12 ms·

Voting machines pose a greater threat to our elections than foreign agents

153 points by howard941 7y ago

mikece 7y ago
“Right now there are no mandatory federal cybersecurity standards for elections...” And that's a good thing. Each state/county/city can implement the election however they want which makes it practically impossible to rig the vote. If we all used the same system/procedures/process then hacking the election could scale much more easily as the same tricks that works in Manhattan would work in Montana.
- howard941 7y ago
  It's not a good thing when the state has ineffective processes that rely on the vendor's assurances if it has any standards at all. If the feds were imposing a preemptive monoculture that'd be bad. But that's not at issue.
- tlb 7y ago
  In fact they all use voting machines from the same few vendors and mostly running Windows, so there are plenty of common vulnerabilities. Also, in the US, hacking a single large state can swing a federal election.
- kadoban 7y ago
  That would only makes sense to me if rigging only one state was near useless. It's very much not. If you rig say, Florida, there's a fairly high chance of deciding the election.
  - parvenu74 7y ago
    I don't think the machines matter as long as the vote can be replayed/recounted without ambiguity. An idea: https://medium.com/@dotnetmike/touch-screen-voting-should-be-illegal-59295dbabc27 https://medium.com/@dotnetmike/touch-screen-voting-should-be...
    - swader999 7y ago
      It needs a paper record, this needs to be the source of truth.
      - daveguy 7y ago
        Not just a paper record. A hand marked paper record. If it doesn't go through a computer first it can't be altered. There are several states that do it this way. It's a "Scantron" style ballot. Fill in the vote, run it through a tally machine and save the ballot. The tally machines could be messed with, but if there is evidence of tampering with the tally there is always the authentic original ballot.
        swader999 7y ago
        Yes!
      - pmoriarty 7y ago
        If you've got a paper record, just use that instead of the machines. Machines just add more opportunities for fraud.
    - bediger4000 7y ago
      That's traditionally been the problem with voting machines: a "recount" just re-read some tally. Combine this with voting machine companies being opaque, not recognizing obvious flaws and their executives promising to deliver states to particular candidates (https://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm https://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm), and you begin to feel that all the suspicion is justified.
    - ska 7y ago
      > as long as the vote can be replayed/recounted without ambiguity. Isn't this the core problem with most electronic voting as currently implemented in the US? I mean, that no such guarantee exists?
- jbob2000 7y ago
  You don’t need to corrupt all of the voting processes though, you only need to do it in a few key states. Funnily enough, the states you’d need to do it in would be the poorer ones who’d have no ability to discern a good voting solution from a bad one. The real solution is to use paper. There’s no way to fuck with a paper ballot system other than to go to every polling station and fuck with their counts - an expensive and highly visible attack.
- yongjik 7y ago
  That's almost like saying that if there isn't a company-wide security policy, every department will implement security whatever way they want, making company-wide data breach impossible.
- onemoresoop 7y ago
  Perhaps votefrauding swing states would be an easier target, much easier than targeting all states..
- gbrown 7y ago
  This gets repeated a lot, but it directly contradicts another bit of common wisdom: security by obscurity isn't. Not only are we vulnerable to a few key districts tipping elections, nation state actors should find it absolutely trivial to build a comprehensive program targeting the full spectrum of voting machines used in practice.
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  Or you can design a system that’s the same for everyone because it actually works. Like, you know, observable paper ballots.
  - daveguy 7y ago
    Hand marked is better than just observable. Takes the machine out of the equation except for the tally and the tally could be confirmed with multiple machines. There should still be minimum security standards required. Air gapped counting machines with hand marked ballots is a good start.
- drak0n1c 7y ago
  The federated security you describe holds as long as the Electoral College holds. If elections are decided by popular vote, just one or two hacked/corrupt county-administrated systems could decide national elections.
  - evv 7y ago
    This statement confuses me. What one or two counties contain the majority of the US population? If elections moved to a popular vote, it would be much harder to rig the election because you'd need to manipulate the whole country, rather than a few key states.
    - drak0n1c 7y ago
      The popular vote difference between candidates sometimes comes within 0-2 million votes. LA County has 10 million people, and there are over 40 other counties that have more than 1 million people. If elections are decided by popular vote, then just LA County alone, or a combination of the others, could artificially add or flip enough votes to overcome that 0-2 million vote difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_coun...
      - evv 7y ago
        Would it really be so bad for people in LA County to have as much of a vote as the rest of the country? If we switched to a popular vote, I bet the number of voters would shoot way up, which is undoubtedly a good thing!
    - tropo 7y ago
      We already have a problem with counties reporting more registered voters than should be possible, and a problem with poll workers who vote on behalf of missing voters after the polls officially close. Currently the damage is limited to flipping one state. If we used a popular vote, a malicious county could supply an extra 50 million votes. Just one corrupt county could change the election results, even when the results would not have been close, and there is nothing that could be done about it after the election day.
