13 ms·

XKCD: Voting software

164 points by tiborsaas 8y ago

herogreen 8y ago
Perhaps the most important political message I have seen on XKCD. Related Computerphile episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI I guess that some computer-powered elections are coming in the US, EU ?
- freeone3000 8y ago
  https://voatz.com/ https://voatz.com/ is going to power remote voting in West Virginia, according to https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/07/voatz-mobile-voting-west-virginia-blockchain/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/07/voatz-mobile-voting-west... .
  - jandrese 8y ago
    It's pretty incredible that the state government is going to send retirees a notice that tells them to install the "voatz" app on their phone. Might as well call it xXxl33t v0+exXx. It doesn't look like an official government anything.
  - mikestew 8y ago
    With that domain, I thought it was your half-assed attempted at a joke, or maybe something you found on 4chan. Then I clicked the first link. There is no way in hell I'm trusting my enfranchisement to an application called "voatz" (or an application, period. But especially not...). Bonus points for the fact that they've got that blockchain bullet point covered: https://blockview.voatz.com/ https://blockview.voatz.com/
  - martythemaniak 8y ago
    When Reddit kicked out some hate groups, they setup their own website called "voat.co". I thought this was something associated with them.
    - rhencke 8y ago
      That isn't how Voat was created at all.
      - Nadya 8y ago
        If people repeat a lie enough it becomes the truth. That's the goal when misinformation like this is spread. Even better when ignorant people with only secondhand knowledge begin to spread the message. Voat had existed for just over a year before the mass subreddit ban on Reddit. The timeline is easy to look up on their Wikipedia page [0]. It was already a trollfest 4chan-like-community version of Reddit before the users of banned subs joined. - Founded as WhoaVerse in April 2014 - Subreddits banned June 2015 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voat
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
bradknowles 8y ago
Gloves won't save you this time. Nor will sand.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  Nuking the entire planet from orbit is the only solution.
  - nscalf 8y ago
    Based off recent findings, it seems as though aiming at one country in particular would also have the same results.
genericid 8y ago
Proper link: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  I prefer this format as well, even on mobile.
  - ygra 8y ago
    How do you view the alt text on mobile with the desktop view, though?
    - stochastic_monk 8y ago
      On iOS, hold your finger over the image to make it appear.
GuiA 8y ago
As a software engineer I have some vague notions of why voting software is a slippery slope to get on; but can anyone sum up the main arguments/ELI5 why we can trust avionics or elevator software to an acceptable level of confidence, but not voting software?
- ZainRiz 8y ago
  People are much more interested in hacking into voting machines than they are in hacking into public air planes. Planes and elevators are not connected to an internet, unlike most voting machines, making them harder to hack into. Also, when people hack into planes/elevators the hack will quickly get noticed and thus the exploit will get fixed pretty soon. With electronic voting machines the hack could remain undiscovered for years since there's no clear visible sign that the machine has been hacked.
  - furgooswft13 8y ago
    Electronic voting machines themselves are not connected to the internet. I don't think software development in this field is that retarded. They can still be hacked of course, but the delivery mechanism would at least be some local network or more likely compromised firmware upload. Most likely some computer somewhere in the chain of voting machine counts -> official "verified" vote totals is connected, but you could say that of vote rolls coming from manual punch ballots as well. A lot of people suggest the solution is for electronic voting machines to produce at least an actual vote paper trail, but I don't see that helping as a hacked machine could spoof those just as well as bits.
- genericid 8y ago
  It is pretty easy to verify that a plane or an elevator behaves correctly. Did it transport its passengers to their destination? Pass. Did everyone die? Fail. (This is obviously simplified). You cannot do that with voting software. To verify the result of a software-based election, you would have to compare the vote counts the software reports with the actual vote counts. But if you knew the vote counts, you wouldn't need the software anymore. There a proposals to get around this issue by storing each voter's decision so they can verify that their vote was counted properly. That would abolish the secret ballot, making it a horrible idea. Even if there were a software-based voting system that could be verified by experts, it would almost certainly be too complicated to be verified by the general public.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
I know this is mostly over how important it is not to have anything voting/democracy related fail horribly, but going after the comment in the fourth panel what exactly happened to our field that we can't generally be trusted to make something that works? Is it just "Move fast and break things" in action?
- timr 8y ago
  It's because this field doesn't value experience, and instead values youth and rewriting things in Javascript. It's maddening how preventable a lot of this stuff is, but you can't convince anyone to listen to you because rules and processes aren't fun.
  - lotyrin 8y ago
    Conversely, a lot of the incentives on these teams are perverse -- like the conversation in another thread about not being able to sell to stakeholders the idea of "remove junk" but being able to sell them the idea of "add AMP". So even if you are the sort of software developer to consider the lifecycle and long-term utility of the products you produce -- good luck with that.
    - timr 8y ago
      True. However, one thing I'll say about that: the older and more experienced you are, the easier it becomes to push back on stupid things.
  - tabtab 8y ago
    Re: doesn't value experience, and instead values youth and rewriting things in Javascript. JavaScript is so yesterday, PyChainGo is the newest and best. Get with the times!
- yifanl 8y ago
  In this specific case, we have an essentially static system that's exposed to the public that you need to protect from an unknown number of attackers with substantially more resources than you do. To use the analogy of the plane designer, it'd be equivalent to building a consumer airliner that can handle flying through a warzone.
ihucos 8y ago
Blockchain only solves one part of the problem. All end devices are not secure. My mother keeps clicking on funny ads and single hardware components may be compromised.
tabtab 8y ago
The Space Shuttle software was some of the most reliable software ever written. However, it was expensive and time-consuming. In practice, few want to wait and/or pay for such. Related: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff and http://wiki.c2.com/?IsThereEverGoingToBeSufficientEconomicIncentiveToDoSoftwareRight http://wiki.c2.com/?IsThereEverGoingToBeSufficientEconomicIn...
- earenndil 8y ago
  Ironically enough, voting software being accurate will arguably save more people's lives than space shuttle software being accurate, it's just less visceral and immediate so people care less.
