Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system
zdnet.com

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 law, means, methods, processes are visible to all involved and human readable.

3. Oversight. Depends on transparency. The election happens under the public eye, and we've got clear means and methods to resolve issues in a just and true manner.

4. Freedom. Voters are free to vote or not as they will.

The basic problem with electronic voting is this:

We don't record the voter intent. We do record what some device or enabling technology understood the voter intent to be. This is a vote by proxy.

Physical media, such as pencil and paper, present a chain of trust from the voter intent to the record of the vote, verifiable by the voter.

Electrons and computing systems in general depend on the fact that information states change easily and transparently. This is a good thing in most cases.

With voting, it's not a good thing because we do not actually record voter intent! Secondly, a voter cannot ever understand whether or not their vote record cast reflects their intent. They must trust the proxy.

Touching a screen may set a bit and that bit once set can be displayed back to the user. This display can be anything!

Physical media, directly used as the record of the vote, does present the user with a verifiable record they can compare to their intent before their vote is cast.

Human readable records, fed to machines, work reasonably well. There are exploits, mistakes, and such possible. However, the entire election can be litigated, validated as the election process and the people participating in the election deem necessary. While this is painful, it is necessary, if we are to trust the election.

Voter records presented in a court of law in electronic form contain very little other than the interpretation of the voter intent done by the machine at the time. Worse, it's extremely difficult to understand whether or not the machine interpretation actually reflects voter intent, and or if it complies with election law requirements.

A physical record has another property in that the media is actually changed in a material way by the voter as they record their voter intent. Further modifications to this record are very difficult to perform without leaving evidence of said modification on the media right along with the original, uncorrupted voter intent.

Electrons, if modified, changed, corrupted... just present different data states. For an analogy, say the vote count is in your mind, and suddenly you change that count, or manipulate it in subtle ways. The count is just different now, a mere information state.

Electronic voting isn't verifiable and trustworthy without extensive auditing and votes linked to users. For an example of this working reasonably, see banking and how all the records and accounting can work.

Do we want to link votes to people? If so, then e-voting can make some sense. I personally am opposed to this, and as a result, am opposed to electronic voting, but I do believe electronic counting, plus audits, given it's done from human readable records, can make sense.

Oregon, Washington and Colorado are vote by mail States, where the voter intent is collected in a human readable way, counted electronically, audited with appropriate sample sizes to insure accuracy within reasonable limits, and the entire election can be verified in court, one vote at a time, if needed.

This is the path forward IMHO. E-votes are a PITA and we can't really trust them. Votes by mail have a lot of advantages and they cost less than full on "go to the polls" elections do.

Finally, 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.

I sure hope Brazil figures this out before they suffer too much from it.

SOAP BOX = 0

You're missing out on the last 20 years of crypto research. I'd say we're not there yet, but people have been thinking hard about things such as verifiability (with vote confidentiality of course!), coercion resistance etc, and have come up with really cool ideas. As with his other work, David Chaum has some stuff that makes you go "WTF?!? oooh", check out things like Pret a Voter or Scantegrity.