- gpvos 7y ago
  To some extent, yes. But you can still have centrally-imposed rules that improve security for specific voting methods.
- donarb 7y ago
  The US Election Assistance Commission develops testing and certification standards for voting equipment. They also certify 3rd party laboratories that certify equipment. States are not required to use the recommendations but some states have passed laws that only certified equipment be used. https://www.eac.gov/voting-equipment/system-certification-process-s/ https://www.eac.gov/voting-equipment/system-certification-pr...
not_a_cop75 7y ago
Foreign agents are always discussed because frankly, they are almost completely outside of the law. But what about non-foreign agents? Surely, they exist, and the ones that break the laws to get their way should be thrown in jail, but when do you ever see that?
- bediger4000 7y ago
  North Carolina, Congressional District 9 - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/north-carolina-ninth-district-fraud-mccready-bishop/597412/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/north-caro... It sounds like there was a more-or-less professional election rigger involved: "According to prosecutors, McCrae Dowless, a contractor for the Harris campaign, oversaw extensive election fraud in Bladen County, in the district’s rural east, affecting potentially hundreds of votes." Details about McCrae Dowless: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article226864674.html https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/a... He sounds extra sketchy.
  - not_a_cop75 7y ago
    Thank you for sharing. Baffling that they don't get more national traction.
- ryanobjc 7y ago
  When people talk about voter suppression, we don't always talk about these highly effective methods such as: - requiring a specific ID that is difficult for certain segments of the population to get. Either by requiring non-existent documentation, or making the in-person process onerous. - closing polling stations, or understaffing in certain areas. - adding regulations that are prima facie neutral, but in reality disadvantage some population segments more. (eg: unstable home addresses, no PO boxes accepted, not allowing college addresses) - not making good faith effort to ensuring everyone has maximum access and accommodation at polls, eg: signage, language translation, advertising campaigns, technical use challenges. A lot of these rules and restrictions are constructed in such a way that the dominant language/culture/homeowners don't have any problems meeting them, thus offering an easily defensible reasoning behind them. It seems totally reasonable to assume everyone has ID - but if you don't drive, and are well established in a community you probably won't need ID to conduct life. The reality with the importance of the chief federal executive office and how the election swings on such narrow margins in certain states, this is a problem that constitutional we just aren't able to easily solve - deliberately so, that is the constitutional order constructed on purpose.
notadoc 7y ago
Hasn't this always been the case? Without a verifiable paper trail, why would anyone trust a voting machine?
frozenlettuce 7y ago
I find this topic fascinating. Here in Brazil, anyone that dared to oppose voting machines was called anti-democratic and conspiracy-theorist by the mainstream media and public officials.
- devtul 7y ago
  Not even oppose really, the mere act of questioning how secure they are given their track record of being prohibited in Germany, Holland, and India would attract not opposing arguments but name-calling. We are supposed to just trust that everything is well and good.
  - rmetzler 7y ago
    Germany's stance on voting machines is not in a small part due to the history of the CCC and their expertise. Without the CCC it might be much different, but they recognized and spoke about the risks years ago.
scohesc 7y ago
I think the key issue is that these machines are internet or network connected. If we're really concerned about this - get rid of the network connectivity. Obviously this is over simplified, but just make a simple locally ran app or web application that refreshes once a vote has been cast. Store the vote in a simple SQLite database and at the end of the day, have a voting official go to the machine, and unlock the case, press a button on the back, which prints out or shows vote counts on the back on a small screen or something. They then can report that to whatever commission, committee, or otherwise is monitoring the election. It's all locally stored, maintained, and under lock and key. Why does this seem so difficult? We don't need democracy hindered by "network connectivity", just make it more environmentally friendly so however millions of people times the size of the paper ballot isn't wasted needlessly.
- foepys 7y ago
  How do you make sure that the firmware image deployed on those machines wasn't compromised from the beginning? What happens when a bug occured and machines need to be updated? Do you bring all machines in for maintenance or does a local IT shop do it? Maybe the manufacturer send a person but can the person be trusted to update multiple machines all over the country?
- Merrill 7y ago
  If we just disconnect from the internet, then the local politicians will still be able to fix the elections. Unscrupulous local politicians are a bigger problem than foreign interference.
- eli 7y ago
  I don't think you're correct to assume that the biggest problem is connectivity for reporting results.
- cwkoss 7y ago
  How does the voter verify that their vote was counted correctly? All electronic voting machines should output a paper human readable 'scantron' type ballot that is safely stored for verifying the internal digital tally.
eli 7y ago
