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Seals Used to Protect Voting Machines Can Be Opened With a Shim from a Soda Can
- dang 8y agoUrl changed from https://boingboing.net/2018/10/16/tamper-evident-seals.html https://boingboing.net/2018/10/16/tamper-evident-seals.html, which points to this.
- nickthegreek 8y agoA good point in the comments that you would most likely not have unrestricted access to the back of the tag for the shim as it SHOULD be pulled tight but it still does not appear as secure as one would hope.
- SamBam 8y agoYou're assuming that the person who put the tag on isn't the person who wants to undetectably open it at a later time.
- r00fus 8y agoIs this a "works as designed" system? Meaning: designed to get exploited... FTA: "Bernhard, however, said that although voting machines may be locked when they are stored in the county clerk's building, they are left unattended for days at polling places—high school gyms, churches, and community centers—prior to elections. " I mean, your honor, she was just asking for it!
- martin_bech 8y agoWhy are you guys not using paper ballots, like the civilised world?
- cabaalis 8y agoI'm not quite following why you left this comment, when the photograph on the article is of a woman in Michigan literally depositing a paper ballot. The machines discussed are for tabulating paper ballots.
- jakelazaroff 8y agoThis is not true everywhere. From the article: > Bernhard, who is an expert witness for election integrity activists in a lawsuit filed in Georgia to force officials to get rid of paperless voting machines used in that state
- donarb 8y agoThen the headline is wrong, they’re not voting machines, but tabulating machines.
- monocasa 8y agoAnd why are we using machines for tabulating? The number of people available to count ballots scales linearly with the number of votes cast generally...
- dragonwriter 8y ago> The number of people available to count ballots scales linearly with the number of votes cast generally... Yes, but the amount of work in tabulating with humans, if you have a time bound, scales superlinearly; as you scale out the number of people tabulating initially beyond one, you add coordination overhead, which is superlinear with the number of people coordinated.
- monocasa 8y agoOnly slightly. Other countries manage to get results the same night as the election despite hand counting. Even with an extra level of management to handle 300m instead of 30m, you would still get it all done in the same time.
- Thlom 8y agoWhat about machine tabulating first and then hand count afterwards as a check? Alternatively any party can ask for a manual recount of individual districts?
- ams6110 8y agoBecause not so long ago, all the tech luminaries were asking "why are you still using paper ballots that take hours to count and are prone to error (both on the part of the voter and the counter)?" Might have even been as recently as the "hanging chad" debacle in the Bush/Gore recount.
- btilly 8y agoAll the tech luminaries? That was never my experience. For example see http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/risks.html http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/risks.html for a warning about the insecurity of voting machines before the Bush/Gore recount happened. And even then it was old hat among the knowledgeable. For example there was the Nebraska senatorial election that Chuck Hagel stole in 1996. (He resigned as CEO of ES&S in 1995, and won by a wide margin in 1996 in an election counted by ES&S machines despite being behind by an even wider margin in the polls. The machines did not allow a recount. What do YOU think happened?) Were lots of people singing about the future? Of course. But lots knew that "put it on a computer" isn't a recipe for accuracy when the people who make the computers have a vested interest in the outcome!
- henrikschroder 8y ago> The machines did not allow a recount. This is insane on so many levels. How would you even technically implement that? You'd have to make an effort to design the system like that. Why would anyone, anywhere, EVER, put in place a voting system that doesn't allow a recount? Paper ballots don't magically, invisibly, change over time or suddenly become uncountable or un-inspectable.
- btilly 8y agoOh, I'm sure that you can think of lots of reasons if your possible motivations include corruption. Every kind of voting system that has been created has also been corrupted somehow, somewhere.
- jimrandomh 8y ago
- ivl 8y agoI actually liked Gambia's choice of using marbles. Only really works for single ticket elections, though.
- dang 8y agoPlease don't post nationalistic swipes to Hacker News. We already had to ask you not to do this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16467863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16467863). Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- java-man 8y agoworks as designed.
- lolc 8y ago> Bernhard was able to order two other types of election seals listed on the Michigan website, as well as several paper seals, tamper-evident stickers, and election certificates through Election Source. Is that a form of leaving your wifi open so you have plausible deniability later?
- gwbas1c 8y agoNothing is 100% tamper proof
- just_steve_h 8y agoObviously, expecting deals to protect voting machines is foolish! They should've hired walruses.
