In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online • Hacker News Board

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#151

Post by codedokode » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 10:59 AM UTC

Mirioron wrote: post #141

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My main criticism is that as it is it could still feed the card with the wrong vote to sign. In other words: It doesn't help at all against malware on the computer. > The (state-provided) USB reader should have a small lcd screen to sum up the thing being signed "Vote for Ms.Ryjavik on election #123" "Vote for Yes on vote #432" and a confirmation button. In other words: If the USB firmware is infected, it's still n…

Considering Estonia's history, paper voting isn't exactly amazing either. The Soviet era showed that election fraud happens anyway. The problem with paper voting is that mistakes in counting happen very often. During the election that just happened in Estonia officials wrote the candidate number into the box that said how many votes they got.[1] In the 2016 US presidential election officials basically typod the elect…

Paper voting is hundred times more secure than electronic. With paper voting observers can see all the ballots and verify the results; these results are usually published so if you have observers at all polling stations you can verify that all votes have been counted correctly.

With electronic voting nothing stops sysadmin from doing UPDATE votes SET vote = 'Good Candidate' WHERE vote = 'Bad Candidate'.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#152

Post by usrusr » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:01 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #74

riffraff wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can avoid that, by having your vote correspond to multiple potential entries. But that is still pointless cause the person you sold your vote can be physically next to you, or you can film yourself voting. Online voting is unsafe, and should only be used if any other option is unfeasible.

You can film yourself voting now. Vote buying is not a serious problem, and can be readily solved by stiff jail time for attempting it, and large monetary rewards for reporting on people doing it. If you get 10 years in prison for trying to buy votes, and the government offers a standing reward of say, $100,000 for evidence that leads to a conviction, all of the sudden you have to pay substantially more than $100k/vo…

> Vote buying is not a serious problem

It's not a problem because there is too much "friction". Vote buying is already not impossible but way too hard to establish itself. When it becomes gradually easier it still won't be a problem, because it is still not yet established. So you allow even more changes that make it easier, because it's not a problem yet. Call it a slippery slope argument all you like, but there is a crazy amount of inertia in the absence of vote buying that is protecting democracy now, but that will turn against us once it is overcome. When barriers are lowered so far that the inertia is overcome, the same inertia will make it incredibly hard to get rid of vote buying again. Keeping honest people honest is orders of magnitude easier than making them if they are not. I would not want to risk it without a promises of truly significant gains and I just don't see those with e-voting.

But vote buying is not even the problem I would focus on. Much more pressing is the form of soft coercion that is enabled by allowing voting in what I would call "unchecked privacy": imagine you are part of a group where everybody assumes that all would vote the same. There is a documented tendency (proudly showing off your ballot on Twitter) to scrap vote secrecy in favor of virtue signaling for "the cause", whatever cause that might be. As soon as there is a group with supposedly aligned opinions, the true believers will tend to erode secrecy and establish an expectation that the others follow. Maybe your spouse won't beat you, maybe your friends won't shun you for insisting on voting in secret, but the easy path is to just go with the flow and play along. "What difference does a single vote make?" Optional secrecy is a serious weakness to the democratic process.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#153

Post by pryelluw » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:02 AM UTC

antris wrote: post #136

Essentially, Estonia gives 44% influence of their country to a system that cannot be verified to have almost any relation to what people actually have voted for. The people have will just look at the results and have to think "well, I hope weren't hacked this time" and move on. Rest in peace, democracy in Estonia.

It is no better or worse than electronic voting machines in Georgia.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#154

Post by egao1980 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:10 AM UTC

antris wrote: post #136

Essentially, Estonia gives 44% influence of their country to a system that cannot be verified to have almost any relation to what people actually have voted for. The people have will just look at the results and have to think "well, I hope weren't hacked this time" and move on. Rest in peace, democracy in Estonia.

As if they had one - https://www.osce.org/odihr/341596?download=true

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#155

Post by usrusr » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:54 AM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #85

darawk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can film yourself voting now. Vote buying is not a serious problem, and can be readily solved by stiff jail time for attempting it, and large monetary rewards for reporting on people doing it. If you get 10 years in prison for trying to buy votes, and the government offers a standing reward of say, $100,000 for evidence that leads to a conviction, all of the sudden you have to pay substantially more than $100k/vo…

You don’t even need that. In many systems, you can vote multiple times, and only your most recent vote counts. As a buyer you have no way of knowing if your agent didn’t vote after they photographed them self voting for the party you picked.