shirro 8y ago
It isn't that software engineers are bad at their jobs. Information and matter happen to have very different properties when it comes to resisting modification and showing evidence of tampering at our current level of technology. It isn't that electronic voting systems can't be made more resistant to tampering. The problem is that if tampering is possible it seems more likely to succeed with an electronic system than it would exposing a large number of human agents modifying paper ballots. I live in a country with compulsory voting and paper ballots and we have proportional voting in one house and we still manage to get a concession speech within a few hours typically. If it ain't broken... I don't see what is gained from taking human observers out of the loop and hiding everything under the skirts of a computer system with a sign saying "trust us".
- a-priori 8y ago
  There's also trade off where the more tamper resistant/evident the system is, the more sophisticated it must be and the harder it is to understand the system. Trust isn't just about engineering like it is for avionics or other high-reliability systems. It's also about independent verification, including by lay people. If it requires advanced cryptography or computer science knowledge to trust the election results. I live in Canada where we do paper ballots everywhere. We also get same-night results on election day. They're just starting to experiment with vote tabulators, and this means that results come in faster now. In fact, in the latest Ontario provincial elections they had a declared winner 20 minutes after polls closed. Especially with tabulator machines I just don't get the point of electronic voting.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
  Another important difference is computer systems themselves are inherently general purpose [0], unlike a physical machine - An airplane cannot be subverted to calculate the GDP of the United States, but all Turing machines are created equal. Another difference is computer systems are generally open to unpredictable external inputs [0], unlike a physical machine - An airplane is not needed to be designed under the assumption that an adversary would use weather modification to destroy it. [0] Unless specialized designs are used explicitly in hardware and software, similar to those which are found in embedded industrial control systems, which removes these uncertainties to a large extent. But they are rarely used in practice because of its difficulties and cost. As Bruce Schneier written in Cryptography Engineering, One of the biggest differences between security systems and almost any other type of engineering is the adversarial setting. Most engineers have to contend with problems like storms, heat, and wear and tear. All of these factors affect designs, but their effect is fairly predictable to an experienced engineer. Not so in security systems. Our opponents are intelligent, clever, malicious, and devious; they’ll do things nobody had ever thought of before. They don’t play by the rules, and they are completely unpredictable. That is a much harder environment to work in. Many of us remember the film in which the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge wobbles and twists in a steady wind until it breaks and falls into the water [1]. It is a famous piece of film, and the collapse taught bridge engineers a valuable lesson. Slender suspension bridges can have a resonance mode in which a steady wind can cause the whole structure to oscillate, and finally break. How do they prevent the same thing from happening with newer bridges? Making the bridge significantly stronger to resist the oscillations would be too expensive. The most common technique used is to change the aerodynamics of the bridge. The deck is made thicker, which makes it much harder for the wind to push up and down on the deck. Sometimes railings are used as spoilers to make the bridge deck behave less like a wing that lifts up in the wind. This works because wind is fairly predictable, and does not change its behavior in an active attempt to destroy the bridge. A security engineer has to take a malicious wind into account. What if the wind blows up and down instead of just from the side, and what if it changes directions at the right frequency for the bridge to resonate? Bridge engineers will dismiss this kind of talk out of hand: ‘‘Don’t be silly, the wind doesn’t blow that way.’’ That certainly makes the bridge engineers’ jobs much easier. Cryptographers don’t have that luxury. Security systems are attacked by clever and malicious attackers. We have to consider all types of attack. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/f/f2/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_destruction.ogv/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_destruction.ogv.480p.webm https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/f/...
dqpb 8y ago
Why don't we start with voting machines that either produce or consume a paper ballot (with user confirmation that paper/electronic records match). Then have people count the paper ballots and compare their count to the computed electronic counts. The counts should match.
- joveian 8y ago
  For the US, the Oregon/Washington/Colorado style vote by mail ballot seems best. There is no need for anyone to stand in a line to vote and a human count of the paper ballot is possible if necessary. The computers involved are not in direct contact with the general public.
mulletbum 8y ago
Why should we wait till the people currently in the field retire?
- twoquestions 8y ago
  The field of programming simply isn't mature enough to reliably manage an election with millions of participants, especially when we have ancient traditions of vote counting that work well enough right now. Look at how fast the people at DefCon rooted a voting machine! https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/07/30/hackers-defcon-conference-exploit-vulnerabilities-voting-machines/523639001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/07/30/hackers-defco... Think about the development of heavier-than-air flight. It was a thing for 50 years or so before commercial flights became common, and they had the collective world's genius spurred on by 2 World Wars to advance the field. Entrusting something as critical and nigh-sacred as our elections to such a provably immature and insecure as modern voting machines, and there's little impulse to remedy the situation right now.
  - heavenlyblue 8y ago
    Rooting a voting machine does not imply the votes can be faked, if the voting is based on cryptography. The fact that US believes IDs are optional for the citizens but also thinks that all-encompassing surveillance is OK looks delusional to me.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
nailer 8y ago
That's not it. It's among other things: - the threat model of a startup with only 2M of funding managing an asset (election outcome) that is worth far more - the lack of verifiable proofs for individuals to see that their vote was handled correctly - systems with known issues being deployed. The idea isn't awful, the execution is.
- ebiester 8y ago
  I was talking with a friend about this. The key is verification, and paper is a cheap form of verification. That said, if we are to have voting machines, I believe they simultaneously need to be developed by the government and have open source code so that it is independently verifiable and we have a way to check that the binary build is exactly what it says it is. Fundamentally, voting is a hard problem that looks like an easy problem precisely because the incentives to break it are so high.
