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Here’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 practical

• sitharus 8y ago
  Physical 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 ago
    Also 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 ago
      But if the parties are picking partisan voting officials to oversee the election, there might not be much moderation or civility among them.
  • toyg 8y ago
    Same 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.
  • jcrawfordor 8y ago
    Election administration is by state in the US. To my knowledge, every US state except for West Virginia allows some form of "observer" or "challenger" (or sometimes both with different purposes), often appointed by either political parties or candidates. It's a bit of a patchwork from state to state, but yes, in general, there is a system of interested persons observing the polling place. (In this state, observers and challengers are different, with challengers specifically serving the purpose of challenging individuals that may not actually be qualified to vote. Since the pollbooks are electronic today challengers are rarely seen, they were generally only able to challenge clerical errors that are no longer seen with computer pollbooks)
    • nemo846 8y ago
      Kind of hard to observe electronic voting. If someone wants to screw with physical votes, they have to access the boxes which hold them. Easily detectable. Electronic ... you can have the software changed to modify votes and few would be the wiser - even have the changes hide themselves if you are smart.
      • taeric 8y ago
        This seems overly simplistic. Both have ridiculously tough to harden attack vectors. In physical, it isn't enough to protect where the votes are done. They have to be transported back and ultimately counted somewhere. At any point in that process, they are vulnerable. No?
        • Retra 8y ago
          Vulnerable to what, though? Physically changing votes takes time, and swapping them leaves a paper trail. If someone miscounts paper votes, you can just recount them. With a computer, you flip a bit and there's no record. Votes are miscounted? Tough, those numbers are a real as any other numbers. And how much time does it take to swap a vote? Less than a microsecond?
          • mathieuh 8y ago
  • ironic_ali 8y ago
    Yeah nah, that's choice but, at least our scrutineers aren't so easily bribed by fish. Edit: should read articles before commenting..
    • Simon_says 8y ago
      It's animal cruelty to open seals with shims, no matter what they're protecting.
  • hyperpallium 8y ago
    They can collude to exclude a third party.
  • TheSoftwareGuy 8y ago
    So what happens if one of them sees something fishy? Can they report it in a way that will lead to action?
• slg 8y ago
  The physical collection box is generally (always?) out in the open so tampering would be obvious. Even with electronic voting machines it is rare to get enough privacy to hide attempting to tamper with the back of the machine like this article discusses. Voting machines without a user verifiable paper trail are certainly a problem, but they pose a much lower risk to the health of our democracy than other issues like what is currently happening in Georgia.
  • jcrawfordor 8y ago
    The major concern surrounding voting machine or ballot tampering is usually at early voting locations, since there it is typical to leave the ballot boxes and/or voting machines unattended overnight. The state I'm a poll worker in does have reasonable additional precautionary measures, such as printing and retaining daily open and close reports from the digital tabulators to guard against overnight ballot stuffing, but this does present an opportunity to do something like tampering with the machine so that it incorrectly tabulates future ballots. Not really an easy attack but still a possible one, and these machines have not established a strong reputation for protection against something like a firmware implant This state uses and retains paper ballots, so it would be yet more difficult to design an attack that would withstand an audit of the paper ballots. But some states don't...
  • usrusr 8y ago
    > Even with electronic voting machines it is rare to get enough privacy to hide attempting to tamper with the back of the machine like this article discusses. An electronic voting machine could be tampered with well ahead of voting day. Verification hashes and the like are only aggregates that are open to trickery on the way to the humans checking them, the ground truth is impossible for a human to process. We cannot sense the state of a computer without its help. In contrast to this, the initial emptiness of a physical ballot box is very much in the realm of human senses, it's perfectly safe to leave them unattended until voting starts.
• TallGuyShort 8y ago
  Is that really what happens? I would hope that if enough votes to come within a margin of error of changing the outcome were thrown out, the ballots would be re-cast. Or is there enough anonymity to make that impossible?