Election and voting security is a phenomenally difficult problem space. Much harder than it seems at first. The National Academies wrote a report not long ago that gives a nice overview, has lots of detail, and makes specific policy recommendations to Congress: https://www.carnegie.org/media/filer_public/34/9d/349d3207-d994-4838-8b79-5f8d88e0e412/nas_report.pdf https://www.carnegie.org/media/filer_public/34/9d/349d3207-d...
- srajabi 7y ago
  Have you heard about the STAR-Vote system? What do you think about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl8q_356zZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl8q_356zZs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems#Use_in_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
  - eli 7y ago
    Looks genuinely interesting. But also looks complicated and hard to explain.
andrewla 7y ago
I'm of the opinion that the headline is true, but only vacuously -- foreign agents are not a threat to our elections (except where they attempt to directly compromise voting infrastructure), and similarly the threat from bad voting machines is extremely small. There are enough checks in the system (bipartisan counting and validation committees) that a pure digital compromise of an election that would not be flagged and detected is very small. There are much more pressing matters, like access to voting stations (both distance and time), voter roll purging, ballot design flaws that make voting fundamentally error prone, and (controversially) a lack of identification requirements for elections that make certain classes of fraud difficult to detect. I think on balance, all-remote elections, like Oregon has had for a while, and I think Washington now too, are the best balance here. There are certain vulnerabilities around buying, compelling, and selectively harvesting votes, but with universal cell phones, "proof of vote" is too easy to obtain anyway so those ships have mostly sailed, and it seems like a reasonable tradeoff to make.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  How do you do "bipartisan counting" and validation in an all digital voting system? Reading the same digital information twice, doesn't verify it. If you have paper ballots, sure, but the US does not have paper ballots in some states and won't by the next national election. And even if they did (as many do), few states have a uniform system of random vote audits. So I'm not sure what you're referring to with this: > There are enough checks in the system (bipartisan counting and validation committees) that a pure digital compromise of an election that would not be flagged and detected is very small. I literally read the Diebold Voting machine source code (and tabulator) that was leaked (twice). There's nothing remotely like that in there. There's no facility to do that. And while most of those are now retired, there's similar machines that work exactly the same way still in usage.
  - andrewla 7y ago
    > US does not have paper ballots and won't by the next national election This isn't true universally, in fact, fair to say it is rarely true [1]. Often the vote is tabulated electronically, but there is always a bipartisan committee overseeing random re-tabulations and recounts as a matter of course. In the process of rolling up results, there are cross-checks with voter rolls that make certain types of ballot stuffing infeasible (that is, an attack would have to be a read/modify/write). There are also state departments that are tasked with overseeing the general quality of elections that will spot outliers and investigate. It's always possible that corruption or partisan efforts will bypass scrutiny (and there have been several iffy cases of precincts in previous election cycles) but that has been a problem even pre-electronic equipment. [1] https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_state https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat... EDIT: the parent post has been modified to be slightly less aggressive in its claims, including limiting the scope to "some states". Also added "And even if they did (as many do), few states have a uniform system of random vote audits", but can easily be refuted [2]. [2] http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/post-election-audits635926066.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/post-el...
samstave 7y ago
In a perfect world, I want to be able vote from my phone/online.
- samstave 7y ago
  OK, so if that's an unpopular opinion, then lets at least make voting a national holiday, move it to a weekend day, or make it last more than one day? A single Tuesday in November seems like an awfully thin window to measure the sentiments of a nation of ~350MM, no? Why are we married to such an archaic idea of what is a reasonable time to cast a vote?
excursionist 7y ago
For something as important and simple as voting, I'd think we could develop an unhackable, fully open-source, formally verified voting system...?
- andrewla 7y ago
  I think this is a hopeless goal, sort of related to Reflections on Trusting Trust. Even the most basic version of this, a ballot-marking system, is pretty much infeasible unless you have formally verified hardware as well, which is not even possible even for commercial vendors. At least for them, selling sealed units that are somewhat resistant to physical modification is possible, but even there physical compromises have been demonstrated. Ballot scanning machines (for hand-marked ballots) are a pretty good balance of time/accuracy/simplicity, with the auditability being a big bonus for both random checks and for disputed elections. To take New York state as an example, it has manually marked ballots now with ballot scanners for tabulation, and I'm reasonably comfortable with the tabulation and placement aspects; where NY fails is largely in usability -- ballot design is worse than terrible, and borders on misleading. That plus the inscrutibility of NY's ballot initiative system (trying to find the actual text of the ballot measures is nearly impossible) makes the whole system a little shakey. And part of that as well is the scope of elected positions for minor things (what the hell is a Comptroller and why are we voting for one); they basically are a power transfer from the executives to the party machine to allow them to essentially give positions to people favored by the (unelected) party apparatus, which give toeholds to higher positions.
