They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/22/us-voting-machine-private-companies-voter-registration

by wallace_f • 7 years ago

256 179 7 years ago

This isn't a complicated problem. State election agencies are underfunded and have to cut corners in order to survive. A simple federal cash infusion would solve 70% of this problem. The other 30% is coming up with sufficient election machine standards.

rectang4• 7 years ago

It isn't technically complicated, but it is politically complicated: free and fair elections are not in everyone's interest. The technical problem will continue to persist (or will be reintroduced!) so long as it benefits someone in power to have a broken system in place.

maxxxxx• 7 years ago

I think that's an important point. For a lot of people in US politics it's more important to "win" than to have fair elections.

peteradio• 7 years ago

This problem was solved millenia ago, no focus group needed. The problem is power interests standing in the way of simple solutions. More money for more polls, hell yes. More money for "better machines" fuck no, that money goes to no good.

paulgb2• 7 years ago

It's bizarre to me that elections are not considered a central component of natural security. It doesn't matter how many nuclear submarines you have if the very means of government are vulnerable to cyber espionage because of severe underfunding.

throwaway2048• 7 years ago

it isn't an accident

throwanem• 7 years ago

We could vote on paper for the same people we've been voting for, and we'd still end up with the same problems.

joshfraser11• 7 years ago

It would be a lot easier to trust an electronic voting system if it was open-source, open-hardware, and votes were recorded on a public blockchain.

mi100hael• 7 years ago

Voting is one of the very few use-cases I can think of where Blockchain would actually be a valuable and differentiating addition.

jammygit3• 7 years ago

Im a blockchain noob, but if the election was driven by blockchain, how would one protect against Chinese mining warehouses trying to gain control of the network? What would a double spend attack look like? Again, just a blockchain noob asking noob questions

achenatx• 7 years ago

all social media (or any system) where you dont trust the entities that are holding your data are candidates for blockchain.

With blockchain based databases you can have entities that store massive amounts of data encrypted, but they cant read it or access it. The blockchain controls access to it. The data itself doesnt need to be replicated, just the access control. This resolves the issue of very slow blockchain databases.

The storage providers can charge the blockchain for storage and access.

blockchain disintermediates access control, storage, and display.

With open protocols for data, you could use any number of reader clients to access your (and other) data.

rectang4• 7 years ago

But such a system is incompatible with the secret ballot, and is therefore vulnerable to voter coercion.

Didn't vote for the right candidate? You're fired "for performance reasons".

orev5• 7 years ago

The votes can be public but that doesn’t mean the data needs to include information that identifies the voter.

joshfraser11• 7 years ago

It would be pseudo-anonymous like Bitcoin. You would keep the mapping between public keys and real-world identities private. But perhaps some percentage of people would choose to waive their right to privacy, further strengthening trust in the system. Statistically, the public voters should be in line with the final outcome.

logfromblammo3• 7 years ago

The voting system sends out postcards to registered voters with a temper-evident scratch-off covering, over a private key.

This key can be used with a personal computer, or public voting computer, each using the same open-source, audited software, to produce a printed ballot with a 2D barcode on it, and a printed voting token with a 2D barcode on it.

The ballot printout can be scanned and verified independently, before casting it, that all the choices are correct. Again, all using the same open-source, audited software as the public vote-recording computers. This printout contains a hash of the voting token. This is so a party can't just print out a bunch of pre-filled ballots, and then hand them out for voters to cast, and also useful for recounts and audits.

A separate printout encodes the voting token. It cryptographically verifies that a registered voter is voting now. The voter registration system associates a different hash of the voting token, a voter hash, with the voter. The voting system can associate the ballot hash of the voting token with the voting choices. If you have a voting token, you can compute the voter hash, look up the registered voter on the voter site, compute the ballot hash, and look up what their votes were on the vote-counting site. You can't tell whether that particular ballot is the one that counts for that voter.