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    Even if a hypothetical voting machine was open source, and developed by an independent 3rd party, it's still not enough IMO. How many people in the country can correctly audit complicated cryptographic protocols? How many can fully audit a codebase like this? And how many of those do you think would instantly shut up if threatened with a lifetime of jail or death? Have you ever seen the underhanded C contest? It's nearly impossible for seasoned developers to find the problems with some of those, in a contest where they KNOW for a fact that there is an exploit, and even sometimes what that exploit is trying to achieve. I can make a complete guess at the number of people capable of auditing this in the US being less than 1000, and the number of people in that position willing to sacrifice everything to tell the world about their discoveries being basically zero. But let's even ignore that, let's say that there are tens of thousands of capable engineers chomping at the bit to review this. How do you prove that code is what is running on your voting machine? How do you know the hardware is secure? If you come up with steps to fullproof verify, how many people will check it? How many people will be capable of checking their cryptographic proof (if the scheme has one). This is voting, 1-2% can make all the difference, and if a bad actor can modify 1-2% in some key areas, they can swing the whole election. Stick with paper checkmarks thrown into a ballot box, written on with pencils. Then every single person that is able to count can help "verify", they can guard that box all election day if they want, 1 or 100's of people can all do it, old, young, english speaking or otherwise. We have a nearly perfect system right now, but nobody wants to use it, and I can't for the life of me see why.
IshKebab 8y ago
Is he unaware that planes have millions of lines of code? Writing robust software is possible, but nobody wants to pay for it when it isn't safety-critical.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Is he unaware that planes have millions of lines of code? He's an ex-NASA engineer, so he's perfectly aware of that. > Writing robust software is possible, but nobody wants to pay for it when it isn't safety-critical. That's the core reason why the field of software engineering is bad at what it does, while aviation isn't. Somehow, aviation can get people to pay for doing the job right, while software cannot.
  - odyssey7 8y ago
    I had hoped "software engineer" would have meant more of a focus on making systems reliable, vs "software developer," but in my experience it's only a trendy job title preference.
    - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      In Canada you can't call yourself an engineer unless you're an actual engineer. While I don't know if it helps actual software quality, it can't hurt that there's been at least some rigor applied. When the title is totally users choice and interchangeable with software developer/programmer/code monkey/Mr. Pill the Wonderful Computer Magician, it doesn't mean anything. Though now I am wondering if there have been studies correlating work performance and title. My initial thought is there is no correlation, considering all the technical support analysts running around.
  - philipov 8y ago
    Moreover, designing to not crash is a task requiring understanding of the laws of physics, which is something that STEM education is good at providing. Meanwhile, protecting against hacking requires large doses of empathy, which is something that the profession seems to weed out. I would trust engineers to design against physics long before I'd trust them to even design an interface for a non-technical user. The laws of physics don't try to adapt to your security measures.
hsnewman 8y ago
Travis county, Texas, is purchasing new voting machines which create an audit trail on paper. https://www.mystatesman.com/news/local-govt--politics/travis-county-approves-purchase-paper-trail-voting-system/3sGRBQijMuh0NEW5QD6WUJ/ https://www.mystatesman.com/news/local-govt--politics/travis... That said, I'm sure there will be hacks...
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Even if there won't be hacks, there will most certainly be accusations. Electronic voting enables accusations of hacking.
bloodboil0 8y ago
I'm my country we can vote online, everything is under control :D
- nashashmi 8y ago
  Why do you make us ask? Tell us which country.
rwmj 8y ago
What problem is electronic voting trying to solve?
- odyssey7 8y ago
  Animal spirits.
- julvo 8y ago
  Potentially reducing cost while increasing voter turnout
  - rwmj 8y ago
    Where I live, the paper ballots are collected, moved and counted by volunteers (in big open halls and other public spaces where anyone can go along and watch). So I guess cost doesn't have to be an issue. Voter turnout: People prefer screens to paper or something? Sounds odd that voter turnout would be affected by the exact method of voting.
    - r-bryan 8y ago
      Maybe we've been looking at the wrong cost. As you suggest, voting machines wouldn't make it cheaper to count the votes. They would make it cheaper to hack the election! "No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up." --Lily Tomlin
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    I honesty don't see how electronic voting machines would increase voter turnout. How would there be a (significant) cause/effect there?
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  Not enough taxpayer money spent on things that aren't broken enough.
- skymt 8y ago
  The 2000 presidential election was a big driver. No one wanted to spend November of an election year hearing about "chads" ever again, so the Help America Vote Act was passed. Among other things it provided federal funding for states to replace problematic punch-card voting machines. Electronic voting, in theory, could be easier to use than a paper ballot and can automatically check that the ballot is filled out correctly (e.g. not voting for multiple candidates for a single office). And of course there were companies lining up to help states spend those federal dollars on overpriced touchscreen PCs running Windows XP.
JdeBP 8y ago
I recommend http://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2030:_Voting_Software http://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2030:_Voting_Software to anyone about to ask "What does X mean?" or "Why Y?" questions.
samuelfekete 8y ago
If airplanes or elevators would become unreliable or would be tempered with, everyone would know. With elections, where the votes are secret (and the monitors are not engineers), hacks and bugs could happen without anyone ever finding out.
jcranmer 8y ago
Here's the thing about voting. There are basically three kinds of fraud: fraud in counting votes (what independent monitors are meant to solve), fraud in casting votes (what voter ID is meant to solve), and fraud in inducing votes (such as voter intimidation). Unsurprisingly, in practice, almost all of the problems that actually occur with legitimate democracies, and even most of them in sham democracies, is with the last category of fraud. People who freak out about the insecurity of voting machines worry about the first two kinds of issues, and generally ignore the latter part.
- detaro 8y ago
  How do voting machines help with the latter part?
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    They don't, but the point is that elections are already manipulated in that way, so that people aren't going to bother with a roundabout way of manipulating an election, when there's a much easier, less illegal (or at least, more opportunities for plausible deniability) way to do it.