  - excursionist 7y ago
    > is pretty much infeasible unless you have formally verified hardware as well, which is not even possible even for commercial vendors Why is it not possible? Formal hardware verification is probably more common than formal software verification.
- yifanl 7y ago
  How do we verify that our hypothetical perfect software is what's running on the voting machine?
a11yguy 7y ago
It's almost like foreign threats are discussed to avoid us looking inside.
maximente 7y ago
> Nevertheless, Democratic chair Damon Circosta reached across the aisle to join two Republican commissioners in opening the North Carolina market to a barcode ballot-marking system. The vote presents a setback to a multi-year effort to provide secure, accurate elections for North Carolina voters. nice to see that this is a bipartisan issue.
- nickthemagicman 7y ago
  I'm confused. They're actively fighting secure elections?
kleer001 7y ago
Paper and pencil should be good enough for every election.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Well, just to be fair, paper and pencil are not good enough any election. I mean, what about elections that you want to steal? It's a whole lot harder to steal an election without an electronic voting scheme in place. /sarcasm
  - kleer001 7y ago
    No no, there's several ways to help you steal the election: Control who counts the votes and report it the way you want. Stuff the ballots with more votes than people. Still, with good faith all around, oversight, and decent security that won't happen.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      I don't know man? Just hacking the machines seems a lot easier than hiring an army of vote counters or ballot stuffers.
      - kleer001 7y ago
        And we've come full circle. High five!
xanth 7y ago
Having watched this[1] talk concerning how they secured the Xbox One to the degree that it's in millions of peoples homes but it's not been hacked onced in 6 years, it's pretty disappointing they've not just lifted nearly exactly the same tech for voting. 1: https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/
- SkyMarshal 7y ago
  Cool, though hacking Xbox is probably less valuable to would-be attackers than hacking US elections.
Mikeb85 7y ago
Of course they do. Voting machines can be rigged by domestic agents to subvert democracy. Honestly, it's actually kind of hilarious that some people think Russian trolls and Facebook ads somehow turned the election and not socio-economic factors (for example, those outlined in the Paul Krugman article and thread).
- chrisdhoover 7y ago
  And its an age old problem. We have expressions for it, ballot stuffing, and quips about it, vote early and often. We even had a partisan judiciary decide an election since the machines failed to fully punch cards.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Why can't both be a factor?
eloff 7y ago
Why can't we just have block-chain based voting where the vote is secret, but you get a paper receipt, and you can run open-source code (like scan a QR code) to check the blockchain if your vote was counted the way you expected. Everything is immutable, and cryptographically verified. Block-chain seems to be a failure for money so far, but voting seems like the killer application. The technology is there, well understood, there are even companies that offer a solution along those lines. Why don't we use them? Isn't it so much better than electronic voting machines in every way?
- cpitman 7y ago
  That will let you verify that your vote is counted, but is there any way to verify that additional votes are not manufactured?
  - eloff 7y ago
    To start you'd want voters to register first I think, so you can't just invent people, at least not without being able to infiltrate the systems that manage birth certificates, tax records, and social-security ids. That raises the question of how do you avoid double-voting or voting for people who didn't vote. I think there's technical solutions to both.
    - cpitman 7y ago
      Even if there is registration, that only helps if I can verify that the entire chain only includes registered people. So how can I verify everyone who voted is registered, without also knowing which vote is from which person? Maybe have a separate record for "this person voted" and another record for "1 vote for X", with encrypted references back and forth? Then you could at least verify that there are an equal number of both records, that all the identities are valid and only used up to once, and tabulate the final results. It would still be possible for someone who didn't vote to have a false vote logged, but that is a more narrow attack.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  It's an interesting idea, but I am skeptical of any system that requires voters to do the verification themselves after the election is complete. I suspect that there wouldn't be enough people to actually do that to make any sort of difference.
thrower123 7y ago
Since it is software, there's virtually no chance it will be implemented in a bug-free way, so even leaving out malice, things are liable to go horribly wrong at some point.
Cyder 7y ago
Any voting progress can be manipulated. Imagine trying to do it in the early 1800s. Thus the inevitable necessity of the electoral college...
ENOTTY 7y ago
I'm going to disagree. We have evidence of foreign agents interfering in US elections and no evidence of actual attacks on US elections carried out via voting machines.
- chillacy 7y ago
  Maybe the old saying "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" applies.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I don't see how, honestly. That's a saying that is almost always misapplied.
harry8 7y ago
Gerrymanders by both Democrats and Republicans an order of magnitude or two bigger threat than voting machines and foreign agents put together. How many states matter in the presidential election? It's insane disgrace that number is not always exactly 50. Every other threat is trivial in comparison.

