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DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

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Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#201

Post by liquidify »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #75
nathan_long wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached. I don't think that's dismissive at all. That's what it is, and it sounds good to me. Basically the computer is a scribe with perfect handwriting that fills out the paper ballot for the voter while the voter watches. Absolutely any voter is qualified to assert whether the ballot contains the votes they intended to…

This is missing two completely unnecessary failure modes that pen and paper don't have: 1. You cannot know whether the device leaks your vote, i.e., whether your vote is secret. Mind you that in addition to an attack inside the device, this can also happen via simple electromagnetic side channels inherent in the device--as has been demonstrated quite a while ago for Nedap voting computers by the dutch campaign agains…

If these are open source hardware and software, then it is unlikely bugs like what you are talking about will slip through.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#202

Post by sonnyblarney »

pmoriarty wrote: post #41

Say goodbye to democracy wherever electronic voting is rolled out.

If there are decent identity foundations, then we have a repudiation benefit here which is better than what we have now.

In places where elections are fabricated, this might help quite a lot.

It won't make a difference in well functioning countries.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#203

Post by Terr_ »

hx2a wrote: post #117
tamaharbor wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And add fingerprint identification, like other countries do.

You mean like the purple finger thing? I've always wondered why nobody suggests doing that in the US to help prevent or ease people's concerns about potential voter fraud. It's simple, low-tech, and hard to screw up. Unless if I'm missing something, which of course is possible. Can someone tell me what the downsides are to an idea like that?

> I've always wondered why nobody suggests doing that in the US

In this case, Occam's Razor beats Hanlon's Razor: The simplest explanation is malice, not stupidity. The groups who are the most hysteric about hypothetical voter-fraud are dishonest. Their actual goal is not to prevent vanishingly-rare crime, but to suppress legitimate voters in a partisan fashion.

Finger-inking at the poll-site does not offer them a useful tool for skewing the election results. It imposes no special discouragement or advantage to a particular group, and it also does not create a system for arbitrary "enforcement." (In contrast, consider poll-taxes or name-similarity databases with insanely high rates of false-positives.)

___

Some might retort: "I don't suggest finger-inking because it won't stop someone from impersonating another voter." True, it won't stop that from happening the first time, but it limits it to once. This means N improper votes require N humans, and as N gets large the odds of keeping it secret go to zero.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#204

Post by masswerk »

grepper wrote: post #171
masswerk wrote: post #152

Thought experiment: Have, like in aviation, units built of two separate, but parallel architectures designed and built by unrelated, independent manufacturers with software written by independent teams in different languages and deploy them redundantly. (E.g., Airbus does this.) Now you have cranked up the cost for any manipulations to the requirements of successfully attacking two separate architectures in the same…

For those who were perhaps intrigued, as I was--here is a bit more information I found through a cursory search about how Airbus's consensus system works. Interesting stuff. [0][1] [0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/15234/how-does-... [1] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/21744/how-do-re...

Thanks for the complementary links!

Regarding Xerox scanner compression issues, compare this great CCC-talk by David Kriesel, "Traue keinem Scan, den du nicht selbst gefälscht hast" [0] – Sorry, German only.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FeqF1-Z1g0

[1] http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_...

(Didn't MS's PDF-viewer have similar issues?)

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#207

Post by bigj0n »

adestefan wrote: post #123
hx2a wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like the purple finger thing? I've always wondered why nobody suggests doing that in the US to help prevent or ease people's concerns about potential voter fraud. It's simple, low-tech, and hard to screw up. Unless if I'm missing something, which of course is possible. Can someone tell me what the downsides are to an idea like that?

Because voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the US. Now election fraud is a different issue.

There have been lots of reports of non-citizens being registered to vote in the US. It is very rare, but elections are also generally very close races.

I dont get how people can just shrug off reports of dead people and non-citizens being registered to vote as a non-issue.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#208

Post by skybrian »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #131
dragontamer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached. And I like it. The simpler the design, the better. Sometimes it takes a billion dollars and a couple of smart researchers to invent the "obvious" solution to a problem. We've got butterfly ballots, confusing electronics-only machines, and a variety of bad standards as the basis of our current voting infrastructur…

And suddenly I have another use case for my language for specifying scientific protocols. Counting votes in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Turns out keeping verifiable lab notebooks for legal reasons is a really similar problem to keeping verifiable vote tallies, also for legal reasons (hopefully). It is telling that we have better provenance systems for far more complex processes but we still haven't manag…

The problem is not very similar. Scientists don't work anonymously, and we aren't trying to prevent scientists from selling their vote.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#209

Post by jfoutz »

beat wrote: post #86
simongr3dal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached. I do agree that the paper trail is a great thing. I'm not fundamentally against electronic voting, but I haven't heard of a system that can really compete with the simplicity and verifiability of the immutablility you get from paper ballots inside ballot boxes being watched over by interested parties on all sides.

The part I don't like is the printer. They're woefully unreliable devices. Having been an election judge, handling a bunch of flaky tech in polling places is the last thing the poll workers need. They have a lot to do already. In MN, we use paper ballots with Scantron readers for excellent results. I'm not sure what problem this new system is supposed to solve that the Scantron model doesn't.

My grandma has shaky hands. She can’t really fill out a scantron. I have no problem with people filling out their own ballots. The pristine filled out and verified by the voter ballot seems harder to spoil than a hand filled out ballot.

My preference is for plenty of machines available to fill out paper ballots, but give voters the option of filling out by hand.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#210

Post by alasdair_ »

ams6110 wrote: post #198
i_am_proteus wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will the voters who are (reportedly) unable to obtain ID be able up get their prints into the verification system? I have been informed by social scientists that requiring voter ID is racist, so it seems that fingerprint checks would also be racist via the same logic.

> I have been informed by social scientists that requiring voter ID is racist Do you have a personal opinion on that? I don't see it as racist in any way, because it applies equally to everybody. We have a few basic rules for voters in this country, one is that they are citizens, two is that they are registered. Being able to demonstrate that you are the registered voter you claim to be seems to me to be essential to…

>Do you have a personal opinion on that? I don't see it as racist in any way, because it applies equally to everybody.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

In practical terms, there are a lot of people in the US that simply cannot afford to buy an ID - both because of the actual cost and because of the logistics and documentation required. Trying to get a certified birth certificate from another state when you are homeless is, I imagine, pretty damn hard and relatively expensive to do.

If the US had a system where ID was available to all completely without cost (and only taking a trivial amount of time) then I’d agree with you more.

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