More and more I think our election system is ripe for foreign manipulation. I'd love to be proved wrong in an audit.
Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine
111–120 of 207 posts
Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
A former co-worker of mine wrote software for voting machines in Brazil. He described to me a few reasons why electronic voting machines are important. To be honest I forget the majority, but one story that stuck with me: One common scheme electronic voting machines help prevent is forced votes. A bad guy gets their hand on a single empty ballot and writes the name of the candidate he wants to win on it. He then come…
Voter coercion is something to be concerned about but the scenario you describe won't keep me up at night. The number one problem is it's hard to scale up to a level that would actually sway an election. It only takes one hero to call the police while they're at the polling station or after their family is released and the sequence is broken. There's no need for the victim to actually submit the pre-filled ballot, th…
> How would an electronic voting machine improve upon this?
I am just theorizing here: Someone now takes the box of paper votes and runs it through the scanner machine. And passes this number along to someone. What is stopping them from tampering at this step? I think this is precisely what my co-worker was describing. There is an inherent trust that your paper ballot is scanned and recorded in a fashion that matches your vote.
An electronic voting machine could potentially communicate votes in real time over a secure connection. Or in the case of Brazil's machines, I believe stores it locally, encrypted, with a verifiable cryptographic signature of some sort.
I'm sure we all know the multitude of other attack vectors this introduces. I guess I am just not convinced that paper makes things more secure.
Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I forget the statistical term but after the fact, you can't go back and say "look at this, only 107K votes determined the outcome" because you can always find such explanations post hoc. I tried to search but couldn't find the discussion but one example is how couples use this type of fallacy to "prove" their love was fated. Typically on the day the fated couple met there were a number of unusual events or circumstan…
I mean, the swing states were known beforehand. A concerted effort to fix the elections there would decide the election, surely?
> WI, MI, and PA
Wisconsin was not considered to be a battleground state. HRC didn't even campaign in the state after the convention.
Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you distinguish between a real ballot and a fake ballot? How do you know if someone decided to throw away some of them? (While also ensuring voters remain anonymous and allowing voters to verify their votes.)
Scrutineers : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrutineer You have a number of differently affiliated persons watching the proceedings, and having at the end a rough idea of the number of votes that were returned per polling station. Then (with some coordination that should be trivial for the smallest of political parties) those results can be independently reckoned and compared back to the official totals. Any irregula…
Scrutineers also have the advantage of being understood by anyone with a pulse. "Votes go in here, mutually opposing interests watch them like a hawk until they get to the counting center, then the count is watched by those mutually opposing interests. You can be a scrutineer yourself if you're concerned. The record can also be re-tallied if there's a concern".
Compare to voting machines: "Just trust us. You need to have deep domain knowledge in several fields before you can even start to evaluate our trustworthiness (software, hardware, security, etc)... so just trust us. No, you can't examine the machines."
Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I forget the statistical term but after the fact, you can't go back and say "look at this, only 107K votes determined the outcome" because you can always find such explanations post hoc. I tried to search but couldn't find the discussion but one example is how couples use this type of fallacy to "prove" their love was fated. Typically on the day the fated couple met there were a number of unusual events or circumstan…
I mean, the swing states were known beforehand. A concerted effort to fix the elections there would decide the election, surely?
I'm not an expert of swing/fling states, but FiveThirtyEight listed 22 states as potentially competitive; Trump also won 194 of the 207 counties that voted for Obama either in 2008 or 2012; and finally I count 8 states that shifted to Trump after voting Obama [1]. Therefore all hands are required to win an election, even for the first 49.9%, even if a few fling states make the difference at the end.
Of course, although it's not possible to earn an election purely by fraud, it could still alter it.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/09/us/elections/s...
Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine
#116Looks like we're about to have the same voting/election discussion we've had at least 5 times over the past month or so. If anyone's interested in reading what's already been discussed, here are links to the previous threads: "American Elections Will Be Hacked" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921967 "Maryland will audit all votes cast in general election" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885396 "Cylance…
I remember the discussions of Bush rigging the 2004 elections (not on HN).
Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine
#117This is missing the point though. The american voting system is actually very secure. It's highly decentralized, machines are not connected to the internet, implemented in many different ways, which means that they would have to do many attacks many different places without being discovered to even have an effect. 75% of them have paper trails which would require an even bigger achievement to change enough off as it'…
Beyond the actual security of the voting machines, the other challenge in any hack is making it match the demographic make up of a state. People talk about "red" and "blue" states but the reality is that states are not homogeneous. It would stand out if a traditionally red county suddenly went blue and vice versa.
Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Voter coercion is something to be concerned about but the scenario you describe won't keep me up at night. The number one problem is it's hard to scale up to a level that would actually sway an election. It only takes one hero to call the police while they're at the polling station or after their family is released and the sequence is broken. There's no need for the victim to actually submit the pre-filled ballot, th…
> How would an electronic voting machine improve upon this? I am just theorizing here: Someone now takes the box of paper votes and runs it through the scanner machine. And passes this number along to someone. What is stopping them from tampering at this step? I think this is precisely what my co-worker was describing. There is an inherent trust that your paper ballot is scanned and recorded in a fashion that matches…
There are many steps along the chain that have to be secured in both electronic voting (which has a variety of meanings) and paper ballots. Paper ballots enable audibility, which is a separate issue that's also important for voting.
Given the number of comments you've made on this thread, it seems this is an area of interest to you. I encourage you to look though the previous HN discussions on this topic. Here's a list of some of those from the past month or so:
Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine
#119Looks like we're about to have the same voting/election discussion we've had at least 5 times over the past month or so. If anyone's interested in reading what's already been discussed, here are links to the previous threads: "American Elections Will Be Hacked" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921967 "Maryland will audit all votes cast in general election" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885396 "Cylance…
I remember the discussions of Bush rigging the 2004 elections (not on HN).
Secure voting came to my attention after the 2000 Bush-Gore election and recount. There's been a lot of work really interesting work since then. If you're interested in what can be done to improve voting security, I encourage you to see https://www.verifiedvoting.org
Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine
#120Why hasn't some state used a hash to allow trustworthy online voting? They could add a unique id on the back of your driver's license and then allow you to use your unique id to generate anonymous/one time use id's. They could then have a publicly accessible server that at all time displays a column with anonymous id, vote and every person can verify that their personal vote is correctly displayed.
In general, any process that allows an individual to verify their vote after the fact will enable coercion over voting. For example, in your proposal, an unscrupulous boss could make a demand before the election: "You must tell me the one-time ID you're voting with. If you choose not to, or if that ID doesn't show up in the registry having cast a vote for , you're fired." I think that, no matter what the process is,…
@jjuhl answered that question somewhere else in the thread with homomorophic encryption (Numberphile : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRTvoZ3Rho ): The hash out of the machine doesn't tell who you voted for, but the sum of the hashes do tally properly. It's still unclear for me, but it's sure that there are mathematical solutions.