To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/open-source-software-hacker-voting.html

by bleakgadfly • 9 years ago

228 228 9 years ago

mobile.nytimes.com

alkoumpa3• 9 years ago

to protect voting, audit your software/system extensively. Openssh is open-source and we all know the story..

fredley6• 9 years ago

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?

Sholmesy2• 9 years ago

You can't. Especially at scale (every person validating the software before voting). Paper ballots with a anonymised ledger of votes placed is, in my opinion, the best method.

mtgx• 9 years ago

You can't. And even if the software is open source, it doesn't guarantee that state or election officials will set aside budgets to deploy such patches swiftly, or even care to deploy them.

alkoumpa3• 9 years ago

do you think these questions are addressed by open-source software? I mean, if you only have a few buttons in front of you, how can you verify/audit the software it's running?

alkoumpa3• 9 years ago

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.

danirod• 9 years ago

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.

giancarlostoro• 9 years ago

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-

Way too many factors...

fredley6• 9 years ago

On top of this, we all know that if it was implemented as well as physically possible, there would still be vectors for attack. However, if current voting machine trials are anything to go by, it's usually implemented extremely poorly.

DarkKomunalec2• 9 years ago

I don't see people running shell commands on the software before and after they vote to make sure it's the correct software.

How would you know the shell itself, running on the machine you're trying to verify, isn't lying to you?

nurettin• 9 years ago

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.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC14• 9 years ago

So you mean it doesn't really matter whether we even know about the fraud happening?

Accacin2• 9 years ago

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.

richardknop11• 9 years ago

That should be solved by issuing a free government ID, not by compromising and creating a giant loophole when potentially citizens of other countries can vote in your election and there is no way to verify that.

TeMPOraL3• 9 years ago

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.

octalmage2• 9 years ago

At defcon this year they had a bunch of the popular electronic voting booths set up, and they were all hacked within 6 hours. A big problem is having physical access to the booth. All of the hacks involve picking a lock.

Iv3• 9 years ago

If all that was at risk was a night in police jail and a slap on the wrist, it would be done, but reading the sentences one faces for election tampering is really chilling.

I would not risk it for a million, I will certainly not risk it for the lulz. Plus, in most cases, it involves (laughably weak) physical security. I am less confident on how to hide my tracks there and I suppose many would-be hackers feel the same.

Chardok• 9 years ago

Unfortunately it would need to be a hack that purposefully gets itself caught in order to drive any point home. I can imagine the risk vs reward on something like that would be very undesirable.

cookiecaper• 9 years ago

It doesn't matter what gets done, it matters how it's portrayed. Such a hack would just be used by the media to vilify their target-of-the-week, and politicians to institute ever-more-prominent centralized electronic controls that don't grant any related protection, but allow them to expand their personal influence and institutional surveillance surfaces (see also: TSA).

In fact, the media is already trying to CYA, and the state is already trying to expand control, by claiming that such a hack was perpetrated by a nation-state in the 2016 election, and that that's why they were so egregiously wrong in everything they said about Clinton/Trump in the preceding 18 months.

JorgeGT• 9 years ago

and I'd be suspicious on anyone trying to promote it.

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?

drdaeman3• 9 years ago

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.

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).

pjmorris2• 9 years ago

The trick is that you don't just have to convince somebody (a security expert) that the system is trustworthy, you have to convince everyone (voters) that the system is trustworthy. Anything more complicated than paper ballots counted in public will leave room for doubt.

09094920394314• 9 years ago

The wikipedia link mainly mentions crypto-methods...how exactly is a non-engineer supposed to end to end verify this? If you use paper ballots you can simply sit down and count...heck not even that basic math if you get creative with sorting

vmateixeira• 9 years ago

Not just the software we should be concerned about, hardware too.

cmiles743• 9 years ago

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.

TeMPOraL3• 9 years ago

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.

I think the main argument for physical voting is that it's much safer precisely because it doesn't scale well - and so attacks against it don't scale well either. The manpower requirements buy you security.

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.

I agree, but I think it does not apply to elections - simply because it's the one place where both the ruling party and competing groups have very strong incentives to mess with the process.

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?