- SilasX 8y agoYou probably had the same reaction as me: "lol yeah, they're not supposed to be indestructible, silly, just tamper-evident". Well, bad news there too: >But a security researcher in Michigan has shown in videos how he can defeat plastic security ties that counties across his state use to protect ballot bags, the cases that store voting machines and the ports that store the memory cards on optical-scan machines—electronic voting machines that record paper ballots scanned into them. He can do so without leaving evidence of tampering. [Emphasis added]
- outside1234 8y agoBut it would take someone with this expertise, say a foreign government, like Russia, to pull off, so that's not so likely. Oh wait.
- boomboomsubban 8y agoOr either political party, the far, far more likely perpetrators.
- dfee 8y agoHere’s a unique idea: if you want to influence elections, tamper with tamper-evident stickers to get votes from an unfriendly district thrown out. So practically (ethically) speaking, why don’t we see physical ballot collection as equally risky? Is there a good solution?
- sitharus 8y agoPhysical collection is risky, but we can mitigate the risks. I can't speak to the US system, but here in New Zealand every political party is entitled to appoint scrutineers to each polling place. They cannot speak or interact with anyone but they watch the whole process from checking voter entitlement, through transporting the ballots and then counting. The idea is each party distrusts the others so won't let them get away with rigging the ballot. Mutual distrust produces a trustworthy outcome.
- roenxi 8y agoAlso on this point, we know the large silent majority is made up mostly of moderates who want to live in a civilised democratic country where the government either leaves everyone alone or have a mass benevolent impact. As long as attacks don't scale it seems safe to assume corruption will be localised and the integrity of the system will hold. The risk is that IT is used to centralise democracy to bring down costs, then becomes compromised in an unrelated attack.
- everdev 8y agoBut if the parties are picking partisan voting officials to oversee the election, there might not be much moderation or civility among them.
- toyg 8y agoSame in Italy, each party can have one person observing proceedings. There used to be tons of parties, hence there were lots of eyes around. The better-organised parties also tracked in realtime whether their sympathizers had actually voted, seat by seat, and could send messages through relays to hurry them to the booth. Before computers, journalists typically relied on the major parties to have the first results, well before they were officially declared. This has changed in modern times, as a number of parties disappeared after electoral reforms; and the risk of tampering and shenanigans has increased substantially.
- cududa 8y ago@mods can you fix the capitalization in the title
- guhcampos 8y agoSo what stops someone from tampering with a box of paper ballots and replacing them with their own, anyway? Honest question, not rethoric. I don't see how paper ballots get any safer than electronic, it just seems to change what's the easiest approach to tampering. Using both methods to verify one-another sounds decent though.
- matuszeg 8y agoYou cannot network together boxes of paper ballots and access them via the internet. It does not fully prevent tampering it just makes it way harder.
- kosievdmerwe 8y agoAlso if you try to organize large scale tampering someone will fuck up and you'll realize large scale tampering happened. With electronic voting it might not be obvious.
- Trombone12 8y agoFor paper ballots you can't usually manipulate them ahead of time to record an fraudulent vote, and you need to sneak around with a big box of votes which is just logistically more challenging.
- a1369209993 8y ago1: A bunch of people (from both parties and nominally anyone else who feels like showing up) look at the ballot box to confirm that it's a empty cardboard (or whatever) box with no interesting properties. (This part is what's impossible with a voting machine, for obvious reasons.) 2: People watch the box to make sure it's not tampered with as people put their ballots in. (This works to a point with voting machines, although a attacker interacts with a voting machine for much longer than the ~6 sec it takes to drop a paper ballot in a box.) 3: The ballots are taken out and counted, with more watching. Due to physical laws like conservation of mass, it's very hard to make the number of ballots coming out differ from the number that went in, and even changing existing ballots is nontrivial. (Voting machines can silently delete, alter, or add ballots matching arbitrary criteria.)
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoSo every attempt to improve on physical paper ballots and manual counting seems doomed to fail. I'm not surprised having seen how secure most secure IT turns out to be. How can we either a) learn to stop fixing it as it seems quite far from broken, or b) achieve something that's actually an improvement?
- jcrawfordor 8y agoThe same type of seal is used in securing physical ballot boxes (and in fact is used on these digital tabulators to secure their ballot receiver box), so this kind of issue is not unique to electronic voting systems. Paper-based voting also uses a system of seals to ensure integrity.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoThe difference of course is there are manual observers, usually independent and from the main parties, watching physical ballot boxes while they're "live". Making tampering harder even if the seals are defective.
