Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system • Hacker News Board

Re: Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

#51

Post by ddingus » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 9:39 AM UTC

oggy wrote: post #37

specialist wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely I, as an individual, could not just go and demand to see and count all the ballots myself. Different jurisdiction, different rules, so YMMV (at least in the USA). Sometimes manual recounts are automatically triggered for highly contested races. And sometimes campaigns can pay for a recount. I would need to turn to somebody I trust. The system I "trust" is mutual distrust. If all the candidates (campaigns) agre…

Are you saying that you, just by the virtue of being a voter in your constituency, can go to the local election office, and demand that you yourself count all the ballots? Anyway mutual distrust is what the proposed e-voting systems rely on. You need to trust k out of n (where k can be tuned between 1 and n) parties involved that your vote privacy won't be compromised. Maybe you're not prepared to trust any single on…

No, he's saying that if there is some problem with the election, the actual record of the voter intent for all the voters can be dragged into a court of law and sorted out.

This can be done under the public eye, with mutually distrustful parties evaluating the vote intent fairly, and in the open.

That's something electronic systems do not, and are not capable of offering us.

Why?

They do not record voter intent, only what a machine determined the intent to be. A voter must trust the machine, and can never really understand whether or not their vote intent record actually reflects their intent, They cannot understand this because, unlike media which presents an unbroken chain of trust between intent and the record of the intent used for the tally, electronic means are a proxy, and do not use human readable records, which breaks the chain of trust.

A voter can and should be suspect in this case as the creator of the proxy (machine) may well not be compliant with both their intent and the law.

Re: Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

#52

Post by ddingus » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 9:43 AM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #24

crdoconnor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anything else (voting from home, or being presented with a slip linked to your cast vote, or any other such system) is subject to buying and selling votes and the result of such vote would never (and should never) be legitimate in the public eye. Vote buying is a MUCH lesser problem than fraud by those running the ballot box. It's expensive; it's hard to do without being detected and on a large scale it becomes almo…

> Vote buying is a MUCH lesser problem than fraud by those running the ballot box. If it is, it's either because 1) you don't know it's there, or 2) there are easier ways to cheat the system. Please take note that buying votes does not need to be large scale to put the legitimacy of the outcome in question. It is enough if, for example, it is possible for abusive patriarchs to vote for family members. > Furthermore,…

"impossible" refers to this:

When a voter marks a ballot, there is an unbroken chain of trust between their intent and the record of their intent used for the tally.

When a voter uses a machine, the machine records something it thinks is the voter intent. The voter must trust the machine as they are not capable of seeing the actual record.

Further, the actual record of their intent is never captured, just an interpretation of it. Additionally, this record is copied, not used directly.

Re: Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

#53

Post by ddingus » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 9:51 AM UTC

specialist wrote: post #30

ddingus wrote: post #5

SOAP BOX = 1 For what it's worth, e-voting isn't verifiable directly, unless it's done in a way linked to voter identities. Even then, it's highly exploitable, but it is verifiable, depending on the implementation. A trustworthy election embodies these four ideas to the maximum extent possible: 1. Anonymity. Votes cast are not linked to voters who cast them. 2. Transparency. The record of the voter intent, election l…

Your enthusiasm for vote by mail is unwarranted. Who will deliver the ballots once the USPS goes away? The push for e-voting will really heat up then. I encourage you learn how your local jurisdiction handles mail ballots. It's more or less making sausage. The UAA is 1% (both directions). A large percent are challenged during signature verification. Ballots are electronically scanned (like a fax or OCR) as they arriv…

The USPS is in the Constitution. And it must be run by the Government.

Unless we want to amend to remove it from service, having it deliver votes is a perfectly fine use of an excellent service the public benefits from daily.

Actually, Oregon elections can be 100 percent verified. Every single ballot is available for recount activities, which can be done manually, under court and multiple party supervision.

Audits are performed and the stats on these and margins of error are well understood. We do use electronic counting, and where those do not match audit records, work is performed until they do.

There isn't a fully transparent electronic system, without also personally identifying voters to their votes.

I realize you guys do it differently. That's fine. In the US, we do not link voters to votes and we have strong reasons for that.

Frankly, I've always maintained e-votes are possible to do in a trustworthy way if we surrender anonymity.

I don't see that happening in the US. So long as that is true, we really do need to record voter intent in such a way that it can be used directly for the tally and reviewed under the public eye.

Which means e-voting is not trustworthy in the US. VBM is trustworthy, and it delivers very high and consistent turnout rates too.

That's another difference. You guys use mandatory voting. We don't. I personally wouldn't mind if we did, but we don't.

E-voting really hasn't done us any good on turnout as the machines, placement, performance, record keeping and a host of other factors make it a bigger mess than ballots currently are.

VBM sidesteps nearly all of those problems nicely. Every year, another district or another state picks it up because it works.

Re: Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

#54

Post by ddingus » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 9:55 AM UTC

specialist wrote: post #32

ddingus wrote: post #5

SOAP BOX = 1 For what it's worth, e-voting isn't verifiable directly, unless it's done in a way linked to voter identities. Even then, it's highly exploitable, but it is verifiable, depending on the implementation. A trustworthy election embodies these four ideas to the maximum extent possible: 1. Anonymity. Votes cast are not linked to voters who cast them. 2. Transparency. The record of the voter intent, election l…

voting happens over a period of a week or two, distributing the votes nicely in time, preventing attacks, surprises and other things that can corrupt an election when it's all got to happen in one significant day. Replying to this separately. I disagree. By greatly increasing the window size of the election, vote by mail greatly increases the cost of running campaigns. Leading to the money chase. So the barrier to en…

The campaign cost is a separate issue.

The US has a very grave money in politics problem. We've got movements in place to check those problems, and if they are successful, the campaign cost will be just fine.

Here in Oregon, there are efforts to help people vote. Lots of different efforts, some funded, some not. Voting is not hard, and the vast majority of voters simply vote.

The nice thing about having it distributed over time is it eliminates caging efforts, challenges, and all sorts of fuckery at polling places.

I voted both ways here and have observed turnout consistently improved over polls.