Yes, but again, the argument goes, the less scalable and more manpower-intensive the whole process is, the more difficult is to hack it.

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.

I agree with the call for transparency, but I also agree with the people who point out that inserting electronic systems destroys that transparency (too easy to hack, too complex for general population to inspect).

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC14• 9 years ago

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.

How can you be sure about that?

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.

The point is that if you are not convinced, you can go and observe the process. The point is to remove as much trust as possible. The point is not to just have some human in the loop, but to make sure that people who distrust each other can personally make sure that the correct procedure is being followed.

It would be my preference that the pieces of the system that perform this processing are backed with open source software.

The problem is that you have no way to verify that what is actually processing your vote is the open source software that you hope it is.

See also Ken Thompson's classic "reflections on trusting trust":

https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...

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.

No, they can't. The only way to check what software is running on the computer is to use software that is running on the computer, which is thus also suspect. That is, short of decapping each and every chip in the one computer that you are trying to check and extracting all the circuitry and all storage bits in it.

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.

But ensuring trustworthiness of elections is not one of those. Elections are the anchor that all the other trust that we put into democratically elected governments is anchored at, it's the one lever that we have to remove governments that turn out to not be trustworthy. You cannot trust the government to remove itself in case you want to have it replaced.

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?

If the election is run properly: No.

Represenatives from each party will be observing the election process at every polling station, and the general public can usually also observe if they wish to, from opening until the votes are counted. Also, election results should generally be published broken down by polling station, so each of the observers can check that what they observed at their polling station actually matched what went into the total.

There is absolutely no place for trust in elections.

deelowe• 9 years ago

Your entire premise is based on there being a long complicated chain, which I think is a bit of a red herring. Voting happens in districts. The totals for those districts are already posted publicly. There's no need to validate the entire chain when the lowest level is already open and free to be audited by anyone. Additionally, for the districts I'm familiar with, polls are staffed by volunteers and anyone is free to stand around and watch the whole process.

A paper ballot system where local volunteers from the district count the votes at the polls in a manner that can be observed would absolutely work for the US. It would be pretty easy to just write down what the volunteers counted and then check later whether that matched up with the nationally posted numbers. No long chain to decipher, no obscure software to worry about. And, as a bonus, there are places where this is already done this way, so really nothing needs to change policy wise (other than eliminating the other methods).

bluGill3• 9 years ago

Electronics isn't a problem. The problem is electronics that you cannot personally verify. Every step can be electronic and things be just fine. However if someone decides to cast doubt on any point in the chain it needs to be possible to verify that link actually was done correctly.

With your system I can cast doubt on the entire chain, and there is no problem because you can remove all doubt by taking those paper ballots and counting them all by hand. With several hundred million ballots to count it is obviously expensive (in man-hours), but you can see how to verify that counts. Note that the above verification is something your average idiot with no knowledge of computers can understand and trust.

There exist systems that are all electronic: the voter pushes a button (on a touch screen) and from there on we only have the count. As a programmer I can think of many ways I can make the voting system change a few votes and there is no way to know that the machine's count is wrong.

Part of what make this hard is anonymous votes are important. There are cases in history where someone was forced (with a gun) to vote for someone they probably wouldn't have voted for otherwise. We have solved this problem by having watchers at the polls (from all sides) ensure that nothing funny happens at the polls, and once you leave the booth nobody has any way to know who you voted for.

The above is why I think absentee voting needs to be restricted to those who physically cannot get to the polls on voting day (I'm fine with a voting week or month)

JumpCrisscross2• 9 years ago

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

I've worked with the New York City Board of Elections [1]. We have what I consider to be best in class: electronically-scanned paper ballots.

When a voter walks in, their name is checked against the rolls and the stub number on the blank ballot they're given is recorded. The voter marks the ballot in confidence and then inserts it, themselves, into an optical scanner. The scanner increments a "public count" by one and drops the ballot into a locked box.

At the end of the day, the public count is compared to the count at the beginning of the day. (These counts are publicly recorded for each machine and do not increment down over the life of the machine.) The aggregate votes to each candidate are then printed to a tape and posted publicly.

