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Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

arstechnica.com

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Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#351

Post by ytpete »

saturn8601 wrote: post #173
tupolef wrote: post #13

The only way to get an honest electronic vote is by giving realtime visibility on who voted what and where publicly. Everything else is a scam. It would mean no secrecy of vote, but I think that secrecy of vote is for places that are new to democracy. It could be anonymised to a point a clever system of personal certificats, but the idea is that in a 100 people district, the citizens should be able to count themselve…

>The only way to get an honest electronic vote is by giving realtime visibility on who voted what and where publicly. How about having the voter verify a printed copy of their electronic vote before the machine casts the ballot and then counting the paper ballots afterwards to verify the tally with the machine. Two way verification. Problem solved. Since 2016, with the help of activists over the country, NJ and many…

I believe since 2002 all electronic voting machines must produce a paper receipt like that, due to the Help America Vote Act.

I don't think most states hand-check every single ballot, but I'd be shocked if there are any that don't perform random audits where some sampling of the receipt are hand-checked.

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#352

Post by mulmen »

bboygravity wrote: post #328
breatheoften wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I voted early in person in Colorado a few days ago. Use a machine to entry my votes. Votes were printed onto a piece of paper. I checked to make sure the marks on the paper matched what I entered into the machine and then dropped it into the ballot box (not a machine just a box that collected the ballots). It was pretty sane and didn't seem like there was a lot to worry over related to the electronic entry system. As…

1. If all the machine does is mark who you voted on paper than what is the point of the machine over a pencil? 2. If it does more (for example count your vote) then how did you know that it actually did that? Either way it smells extremely fishy to me.

It avoids dangling chads and improperly filled bubbles which were both used to steal the 2000 presidential election.

I have never used such a machine but the UX could be a lot clearer than the analog filp-and-punch machines used in Florida in 2000.

I don’t love software in the voting process but printing the choices is verifiable and reduces ambiguity in the voting process.

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#353

Post by floating-io »

shawnz wrote: post #319
floating-io wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my locale there is a header on the physical ballot that contains a bunch of barcodes, presumably to make your votes machine readable. It then prints the votes in text below. I absolutely hate that fact. I am a human, I cannot read barcodes without a computer. Therefore, I cannot tell if the important part of what was recorded is correct. Not sure if Colorado's are the same...

Let's say they get rid of the barcodes and only show the human readable text. How does that prove any better or worse that the machine counted the vote the way it says it did on the slip? The presence of the barcodes doesn't do anything to reduce the trustworthiness of the system

It starts with being able to tell that the information was encoded correctly when I submitted it.

Tell me this: what is the advantage of a barcode, over a scantron-esque system where I can see which item I chose because a dot is filled in?

The scantron-esque system is still efficiently machine readable; we've had scantron since I was a kid. The difference is, I can verify with my own two eyes that the information is encoded correctly on the ballot I submitted if it's done scantron-style.

I cannot do that with barcodes.

It adds another layer of safety. Do we still have to be able to trust the rest of the system? Yup. But I cannot trust anything at all if I cannot even verify that my vote was submitted correctly in the first place.

JMHO.

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#354

Post by mulmen »

EGreg wrote: post #297
roenxi wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like it'd be impossible to implement. Either I'd have a record that I voted with no way to confirm who my vote was counted for, or I'd be able to prove that I voted for a specific candidate which opens a Pandora's box of problems (either coercion for voting for the wrong candidate or bribes for provably voting for a specific candidate). I mean sure, if someone can come up with a workable blockchain-based s…

First of all zero-knowledge proofs allow you to verify stuff without being able to prove it to others But honestly, I think the whole idea of being able to prove how you voted being dangerous is overblown. The same people who say you don’t need an ID to vote because it’s a non-issue then come up with fantasy scenarios of masses of people being forced to prove how they voted, or bribed to do it LOL.

> But honestly, I think the whole idea of being able to prove how you voted being dangerous is overblown.

Well you’re wrong.

