91–100 of 303 posts
My ideal voting system would allow me to have a real time feed of votes as they come in, so that at the end of the night I can check my records vs the "official" records. Names can be detached, all I need is a Ballot id. BallotId can be something as simple as the hash of RegisteredVoterId + password + Salt + ElectionId. As long as the voter remembers their password, they can look up their record, and the record can b…
Open source, open hardware? What a joke. Neither are resistant to chip/compiler level attacks such as https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/adding_backdo... and https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html That's all assuming the voting machine is actually running the software/hardware they tell you - how would a voter check? The article briefly mentions "That receipt does not permit you to prove…
> That's all assuming the voting machine is actually running the software/hardware they tell you - how would a voter check? Have dedicated hardware compute a hash from the content of program ROM on demand with a button press and present it on an auxilliary 7-segment display. Compare against the hash of the vetted image. No software need be involved. At some point in the process, machines will be used for tabulation.…
How do you check the circuit of that hardware?
How do you know the ROM you are reading is the ROM the CPU is executing from?
How do you know the CPU is the architecture you think it is and the program means what you think it means?
> You have to trust the hardware to some extent.
No, you don't, and you shouldn't. You can do all of that calculation by hand. And at the very least you can check a random selection by hand.
> Just keep it as simple as possible to minimize confounding complexity that an attacker can hide in.
In other words: Don't use electronics. You can't get simpler than pen and paper.
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In California[0] we audit 1% of all ballots, regardless of the outcome. [0] - https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-systems/oversight/co...
What does that prove? Your electronic voting machine could completely tell you the truth about every ballot you ask it about, but lie about the total.
Software is perfectible, skinware is not. As long as corruptible human beings are in charge, there will be room for fraud.
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The paper trail is not so wonderful. What we saw in 2016 was that even if a candidate were to contest a result, none of the election committees were willing to commit to a full hand recount; instead, the only options were to retabulate through the very same tabulation processes and machines that had produced the questionable results in the first place. Without low barrier to recount by hand, the electronic systems pr…
With too low a barrier to recount-by-hand, every election becomes contested because the cost to demand a recount is minimal and the losing candidate might win.
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or just use paper ballots like other countries do ..
The Butterfly ballots WERE paper ballots. Give America an idea, and SOMEONE in America will royally screw it up. Its a big country filled with lots of smart people, but also filled with lots of dumb people. DARPA is working to come up with the standard that the whole country should follow. That's good and useful research. Even if it comes out to be the obvious solution (a paper ballot off of a damn printer), there's…
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Your ideal voting system is vulnerable to coercion ("log in and show me who you voted for or else") and phishing. Voting systems should provide confidence to voters that votes are counted correctly, but not permit anyone, including the voters themselves, to learn how they voted after the ballot is cast.
Laws can prevent coercion, at least by major businesses, but another concern is people selling their votes on a black market. Still, to me, the benefits of an open and verifiable voting system would outweigh the downsides.
Voters don't need to be able to verify their vote post-election because a) they cast their ballot, so they can just remember who they voted for, and b) they can't change their decision, so there is no need to have a record of it.
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> Have there been any competitions to make an open source, highly scalable and verifiable anti-tampering voting system Yes, for thousands of years. The result is called the paper ballot. You cannot have a verifiable anti-tampering voting system using computers. You need verifiability by the general public. Auditing a microchip is not something members of the general public know how to do, and in any case, it detroys…
Are those tamper proof? I recall some engineers testifying before congress about specifically making paper ballot systems that were designed to allow altering results. DieBold I think? I don't have a link handy, but it seems that is just as fallible. Or do you mean hand written ballots? Does anyone still use those? And yeah, the digital ones have been hacked at DefCon by children. (their parents taught them how to ha…
Yes. The constitutional court of Germany ruled that electronic voting is essentially illegal in Germany due to all the inherent flaws, so all elections are done with pen and paper, ballot boxes, and manual counting.
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Do you want it looked at, or not? You make no point. You get mad about the research, then get mad about some wanting to do it without enough research. Is your point that we should never, for the rest of time, investigate the use of electronics for secure voting?
I'm sorry if this comes off as a bit hostile, but did you read at least the title of the article? "DARPA is building ", not researching . The content of the article reflected this - mostly about actually making a system, very little about research on the math behind secure voting on untrusted hardware. It's clear they want to use this.
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Are those tamper proof? I recall some engineers testifying before congress about specifically making paper ballot systems that were designed to allow altering results. DieBold I think? I don't have a link handy, but it seems that is just as fallible. Or do you mean hand written ballots? Does anyone still use those? And yeah, the digital ones have been hacked at DefCon by children. (their parents taught them how to ha…
> Or do you mean hand written ballots? Does anyone still use those? Yes. The constitutional court of Germany ruled that electronic voting is essentially illegal in Germany due to all the inherent flaws, so all elections are done with pen and paper, ballot boxes, and manual counting.