  - mcherm 8y ago
    One example is that a voting machine (depending on how it is built) can either provide or fail to provide secrecy for the voter. If the fact that a voter cast a vote is public knowledge but HOW they voted is well concealed, then certain kinds of induced votes ("vote for the right guy or I'll beat you up afterward") are not possible.
    - detaro 8y ago
      What specific attack scenario that works for paper ballots fails with a voting machine?
- adamlett 8y ago
  The majority of countries where elections take place, don't have voting machines. So it's hardly surprising that most kinds of election fraud don't involve voting machines. Also, I am very sceptical of your claim that most of the problems belong to the last category. If it seems that way, I say that is because of observation bias. It's much easier to find evidence of voter intimidation than for fraudulent counting, even if both take place.
merraksh 8y ago
No technology (aerospace engineering, building engineering, voting machines) is 100% resilient as long as there is an entity with tools, money, and knowledge to bring it down. I guess the comparison holds here because voting machines can be approached by said entity in a remote fashion, unlike an aircraft or an elevator.
- mcherm 8y ago
  That is true, but the XKCD cartoon is pointing out that there is a fundamental difference here. In aerospace or elevators, the experts say that what we have is really quite safe, although a determined adversary could potentially cause harm. In voting machines, the experts say that what we have is fundamentally UNSAFE, and that a half-hearted effort from a bright college student could bring it to its knees. That difference should DEEPLY concern the people who run elections.
  - JdeBP 8y ago
    It has deeply concerned the people who contribute to the RISKS Digest. Since Volume 2 in 1986. It's still a topic in Volume 30. * http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/ http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/ * http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/2/12#subj6.1 http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/2/12#subj6.1
  - merraksh 8y ago
    Agreed, but even if we got voting machines to the level of resiliency of aircraft engineering, the effort of a determined adversary would still carry enormous consequences.
  - anon0604 8y ago
    A half-hearted effort from a bright college student can also bring an airplane or elevator to its knees. The security standard for voting machine software is higher; airplane engineers get to inflict TSA checks on their users. In software we often ask ourselves about dedicated attackers with no other goal than to cause harm, and often try to make our products defended against that. This is because the cost to achieving this is largely limited to doing more engineering work. In physical products, people do not try to protect their work from hypothetical hammer-armed attackers with no other goal than to cause harm. Protection there is more expensive so its not worth it.
z3phyr 8y ago
In India, its actually very hard and time consuming to accurately count around a billion paper votes. Paper votes kind of do not scale. Also India used to face a lot of incidences of booth capturing[1] which came to a stop after EVMs. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing
- AndrewDucker 8y ago
  Of course paper scales. Because if you have more people then you have more people to count the votes. In the UK every vote count happens with observers from the local area, in a semi-public manner. The process is very simple, and hard to manipulate, because the observers (from all sides) ensure it.
  - JdeBP 8y ago
    The point of xem mentioning booth capturing is that it is the practice of the "observers" from one side forcibly ejecting the observers from the other sides and then proceeding to rig the ballot.
    - AndrewDucker 8y ago
      And in that case you need to have police involved. And if your response there is that the police will help one side against the other then your problem is massive corruption, and no technological solution will fix your voting problems (other than members of the public having the ability to record it and then make it public).
      - z3phyr 8y ago
        The process of Booth Capturing happened during the ballot, not the counting. It was actually a very serious problem of rigging which vanished after the introduction of EVMs Before the introduction of EVMs, there was a massive problem of "Illegal Votes" due to illiteracy (for most part). That vanished to because pressing buttons is absolute and intuitive. I get where you are coming from though. Ideally, civilized behavior and rule of law should reign supreme, but a populace cannot be educated and society reformed with a single button. And we cannot forsake democracy "until the rule of law reigns us". We must find the middle ground There were impeding cases of rigging with paper ballots anyway and people did not trust the people who counted during the paper ballot time. Everything's the same. Now people do not trust the machines.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lucideer 8y ago
This comic may have been inspired by this thread in West Virginia's voting system https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17706849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17706849
bilbo0s 8y ago
To be completely fair, the problem is likely not the voting machines themselves. The problem, at a fundamental level, is that most democracies are deeply corrupted. Some from within. Some from with-out. Some corrupted from with-in and from with-out. (Most probably fall into the latter category if we're being honest.) The voting machines simply represent another tool in the box of the corrupt. Like money, or judges and politicians, or social media. Is it a good idea to refrain from using voting machines? Probably. But realize that you've only eliminated a single attack vector for corrupting an electoral process. There are many, many, many more. And they are probably a lot easier and more effective than breaking into a voting machine. A few for instances: The entire nation has been thoroughly Gerrymandered. This is a fairly effective method of corrupting elections and it is a fact of life for us here in the US. Professional manipulation campaigns. Yeah, I don't think I need to tell anyone how effective these are. Basically, any comment on the internet that is remotely political ought to be discounted, as it should be assumed to be part of a professional manipulation campaign. Including this and every other comment on this thread to be perfectly frank. Another example. In North Carolina, they simply deleted all the black people from the voter registration database during the last election. Fast. Simple. Effective. And WAY easier than hacking into Heaven only knows how many different voting machines to tamper with the numbers. My only point is that, yes, voting machines are corruptible. Anyone who says they aren't is being willfully dishonest. (And probably trying to screw you.) That said, there are so many other methods of corrupting a modern election that I'm not at all sure that breaking into the voting machines would be option number one for all those political types out there. So, yes, by all means, stay away from voting machines. It probably makes sense for you to agitate for their removal in your municipality. But realize there are many, many other threat vectors out there that you should probably be more worried about.