Because up until the end of the election, the voter can also request a new token, which invalidates their previous ballot, and cast a new one. That token will also be associated with their votes and their name, but the official election system knows to count that one, and not another one. Or they can request a "provisional", "test", or "decoy" token, which can be used to cast a ballot that will never be counted.

Anyone that attempts to coerce a voter into voting a particular way, or who tries to pay for votes, can be given a genuine token that is later cancelled, or a dummy token that was never valid to begin with. They have no means of validating if the token represents a vote that counts until after the election is over. At that time, an audit or recount might show that it was a decoy vote. You can't work backwards from a ballot to see who cast it. You can't work backwards from a public voter registration to see how they voted in any election. You can only start from the set of tokens, verify that one belongs to a registered voter, verify that it was used to cast a ballot, and if you also have privileged access to the voter registration system, determine whether or not that token is the single authoritative voting token for that voter in the current election.

In a recount or audit, the voter registration authority consults its database, finds all the tokens valid for a given election, computes the ballot hashes for each, and prints out all the ballot hashes, including machine-readable barcodes. A sorting machine could be loaded with the list, and automatically spit out a pile of ballots to be counted, and a pile of ballots that don't count. Or a human could sort them by hand, by consulting the list of valid ballot hashes, and crossing out the one printed on the ballot they are looking at. Any ballot not on the list, or already crossed off of it, goes in the "don't count" pile. Then, once again, by machine or by human, the ballots in the "valid" pile can be independently counted for the office or issue in question, and compared against the original automated count.

The secret part of this voting system is the secret kept between the voter and the government with respect to "does this specific ballot count or not?".

Frondo• 7 years ago

This is already a theoretical risk with vote-by-mail systems, and in practice it is Not a Problem.

Oregon has had vote-by-mail for more than two decades; there are present-day voters who were born after Oregon dropped polling places entirely.

Vote coercion is not a concern, after 20 years of practical experience with the system. Neither is voter fraud (something like 54 fraudulent ballots cast, out of 2+ million, in 2016; the vast majority of those were people voting in Oregon and in another state.)

The benefit, however, comes in the form of increased turnout; no need to rush to a polling place on a day that's very likely not a holiday for you.

I wish everyone would switch to vote-by-mail the way Oregon does it.

_tb1_• 7 years ago

But people can always take a photo, it's illegal, but so is buying votes.

brighton36• 7 years ago

Everything is easier with blockchain. A blockchain is a database with virtue.

joshfraser11• 7 years ago

It's actually more challenging from a technical perspective, but it's easier to trust.

orev5• 7 years ago

It would bring up extra risks as the machines would most likely then need to be connected to the Internet to be able to participate in the blockchain network.

Otherwise the reason we don’t have that is because there’s no money in it. Maybe if we allow the voting machines to also mine cryptocurrency when sitting idle...

thatfrenchguy• 7 years ago

Paper ballots solve that problem pretty easily

deogeo• 7 years ago

Once in the voting booth, how do you know the hardware or software haven't been replaced or tampered with? How would election officials know it? Open-source/hardware won't help you - it's still fundamentally a black box, and must be provable secure solely based on its inputs and outputs.

jandrese• 7 years ago

Sure. You get to be the one who explains how the Blockchain works to a bunch of octogenarians in Florida who can't quite figure out how a double sided paper ballot works.

Voting is already complicated enough. There are way too few people who fully understand all of the security implications of the Blockchain and all of the implementation details you need to get correct to make this a workable solution on the national level.

specialist8• 7 years ago

What makes the Australian Ballot (private voting, public counting) is the one-way hash of dropping one's ballot into the box.

All of the crypto systems I've studied try to accomplish the same with hash collisions. So that individual ballots get lost within the herd. Unfortunately, due the complexity of our ballots and the small size of our jurisdictions (elections are administrated per precinct), those hash collisions don't happen. One remedy may be to split complicated ballots into many simple ballots.