The machine also uploads these data to a USB drive, which is taken to a computer at the poll site for electronic transmission to the Board. Before transmission, anyone may compare those numbers to the tape or pubic count. (The scanner workers have to certify the electronic transmission before it's sent.) The NYPD then collects the machines, paper ballots and tapes.

Throughout the day, anyone may see the public count at each scanner. At the end of the day, anyone may review the publicly-posted tapes. Stub numbers for the paper ballots issued and public counts recorded are reconciled, with multiple poll workers certifying the reconciliation.

It's a messy system, but it's robust. The public count means you'd have to compromise everybody at a poll site to add or destroy ballots. (Or, you'd have to predict who won't vote and manually commit fraud.) To tamper with the votes, you'd have to compromise machines before they print their tapes. You'd then have to hope the Board's random audits don't attempt to reconcile the paper ballots with the compromised tapes.

[1] http://www.vote.nyc.ny.us/html/home/home.shtml

Iv3• 9 years ago

Came here to say that.

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.

_Codemonkeyism• 9 years ago

Same in Germany.

creaghpatr• 9 years ago

About the author of the article: R. James Woolsey is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Sums it up.

cortesoft4• 9 years ago

Or make voting last multiple days instead of just one.

EugeneAZ5• 9 years ago

The most funniest thing is who is just eligible to be a candidate (not mention his chances to win). And how the chosen legislation, which is the result of those elections, is far from the most fair - one approved by score voting in direct democracy.

pgeorgi2• 9 years ago

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.

Historical reasons: http://www.whytuesday.org/answer/

rotten2• 9 years ago

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?

vertex-four4• 9 years ago

No, the point of a polling station is so that there's provably no coercion. You fill out your ballot in secret, you're not permitted to take a photograph of it, and you place it in the ballot box without telling anybody what you've voted for.

The more you allow people to vote from their homes, the more likely it is that people can be coerced into voting the way their partner, employer, or otherwise, want them to.

chiph• 9 years ago

There's some challenging requirements around this. You need to positively identify someone as having the right and ability to vote (no dead people voting like in Illinois). You need to make sure they vote only once (no ballot box stuffing). You need to make sure their vote wasn't coerced (as far as you can). You need to make sure their vote is anonymous (to protect the voters from retaliation). And it needs to be easy enough so that your 80 year old grandmother can do it.

lawless123• 9 years ago

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.

grondilu• 9 years ago

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.

nobodyorother• 9 years ago

pvote.org seems like a decent solution, it's <500 lines of code that needs to be audited.

That doesn't handle auditing the machines themselves, but as the 2016 US presidential election recount found in Wisconsin, the tamper-evident machines showed evidence of tampering, so maybe we're closer to knowing whether the trusted systems we use to count votes are trustworthy.

Of course, the current machines are still Diebold ("Premier Election Solutions"), so who knows. Ken Blackwell will make sure only the right folks vote, anyway, just like he did in 2008.

specialist6• 9 years ago

"Eventually someone will find a solution."

First define the problem.

I demand the Australian Ballot: private voting, public counting.

After studing this extensively, I believe there is no way to digitize elections and preserve the Austalian Ballot. Because there is no digital equivalent of the physical secure one-way hash (shuffle) of dropping ballots into a box.

Any crypto- blocko- based system has to design for the whole election. Not just the voting. Including pollbooks, which record when ballots are issued to voters. Including precinct-based election counts, because every single precinct gets a different ballot (say 500 voters).

Maybe someone will prove me wrong. Cool. Then show me. The burden of proof is one them, not me. Otherwise, stop wasting everyone's time with technophilia sideshows. We've got real democracy with real work to do.

---

Alternately, any proposal has to replace the Australian Ballot with something new. Some ideas which would simplify the problem space:

- replace winner takes all with Approval Voting;

- issue separate ballots for federal, state, county, and local elections;

- decide that time-boxed privacy, where the secret ballot is preserved until an election is certified and then made public, is sufficient

- supplant our current loose voter ID regiment some kinda of U2F futuretech.

specialist6• 9 years ago

There's a lot more to elections than tabulation.

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.

xroche• 9 years ago

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.

fredley6• 9 years ago

To protect voting, use paper ballots.