153 points by howard941 7y ago

“Right now there are no mandatory federal cybersecurity standards for elections...” And that's a good thing. Each state/county/city can implement the election however they want which makes it practically impossible to rig the vote. If we all used the same system/procedures/process then hacking the election could scale much more easily as the same tricks that works in Manhattan would work in Montana.

howard941 7y ago
It's not a good thing when the state has ineffective processes that rely on the vendor's assurances if it has any standards at all. If the feds were imposing a preemptive monoculture that'd be bad. But that's not at issue.
tlb 7y ago
In fact they all use voting machines from the same few vendors and mostly running Windows, so there are plenty of common vulnerabilities. Also, in the US, hacking a single large state can swing a federal election.
kadoban 7y ago
That would only makes sense to me if rigging only one state was near useless. It's very much not. If you rig say, Florida, there's a fairly high chance of deciding the election.
- parvenu74 7y ago
  I don't think the machines matter as long as the vote can be replayed/recounted without ambiguity. An idea: https://medium.com/@dotnetmike/touch-screen-voting-should-be-illegal-59295dbabc27 https://medium.com/@dotnetmike/touch-screen-voting-should-be...
  - swader999 7y ago
    It needs a paper record, this needs to be the source of truth.
    - daveguy 7y ago
      Not just a paper record. A hand marked paper record. If it doesn't go through a computer first it can't be altered. There are several states that do it this way. It's a "Scantron" style ballot. Fill in the vote, run it through a tally machine and save the ballot. The tally machines could be messed with, but if there is evidence of tampering with the tally there is always the authentic original ballot.
      - swader999 7y ago
        Yes!
    - pmoriarty 7y ago
      If you've got a paper record, just use that instead of the machines. Machines just add more opportunities for fraud.
  - bediger4000 7y ago
    That's traditionally been the problem with voting machines: a "recount" just re-read some tally. Combine this with voting machine companies being opaque, not recognizing obvious flaws and their executives promising to deliver states to particular candidates (https://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm https://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm), and you begin to feel that all the suspicion is justified.
  - ska 7y ago
    > as long as the vote can be replayed/recounted without ambiguity. Isn't this the core problem with most electronic voting as currently implemented in the US? I mean, that no such guarantee exists?
jbob2000 7y ago
You don’t need to corrupt all of the voting processes though, you only need to do it in a few key states. Funnily enough, the states you’d need to do it in would be the poorer ones who’d have no ability to discern a good voting solution from a bad one. The real solution is to use paper. There’s no way to fuck with a paper ballot system other than to go to every polling station and fuck with their counts - an expensive and highly visible attack.
yongjik 7y ago
That's almost like saying that if there isn't a company-wide security policy, every department will implement security whatever way they want, making company-wide data breach impossible.
onemoresoop 7y ago
Perhaps votefrauding swing states would be an easier target, much easier than targeting all states..
gbrown 7y ago
This gets repeated a lot, but it directly contradicts another bit of common wisdom: security by obscurity isn't. Not only are we vulnerable to a few key districts tipping elections, nation state actors should find it absolutely trivial to build a comprehensive program targeting the full spectrum of voting machines used in practice.
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
Or you can design a system that’s the same for everyone because it actually works. Like, you know, observable paper ballots.
- daveguy 7y ago
  Hand marked is better than just observable. Takes the machine out of the equation except for the tally and the tally could be confirmed with multiple machines. There should still be minimum security standards required. Air gapped counting machines with hand marked ballots is a good start.
drak0n1c 7y ago
The federated security you describe holds as long as the Electoral College holds. If elections are decided by popular vote, just one or two hacked/corrupt county-administrated systems could decide national elections.
- evv 7y ago
  This statement confuses me. What one or two counties contain the majority of the US population? If elections moved to a popular vote, it would be much harder to rig the election because you'd need to manipulate the whole country, rather than a few key states.
  - drak0n1c 7y ago
    The popular vote difference between candidates sometimes comes within 0-2 million votes. LA County has 10 million people, and there are over 40 other counties that have more than 1 million people. If elections are decided by popular vote, then just LA County alone, or a combination of the others, could artificially add or flip enough votes to overcome that 0-2 million vote difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_coun...
    - evv 7y ago
      Would it really be so bad for people in LA County to have as much of a vote as the rest of the country? If we switched to a popular vote, I bet the number of voters would shoot way up, which is undoubtedly a good thing!
  - tropo 7y ago
    We already have a problem with counties reporting more registered voters than should be possible, and a problem with poll workers who vote on behalf of missing voters after the polls officially close. Currently the damage is limited to flipping one state. If we used a popular vote, a malicious county could supply an extra 50 million votes. Just one corrupt county could change the election results, even when the results would not have been close, and there is nothing that could be done about it after the election day.
gpvos 7y ago
To some extent, yes. But you can still have centrally-imposed rules that improve security for specific voting methods.
donarb 7y ago
The US Election Assistance Commission develops testing and certification standards for voting equipment. They also certify 3rd party laboratories that certify equipment. States are not required to use the recommendations but some states have passed laws that only certified equipment be used. https://www.eac.gov/voting-equipment/system-certification-process-s/ https://www.eac.gov/voting-equipment/system-certification-pr...

