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Software and voting don't mix well. We should have collectively realized this by now.

• SigmundA 7y ago
  Software runs our cars, planes, spacecraft and banks. I think we could make it work for voting if we want to put the effort into it.
  • colejohnson66 7y ago
    There’s so many things wrong with digital voting. The biggest being that it’s so easy to hack compared to analog (paper) voting. You want to change an election, just hack the machine. With paper, you need a grand conspiracy.
    • dylan-m 7y ago
      More than that, you need a grand conspiracy that is so obscure third party observers can't see it happening. Relatively easy with software, because software is obscure almost by definition. Difficult with something tactile like paper ballots. (Or you need a country where those third party observers are already powerless, but that's beside the point).
    • otachack 7y ago
      It's easy to hack analog as well if the administration is in on it.
      • iso947 7y ago
        Sure with gerrymandering. I’ve been involved in two major elections in the last 12 months in the uk, one as a candidate. I couldn’t think of any way of significantly changing the votes without another party finding out. Can’t register fake people in bulk, can’t registrr normally non voting people for postal votes without them finding out, can’t vote as multiple people without a lot of co conspirators and without at least some finding out they’d already voted, can’t introduce fake ballots without many conspirators, can’t change ballots or lose ballots
        • bradknowles 7y ago
          Gerrymandering isn't the only solution there. If you're the secretary of state for a given state of the union, and you're in charge of the voter rolls, and you're running for office, then you are fully empowered to just remove anyone from the voter rolls who has a name you don't like, or who has a race you don't like, or who has a political affiliation you don't like. And you can stymie all attempts to uncover your malfeasance by just shoving all those requests in the drawer, where they get mysteriously lost.
          • deleted 7y ago
            [deleted]
          • colejohnson66 7y ago
            I don’t think this would work. Isn’t Georgia in the middle of some lawsuits regarding their elections?
          • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
            That is not a property of paper ballots, that's just the property of a broken election system.
          • iso947 7y ago
            But that can’t be done en mass without people noticing and reporting it
      • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
        No, it isn't. You can't be "in on" a properly constructed election system, because all relevant steps are open to the public for any interested party to watch. Which is exactly the problem with digital voting: They can not be transparent while also preserving secrecy of the ballot.
  • siv- 7y ago
    It doesn't seem to be worth the risk or hassle.
  • glial 7y ago
    Perhaps, but why bother? Counting ballots is not that hard, and the time saved by using software (if it is really saved...see Iowa) is inconsequential to the outcome of the election, or the installation of the candidate into office. Perhaps TV on election night would be less exciting, but I'm willing to sacrifice that for more secure elections.
    • iso947 7y ago
      In the uk we count by hand, and election night is exciting as different districts race against each other. We have a good idea of the results after 4 hours, usually a concession speech by 6 hours
  • chadash 7y ago
    There are a few issues that make voting different: 1) Large scale elections come around every 2 years. It's hard to test things at scale in the interim. 2) Security is good at banks because these are large wealthy companies and their life depends on it. A bank that gets hacked loses money and loses trust, so they pay top dollar for security (I have a friend in the software security space who says that 90%+ of his company's revenue comes from banks). 3) Spacecraft and cars don't need to authenticate who their users are. For voting, this is the critical--and hardest--issue to solve. Banks seem to do a pretty decent job at this, but again, they put a lot of money into it. 4) There's a perception that with more complex voting systems, someone can mess up the results intentionally at a large scale. Yes, with paper ballots this can and does happen, but a large scale conspiracy is pretty hard to pull off. Point 4 is the really the most important one. If people don't trust the election system (regardless of whether their mistrust is well founded), then the whole system falls apart. People trust paper ballots. Let's stick with those.