Shivetya• 9 years ago

Valid ID should also be required.

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?

dsr_• 9 years ago

ID is only necessary if you haven't already established the right to vote in a particular location. After that, you're on the list and it's remarkably difficult to get you off of it; as it should be.

ID requirements are frequently used in order to deny voting to people who are poor or otherwise find it difficult to get particular documents.

richardknop11• 9 years ago

Paper ballots without voter ID requirement are ridiculous.

dghf2• 9 years ago

The UK seems to manage OK (ID is only required in Northern Ireland). 2015 saw 37 allegations of personation out of 51.4 million votes cast (https://www.ncpolitics.uk/2016/12/how-big-a-problem-is-votin...).

Graham24• 9 years ago

Works fine in the UK, voter fraud is tricky (although there have been cases with postal votes) when there's a piece of paper that can be physically counted again.

Very hard to defraud if you are in, purely for example, Russia.

danhardman• 9 years ago

I'd like to reference Tom Scott's video[0] here. There is no need for an electronic voting system, paper ballots work perfectly.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

fredley6• 9 years ago

Depends on what your need is. If you need to alter votes, it's an extremely good system!

TeMPOraL3• 9 years ago

This video is absolutely an amazing summary. Thanks for linking it!

warcode• 9 years ago

Until you want to scale due to using rapid direct democracy. Paper ballots will still WORK perfectly, but the workload will be massive.

zython• 9 years ago

Which is something you can justify IMO for a direct, just, free, equal and confidential election.

specialist6• 9 years ago

The gold standard is paper ballots cast at a precinct, counted the moment the polls close.

In the USA, average precincts are 500 voters. Totally doable. In fact, that's how many jurisdictions did it.

jk5632• 9 years ago

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.

fredley6• 9 years ago

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?

jk5632• 9 years ago

Last time I voted I took a driving licence. All they did was check my face matched my card, and the name and address matched my registration no real check on whether or not the card was genuine.

When I created my government account I provided passport and driving licence numbers on top of the above.

I feel this invalidates your veracity point, and probably the scaling point too?

The second and third points seem more viable and are potential issues. Especially the third, this would be the main concern IMO. Though I'm sure there are protections against this too (thinking virtually distributed).

scaryclam4• 9 years ago

All that, in addition to the problems that would arise from voter coercion and threats to vote a certain way.

DarkKomunalec2• 9 years ago

Because then you need to secure the computer used to access the website. Good luck with that.

yoz-y3• 9 years ago

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)

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC14• 9 years ago

Also, whether it is actually possible with an electronic system or not: It is really important that the (below) average voter actually understands that it is impossible for anyone to figure out who they voted for.

vowelless• 9 years ago

Someone needs to start a campaign: "Say No To Electronic Voting"

r721• 9 years ago

Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14920513

clarkevans• 9 years ago

This past election has shown that it's not just the voting software, but the software/systems that control who is permitted to vote.

boomboomsubban• 9 years ago

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."

ai_ja_nai• 9 years ago

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.

This gives much better guarantees of no tampering

cmiles743• 9 years ago

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.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC14• 9 years ago

But the data is worthless if you cannot trust the way is has been acquired.

Ajedi32• 9 years ago

One other requirement too.

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.

deathanatos• 9 years ago

4. Check that all votes in the tally belong to actual, eligible voters.

Verifying your vote is in the sum, and tallied, is not good enough if the result is swamped with, or more craftily, the balance just tipped by fake votes.

I have no idea how you would implement that.

kennydude• 9 years ago

This does not ensure the data itself isn't wrong.

ivanbakel• 9 years ago

Previous discussion (5 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14920513

kome• 9 years ago

My first job was an ethnography of electronic voting in a wealthy region in northern Italy.

By our observations electronic voting added several layers of complexity that are difficult to justify.

nkohari• 9 years ago

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.

drdaeman3• 9 years ago

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.

tiku2• 9 years ago

why not blockchain voting. everyone receives 1 voteCoin, and transfers it to the correct wallet address of the person he or she votes for?

tiku2• 9 years ago

and it could even help with vote counting per city, if they originate from a "city" wallet, that came out of a "region" wallet and so on..