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#356

Post by [deleted] »

fulladder wrote: post #298
inlined wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditionally, you would sign with the government’s public key so that only they can decrypt it. But ballots are so low entropy that I’d be worried about brute forcing it (maybe some significant nonces can be added?) a solution where you use the block chain signed with certificates held in a central database is just… another case of people pushing blockchain without understanding it

Nah, not a problem. You generate a random number R and encrypt R || V where V is your vote. (Or, equivalently, use something like CBC mode with a random i.v.)

[deleted]

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#357

Post by mattclarkdotnet »

sadeshmukh wrote: post #324
Dalewyn wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of absolute transparency is why nothing will beat paper ballots written and marked in plain English counted by hand with anyone and everyone who cares about election integrity watching the process.

I mean, if you're willing to spend that much, and it'll be very expensive, then sure. It's just technophobia - machines are going to be more accurate than a human (who also can make a mistake!).

The disconnect is that in most of the world we only vote for one or two candidates on a ballot. In America you vote for everything from the president to the dog catcher on one ballot.

While I think of it, the USA and UK should both stop holding votes on working days. That is nuts! Do what Australia does and vote on a Saturday and make it compulsory.

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#358

Post by JumpCrisscross »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #226
coolhand2120 wrote: post #48

Please correct me where I'm mistaken. * This password list has been public for a long time, and is easy to access: hidden excel column on a public spreadsheet. * BIOS access means the intruder can change boot devices, boot their own OS, infect the BIOS with a virus, change boot devices back, compromise the vote host OS. * Keycard security isn't tight security. Any amature physical penetration tester would just use a…

It is important that the voting system have credibility for everyone - regardless of party. Has anyone done a ground up exercise of rethinking the process and the involved technologies from a cybersecurity standpoint? It would be great to offer voters verification of their votes while maintaining secrecy. But right now I feel like we are stuck, with one half the country having doubts about the process and the other h…

> Has anyone done a ground up exercise of rethinking the process and the involved technologies from a cybersecurity standpoint?

Chesterton’s fence.

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#359

Post by tsimionescu »

prophesi wrote: post #205
echoangle wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage of just counting in public and having other people vouch is that it is easily understandable by everyone. If you use the blockchain, how many people can be convinced that the election was stolen with some techspeak? Do you think the average citizen understands enough cryptography to validate that the election was legit?

This has me wonder if highschools should start teaching the basic concepts of cryptography so that we eventually do end up with a common understanding of blockchains, password managers, passkeys, or any other technologies that we end up using in our day-to-day lives for crucial tasks.

That wouldn't help for this case. Even a PhD in cryptography and computer science doesn't help you in any way be convinced that a particular machine is securely counting your votes. If you want to be convinced of that, you have to audit the code and the hardware specs and the network code and everything in between to ensure that the system: (a) implements the claimed algorithms, (b) does so correctly and free of side-channeled attacks, (c) doesn't implement other things that can weaken the security after the fact, such as remote code download, and (d) has adequate physical protection to prevent hardware interference. And probably other things I'm not even thinking about.

And all this work doesn't then help you ensure that another machine in a different jurisdiction, even one that is the same make and model, is also secure. Plus, every single person that cares about the vote has to put in this work for themselves: you can't "trust the experts" when the stakes are so high.

I think this pretty clearly goes beyond what you could do teach a high-school setting.

Re: Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak

#360

Post by cm2187 »

worstspotgain wrote: post #340
cm2187 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was compromised, it wouldn't flip all the votes, it would flip just enough to change the result while staying credible. So the question is how many people double check the paper ballot. Because if it randomly flips, say 1 ballot out of 15, and the paper ballot is consistent with the tally, it could very well go unnoticed.

Not with a randomized audit, such as this one for the 2022 primary [1]. If it flipped just one vote out of 100, and you drew an audit sample of just 1000 votes, the probability of detecting it would be 99.996%. [1] https://www.cpr.org/2022/07/13/colorado-counties-begin-audit...

What do you audit if both the tally and the paper ballot are consistent? The only check possible is the voter checking themselves before they hand over the paper ballot.
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