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Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

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Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

#31

Post by sgk284 »

erichocean wrote: post #11
Procrastes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Hacker_9. In Texas, where I vote, the machines don't even print paper. We just have to trust that the machine correctly recorded our vote. The reasons for the machines are, 1. cost cutting over manual counts, 2. profiteering by well connected companies, 3. And potentially making sure only the "right" votes count, although that part isn't proven. In California we were able to vote at home with a mail-in, paper ball…

> In California we were able to vote at home with a mail-in, paper ballot and I much prefer that. I guess you trust the mail service and the people on the receiving end to properly record your vote. I prefer the day of (also in CA), where you get to put it into the counting machine yourself—at least then I know it was counted at my polling place.

When you do mail-in voting, your ballot has a tab you pull off with a number on it. You can check on a government website whether or not your ballot was counted using this number (though it won't show how you voted).

Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

#32

Post by RandomInteger4 »

erichocean wrote: post #11
Procrastes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Hacker_9. In Texas, where I vote, the machines don't even print paper. We just have to trust that the machine correctly recorded our vote. The reasons for the machines are, 1. cost cutting over manual counts, 2. profiteering by well connected companies, 3. And potentially making sure only the "right" votes count, although that part isn't proven. In California we were able to vote at home with a mail-in, paper ball…

> In California we were able to vote at home with a mail-in, paper ballot and I much prefer that. I guess you trust the mail service and the people on the receiving end to properly record your vote. I prefer the day of (also in CA), where you get to put it into the counting machine yourself—at least then I know it was counted at my polling place.

"At least then I know that I put it in a machine physically, which gave me psychological comfort, but no actual verification that my vote was counted."

^-- Fixed that for you.

But seriously, at some point, unless everyone sticks around to watch everyone else's votes being counted, there has to be some level of trust with the system. The only thing we can do better is to make vote counting machines' code open sourced and have the code signed with a trusted Public Key Infrastructure of some sort.

Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

#33

Post by Zombieball »

hacker_9 wrote: post #3

Why do Americans use voting machines exactly? I mean, it just prints out their choice at the end right? What benefit do they actually gain from having pressed buttons instead of using a pen? It just seems to fuel the hacking conspiracy every time a president is elected. In the UK we turn up, go into the booth with the paper slip, and tick our choice with a pen. Then we fold it and post it into a container which later…

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 comes to you and threatens you and your family. Says hand in this pre-filled ballot and bring me back your empty ballot, or else... You comply, he fills out the empty ballot again, and repeats.

The electronic voting machines protect your identity. They allow you to vote anonymously. They provide data integrity that is harder to spoof than paper voting methods. I explicitly asked why they don't just vote on paper ballots like they do in Canada (or the UK as you describe). His response was that we take for granted the inherit trust our societies have to allow us to vote in such a fashion without it being tampered.

Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

#34

Post by strathmeyer »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #24
Procrastes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Hacker_9. In Texas, where I vote, the machines don't even print paper. We just have to trust that the machine correctly recorded our vote. The reasons for the machines are, 1. cost cutting over manual counts, 2. profiteering by well connected companies, 3. And potentially making sure only the "right" votes count, although that part isn't proven. In California we were able to vote at home with a mail-in, paper ball…

Mail-in ballots are the devil, they allow vote-buying. It happens with regularity that elections are annulled in ethnic enclaves in the UK over that. Elections don't have to be convenient, first of all they have to be safe.

In America we prefer the Clinton "walking around money" type of vote buying?

Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

#35

Post by ThomPete »

This 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's again highly distributed and decentralized, and it would require mostly physical presence to do it. And thats just a few of the things that makes this more or less impossible.

A bigger concern is access to the actual voter databases but what they can there there is mostly creating chaos which would obviously be horrible but have no effect on voting.

The biggest problem is actually when examples like these spread without the above consideration as that can trigger the population to loose faith in a system that is probably as safe as it has ever been.

P.S. I am highly supportive of whistleblowers like Snowden but this is missing the point.

Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

#36

Post by [deleted] »

twright0 wrote: post #19
ajf3 wrote: post #9

Why 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,…

[deleted]

Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

#37

Post by grzm »

Looks 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 Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883356

"In Pennsylvania, Claims of a Rigged Election May Be Impossible to Disprove" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790247

"Votes could be counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841178

Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

#38

Post by pdkl95 »

ajf3 wrote: post #9

Why 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.

> trustworthy online voting

That doesn't exist. See this[1] talk by Andrew Appel (CS Prof. at Princeton) for a very nice overview of the technology in the traditional pre-printed secret ballot and an why electronic/internet voting cannot be secured from all of the known threats.

TL;DR - Adding anything that can be used as an identifier enables vote buying or coercion. Adding computers introduces "Trusting Trust"-style problems where you never know what is actually running (hashing/verification only pushes the problem around).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQCqIbBBeM

Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

#39

Post by Symbiote »

rhino369 wrote: post #15
hacker_9 wrote: post #3

Why do Americans use voting machines exactly? I mean, it just prints out their choice at the end right? What benefit do they actually gain from having pressed buttons instead of using a pen? It just seems to fuel the hacking conspiracy every time a president is elected. In the UK we turn up, go into the booth with the paper slip, and tick our choice with a pen. Then we fold it and post it into a container which later…

You are still using a voting machine, but you've just introduced a shitty paper input that needs to be scanned into the machine. The counting machine is a voting machine. It can be hacked. The only benefit is that you have a paper record that can be corroborated if there is evidence of hacking later. But we could do a printout paper record on voting machines too. You'd be surprised how many of those paper ballots don…

Ballots are counted by hand in the UK.

There are pictures and a description here: http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-england-32533064

Re: Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

#40

Post by hacker_9 »

rhino369 wrote: post #15
hacker_9 wrote: post #3

Why do Americans use voting machines exactly? I mean, it just prints out their choice at the end right? What benefit do they actually gain from having pressed buttons instead of using a pen? It just seems to fuel the hacking conspiracy every time a president is elected. In the UK we turn up, go into the booth with the paper slip, and tick our choice with a pen. Then we fold it and post it into a container which later…

You are still using a voting machine, but you've just introduced a shitty paper input that needs to be scanned into the machine. The counting machine is a voting machine. It can be hacked. The only benefit is that you have a paper record that can be corroborated if there is evidence of hacking later. But we could do a printout paper record on voting machines too. You'd be surprised how many of those paper ballots don…

Actually in the UK votes are counted manually by people in big halls under watch by accredited observers. No voting machine in the process at all.
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