- jcrawfordor 8y agoI'm not sure that this is a useful difference. Physical ballot boxes often sit unattended overnight in the case of early voting centers (and in some cases even in regular voting locations depending on local procedure), and digital tabulators are usually observed at all times that they are unlocked. If anything digital tabulators may be somewhat more secure from this perspective, because they typically require authentication with a cryptographic token (which is held by the presiding judge of the polling location or a similar person) before they will count any ballots. This is a second measure preventing ballot stuffing when unattended as compared to a ballot box without on-site tabulator. The issue is different for direct-recording electronic (DRE) or "paperless" machines, but this article pertains to digital tabulators that are actually a voting machine and ballot box in one: they scan the ballot and then retain it in a box for later audit. The seals pictured are actually used to secure the ballot box, not on the machine itself which sits on top of the box.
- kristopolous 8y agoThese flaws are likely intentional. In a global marketplace, the current regimes in power are the ones making the purchasing decisions of what machines to use to run the next election. Machines that can be readily tampered with and reprogrammed in undetectable ways likely sell better under the assumption leaders would rather stay in power and have ceremonious democracy than risk being ousted or overthrown. Regardless, if someone was upstanding and wanted to run a fair election with the machines, they can do that as well. Ones that can be altered, preferably only by the election committee to change an election without getting caught, is likely a highly sought after device. That's likely why we keep finding them over and over again. Every few months another trivial exploit that a fairly incompetent people could discover is found on yet another device. No receipts, audits, paper trail or any verification ... just a bunch of readily reprogrammable devices that anyone with a USB stick or an sd card or the edge of a housekey could use to change the votes however they please. Again and again and again. It's very likely intentional.
- sebleon 8y agoIndeed, the US presidential election is a joke on various levels. 1. The president is not picked based on the people’s vote. The US is a republic, not a democracy, where government officials cast the deciding votes. 2. The voting infrastructure can be easily tampered with, likely by design as pointed out above. 3. There is no limits on campaign spending, enabling billionaires and corporations to own the winning candidates that got the most airtime. 4. Two private entities have a duopoly on the presidency. They’ve established rules that prevent any new parties from serious consideration. 5. As surfaced by the Wikileaks DNC dump, at least one (if not both) of these parties actively sabotage some of their candidates to ensure the party’s pick a spot in the final national election.
- lucozade 8y ago> The president is not picked based on the people’s vote Yes, the US President is. It's not a straight referendum but that doesn't mean it's not based on people's votes. > The US is a republic, not a democracy It's both. > where government officials cast the deciding votes No they don't. > The voting infrastructure can be easily tampered with The machines appear to be. That's quite a way from saying that the infrastructure is. That would require the tampering to be easily achievable. There's little evidence of that. > There is no limits on campaign spending Yes there are. They're not very effective but they exist. > Two private entities have a duopoly on the presidency Effectively yes. > to ensure the party’s pick a spot in the final national election This would be way more convincing if Trump wasn't the President. He clearly wasn't the pick of the Republicans establishment. Or anywhere near. If anything, his election shows that the parties don't have the control that they'd like you to think they have. The US presidential elections are far from a joke. Not perfect by any means but internationally important events and, in historic terms, beacons of democracy. And in case it need saying, I'm not American and have no interest in being American.
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- orasis 8y agoI was picturing aquatic mammals (seals) guarding voting machines...
- 323454 8y agoSurely the Seals have better things to do?
- barry0079 8y agoI think to make the public aware of the risks an election result needs to simply be hacked in such an obvious way that it's instantly discredited.
- INTPenis 8y agoThey're simply tamper seals. Not padlocks. Payment terminals have the same thing. You're only supposed to detect tampering, there is no way to stop tampering when the system is local. Do Vice not understand this simple principle?
- sebtoast 8y agoMaybe you already know this but some padlocks can be easily opened using the same shimming technique.
- nimbius 8y agoso, a little bit more about these seals. I am an engine mechanic for a small chain of truck stops, and what the seal appears to be is an old style Cambridge MPT series truck trailer seal. It would be easy to mistakenly use these if you werent 'in the loop' as far as cargo shipping is concerned because theyre cheap and nobody in your wheelhouse complained about them. The problem is they are brittle, weather poorly, and as evidenced can easily be bypassed by shimming. Every MPT style seal can be bypassed with a soda bottle or pop can AFAIK. the trucking industry has moved away from them for chain-of-custody purposes. What the voting machines should be using is the Cambridge PTS series or similar. Not only does it reveal tampering, but even tampering attempts will cause the plastic to turn white/red from stress. if you really wanted to knock it out of the park: CT-PAT Bolt seals. in vitro locking with spin protection and ISO certified. These can get pricy though, and require bolt cutters to open when necessary.