That's definitely a good improvement over a single final commit, but there has to be some cut-off time and it would be perfectly possible to control the voter's ability to make last moment corrections. Buy/coerce the vote close to the deadline, then keep them occupied until it's over.

A countermeasure might be an undisclosed deadline lottery: a guaranteed voting window until some time t, then allow corrections until an individually randomized cutoff moment t+x, with a sufficiently big range for x (up to two days, perhaps?). Don't provide feedback wether a correction went through or not to make it even more opaque to a possible buyer.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#156

Post by nukeop » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:57 AM UTC

antris wrote: post #140

JDiculous wrote: post #128

All these "e-voting can never work" comments just scream ludditism. Estonia has already demonstrated that it works, we have online banking and cryptocurrencies worth billions of dollars in market cap, and people want to say it's not possible. Yeah, ok. Feel free to express your views, but don't pretend to represent the software engineering community.

Online banking and cryptocurrencies are not equivalent technologies. Just because you can solve those problems with software doesn't mean you can solve every problem in the world with software.

Correct, online banking is in the stone age compared to even the crudest cryptos.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#157

Post by ataturk » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 12:14 PM UTC

Latteland wrote: post #93

deogeo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a smartcard, secured and provided by state officials [..] The (state-provided) USB reader [..] are not immune to attack either. Unless you go to the extraordinary lengths of making your own hardware in a facility you secure and keep secured for the duration of your democracy , there is no such thing as a 'secure device'. Not when the prize is something so hugely lucrative and advantageous as control over an entire…

In Washington state, all voting is via paper ballots mailed or dropped off at a voting location. You sign them. People end up having different ballots because your ballot is customized for the district you live in (unique city, school district, county, state combinations is a reasonable size). They verify your signature. You can track if you ballot was received (it's inside an inner envelope) and if your signature wa…

I lost any respect I had for WA after I-1639. The ballot initiative that never actually got enough signatures, but Michael Bloomberg's money ensured it got on the ballot anyways. You're making felons out of everyday people now. Who cares how great your voting is when you can't even follow the US Constitution? It's a joke, it's all just a sick joke now.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#158

Post by TheOperator » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 12:19 PM UTC

I understand the cost appeal of such a voting system but it's pretty low security for an election. I wouldn't even worry about foreign actors as much as I would worry about domestic actors controlling the digital ballot box by fucking with the online voting system.

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#159

Post by ataturk » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 12:19 PM UTC

Mirioron wrote: post #141

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My main criticism is that as it is it could still feed the card with the wrong vote to sign. In other words: It doesn't help at all against malware on the computer. > The (state-provided) USB reader should have a small lcd screen to sum up the thing being signed "Vote for Ms.Ryjavik on election #123" "Vote for Yes on vote #432" and a confirmation button. In other words: If the USB firmware is infected, it's still n…

Considering Estonia's history, paper voting isn't exactly amazing either. The Soviet era showed that election fraud happens anyway. The problem with paper voting is that mistakes in counting happen very often. During the election that just happened in Estonia officials wrote the candidate number into the box that said how many votes they got.[1] In the 2016 US presidential election officials basically typod the elect…

[dead]

Re: In Estonian parliamentary election, 44% of the votes were cast online

#160

Post by hopler » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 12:40 PM UTC

eftpotrm wrote: post #147

Mirioron wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My main criticism is that as it is it could still feed the card with the wrong vote to sign. The (state-provided) USB reader should have a small lcd screen to sum up the thing being signed "Vote for Ms.Ryjavik on election #123" "Vote for Yes on vote #432" and a confirmation button. You can check who you cast your vote for through online voting. You can do it 3 times for half an hour after you voting. You cast your…

You can check that the reporting app tells you that you voted for who you think you voted for. You have no way of asserting that that was the vote that was actually counted in the reported result.

I don't know what Estonia does, but there are ways to publish the votes in a secure way that prevents anyone from decrypting a single vote, but lets anyone verify their vote was correctly counted using their own secret key.

httpp://news.mit.edu/2009/rivest-voting

Of course you need monitors from all interested parties to prevent ballot stuffing, but that's true in every election. It's up to monitors to read the voter list and verify that (probabilistically) there are no/few fake voters on it.