not_a_cop75 7y ago

Foreign agents are always discussed because frankly, they are almost completely outside of the law. But what about non-foreign agents? Surely, they exist, and the ones that break the laws to get their way should be thrown in jail, but when do you ever see that?

bediger4000 7y ago
North Carolina, Congressional District 9 - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/north-carolina-ninth-district-fraud-mccready-bishop/597412/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/north-caro... It sounds like there was a more-or-less professional election rigger involved: "According to prosecutors, McCrae Dowless, a contractor for the Harris campaign, oversaw extensive election fraud in Bladen County, in the district’s rural east, affecting potentially hundreds of votes." Details about McCrae Dowless: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article226864674.html https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/a... He sounds extra sketchy.
- not_a_cop75 7y ago
  Thank you for sharing. Baffling that they don't get more national traction.
ryanobjc 7y ago
When people talk about voter suppression, we don't always talk about these highly effective methods such as: - requiring a specific ID that is difficult for certain segments of the population to get. Either by requiring non-existent documentation, or making the in-person process onerous. - closing polling stations, or understaffing in certain areas. - adding regulations that are prima facie neutral, but in reality disadvantage some population segments more. (eg: unstable home addresses, no PO boxes accepted, not allowing college addresses) - not making good faith effort to ensuring everyone has maximum access and accommodation at polls, eg: signage, language translation, advertising campaigns, technical use challenges. A lot of these rules and restrictions are constructed in such a way that the dominant language/culture/homeowners don't have any problems meeting them, thus offering an easily defensible reasoning behind them. It seems totally reasonable to assume everyone has ID - but if you don't drive, and are well established in a community you probably won't need ID to conduct life. The reality with the importance of the chief federal executive office and how the election swings on such narrow margins in certain states, this is a problem that constitutional we just aren't able to easily solve - deliberately so, that is the constitutional order constructed on purpose.

notadoc 7y ago

Hasn't this always been the case? Without a verifiable paper trail, why would anyone trust a voting machine?

frozenlettuce 7y ago

I find this topic fascinating. Here in Brazil, anyone that dared to oppose voting machines was called anti-democratic and conspiracy-theorist by the mainstream media and public officials.

devtul 7y ago
Not even oppose really, the mere act of questioning how secure they are given their track record of being prohibited in Germany, Holland, and India would attract not opposing arguments but name-calling. We are supposed to just trust that everything is well and good.
- rmetzler 7y ago
  Germany's stance on voting machines is not in a small part due to the history of the CCC and their expertise. Without the CCC it might be much different, but they recognized and spoke about the risks years ago.

scohesc 7y ago

I think the key issue is that these machines are internet or network connected. If we're really concerned about this - get rid of the network connectivity. Obviously this is over simplified, but just make a simple locally ran app or web application that refreshes once a vote has been cast. Store the vote in a simple SQLite database and at the end of the day, have a voting official go to the machine, and unlock the case, press a button on the back, which prints out or shows vote counts on the back on a small screen or something. They then can report that to whatever commission, committee, or otherwise is monitoring the election. It's all locally stored, maintained, and under lock and key. Why does this seem so difficult? We don't need democracy hindered by "network connectivity", just make it more environmentally friendly so however millions of people times the size of the paper ballot isn't wasted needlessly.

foepys 7y ago
How do you make sure that the firmware image deployed on those machines wasn't compromised from the beginning? What happens when a bug occured and machines need to be updated? Do you bring all machines in for maintenance or does a local IT shop do it? Maybe the manufacturer send a person but can the person be trusted to update multiple machines all over the country?
Merrill 7y ago
If we just disconnect from the internet, then the local politicians will still be able to fix the elections. Unscrupulous local politicians are a bigger problem than foreign interference.
eli 7y ago
I don't think you're correct to assume that the biggest problem is connectivity for reporting results.
cwkoss 7y ago
How does the voter verify that their vote was counted correctly? All electronic voting machines should output a paper human readable 'scantron' type ballot that is safely stored for verifying the internal digital tally.