    • bradknowles 7y ago
      Anyone who has done any security consulting at a bank knows that many of them operate almost exclusively in the "security through obscurity" model. The rest seem to look only at regulations that were written ten or twenty years ago, come up with specific concrete solutions that are required to be blindly applied across the board in all cases, and then are totally incapable of dealing with the situation when trying to make the mandatory 8" floppy drive work with the latest and greatest iPad that doesn't have even a single hard wired connection at all. They have all the money, so they can afford to buy off anyone who would expose their security weaknesses to the world. This emperor definitely has no clothes, and pays people to poke out the eyeballs of anyone who might say differently.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • qchris 7y ago
    I'm not sure this is fair. Elections are discrete events, typically dealing with (relatively) small amounts of data, at least compared to any of the above systems, which processing thousands of responses per second, and need close-to-real-time latency. Plus, there have been multiple instances in recent years of cars crashing because of software issues, planes crashing because of software issue, Mars rovers becoming unresponsive due to software issues, and banking systems getting hacked. Granted, the rover failure was solved, but any of these issues occurring during an election of almost any size throws democratic systems into chaos. While I agree that putting more effort and expertise into voting software can make them more resilient to problems like the one in Iowa, I don't think it's obvious at first glance that deepening reliance on software is actually the best way to handle this problem, since it is actually possible to do them in a semi-analog manner (as opposed to flight-control systems or automated banking). [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-regulators-review-2018-fatal-161722509.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-regulators-review-2018-fata... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/investigators-fault-boeing-737-maxs-flight-control-system-regulatory-lapses-and-pilot-training-in-lion-air-crash/2019/10/25/e8143d06-f69c-11e9-b2d2-1f37c9d82dbb_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/investigat... [3] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/305205-mars-rover-is-frozen-in-place-following-software-error https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/305205-mars-rover-is-fro... [4] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/russian-national-confesses-to-biggest-bank-hack-in-us-history/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/russian-national...
  • dtnewman 7y ago
    Even if you make your software open source and have the top security experts pour over the code and have a transparent process for how it gets deployed... laypeople won't trust it. In fact, quite the opposite, the more you focus on security, the less people are likely to trust it. Our government's legitimacy is based on trust in our elections. I may not like who wins all the time, but I more or less feel that the wins are legitimate in the US. But if you erode this basic trust, then the government can't function.
  • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
    No, we can't. The attack scenarios for all of the above are nothing like elections. Elections have to protect both against unauthorized voting (so every person has only one vote) and against determining how anyone voted, including by those running the election (so people can not sell votes/be pressured into voting a certain way). And not only do these properties have to be guaranteed, it is also an absolute must that the vast majority of citizens can verify that that is the case, both because of the amount of power that is controlled by elections (the entire taxes of a country, control of the military, ...), so there is a significant risk that someone could be able to corrupt any group of experts that isn't a significant proportion of the population, but also for rasons of political stability: Even if the election system is in fact counting correctly, it's a major political risk if people suspect that things are rigged and have no way to really find out.
• qchris 7y ago
  Agreed. It's a little frustrating to watch, like people trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Especially when you know how pegs are built, and that most of them are filled with cracks that make them fragile under good circumstances, and extremely vulnerable in worse ones. And when round pegs are totally fine for the situation, and have been around for a long time, and can be used intuitively by anyone that wants to double check the geometry of the hole. My analogy is breaking down. But certainly agreed.
  • bingerman 7y ago
    Tangentially related fun fact: square pegs fitted in round holes is a traditional way of doing things when building log cabins/houses. They actually fit pretty well and are faster to make than perfectly fitting round ones with simple tools.
    • trianglem 7y ago
      I realize it’s a trade off but imagine that adhesion is they just used round pegs.
• dimgl 7y ago
  I don't know if I agree with this. I just don't think it's been done well.
  • profmonocle 7y ago
    It could be done well. After all, for decades we've been using software for safety-critical applications like flight computers, medical devices, industrial machines, etc. There's no reason you couldn't write extremely reliable election software by applying that level of extreme rigor, but it seems like the vendors aren't doing so.
    • chaps 7y ago
      Please no. https://www.wired.com/story/boeing-787-code-leak-security-flaws/ https://www.wired.com/story/boeing-787-code-leak-security-fl...