As of yet, I've not seen an electronic voting system proposal which states under which circumstances it will (likely) preserve the secret ballot and public count. A failing I consider to be gross intellectual malfeasance, willful ignorance, or both.

munk-a6• 7 years ago

If you had just omitted the blockchain portion you'd be correct - why oh why does everyone try to throw blockchain into everything.

5trokerac3• 7 years ago

“To say that they don’t have any evidence of any wrongdoing is not to say that nothing untoward happened,” Raskin said. “It’s simply to say that we don’t have the evidence of it.”

What kind of "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" nonsense is this? Why doesn't this article talk about how DHS was caught red-handed hacking into GA election systems?

WillPostForFood• 7 years ago

Because it wasn't true:

https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/339734-investigatio...

sciurus• 7 years ago

Then Secretary of State and now Governor Brian Kemp has a history of falsely claiming groups he doesn't like are hacking GA election systems.

https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/prob...

cjslep• 7 years ago

One way to make it harder for those who "own" the voting system to rig it would be to reform the voting system itself so that it isn't the first-past-the-post winner-take-all system we have today.

dbcurtis• 7 years ago

I would feel better if these folks https://www.gaming.nv.gov/index.aspx?page=15 helped establish the best practices for voting machine approval.

Seriously, what does it say about our society that it is harder to deploy a slot machine in Reno than a voting machine in Peoria?

organsnyder2• 7 years ago

Money.

I work in healthcare. We have a much higher regulation burden on how care is paid for compared to how it is actually delivered.

cardiffspaceman• 7 years ago

I recall compliance with the NV Gaming Control Board's processes to be painless compared to other regulated markets such as health care, but this is from the 80's. Can you say something about one dimension of the comparison such as change control in both cases?

1024core3• 7 years ago

It's a shame that neither party is interested in fixing this issue. These problems have been known for many years, but regardless of who's in power in the Congress, nothing gets done about it.

hannasanarion8• 7 years ago

This is a lie. The Democrats have tried at least six times in the last fifteen years to get money out of elections and make elections more secure, such as by requiring paper backups.

Every time they were blocked by Bush, or the Republican Filibuster, or Trump.

Election security is not a "both sides" issue. Democrats want more of it, Republicans want less of it, and this is bourne out very clearly in their voting record.

https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/6brytw/justice_departm...

rectang4• 7 years ago

This isn't uniformly true: consider that New York's governor Cuomo blocked played a part in blocking reforms there for several years. It's not historically true, either, when you consider buying votes in the Daley machine of Chicago.

It's possible to talk about the politics of this on HN, but if we apply one level of generalization ("people in power for whom free and fair elections do not serve their interest"), we can have a less inflamed discussion.

My rejoinder to the grandparent is, "some states are better than others". This is well known, and the correlation with party is well known as well.

jerf3• 7 years ago

This is a Uniparty issue. There's several issues in the US that are always proposed by the minority party and blocked by the majority party. The reason is that neither party wants them, but both see an advantage in calling for them while in the minority.

1024core3• 7 years ago

The Democrats have tried at least six times in the last fifteen years to get money out of elections and make elections more secure, such as by requiring paper backups.

Couple of points. 1) "getting money out of elections" and "secure elections" are two entirely different problems. By grouping them into one, the Democrats make sure that there's a lot of opposition to it. And 2), for 2 years (2008-2010?) Democrats had full control of the Congress and Whitehouse. Why didn't they try then? I can tell you why: because then it would have become law! And then no more rallying your troops with the whole "elections are being stolen! elections are being stolen!!" cries.

I am mostly a Democrat, but I'm not willing to give them a free pass just because they're Democrats.

tptacek4• 7 years ago

If you want to have strong opinions about voting security, you should do as Matt Blaze recommends and sign up to be an election judge. I did it after my business partner 'lvh did, presumably at Blaze's urging, and he's right: you really can't comprehend fully what's going on in an election until you've worked on one firsthand. A lot of things you'd be inclined to think are major security problems probably aren't, and the converse is also true.

