where's the incentive for the government to make this happen?
There's got to be some way to put votes on a blockchain. More important than voting electronically is being able to verify your own vote was not tampered with, and that all the votes add up as reported.
A lot of talk about securing voting machines/verifying that they run the correct software. Why do we have to have physical machines? If it's electronic, surely a website would do if you have the correct means of ID?
NB: this is not an indication of which side I fall on the debate, it is an observation.
[EDIT] Also, I'm aware similar issues exist with a website, but it seems a lot of focus goes on the actual machine.
In case anyone can't see why this is a whole heap more terrible on top of the terribleness of electronic ballots...
Verifying actual real identity over the internet is impossible. Even if you did webcam-based biometric authentication of identity - these are fooled by a photograph. Going to a polling station and verifying your identity to a human being is much harder to fake, and almost impossible to scale.
The web is an untrustworthy delivery mechanism. What say if a nation state wants to disrupt your election, and starts DDoSing the hell out of it all. Protecting against such attacks at that scale would be extremely difficult.
Also on the topic of state-level disruption, it is well known that orgs such as GCHQ, the NSA etc. hoard zero-days. How do you know your extensively tested system isn't vulnerable to a zero-day that another state has and you don't?
For me the biggest issue with voting that is not a "paper ballot cast in a sealed secure room" is that there is no way to guarantee that the person is voting for the party they like. This is because somebody could break into your home and coerce you to vote for some party, they will also be able to verify that you have voted as they have instructed you. With a secure room they can maybe pressure you to vote one way or other, but in the end they can not verify it. Unless they can hack the electronic system and reverse the ID->vote link. This problem disappears with paper ballot (if it is reasonably secured, in my country at some point you received a ballot for every party and only cast the one you liked, the third party could ask you to bring them all the other ballots as proof)
Wait, what? I haven't seen a single anti-free-software comment in this thread; most people are against electronic voting entirely, whether it is open or closed source. Why would Microsoft be anti-electronic voting?
"The blockchain is an undeniably ingenious invention – the brainchild of a person or group of people known by the pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto."
It isn't even definitively known who invented blockchain, it is behind the pyramid scheme known as bitcoin and no, no way should that ever be used in voting system computers.
The block chain is best known for bitcoin, but it's actually a really awesome tool for keeping public records safe.
Things like land ownership is vulnerable to manipulation. We don't think about it much in the west because our governments don't change the name of the owner of your house for money, but it's a real problem in corrupt countries.
It's also a major problem in shipping. Where ownership of containers is done with paper forms, that because of corruption have a higher cost of shipping than the actual container itself, and containers still get claimed with faked forms.
Know what Mærsk did to secure the container contracts? They used the block chain.
Much like container forms or land contracts, paper votes are only safe if your system isn't corrupt. With the block chain you could remove the need of relying on the system to be honest because everyone would be able to read the record.
Right now you rely on independent observers, and I hate to tell you this, but we've been unable to influence elections in corrupt countries so far.
When Putin wins with 900% of the votes in regions that hate him you can say that it seems unlikely, if they'd used block chain you would be able to see that it was a lie.
But how can I (a voter), audit it in the voting booth? How can I verify that the extensively audited software is actually running on the machine in front of me?
plus, I might add, you can create secure software, that can't be penetrated from outside, but what about the hardware? Unless you write this (software) too, how can you trust the underlying hardware? e.g.: broadpwn.
Yes, open source makes it easier to audit/collaborate/patch but it's not enough.
I'm not a crypto fanboy or anything, but I feel like voting is a great application of blockchain technology. It seems like the system could be made to be both anonymous and publicly verifiable, and the vote count would return more or less immediately.
Uh. Blockchain is just a doubly-linked list with hashes. And a set of rules how the peers validate blocks and come to a consensus. Not some magic crypto pixie dust that brings anonymity or prevents fraud.
It could come useful, e.g., for keeping census data to avoid some forms of fraud. E.g. prevent rouge organizers loading elections with "dead souls" voters (Gogol-style). But I don't see any immediate use for election themselves.
Say, the blocks would store anonymized votes (nothing about blockchain itself implements the anonymization). One immediate issue I see is that blockchain only verifies integrity of the blocks after they're in there and out to the public, so it could be verified. Sending them too early would skew election results (observers would be able to see the intermediate results and bias their votes accordingly), and sending them too late would probably make blockchain mostly pointless.
r721|8 years ago
blackkettle|8 years ago
Besides the issues with what software the machine is actually running, most people cannot comprehend or understand that software - even if it is open source. That is not acceptable for an open democratic society, or to sustaining it.
In this particular situation it should not be necessary to rely on an expert to explain whether the vote counting mechanism is reliable. This only adds to the problem of unreliable or scheming officials - it doesn't improve anything in terms of transparency.
