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Eight states[0] still have electronic voting systems without paper backups. They're un-auditable. I'm not going to weigh in on the current politics of this situ
by Someone1234 6y ago
Eight states[0] still have electronic voting systems without paper backups. They're un-auditable. I'm not going to weigh in on the current politics of this situation, but US Election security is awful, now, and since at least 2000.
I actually did my degree thesis on designing electronic voting systems (and built one), and ultimately concluded it was impossible to make them fully secure. The best you can do is paper backups and random audits to detect anything illicit followed by a full audit if that fails. No paper backups results in it being undetectable.
Computers are good at making things more efficient, but in terms of election security the inefficiency is a feature (i.e. it takes more people to alter votes, and the more people you add the harder a lie is to keep).
[0] https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/457168-report-says-eight-states-to-use-paperless-voting-in-2020-despite https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/457168-report-says-...
- exabrial 6y agoI'd rather have someone hack 1700 local elections than one 'national standard' quite frankly. The inefficiency delights me
- vvanders 6y agoPeople are always rallying to add blockchain for voting without realizing that the paper ballot is a proof of work that predates it by a significant margin.
- exabrial 6y agoYep. I approve both measures
- blackflame7000 6y agoYea that's the only way to do it.... instead of some sort of software that's bad like a malicious software or Malware if you will that changes votes silently
- mehrdadn 6y agoI don't think you need to hack 1700 local elections to swing the vote.
- mjevans 6y agoI'm fully for a fast electronic count for preliminary results, that are then hand-recounted for the formal validation and final results (up to a month later).
- ehsankia 6y agoyeah I just don't understand the downside of having a paper backup just in case. Is it the cost? The US already spends a ton on election, what is an extra paper print gonna do?
- anonymouse008 6y agoWhat’s your thinking on the “request” process of mail-in ballots? To me, it’s wild to think all one needs to request a ballot is a name, address and ssn... and on top of all of that, you can get the ballot sent to a different address...
- Someone1234 6y agoThis quickly goes down the rabbit hole of identity and identity theft in the USA in a more broad sense. Our entire system is build on similarly flimsy "identity" from banking, to medical records, and even getting copies of a birth certificate/driver's license. I would say though that "scale matters." If an electronic voting system is compromised the "scale" could be the entire state, and millions of votes, but each time a mail ballot is stolen via identity theft, you're risking it being detected/getting caught, so it ultimately scales to fewer than thousands of potentially problematic votes (which is bad, but not democracy breakingly so, like electronic/computer voting insecurity).
- anonymouse008 6y agoRight on — the thing that worries me most is that Equifax’s breach didn’t cause much of a stir... someone was/is sitting on that trove of 140m records.
- alex_young 6y agoTo me it’s wild that anyone would want voting to be anything but universal. Shouldn’t they send ballots to every person legally allowed to vote?
- dosman33 6y agoRiiiiight. Just look at how districts are gerrymandered to realize this is not what politicians of either side want.
- pstrateman 6y agoEvery person legally allowed to vote should be able to vote. No votes should be cast by people not allowed to vote. Mail-in ballots are not secret ballots and that's dangerous. There's a reason a workplace cannot be unionized in the US without a true secret ballot.
- fergbrain 6y agoDo you have a copy of your thesis online? I’d be curious to learn more.
- Someone1234 6y agoSorry no, my college only publishes Master's and PhD level thesis.
- bitwize 6y agoI don't think you can avoid the politics of the situation because when it comes to presidential candidates, when the R candidate wins, much will be made of how broken the system is, from vulnerabilities in voting machines to fatal flaws in the Constitution itself (viz., the Electoral College). When the D candidate wins, we are assured that election security is airtight, there's no evidence of significant irregularities, and "the system works". This has nothing to do with the factuality or legitimacy of flaws in the system -- in short, yes, I believe you that there are severe problems with the apparatus we use to conduct elections, but there is strong pressure to ignore and even deny these problems, because doing so helps solve the bigger, more important problem of getting Trump out of office. I don't want Trump in office, but I cannot admit to any legitimacy to the claims of vote irregularity in the 2020 election, even theoretically based on your expertise because even if it were true, it would be a "fact that gives power to the enemy" and thus must be treated as a falsehood. That's why if you post about it on Twitter, a little note will be attached to your tweet with a link that says the U.S. elections were perfectly conducted with no chance of fraud.