164 points by tiborsaas 8y ago

Perhaps the most important political message I have seen on XKCD. Related Computerphile episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI I guess that some computer-powered elections are coming in the US, EU ?

freeone3000 8y ago
https://voatz.com/ https://voatz.com/ is going to power remote voting in West Virginia, according to https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/07/voatz-mobile-voting-west-virginia-blockchain/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/07/voatz-mobile-voting-west... .
- jandrese 8y ago
  It's pretty incredible that the state government is going to send retirees a notice that tells them to install the "voatz" app on their phone. Might as well call it xXxl33t v0+exXx. It doesn't look like an official government anything.
- mikestew 8y ago
  With that domain, I thought it was your half-assed attempted at a joke, or maybe something you found on 4chan. Then I clicked the first link. There is no way in hell I'm trusting my enfranchisement to an application called "voatz" (or an application, period. But especially not...). Bonus points for the fact that they've got that blockchain bullet point covered: https://blockview.voatz.com/ https://blockview.voatz.com/
- martythemaniak 8y ago
  When Reddit kicked out some hate groups, they setup their own website called "voat.co". I thought this was something associated with them.
  - rhencke 8y ago
    That isn't how Voat was created at all.
    - Nadya 8y ago
      If people repeat a lie enough it becomes the truth. That's the goal when misinformation like this is spread. Even better when ignorant people with only secondhand knowledge begin to spread the message. Voat had existed for just over a year before the mass subreddit ban on Reddit. The timeline is easy to look up on their Wikipedia page [0]. It was already a trollfest 4chan-like-community version of Reddit before the users of banned subs joined. - Founded as WhoaVerse in April 2014 - Subreddits banned June 2015 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voat
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

bradknowles 8y ago

Gloves won't save you this time. Nor will sand.

bradknowles 8y ago
Nuking the entire planet from orbit is the only solution.
- nscalf 8y ago
  Based off recent findings, it seems as though aiming at one country in particular would also have the same results.

genericid 8y ago

Proper link: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

stochastic_monk 8y ago
I prefer this format as well, even on mobile.
- ygra 8y ago
  How do you view the alt text on mobile with the desktop view, though?
  - stochastic_monk 8y ago
    On iOS, hold your finger over the image to make it appear.

GuiA 8y ago

As a software engineer I have some vague notions of why voting software is a slippery slope to get on; but can anyone sum up the main arguments/ELI5 why we can trust avionics or elevator software to an acceptable level of confidence, but not voting software?

ZainRiz 8y ago
People are much more interested in hacking into voting machines than they are in hacking into public air planes. Planes and elevators are not connected to an internet, unlike most voting machines, making them harder to hack into. Also, when people hack into planes/elevators the hack will quickly get noticed and thus the exploit will get fixed pretty soon. With electronic voting machines the hack could remain undiscovered for years since there's no clear visible sign that the machine has been hacked.
- furgooswft13 8y ago
  Electronic voting machines themselves are not connected to the internet. I don't think software development in this field is that retarded. They can still be hacked of course, but the delivery mechanism would at least be some local network or more likely compromised firmware upload. Most likely some computer somewhere in the chain of voting machine counts -> official "verified" vote totals is connected, but you could say that of vote rolls coming from manual punch ballots as well. A lot of people suggest the solution is for electronic voting machines to produce at least an actual vote paper trail, but I don't see that helping as a hacked machine could spoof those just as well as bits.
genericid 8y ago
It is pretty easy to verify that a plane or an elevator behaves correctly. Did it transport its passengers to their destination? Pass. Did everyone die? Fail. (This is obviously simplified). You cannot do that with voting software. To verify the result of a software-based election, you would have to compare the vote counts the software reports with the actual vote counts. But if you knew the vote counts, you wouldn't need the software anymore. There a proposals to get around this issue by storing each voter's decision so they can verify that their vote was counted properly. That would abolish the secret ballot, making it a horrible idea. Even if there were a software-based voting system that could be verified by experts, it would almost certainly be too complicated to be verified by the general public.

tomatotomato37 8y ago

I know this is mostly over how important it is not to have anything voting/democracy related fail horribly, but going after the comment in the fourth panel what exactly happened to our field that we can't generally be trusted to make something that works? Is it just "Move fast and break things" in action?

timr 8y ago
It's because this field doesn't value experience, and instead values youth and rewriting things in Javascript. It's maddening how preventable a lot of this stuff is, but you can't convince anyone to listen to you because rules and processes aren't fun.
- lotyrin 8y ago
  Conversely, a lot of the incentives on these teams are perverse -- like the conversation in another thread about not being able to sell to stakeholders the idea of "remove junk" but being able to sell them the idea of "add AMP". So even if you are the sort of software developer to consider the lifecycle and long-term utility of the products you produce -- good luck with that.
  - timr 8y ago
    True. However, one thing I'll say about that: the older and more experienced you are, the easier it becomes to push back on stupid things.
- tabtab 8y ago
  Re: doesn't value experience, and instead values youth and rewriting things in Javascript. JavaScript is so yesterday, PyChainGo is the newest and best. Get with the times!
yifanl 8y ago
In this specific case, we have an essentially static system that's exposed to the public that you need to protect from an unknown number of attackers with substantially more resources than you do. To use the analogy of the plane designer, it'd be equivalent to building a consumer airliner that can handle flying through a warzone.

ihucos 8y ago

Blockchain only solves one part of the problem. All end devices are not secure. My mother keeps clicking on funny ads and single hardware components may be compromised.

tabtab 8y ago

The Space Shuttle software was some of the most reliable software ever written. However, it was expensive and time-consuming. In practice, few want to wait and/or pay for such. Related: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff and http://wiki.c2.com/?IsThereEverGoingToBeSufficientEconomicIncentiveToDoSoftwareRight http://wiki.c2.com/?IsThereEverGoingToBeSufficientEconomicIn...