3131s|8 years ago
slim|8 years ago
On the other hand, with direct democracy, the stakes are lower for each vote. So there is less incentive to manipulate the vote. So it makes sense to use e-voting for direct democracy.
In the end the voting mechanism in democracy is not really about precision, it's more about getting an acceptable outcome for all the parties
amluto|8 years ago
You can throw cryptographic verification on top of that if you like.
EGreg|8 years ago
Having a merkle tree and voting from your device instead of a polling station is not just more convenient - it's more secure too. Everyone can verify their vote was counted!!
And right now? Right now we have a government database of who voted for what. That's crazy.
eksemplar|8 years ago
I'm not sure why you would do it in a non-corrupt country though.
danirod|8 years ago
How can you know that even if the source code for the voting machine is open, the voting machine is running the exact same source code? How can you know nobody has tampered the code the instance is running?
I'm glad my country is still running on paper ballots and glad we require voter ID.
Iv|8 years ago
Transparent voting boxes, ballots in envelopes, manual redundant counting done by people, usually voter who were nicely asked if they can come help back in the evening. That's what we use in France, you get the official result a few hours after the closing of the voting stations.
The whole process is watchable, from the sealing of the box the morning to the count in the end and parties send observers in random stations to check nothing fishy happens. An official log book is open for anyone to notice if they feel something fishy happened (you were not allowed to vote, the counting was unfair, etc...)
Oh, and make voting day a holiday, or just put it on Sundays.
I used to wonder how US could not even get that last part right, but then I understood that a whole party thinks it is in its interest to have less voters.
cmiles74|8 years ago
In my district we vote by coloring in little circles with a #2 pencil, we then feed that directly into an electronic machine that tallies the results for my district. While the paper I handled is stored in the machine, I am sure that the results are transmitted to the next link in the chain through some computer system.
With so many links in the chain, it's my opinion that it's unreasonable to expect them all to be processed by people. It won't scale and I'm not convinced that it's that much safer anyway. It would be my preference that the pieces of the system that perform this processing are backed with open source software.
At the very least, if there is a case where tampering is suspected, officials of the court can compare the software on the machine with the software in the repository. This would prove in a clear and straightforward manner that tampering has occurred.
As painful as it is, I think we all need to trust the state, to some degree, to do the jobs that are the responsibility of the state. Once the votes have been tallied for a district, isn't it possible to tamper with them as they are transmitted up the chain to the next link in the processing? Or when regions of the state send their votes up to whatever the next link might be? I think that is possible, the best we can hope for is to push for as much transparency as possible and hope that, if it comes to it, we have enough data to detect such tampering.
TeMPOraL|8 years ago
We need a high-profile hack of some local elections to drive that point home. Something done completely for teh lulz, leading to a result so absurd the elections would have to be redone.
xroche|8 years ago
Or the processor is trustworthy ? Many voting machines are using old processors, such as 68000, and it would not be too hard to emulate a a rogue processor that will have a different behavior, whatever the source code is.
You can also change the behavior of the voting machine at a certain time, or in certain conditions (such as detecting a voting session has started)
The problem is not that voting machines are vulnerable to one or two attacks. There are thousands of ways of compromising them.
The only answer to this is that cryptography specialists do not have any answer to a secure electronic voting not involving a physical element (a bulletin, a receipt, etc.). This means that there is no THEORETICAL solution.
drdaeman|8 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
Sadly, as far as I know, none is without issues (older systems were found to have various problems, and newer stuff is still bleeding edge that wasn't yet reviewed thoroughly).
giancarlostoro|8 years ago
Way too many factors...
JorgeGT|8 years ago
It's just a former CIA Director signing the op-ed. It's not like they have a collection of zero-days and other exploits is it?
vmateixeira|8 years ago
rotten|8 years ago
Accacin|8 years ago
For me it's important that the barrier to voting is as low as possible, and we don't have a governement issued ID that is free.
grondilu|8 years ago
That being said, from times to times articles show up about someone who claimed to have invented a viable solution. So we should not diss the idea and keep an open mind. Eventually someone will find a solution.
specialist|8 years ago
Mapping, voter files, candidate filings, canvassing reports, ballot artwork, translations, ballot tracking, etc.
All of it should be open source. The way it used to be. Before the vendors smelled blood. (Especially after HAVA.)
