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Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?

28 points by rossdavidh 8y ago

I don't generally expect society to listen if computer programmers tell them to do or not do something. But, just maybe, they might listen if programmers said, "don't use software for this", en masse. I feel like voting systems that have no voter-verifiable paper backup are a horrible idea and (in the literal sense) a threat to democracy. Is it possible for programmers to somehow get this message across to the rest of society? Or do most other programmers think this is not a problem and the security risks are overblown?

LinuxBender 8y ago
Multiple engineers have testified before congress that they were ordered to make systems easy to hack. This has been going on for decades and nothing has changed AFAIK. I suspect everything will go fully electronic with no paper-trail, despite my having a paper trail every time I fuel up my vehicle.
a-fried-egg 8y ago
The part where regulation failed was when the engineers went before Congress and not a Grand Jury to testify.
meiraleal 8y ago
Why would you convince them to discard something that is at least better than the alternative? Manual voting systems are easily to hack and more difficult to find who/when or even if it was hacked.
- lev99 8y ago
  How would you hack a paper ballot? You see your choices in paper. You place the paper in a ballot box. The ballot box is watched by people on both sides. The ballot box is sealed and transparently transported to a counting facility. The ballot counting is observed by people on both sides. The counting facility counts the ballots twice, with both counts having to agree. The counts are communicated to a central tallying location. The counts for each counting facility and the total are publicly communicated.
  - rossdavidh 8y ago
    The most important feature of a paper ballot is that the general populace can read them, and understand how they work. The worst feature of any electronic-only voting system is that the general populace cannot verify that they work. This is a bad thing even in the case where no hacking occurred, since it reduces trust in the validity of the outcome by anyone who dislikes the result.
    - krapp 8y ago
      The general populace can't really verify the results of paper ballots either, that would mean letting anyone who wanted to do their own manual counts of all ballots.
      - marshray 8y ago
        https://www.eac.gov/voters/become-a-poll-worker/ https://www.eac.gov/voters/become-a-poll-worker/
        krapp 8y ago
skillachie 8y ago
Interesting enough, i just came across a project that is working on this using the blockchain http://185.25.51.16/papers/VerusVision.pdf http://185.25.51.16/papers/VerusVision.pdf
rogerthis 8y ago
Do you want horror story in this area, look for how elections are done in Brazil. 100% digital, from voting to counting to totals.
itronitron 8y ago
Software-only voting systems are a worse idea than paper-ballot voting systems. Unfortunately, issues do come up with paper-based voting systems so people think the system can be improved by throwing software at it. At this point, voting by mail seems to be the way to go in places that are going all in with software systems.
Chinmayh 8y ago
I am not sure why Software should not be used. My solution would be 1. Open Source software, which can be verified by everyone. 2. Voting via an app with authentication as good as or through your bank account. 3. After Voting, We should be able to query and verify who our vote is with - on a particular day of counting, and get whole history of our votes. An individual persons vote is append only. Please, do let me know drawbacks.
- jimrandomh 8y ago
  You can't have the ability to verify who you voted for, because that would eliminate the secret ballot.
  - Chinmayh 8y ago
    By that logic, you are saying that everything in my bank account is public information. If there is an incentive to get to know who a individual person has voted for, then it would be with all parties. And if you think there is just one party that is much stronger as compared to others. Then, it doesn't matter if you vote or not. They are just being nice by letting you vote.
    - ajurna 8y ago
      please watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI it has a good list of reasons why software voting is a terrible idea. also the secret ballet is very important to maintaining the fairness of elections.
    - mcintyre1994 8y ago
      Your bank statement is available to somebody who's threatening you, because it's available to you. That's the problem with being able to verify your own vote, somebody else can force you to show them who you voted for, so they can threaten you to make you vote for who they want. It's the same reason you can't take a photo of your ballot.
    - endisukaj 8y ago
Scarblac 8y ago
Today's XKCD is on this as well: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
theknarf 8y ago
Why would you turn down the ability to hack entire countries democracy? Think of the power! /s
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
The way I could see doing it would be to hack several states' voting systems, and totally mess with the results so that they are clearly incorrect. Like, Trump wins California and Massachusetts over Hillary by 99% - something obviously, blatantly wrong. Note well: I am not advocating actually doing this. But that's what I think it would take.
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  I suspect you might be right, and I wonder how many not-clearly-incorrect hacks will happen before the first clearly-incorrect one does. But, if one were doing that, better to cause Mickey Mouse to win the state, it is a more clear signal. But I'm not the person to send that signal, which is why I was thinking about how else to communicate it.
squozzer 8y ago
Most software people I know aren't particularly persuasive. One trait noticeably missing among them is the ability to simplify a complex topic without losing too much relevant information. But even if some are, ways exist to undermine an expert's credibility about a complex topic. For example, when Robert Oppenheimer began warning people about the dangers of nuclear war, the attacks came. Once the government felt comfortable enough with Edward Teller, it could proceed with revoking Oppenheimer's security clearance. That said, not sure a paper receipt actually helps because it's certainly possible for a voting machine to spit out a receipt, then change whatever data the receipt was supposed to capture. And unless the change was drastic and massive (e.g. Trump wins California) then it will probably go undetected.
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  Good point on the average persuasiveness of software people. On paper receipts, the idea is that it allows for recounts. Not that paper is invulnerable, but the fact that more people understand how paper works than understand how software works, makes it a better option, I think (speaking as a software person).
gnulinux 8y ago
Wow this thread is very depressing. I'm really sorry to say that this time I strongly disagree with HNers. I'm a previous human rights activist and I worked in a lot of past elections in Turkey. I am very opinionated on this issue and I strongly believe the future is software-only votes. Naive reasons why we should use software-only voting: 1. Humans can do mistakes. Machines can't do mistakes (unless humans who programmed them did mistakes) 2. It takes more time and resources to count votes compared to automating it. 3. You'll use less paper, so better for environment. Better reasons why: 1. Voting is an entirely impossible-to-debug process. If you live in a corrupt republic like Turkey of Russia you need to spend thousands of dollars and people to ensure elections are held democratically. Because government won't ensure that or they will actively work against it. Software can be made debuggable. 2. If you live in a country like Russia, government can attempt collect data about your votes to estimate/learn which party you voted for. With cryptography this can be made mathematically impossible (or equivalent to very hard problems like PvsNP) 3. Recalculating election results is very infeasible in real life. If you store election data (so that it's impossible to find who voted what) and make it open, everyone can confirm election results EVEN IF we find a bug in retroactive computation script. 4. With free software (free as in freedom) it is possible for experts (computer scientists, cryptographers, law makers, attorneys etc...) to audit the process of election. This is not possible in real elections: lawyers cannot audit the election so it's possible some people make wrong decisions interfering in people's votes (i.e. deciding a bad vote to be ok, vice versa) Problems: 1. Backdoors etc. Solution: use free software and pay experts to redundantly confirm system works. Pay software engineers to maybe write parts of the system in agda, idris, coq so it's provable. This is not terribly worse than the space program etc. 2. Not everyone can use computers. Solution: you can organize the exact same election system, call people to special places to vote and use computer instead of paper. 3. What if we're hacked even after experts checking the system? Solution: redundantly store the data, use parity bits RAID etc to ensure data integrity. If there is some unrecoverable data loss, cancel elections.
- erlongsb 8y ago
  Also if one goes with a private-blockchain you could reuse the existing infrastructure. Make all the polling places run their own nodes. Being a programmer, sysadmin or whatever, is such a common occupation nowadays.