eli 7y ago

Election and voting security is a phenomenally difficult problem space. Much harder than it seems at first. The National Academies wrote a report not long ago that gives a nice overview, has lots of detail, and makes specific policy recommendations to Congress: https://www.carnegie.org/media/filer_public/34/9d/349d3207-d994-4838-8b79-5f8d88e0e412/nas_report.pdf https://www.carnegie.org/media/filer_public/34/9d/349d3207-d...

srajabi 7y ago
Have you heard about the STAR-Vote system? What do you think about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl8q_356zZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl8q_356zZs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems#Use_in_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
- eli 7y ago
  Looks genuinely interesting. But also looks complicated and hard to explain.

andrewla 7y ago

I'm of the opinion that the headline is true, but only vacuously -- foreign agents are not a threat to our elections (except where they attempt to directly compromise voting infrastructure), and similarly the threat from bad voting machines is extremely small. There are enough checks in the system (bipartisan counting and validation committees) that a pure digital compromise of an election that would not be flagged and detected is very small. There are much more pressing matters, like access to voting stations (both distance and time), voter roll purging, ballot design flaws that make voting fundamentally error prone, and (controversially) a lack of identification requirements for elections that make certain classes of fraud difficult to detect. I think on balance, all-remote elections, like Oregon has had for a while, and I think Washington now too, are the best balance here. There are certain vulnerabilities around buying, compelling, and selectively harvesting votes, but with universal cell phones, "proof of vote" is too easy to obtain anyway so those ships have mostly sailed, and it seems like a reasonable tradeoff to make.

Someone1234 7y ago
How do you do "bipartisan counting" and validation in an all digital voting system? Reading the same digital information twice, doesn't verify it. If you have paper ballots, sure, but the US does not have paper ballots in some states and won't by the next national election. And even if they did (as many do), few states have a uniform system of random vote audits. So I'm not sure what you're referring to with this: > There are enough checks in the system (bipartisan counting and validation committees) that a pure digital compromise of an election that would not be flagged and detected is very small. I literally read the Diebold Voting machine source code (and tabulator) that was leaked (twice). There's nothing remotely like that in there. There's no facility to do that. And while most of those are now retired, there's similar machines that work exactly the same way still in usage.
- andrewla 7y ago
  > US does not have paper ballots and won't by the next national election This isn't true universally, in fact, fair to say it is rarely true [1]. Often the vote is tabulated electronically, but there is always a bipartisan committee overseeing random re-tabulations and recounts as a matter of course. In the process of rolling up results, there are cross-checks with voter rolls that make certain types of ballot stuffing infeasible (that is, an attack would have to be a read/modify/write). There are also state departments that are tasked with overseeing the general quality of elections that will spot outliers and investigate. It's always possible that corruption or partisan efforts will bypass scrutiny (and there have been several iffy cases of precincts in previous election cycles) but that has been a problem even pre-electronic equipment. [1] https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_state https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat... EDIT: the parent post has been modified to be slightly less aggressive in its claims, including limiting the scope to "some states". Also added "And even if they did (as many do), few states have a uniform system of random vote audits", but can easily be refuted [2]. [2] http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/post-election-audits635926066.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/post-el...

samstave 7y ago

In a perfect world, I want to be able vote from my phone/online.

samstave 7y ago
OK, so if that's an unpopular opinion, then lets at least make voting a national holiday, move it to a weekend day, or make it last more than one day? A single Tuesday in November seems like an awfully thin window to measure the sentiments of a nation of ~350MM, no? Why are we married to such an archaic idea of what is a reasonable time to cast a vote?

excursionist 7y ago

For something as important and simple as voting, I'd think we could develop an unhackable, fully open-source, formally verified voting system...?

andrewla 7y ago
I think this is a hopeless goal, sort of related to Reflections on Trusting Trust. Even the most basic version of this, a ballot-marking system, is pretty much infeasible unless you have formally verified hardware as well, which is not even possible even for commercial vendors. At least for them, selling sealed units that are somewhat resistant to physical modification is possible, but even there physical compromises have been demonstrated. Ballot scanning machines (for hand-marked ballots) are a pretty good balance of time/accuracy/simplicity, with the auditability being a big bonus for both random checks and for disputed elections. To take New York state as an example, it has manually marked ballots now with ballot scanners for tabulation, and I'm reasonably comfortable with the tabulation and placement aspects; where NY fails is largely in usability -- ballot design is worse than terrible, and borders on misleading. That plus the inscrutibility of NY's ballot initiative system (trying to find the actual text of the ballot measures is nearly impossible) makes the whole system a little shakey. And part of that as well is the scope of elected positions for minor things (what the hell is a Comptroller and why are we voting for one); they basically are a power transfer from the executives to the party machine to allow them to essentially give positions to people favored by the (unelected) party apparatus, which give toeholds to higher positions.
- excursionist 7y ago
  > is pretty much infeasible unless you have formally verified hardware as well, which is not even possible even for commercial vendors Why is it not possible? Formal hardware verification is probably more common than formal software verification.
yifanl 7y ago
How do we verify that our hypothetical perfect software is what's running on the voting machine?