I traveled my state advocating "citizen owned software". Everyone gets that phrasing. Overwhelming support.
lawless123|8 years ago
To say a machine hasn't been hacked is trying to prove a negative.
joseppe|8 years ago
[deleted]
nurettin|8 years ago
So yeah. Doesn't really matter whether it's electronic or not.
danhardman|8 years ago
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
fredley|8 years ago
TeMPOraL|8 years ago
warcode|8 years ago
ai_ja_nai|8 years ago
What we need is a zero-knowledge proof: we need the entire voting dataset to be publicly downloadable and some kind of checksumming so that, while maintaining anonimity, I can 1)check that my vote is the same 2)run whole the counting in a blink on my PC.
This gives much better guarantees of no tampering
Ajedi32|8 years ago
3) Users should not be able to prove to another person who they voted for
This is to prevent people from using threats of violence or promise of reward to coerce others into voting a certain way.
Unfortunately, this requirement is very hard to fulfil while also fulfilling requirement 1.
cmiles74|8 years ago
kennydude|8 years ago
beat|8 years ago
Second, never allow paper ballots to be handled by just one person, or by only members of one party - whether blank or used. Require that members of at least two political parties be present any time the ballots are physically touched.
Third, if using machines to read the ballots (ScanTron, etc), conduct spot counts of random machines, to make sure the machine results match the paper ballots. Conduct spot counts of entire polling stations randomly to make sure result totals match voter roll totals. Although this isn't 100% certain, it doesn't take a lot of spot checks to detect any sort of large-scale fraud effort.
Do these things, and it's exceedingly difficult to do statistically meaningful vote fraud, because we have a high degree of trust in the paper ballots and their surrounding process. From there, you can use automatic ballot reading and tallying to get fast results - the vote counting/tallying automation is derived data, not the System of Record.
noja|8 years ago
There are probably less than a hundred people in the world who can understand an electronic voting system at every level down to and including the silicon.
specialist|8 years ago
cletus|8 years ago
Paper ballots (the kind with marks read optically, not the ridiculous punch cards at the center of the Florida 2000 debacle) are easy to use and understand with a very low error rate and keep a paper trail, being the actual ballots.
I don't understand why anyone other than the companies who sell e-voting machines actually want electronic voting.
specialist|8 years ago
They want certainty more than any thing else. For decades, computers were regarded as more accurate, impartial, certain than human tabulators.
Second factor is appropriations. Elections are big money. And like all industrires, there's a revolving door between government and industry.
Admin also want control. Their impulse is to centralize, simplify. Think of the logistics of running 100s of voting sites, 1,000s of precincts. All the training, people, materials, gear that has to be stored, shuttled around, repaired, etc. Moving to voting computers, reducing head count, moving to central count seemed like a huge win. (But you and I people computer people, we know they just traded problems.)
fredley|8 years ago
Shivetya|8 years ago
With paper ballots how do we guarantee those with a right to vote who cannot travel to a secure voting location have the ability to do so?
richardknop|8 years ago
boomboomsubban|8 years ago
Voting software is bound to fail, no bug bounty is big enough to offset the billions that could be made off of hacking an election. It is bound to fail spectacularly, and then for the rest of time people can point at the election and say "the ability to see the source code let this happen."
marcelsalathe|8 years ago
I'd much prefer electronic to paper. Last year I voted on 24 initiatives, and that is just the federal level. It also does not include elections.
vowelless|8 years ago
CapsUnLock|8 years ago
How it will work: A person gets this device in the voting center enters/gets his voter ID, does the voting (anonymously), presses the read-only lock and throws it into the bin. After all the voting these device are scanned and voting data is retrieved. A voting database is populated in each center in a transparent way, to prevent tampering (several parties can be allowed to read this data separately and then all data variants can be compared against each other, just in case). After consensus on the voting data, each voting center sends the results for counting. And the voting is completed.
In the end, these devices are reset and the cycle continues.
Well, I'm sure that there must be some problems when voting the aforementioned way. But I guess it could work out, with some modifications.
EDIT: Grammar.
scaryclam|8 years ago
castis|8 years ago
ivanbakel|8 years ago
kome|8 years ago
By our observations electronic voting added several layers of complexity that are difficult to justify.
ApolloFortyNine|8 years ago
Obviously everything could have fancy UIs created for end users so they don't see that really all have is a JWT (maybe a QR code printed out when they vote? And all the info easily human readable?). Verification could be handled by a .gov address and also through manual use of the public key (so other services could be set up to verify votes as well). And internet connectivity wouldn't be a problem as they could just require T1 lines at polling locations (I assume if phones went out across the country the election would be delayed regardless). You could likely tell if someone had stolen the private key (the only way I can think of breaking this system), if you have a service to verify someone's vote, and it doesn't show up there, even though you have a signed JWT containing your vote. That would prove someone had stolen the private key, allowing for a makeup election.