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC14• 9 years ago

1. Because it lacks anonymity?

2. Because the average voter cannot possibly understand and verify the security properties of that setup.

pjmorris2• 9 years ago

To protect voting, use paper ballots and count them in public (OK, and voter ids if you insist).

noja• 9 years ago

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.

specialist6• 9 years ago

Bingo. And those of us who've studied voting computers extensively have concluded they're to be avoided.

marcelsalathe• 9 years ago

Geneva has made its e-voting software public: https://republique-et-canton-de-geneve.github.io/chvote-1-0/...

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.

cletus• 9 years ago

To protect voting don't use electronic voting.

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.

specialist6• 9 years ago

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.)

joseppe• 9 years ago

One word: blockchain

wu-ikkyu8• 9 years ago

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?

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC14• 9 years ago

Because it doesn't work.

wu-ikkyu8• 9 years ago

Does a system have to be 100% free of security concerns to "work"?

maxerickson3• 9 years ago

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?).

wu-ikkyu8• 9 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

Would there not be far more immediate and direct inconvenience if no one could use their credit cards for a day, than if they couldn't vote for a day? (Assuming the following day both systems were back up and running) What is so inconvenient about have to wait an extra day to cast a vote on who your senator will be for the coming years versus being able to buy food or medicine?

marcosdumay• 9 years ago

It's worse than not working. It's because nobody can ever be sure if it's working or not.

Granted what is publicly known, it not working is a very likely outcome, but nobody will ever be able to contest it.

wu-ikkyu8• 9 years ago

How can any one person be sure that a completely paper based voting system is working fraud-free in a country with hundreds of millions of people?

How can you be sure the financial system you use is working?

nobody will ever be able to contest it.

See blockchain. If everyone has a copy of the vote registry, then they can contest it if things don't match up.

CapsUnLock• 9 years ago

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.

EDIT: Grammar.

castis• 9 years ago

The only winner in that scenario is the company manufacturing the NFC devices. That system is too complex.

scaryclam4• 9 years ago

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?

jjawssd• 9 years ago

Related comment to a related thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14921935

blackkettle2• 9 years ago

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.

eksemplar8• 9 years ago

I think you could do some secure voting software if all your citizens had a secure two factor signature and you used block chain.

I'm not sure why you would do it in a non-corrupt country though.

beat3• 9 years ago

Why do something simple, when we can do something complicated instead?

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC14• 9 years ago

No, you can't. Elections as completely unlike any other scenario that you might be trying to secure. Two-factor auth is of no use for elections.

3pt141593• 9 years ago

And how do you prove that all of those citizens exist?

We have a secure, provable, relatively cheap method right now: Paper ballots and public observers at elections. Compared to the stakes the cost is peanuts.

5trokerac3• 9 years ago

There is no such thing as a non-corrupt country.

3131s• 9 years ago

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).

JshWright• 9 years ago

New York uses the reverse of that. You fill out a paper ballot, which then gets fed into a machine for counting. A random sample (of sufficient size) of the paper ballots are then counted to verify the electronic results.

slim• 9 years ago

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

matt_wulfeck• 9 years ago

The fact that it doesn't scale is exactly why we should stick with it. We want voting to be hard, distributed, and diverse. That prevents a single county or state from destabilizing the rest of the country. It should prioritize accuracy over speed and all else.

It's like an ecosystem. The more homogeneous the system then the more vulnerable we are to a single virus (or hacker) we become.

EugeneAZ5• 9 years ago

Public - i.e. everyone knows how others have voted - voting can be both precise and secure. Public voting can be done electronically, say, via encrypted SMS.

So why to bother with secrecy in the first place?

blibble• 9 years ago

neither do the attacks, which is the point

Fnoord• 9 years ago

Voting with paper does not scale.