a11yguy 7y ago

It's almost like foreign threats are discussed to avoid us looking inside.

maximente 7y ago

> Nevertheless, Democratic chair Damon Circosta reached across the aisle to join two Republican commissioners in opening the North Carolina market to a barcode ballot-marking system. The vote presents a setback to a multi-year effort to provide secure, accurate elections for North Carolina voters. nice to see that this is a bipartisan issue.

nickthemagicman 7y ago
I'm confused. They're actively fighting secure elections?

kleer001 7y ago

Paper and pencil should be good enough for every election.

bilbo0s 7y ago
Well, just to be fair, paper and pencil are not good enough any election. I mean, what about elections that you want to steal? It's a whole lot harder to steal an election without an electronic voting scheme in place. /sarcasm
- kleer001 7y ago
  No no, there's several ways to help you steal the election: Control who counts the votes and report it the way you want. Stuff the ballots with more votes than people. Still, with good faith all around, oversight, and decent security that won't happen.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    I don't know man? Just hacking the machines seems a lot easier than hiring an army of vote counters or ballot stuffers.
    - kleer001 7y ago
      And we've come full circle. High five!

xanth 7y ago

Having watched this[1] talk concerning how they secured the Xbox One to the degree that it's in millions of peoples homes but it's not been hacked onced in 6 years, it's pretty disappointing they've not just lifted nearly exactly the same tech for voting. 1: https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/

SkyMarshal 7y ago
Cool, though hacking Xbox is probably less valuable to would-be attackers than hacking US elections.

Mikeb85 7y ago

Of course they do. Voting machines can be rigged by domestic agents to subvert democracy. Honestly, it's actually kind of hilarious that some people think Russian trolls and Facebook ads somehow turned the election and not socio-economic factors (for example, those outlined in the Paul Krugman article and thread).

chrisdhoover 7y ago
And its an age old problem. We have expressions for it, ballot stuffing, and quips about it, vote early and often. We even had a partisan judiciary decide an election since the machines failed to fully punch cards.
lonelappde 7y ago
Why can't both be a factor?

eloff 7y ago

Why can't we just have block-chain based voting where the vote is secret, but you get a paper receipt, and you can run open-source code (like scan a QR code) to check the blockchain if your vote was counted the way you expected. Everything is immutable, and cryptographically verified. Block-chain seems to be a failure for money so far, but voting seems like the killer application. The technology is there, well understood, there are even companies that offer a solution along those lines. Why don't we use them? Isn't it so much better than electronic voting machines in every way?

cpitman 7y ago
That will let you verify that your vote is counted, but is there any way to verify that additional votes are not manufactured?
- eloff 7y ago
  To start you'd want voters to register first I think, so you can't just invent people, at least not without being able to infiltrate the systems that manage birth certificates, tax records, and social-security ids. That raises the question of how do you avoid double-voting or voting for people who didn't vote. I think there's technical solutions to both.
  - cpitman 7y ago
    Even if there is registration, that only helps if I can verify that the entire chain only includes registered people. So how can I verify everyone who voted is registered, without also knowing which vote is from which person? Maybe have a separate record for "this person voted" and another record for "1 vote for X", with encrypted references back and forth? Then you could at least verify that there are an equal number of both records, that all the identities are valid and only used up to once, and tabulate the final results. It would still be possible for someone who didn't vote to have a false vote logged, but that is a more narrow attack.
JohnFen 7y ago
It's an interesting idea, but I am skeptical of any system that requires voters to do the verification themselves after the election is complete. I suspect that there wouldn't be enough people to actually do that to make any sort of difference.

thrower123 7y ago

Since it is software, there's virtually no chance it will be implemented in a bug-free way, so even leaving out malice, things are liable to go horribly wrong at some point.

Cyder 7y ago

Any voting progress can be manipulated. Imagine trying to do it in the early 1800s. Thus the inevitable necessity of the electoral college...

ENOTTY 7y ago

I'm going to disagree. We have evidence of foreign agents interfering in US elections and no evidence of actual attacks on US elections carried out via voting machines.

chillacy 7y ago
Maybe the old saying "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" applies.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I don't see how, honestly. That's a saying that is almost always misapplied.

harry8 7y ago

Gerrymanders by both Democrats and Republicans an order of magnitude or two bigger threat than voting machines and foreign agents put together. How many states matter in the presidential election? It's insane disgrace that number is not always exactly 50. Every other threat is trivial in comparison.