Am I missing something basic of how this would be hackable? I'm one of those who finds it odd that many elections around the world are susceptible to simple human mistakes/purposeful malicious actions when it comes to counting ballots.
wu-ikkyu|8 years ago
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC|8 years ago
marcosdumay|8 years ago
Granted what is publicly known, it not working is a very likely outcome, but nobody will ever be able to contest it.
maxerickson|8 years ago
For other systems, a disruption is just inconvenient for most people. Like if I can't use my credit card for a day, I don't care (of course this may be of more consequence for some people). Same thing with a power outage (and people that need it can have a backup for grid power; how do you have a backup for legitimate governance?).
Arkanosis|8 years ago
To protect voting, do NOT use software. At all. Open-Source software is no more trustable than paper, and is orders of magnitudes more complex to set up and audit. If you can't explain a 5 years old how it works, your voting approach is not trustable.
Zigurd|8 years ago
1. You don't need to commit widespread election fraud to throw an election if you can predict where a small fraud will matter.
2. Not all election fraud is a miscount of ballots. Throwing out minorities' registrations is also election fraud, and you can't fight that with more-reliable ballots.
3. The best solution might not be a technology solution. Paper ballots make it hard to scale fraud. But that's not enough, since fraud doesn't always need to scale.
4. Early voting and absentee voting need to be taken into considerations and are a growing part of voting in the US.
5. If software systems are used in voting, tallying, or anything connected to election results, the systems should be open to inspection and to pen testing.
pjmorris|8 years ago
xealgo|8 years ago
clarkevans|8 years ago
tiku|8 years ago
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC|8 years ago
2. Because the average voter cannot possibly understand and verify the security properties of that setup.
tiku|8 years ago
ruffrey|8 years ago
tzs|8 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
jjawssd|8 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14921935
jk563|8 years ago
NB: this is not an indication of which side I fall on the debate, it is an observation.
[EDIT] Also, I'm aware similar issues exist with a website, but it seems a lot of focus goes on the actual machine.
fredley|8 years ago
Verifying actual real identity over the internet is impossible. Even if you did webcam-based biometric authentication of identity - these are fooled by a photograph. Going to a polling station and verifying your identity to a human being is much harder to fake, and almost impossible to scale.
The web is an untrustworthy delivery mechanism. What say if a nation state wants to disrupt your election, and starts DDoSing the hell out of it all. Protecting against such attacks at that scale would be extremely difficult.
Also on the topic of state-level disruption, it is well known that orgs such as GCHQ, the NSA etc. hoard zero-days. How do you know your extensively tested system isn't vulnerable to a zero-day that another state has and you don't?
yoz-y|8 years ago
DarkKomunalec|8 years ago
thescriptkiddie|8 years ago
cortesoft|8 years ago
davidgerard|8 years ago
Why did anyone ever think computerising voting was a good or useful idea?
return0|8 years ago
peterwwillis|8 years ago
wnevets|8 years ago
a_imho|8 years ago
scierama|8 years ago
It isn't even definitively known who invented blockchain, it is behind the pyramid scheme known as bitcoin and no, no way should that ever be used in voting system computers.
dang|8 years ago
eksemplar|8 years ago
Things like land ownership is vulnerable to manipulation. We don't think about it much in the west because our governments don't change the name of the owner of your house for money, but it's a real problem in corrupt countries.
It's also a major problem in shipping. Where ownership of containers is done with paper forms, that because of corruption have a higher cost of shipping than the actual container itself, and containers still get claimed with faked forms.
Know what Mærsk did to secure the container contracts? They used the block chain.
Much like container forms or land contracts, paper votes are only safe if your system isn't corrupt. With the block chain you could remove the need of relying on the system to be honest because everyone would be able to read the record.
Right now you rely on independent observers, and I hate to tell you this, but we've been unable to influence elections in corrupt countries so far.
When Putin wins with 900% of the votes in regions that hate him you can say that it seems unlikely, if they'd used block chain you would be able to see that it was a lie.
huhlig|8 years ago
cgmg|8 years ago
How about learning the definition of the words you use before throwing them around?
greggeter|8 years ago
[deleted]
joseppe|8 years ago
unknown|8 years ago
[deleted]
alkoumpa|8 years ago
fredley|8 years ago
alkoumpa|8 years ago
nkohari|8 years ago
drdaeman|8 years ago
It could come useful, e.g., for keeping census data to avoid some forms of fraud. E.g. prevent rouge organizers loading elections with "dead souls" voters (Gogol-style). But I don't see any immediate use for election themselves.
Say, the blocks would store anonymized votes (nothing about blockchain itself implements the anonymization). One immediate issue I see is that blockchain only verifies integrity of the blocks after they're in there and out to the public, so it could be verified. Sending them too early would skew election results (observers would be able to see the intermediate results and bias their votes accordingly), and sending them too late would probably make blockchain mostly pointless.