  • michaelchisari 8y ago
    As far as I know, elections can't be redone on a federal level. I could be wrong, but I certainly don't know of any situations where they have been.
    • azernik 8y ago
      They absolutely can be: see https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/provisions.html https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/..., specifically the section of the US code that speaks to "Failure to make choice on prescribed day" and "Determination of controversy as to appointment of electors". Basically - if for any reason a state can't pick electors on election day, it can do so afterwards by whatever (constitutional) method it desires; and if there's a disputed election and a state has a (pre-election) law enacted for deciding controversies that law just has to come to a decision within 6 days before the electors meet.
  • azernik 8y ago
    This is absolutely doable, and is really the logic behind most current physical election security procedures. Procedures are designed less to prevent tampering than to make tampering obvious. Re-voting can theoretically be done, because (public, real-time) records are kept of who voted at a particular polling place, not counting provisional ballots - look outside for a "street index" at your polling place. (Source: am volunteering for the second time working the physical polls.)
  • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    I'd guess that repeating a vote favours whichever party has a particular demographic (younger?, less employed??) or whichever is better funded (to encourage/assist getting to polls) that subsequent votes get less and less attendees? So, forcing a revote might be a way to swing a marginal seat in your favour.
• kcorbitt 8y ago
  This is essentially how the Directory managed to maintain power during the French Revolution when their party was set to lose a popular election in 1798. In departments where the Directory was expected to do especially poorly, they engineered electoral irregularities ahead of the vote that could then be used to invalidate the results. This became known as the Coup of 22 Floréal.
• bsder 8y ago
  > Here’s a unique idea: if you want to influence elections, tamper with tamper-evident stickers to get votes from an unfriendly district thrown out. Because you don't automatically throw out votes even if the seal is tampered. You have other means of cross-verifying authenticity. You can look at the voter roll signatures to see if the vote totals match. You can do statistical analysis versus the expectation and look for anomalies. You can ask observers if they saw anything untoward. etc. Paper is secure NOT because it is untamperable. Paper is secure because we can bury it a whole host of interlocking cross-checks--of which tamper seals is one of.
  • Terr_ 8y ago
    Paper is also more-secure because tampering costs more in terms of time/money/energy/risk. It's much easier to remotely and anonymously mass-rewrite electronic records than to physically move the atoms of paper and ink.
    • kosievdmerwe 8y ago
      And paper is nice cause lay people can easily understand and verify the system. How do you prove that an electric system wasn't tampered with? How do you verify the voting machines actually run the verified code? How do you verify that some sub-component didn't hack the RAM? Winning an election is too valuable and the risks to myriad for me to ever trust electronic voting. Especially as as you mentioned tampering with paper on a large scale will likely leak something went wrong, whereas electronic tampering might never be discovered and can be accomplished at large scale.
      • magicalhippo 8y ago
        To me, the problem with electronic voting seems to be that in order to trust the system, it is hard to avoid giving up anonymity. Consider for example using blockchain for this. Every eligible citizen gets a "VoteCoin" from the voting officials and deposits it in the official "VoteWallet" of their party of choice. At some cutoff point no more transactions are allowed or considered. Each voter could verify that their vote went to the right party, and the voting officials could easily verify the votes (no unknown VoteCoins for example). However now everyone knows which party else everyone voted for... In general the issue seems to be that if someone voting uses an electronic system they cannot rely on what that system reports back to them. It could be hacked to show whatever. And in order to remain anonymous the person voting has to be the one that verifies that their vote went to the right party.
• ericcumbee 8y ago
  Because i don't think you are going to just not count people's votes if the entire voting district is believed to have been compromised. I don't know what the procedure/ or law would be but being that they know who voted i would think there would be some sort of attempt to allow them to revote.
• gnopgnip 8y ago
  It has to do with the cost. It is more costly to attack physical ballot collection, and riskier.
• pimmen 8y ago
  Because attacks on physical ballot collection doesn't scale as well as on electronic ones.