earenndil 8y ago
Ironically enough, voting software being accurate will arguably save more people's lives than space shuttle software being accurate, it's just less visceral and immediate so people care less.

shirro 8y ago

It isn't that software engineers are bad at their jobs. Information and matter happen to have very different properties when it comes to resisting modification and showing evidence of tampering at our current level of technology. It isn't that electronic voting systems can't be made more resistant to tampering. The problem is that if tampering is possible it seems more likely to succeed with an electronic system than it would exposing a large number of human agents modifying paper ballots. I live in a country with compulsory voting and paper ballots and we have proportional voting in one house and we still manage to get a concession speech within a few hours typically. If it ain't broken... I don't see what is gained from taking human observers out of the loop and hiding everything under the skirts of a computer system with a sign saying "trust us".

a-priori 8y ago
There's also trade off where the more tamper resistant/evident the system is, the more sophisticated it must be and the harder it is to understand the system. Trust isn't just about engineering like it is for avionics or other high-reliability systems. It's also about independent verification, including by lay people. If it requires advanced cryptography or computer science knowledge to trust the election results. I live in Canada where we do paper ballots everywhere. We also get same-night results on election day. They're just starting to experiment with vote tabulators, and this means that results come in faster now. In fact, in the latest Ontario provincial elections they had a declared winner 20 minutes after polls closed. Especially with tabulator machines I just don't get the point of electronic voting.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
Another important difference is computer systems themselves are inherently general purpose [0], unlike a physical machine - An airplane cannot be subverted to calculate the GDP of the United States, but all Turing machines are created equal. Another difference is computer systems are generally open to unpredictable external inputs [0], unlike a physical machine - An airplane is not needed to be designed under the assumption that an adversary would use weather modification to destroy it. [0] Unless specialized designs are used explicitly in hardware and software, similar to those which are found in embedded industrial control systems, which removes these uncertainties to a large extent. But they are rarely used in practice because of its difficulties and cost. As Bruce Schneier written in Cryptography Engineering, One of the biggest differences between security systems and almost any other type of engineering is the adversarial setting. Most engineers have to contend with problems like storms, heat, and wear and tear. All of these factors affect designs, but their effect is fairly predictable to an experienced engineer. Not so in security systems. Our opponents are intelligent, clever, malicious, and devious; they’ll do things nobody had ever thought of before. They don’t play by the rules, and they are completely unpredictable. That is a much harder environment to work in. Many of us remember the film in which the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge wobbles and twists in a steady wind until it breaks and falls into the water [1]. It is a famous piece of film, and the collapse taught bridge engineers a valuable lesson. Slender suspension bridges can have a resonance mode in which a steady wind can cause the whole structure to oscillate, and finally break. How do they prevent the same thing from happening with newer bridges? Making the bridge significantly stronger to resist the oscillations would be too expensive. The most common technique used is to change the aerodynamics of the bridge. The deck is made thicker, which makes it much harder for the wind to push up and down on the deck. Sometimes railings are used as spoilers to make the bridge deck behave less like a wing that lifts up in the wind. This works because wind is fairly predictable, and does not change its behavior in an active attempt to destroy the bridge. A security engineer has to take a malicious wind into account. What if the wind blows up and down instead of just from the side, and what if it changes directions at the right frequency for the bridge to resonate? Bridge engineers will dismiss this kind of talk out of hand: ‘‘Don’t be silly, the wind doesn’t blow that way.’’ That certainly makes the bridge engineers’ jobs much easier. Cryptographers don’t have that luxury. Security systems are attacked by clever and malicious attackers. We have to consider all types of attack. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/f/f2/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_destruction.ogv/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_destruction.ogv.480p.webm https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/f/...

dqpb 8y ago

Why don't we start with voting machines that either produce or consume a paper ballot (with user confirmation that paper/electronic records match). Then have people count the paper ballots and compare their count to the computed electronic counts. The counts should match.

joveian 8y ago
For the US, the Oregon/Washington/Colorado style vote by mail ballot seems best. There is no need for anyone to stand in a line to vote and a human count of the paper ballot is possible if necessary. The computers involved are not in direct contact with the general public.

mulletbum 8y ago

Why should we wait till the people currently in the field retire?

twoquestions 8y ago
The field of programming simply isn't mature enough to reliably manage an election with millions of participants, especially when we have ancient traditions of vote counting that work well enough right now. Look at how fast the people at DefCon rooted a voting machine! https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/07/30/hackers-defcon-conference-exploit-vulnerabilities-voting-machines/523639001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/07/30/hackers-defco... Think about the development of heavier-than-air flight. It was a thing for 50 years or so before commercial flights became common, and they had the collective world's genius spurred on by 2 World Wars to advance the field. Entrusting something as critical and nigh-sacred as our elections to such a provably immature and insecure as modern voting machines, and there's little impulse to remedy the situation right now.
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  Rooting a voting machine does not imply the votes can be faked, if the voting is based on cryptography. The fact that US believes IDs are optional for the citizens but also thinks that all-encompassing surveillance is OK looks delusional to me.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

nailer 8y ago

That's not it. It's among other things: - the threat model of a startup with only 2M of funding managing an asset (election outcome) that is worth far more - the lack of verifiable proofs for individuals to see that their vote was handled correctly - systems with known issues being deployed. The idea isn't awful, the execution is.