Yes, it does, it just scales less well than electronic/internet voting. Each voting method (and arguably, voting system) have their + and - but paper voting has the most important benefit. Specifically, the most important one is that whilst counting we have the benefit of many eyes watching over (one of the things NSA improved post-Snowden). I know this first hand as I have participated as vote counter in the 2017 Dutch election on March 15 (can recommend volunteering for the educational experience and ability to observe alone, plus it can be seen as a civil duty). Our team consisted of approx 8 or 9 volunteers. How many people audit the source code? The patches? The build process? The hardware? Are those random people? Are computer experts biased? You don't need to be intelligent or even familiar with computers to count paper votes. You do have to be a computer expert [2] to audit the software or hardware.

You can't make people vote everyday for example, which is required if you'd like to implement direct democracy.

I'd rather have authentic results for a few elections than have many elections with a higher potential of being bogus.

We should also not neglect that a direct democracy can be dangerously manipulated in times of fake news. The same is true with 2 or 3 elections every 4 years, but the vulnerable choke points are higher in a direct democracy.

Finally, a disadvantage is that you got so many elections that people are tired of elections. I don't know the scientific name for this phenomenon but I know an analogy: visit a supermarket and have a look at all the brands for product X where X can be peanut butter, ice cream, or beer. Result: brand loyalty. So people are gonna vote e.g. 'peanut butter' (I don't wanna name a realistic example to avoid reader assuming I'm partisan) in each of those direct democracy elections w/o looking further. Do not want!

There's an adagium in computerland "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". Paper voting isn't broken, it has a proven track record.

PS: For anyone who is interested in the history of voting security and the risks of electronic & internet voting I can recommend the course "Securing Digital Democracy" by J. Alex Halderman (one of the researchers in the Diebold affair some 15 years ago) on Coursera [1].

[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/digital-democracy

[2] Not sure on a better term here. Computer expert is an inaccurate global term; what is required is a rather specific skillset. Perhaps programmer or hardware hacker is more accurate. But even then programmer doesn't tell us about which programming languages are mastered, and hardware hacker is equally vague. You get the gist.

EGreg6• 9 years ago

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.

BurningFrog3• 9 years ago

With electronic banking I can verify that my money are where they should be.

With electronic voting, I can't be sure my vote got counted, and even less sure others weren't tampered with.

amluto• 9 years ago

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.

foepys• 9 years ago

That's one very expensive pen.

Paper doesn't matter if it isn't being counted. Spotting irregularity in voting results might be possible with statistical methods but how often were votes really recounted?

Arkanosis2• 9 years ago

How do you check that your votes were actually taken into account? Even if you can do that, how do you check that no votes were added on top of legit votes?

If the actual votes are printed, how do you make sure no one can prove their vote to third parties and so be paid for it?

tzs• 9 years ago

To protect voting, use this or something similar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

scierama• 9 years ago

"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.

huhlig• 9 years ago

If you consider Bitcoin a pyramid scheme I would love to hear your treatise on fiat currency, fractional reserve banking, and capitalism in general.

JumpCrisscross2• 9 years ago

I'll bite. What's the failure mode for a paper-money based fractional banking system with deposit insurance that makes it a pyramid scheme?

cgmg• 9 years ago

I don't think you know what a pyramid scheme is.

How about learning the definition of the words you use before throwing them around?

dang2• 9 years ago

Personal attacks will get you banned on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is, so please don't post like this again.

eksemplar8• 9 years ago

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.

dang2• 9 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14969875 and marked it off-topic.

beat3• 9 years ago

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.

Zigurd• 9 years ago

First, you have to understand the problem:

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.

wnevets• 9 years ago

Use open source software that prints a paper ballot then count the paper ballot.

a_imho• 9 years ago

Retire voting in favor of sortition.

davidgerard• 9 years ago

To protect voting use paper.

Why did anyone ever think computerising voting was a good or useful idea?

ApolloFortyNine• 9 years ago

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.

thescriptkiddie• 9 years ago

The amount of anti-free-software FUD in this thread is staggering. Did Microsoft buy off all of you?

cortesoft4• 9 years ago

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?

ruffrey• 9 years ago

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.

peterwwillis• 9 years ago

This story has been posted four times now. Click the 'past' link at the top.

return0• 9 years ago

To what extent is voting fraud an issue in the developed world and why is Nytimes upset about it?

xealgo• 9 years ago

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?

Arkanosis2• 9 years ago

“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.

To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software

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