Wherever you are, it's probably easy to sign up (I did online) and they'll likely pay you to do it.

the_snooze2• 7 years ago

Some people might interpret this as gatekeeping, but it really is true. If you're serious about election security, you'll learn a lot very quickly by immersing yourself in the process and the people who do it.

For example, one often-overlooked advantage of traditional in-person paper voting is that you're entitled to spoil your ballot and request a fresh one. This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof, as there's no guarantee that the ballot in the photo is the same as what was submitted.

paulgb2• 7 years ago

This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof

I like that, and I think it's an important property of voting systems that people who want to implement online voting overlook. But isn't it undermined by absentee voting, or is there a similar mechanism for that?

ska2• 7 years ago

   Some people might interpret this as gatekeeping,...

I don't think it is gatekeeping to suggest people learn something about a subject before developing & propogating strong opinions on it. Obviously this is one of the best ways to learn some of the ins and outs.

thwythwy• 7 years ago

How do I do that in the Bay Area?

Balgair• 7 years ago

https://sfelections.sfgov.org/serve-poll-worker

It's fairly straightforward to google this for the specific elections. Depending on the country, you can even do so as a foreign national, sometimes on the day of.

spenrose• 7 years ago

"VotingWorks is a non-profit building a secure, affordable, open-source voting machine."

https://voting.works/2018/11/votingworks-better-voting-machi...

UweSchmidt• 7 years ago

No machines are needed for voting. Votes should be counted manually. Several tiers if error correction ensure honest counting and no manipulation. Counters should be paid well and be recruited from all parts of society.

specialist8• 7 years ago

Tabulation is the smallest part of the election administration software stack. Even when ballots are counted manually, vendors would still get their cheddar.

Izkata2• 7 years ago

That was a large part of the "hanging chad" controversy in the year 2000 US elections, though...

davidw3• 7 years ago

Happy with my Senator Ron Wyden's take on this: paper ballots. He's also mentioned in the article.

Our system here in Oregon works pretty well: you vote by mail with paper ballots and there's automatic voter registration.

neilv• 7 years ago

One of the downsides of vote-by-mail is that it makes some ways of buying votes easier.

But it does have the upside of making participation easier (especially for people overburdened with work or other responsibilities). And the physical paper auditing trail makes it immensely better than all the electronic systems without that record.

davidw3• 7 years ago

It's not perfect - another potential flaw is late breaking information that might lead some people to change their votes. Still, compared to the mess where people don't vote because of long lines and taking time off work (most western countries vote on weekends) and so on... I think it's good.

Now we just need more ranked choice voting.

Animats• 7 years ago

We need a Democrat to buy an election company. Then legislation for voting transparency will sail through the Senate.

e402• 7 years ago

This is 100% snark and 100% true, at the same time.

jakeogh8• 7 years ago

It's really not. The US is (well was...) dominated by a uni-party. They usually only really need to rig primaries.

techrich• 7 years ago

Or how about we don't use a computer at all, something as important as elections should have nothing to do with a computer. If the russians are that good at hacking elections, why take the chance?

ryanmarsh• 7 years ago

The dichotomy between our pride in the power of the individual to cast their vote and be represented in government, and the facts of how voting and vote counting happens (the security of the systems and the conflicts of interest involved) is so stark a contrast that I can only assume there are forces at work which have achieved full capture.

specialist8• 7 years ago

Journalist Andrew Gumbel called this "America's recurring amnesia."

Steal This Vote [2005]

https://www.amazon.com/Steal-This-Vote-Elections-Democracy/d...

As an (burnt out) election integrity activist, I'd say not much has changed.

Stokes222• 7 years ago

This is a concrete action that is happening right now-- Tulsi Gabbard's bill to have all votes secured by PAPER BALLOT BACKUP: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1946...

Stokes222• 7 years ago

Paper Ballot Backup

Current bill to do just that:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1946...

They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

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