ebiester 8y ago
I was talking with a friend about this. The key is verification, and paper is a cheap form of verification. That said, if we are to have voting machines, I believe they simultaneously need to be developed by the government and have open source code so that it is independently verifiable and we have a way to check that the binary build is exactly what it says it is. Fundamentally, voting is a hard problem that looks like an easy problem precisely because the incentives to break it are so high.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  Even if a hypothetical voting machine was open source, and developed by an independent 3rd party, it's still not enough IMO. How many people in the country can correctly audit complicated cryptographic protocols? How many can fully audit a codebase like this? And how many of those do you think would instantly shut up if threatened with a lifetime of jail or death? Have you ever seen the underhanded C contest? It's nearly impossible for seasoned developers to find the problems with some of those, in a contest where they KNOW for a fact that there is an exploit, and even sometimes what that exploit is trying to achieve. I can make a complete guess at the number of people capable of auditing this in the US being less than 1000, and the number of people in that position willing to sacrifice everything to tell the world about their discoveries being basically zero. But let's even ignore that, let's say that there are tens of thousands of capable engineers chomping at the bit to review this. How do you prove that code is what is running on your voting machine? How do you know the hardware is secure? If you come up with steps to fullproof verify, how many people will check it? How many people will be capable of checking their cryptographic proof (if the scheme has one). This is voting, 1-2% can make all the difference, and if a bad actor can modify 1-2% in some key areas, they can swing the whole election. Stick with paper checkmarks thrown into a ballot box, written on with pencils. Then every single person that is able to count can help "verify", they can guard that box all election day if they want, 1 or 100's of people can all do it, old, young, english speaking or otherwise. We have a nearly perfect system right now, but nobody wants to use it, and I can't for the life of me see why.

IshKebab 8y ago

Is he unaware that planes have millions of lines of code? Writing robust software is possible, but nobody wants to pay for it when it isn't safety-critical.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> Is he unaware that planes have millions of lines of code? He's an ex-NASA engineer, so he's perfectly aware of that. > Writing robust software is possible, but nobody wants to pay for it when it isn't safety-critical. That's the core reason why the field of software engineering is bad at what it does, while aviation isn't. Somehow, aviation can get people to pay for doing the job right, while software cannot.
- odyssey7 8y ago
  I had hoped "software engineer" would have meant more of a focus on making systems reliable, vs "software developer," but in my experience it's only a trendy job title preference.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    In Canada you can't call yourself an engineer unless you're an actual engineer. While I don't know if it helps actual software quality, it can't hurt that there's been at least some rigor applied. When the title is totally users choice and interchangeable with software developer/programmer/code monkey/Mr. Pill the Wonderful Computer Magician, it doesn't mean anything. Though now I am wondering if there have been studies correlating work performance and title. My initial thought is there is no correlation, considering all the technical support analysts running around.
- philipov 8y ago
  Moreover, designing to not crash is a task requiring understanding of the laws of physics, which is something that STEM education is good at providing. Meanwhile, protecting against hacking requires large doses of empathy, which is something that the profession seems to weed out. I would trust engineers to design against physics long before I'd trust them to even design an interface for a non-technical user. The laws of physics don't try to adapt to your security measures.

hsnewman 8y ago

Travis county, Texas, is purchasing new voting machines which create an audit trail on paper. https://www.mystatesman.com/news/local-govt--politics/travis-county-approves-purchase-paper-trail-voting-system/3sGRBQijMuh0NEW5QD6WUJ/ https://www.mystatesman.com/news/local-govt--politics/travis... That said, I'm sure there will be hacks...

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Even if there won't be hacks, there will most certainly be accusations. Electronic voting enables accusations of hacking.

bloodboil0 8y ago

I'm my country we can vote online, everything is under control :D

nashashmi 8y ago
Why do you make us ask? Tell us which country.

rwmj 8y ago

What problem is electronic voting trying to solve?

odyssey7 8y ago
Animal spirits.
julvo 8y ago
Potentially reducing cost while increasing voter turnout
- rwmj 8y ago
  Where I live, the paper ballots are collected, moved and counted by volunteers (in big open halls and other public spaces where anyone can go along and watch). So I guess cost doesn't have to be an issue. Voter turnout: People prefer screens to paper or something? Sounds odd that voter turnout would be affected by the exact method of voting.
  - r-bryan 8y ago
    Maybe we've been looking at the wrong cost. As you suggest, voting machines wouldn't make it cheaper to count the votes. They would make it cheaper to hack the election! "No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up." --Lily Tomlin
- deathanatos 8y ago
  I honesty don't see how electronic voting machines would increase voter turnout. How would there be a (significant) cause/effect there?
peterwwillis 8y ago
Not enough taxpayer money spent on things that aren't broken enough.
skymt 8y ago
The 2000 presidential election was a big driver. No one wanted to spend November of an election year hearing about "chads" ever again, so the Help America Vote Act was passed. Among other things it provided federal funding for states to replace problematic punch-card voting machines. Electronic voting, in theory, could be easier to use than a paper ballot and can automatically check that the ballot is filled out correctly (e.g. not voting for multiple candidates for a single office). And of course there were companies lining up to help states spend those federal dollars on overpriced touchscreen PCs running Windows XP.

JdeBP 8y ago

I recommend http://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2030:_Voting_Software http://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2030:_Voting_Software to anyone about to ask "What does X mean?" or "Why Y?" questions.

samuelfekete 8y ago

If airplanes or elevators would become unreliable or would be tempered with, everyone would know. With elections, where the votes are secret (and the monitors are not engineers), hacks and bugs could happen without anyone ever finding out.

jcranmer 8y ago

Here's the thing about voting. There are basically three kinds of fraud: fraud in counting votes (what independent monitors are meant to solve), fraud in casting votes (what voter ID is meant to solve), and fraud in inducing votes (such as voter intimidation). Unsurprisingly, in practice, almost all of the problems that actually occur with legitimate democracies, and even most of them in sham democracies, is with the last category of fraud. People who freak out about the insecurity of voting machines worry about the first two kinds of issues, and generally ignore the latter part.

detaro 8y ago
How do voting machines help with the latter part?
- jcranmer 8y ago
  They don't, but the point is that elections are already manipulated in that way, so that people aren't going to bother with a roundabout way of manipulating an election, when there's a much easier, less illegal (or at least, more opportunities for plausible deniability) way to do it.
- mcherm 8y ago
  One example is that a voting machine (depending on how it is built) can either provide or fail to provide secrecy for the voter. If the fact that a voter cast a vote is public knowledge but HOW they voted is well concealed, then certain kinds of induced votes ("vote for the right guy or I'll beat you up afterward") are not possible.
  - detaro 8y ago
    What specific attack scenario that works for paper ballots fails with a voting machine?
adamlett 8y ago
The majority of countries where elections take place, don't have voting machines. So it's hardly surprising that most kinds of election fraud don't involve voting machines. Also, I am very sceptical of your claim that most of the problems belong to the last category. If it seems that way, I say that is because of observation bias. It's much easier to find evidence of voter intimidation than for fraudulent counting, even if both take place.

merraksh 8y ago

No technology (aerospace engineering, building engineering, voting machines) is 100% resilient as long as there is an entity with tools, money, and knowledge to bring it down. I guess the comparison holds here because voting machines can be approached by said entity in a remote fashion, unlike an aircraft or an elevator.

mcherm 8y ago
That is true, but the XKCD cartoon is pointing out that there is a fundamental difference here. In aerospace or elevators, the experts say that what we have is really quite safe, although a determined adversary could potentially cause harm. In voting machines, the experts say that what we have is fundamentally UNSAFE, and that a half-hearted effort from a bright college student could bring it to its knees. That difference should DEEPLY concern the people who run elections.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  It has deeply concerned the people who contribute to the RISKS Digest. Since Volume 2 in 1986. It's still a topic in Volume 30. * http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/ http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/ * http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/2/12#subj6.1 http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/2/12#subj6.1
- merraksh 8y ago
  Agreed, but even if we got voting machines to the level of resiliency of aircraft engineering, the effort of a determined adversary would still carry enormous consequences.
- anon0604 8y ago
  A half-hearted effort from a bright college student can also bring an airplane or elevator to its knees. The security standard for voting machine software is higher; airplane engineers get to inflict TSA checks on their users. In software we often ask ourselves about dedicated attackers with no other goal than to cause harm, and often try to make our products defended against that. This is because the cost to achieving this is largely limited to doing more engineering work. In physical products, people do not try to protect their work from hypothetical hammer-armed attackers with no other goal than to cause harm. Protection there is more expensive so its not worth it.

z3phyr 8y ago

In India, its actually very hard and time consuming to accurately count around a billion paper votes. Paper votes kind of do not scale. Also India used to face a lot of incidences of booth capturing[1] which came to a stop after EVMs. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing

AndrewDucker 8y ago
Of course paper scales. Because if you have more people then you have more people to count the votes. In the UK every vote count happens with observers from the local area, in a semi-public manner. The process is very simple, and hard to manipulate, because the observers (from all sides) ensure it.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  The point of xem mentioning booth capturing is that it is the practice of the "observers" from one side forcibly ejecting the observers from the other sides and then proceeding to rig the ballot.
  - AndrewDucker 8y ago
    And in that case you need to have police involved. And if your response there is that the police will help one side against the other then your problem is massive corruption, and no technological solution will fix your voting problems (other than members of the public having the ability to record it and then make it public).
    - z3phyr 8y ago
      The process of Booth Capturing happened during the ballot, not the counting. It was actually a very serious problem of rigging which vanished after the introduction of EVMs Before the introduction of EVMs, there was a massive problem of "Illegal Votes" due to illiteracy (for most part). That vanished to because pressing buttons is absolute and intuitive. I get where you are coming from though. Ideally, civilized behavior and rule of law should reign supreme, but a populace cannot be educated and society reformed with a single button. And we cannot forsake democracy "until the rule of law reigns us". We must find the middle ground There were impeding cases of rigging with paper ballots anyway and people did not trust the people who counted during the paper ballot time. Everything's the same. Now people do not trust the machines.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

lucideer 8y ago

This comic may have been inspired by this thread in West Virginia's voting system https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17706849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17706849

bilbo0s 8y ago

To be completely fair, the problem is likely not the voting machines themselves. The problem, at a fundamental level, is that most democracies are deeply corrupted. Some from within. Some from with-out. Some corrupted from with-in and from with-out. (Most probably fall into the latter category if we're being honest.) The voting machines simply represent another tool in the box of the corrupt. Like money, or judges and politicians, or social media. Is it a good idea to refrain from using voting machines? Probably. But realize that you've only eliminated a single attack vector for corrupting an electoral process. There are many, many, many more. And they are probably a lot easier and more effective than breaking into a voting machine. A few for instances: The entire nation has been thoroughly Gerrymandered. This is a fairly effective method of corrupting elections and it is a fact of life for us here in the US. Professional manipulation campaigns. Yeah, I don't think I need to tell anyone how effective these are. Basically, any comment on the internet that is remotely political ought to be discounted, as it should be assumed to be part of a professional manipulation campaign. Including this and every other comment on this thread to be perfectly frank. Another example. In North Carolina, they simply deleted all the black people from the voter registration database during the last election. Fast. Simple. Effective. And WAY easier than hacking into Heaven only knows how many different voting machines to tamper with the numbers. My only point is that, yes, voting machines are corruptible. Anyone who says they aren't is being willfully dishonest. (And probably trying to screw you.) That said, there are so many other methods of corrupting a modern election that I'm not at all sure that breaking into the voting machines would be option number one for all those political types out there. So, yes, by all means, stay away from voting machines. It probably makes sense for you to agitate for their removal in your municipality. But realize there are many, many other threat vectors out there that you should probably be more worried about.