- whiteflame7000 6y agoEvery person who downvoted you knows this too. They are being willfully ignorant because they are too smart not to notice at least in the slightest the difference in treatment.
- dashundchen 6y agoI don't think it's true. Democrats still don't like the electoral college even when they win. The real margin in this election would be over 5 million instead of the hundred of thousands if the EC didn't exist. And in this case the Republican claims of misnformation and conspiracy have seemed so outlandish and baseless it's hard to take any of them seriously. Like videos of ballots being burned, that turned out to be sample ballots printed from the internet. Or the false rumor that ballots marked with sharpie were being disqualified in Arizona when their own election officials repeatedly cleared that claim. Or the baseless claim that Republican observers were not present for the counting of ballots in Michigan or Pennsylvania - they were. Or the willful misunderstanding of how ballots were being tallied and reported. Or that mail in ballots fraudulently skewed Democratic after Trump spent months telling his supporters not to trust mail voting, then complaining when those mailin ballots were legally counted after November 3rd.
- accurrent 6y agoTo be fair, that's very true for many places. Although I would also argue that there are many places (not referring to US) where electronic voting is safer than paper ballots purely because politicians know how to hire gangsters to blow up trucks carrying votes or trace and blackmail voters due to corrupt officials.
- ehsankia 6y agoI'm not fully familiar with American politics, but out of those states the only that comes close to mattering in terms of EC outcome (this election) was Texas I think? And even then, it's unclear if it was that close considering most of the polling was off by 3-4 points. Then again some other states were spot on, so we'll never know if that was the case for Texas or if they were hacked.
- lukevp 6y agoHmm, I voted in Texas and there were definitely paper ballots, the vote was on a machine with a printer and a scanner was used to actually place the vote.
- ghettoimp 6y agoYep, these new machines seem really good. I heard (discussions with folks online) that in other parts of the state they are still using the older machines, which the voter just has to trust to record their selections correctly. I think I've heard they are transitioning away from these.
- ehsankia 6y agoI see, I guess the article is outdated. I was just going off the 8 states listed there.
- sicromoft 6y agoAre banks auditable? (Yes.) Do they have paper backups of everything? (Not that I'm aware of.) What's the difference? Honest question.
- josephcsible 6y agoIf your bank account balance is wrong, you can tell for sure that it's wrong and then explain it to the bank and get it fixed. If your vote was counted wrong, you'd never know. For them to be equivalent, the secret ballot would have to be abolished.
- pontifier 6y agoMaybe each ballot could include a one time pad that you keep to verify the vote. You could verify your own vote but nobody else could. It could be very simple to use, like a qr code that links to a public api showing the encoded ballot data, and a second qr code that you scan to decrypt it.
- ric2b 6y agoNot being able to verify who you voted for is by design, it's an important feature to prevent people from being pressured into/persecuted for voting a certain way, or selling their vote. If there's no way to verify your specific vote you can just lie about who you voted for.
- pontifier 6y agoHence why you would want to use a one time pad... It would be easy to choose a key that would show any particular vote cast any way you want. Only you would know how to verify your ballot.
- emerged 6y agoIt's utterly insane to me that you can't even verify your vote was counted and for which candidate. But a communities of hackers defends the security of voting.
- garyrichardson 6y agoCanadian here. We still count ballots the old fashioned way and get our election results out the night of the election (typically). Presumably that scales linearly.. more voters means more ballot boxes and more officials counting and auditing. This seems like a solved problem to me. Why doesn't/wouldn't this work in the US? My guess is the complexity of your ballots -- we typically vote for one person and every couple of years there might be a referendum question.
- magicsmoke 6y agoThat and having Elections Canada run everything instead of each province rolling their own protocols.
- ttul 6y agoImagine that: a non-partisan agency, much as the police and fire services are also non-partisan.
- jimmygrapes 6y agoIt's always non-partisan until it becomes partisan somewhere along the line
- snypher 6y agoThe police are not non-partisan, at least in USA.
- koheripbal 6y agoIt's hard to imagine any worker staying non-partisan when one party is threatening their paycheck.
- jcranmer 6y agoOne of the main reasons it is taking so long is the volume of mail-in ballots is extremely high compared to prior elections. And on top of that, in several states, Republicans were adamant that vote tabulation not begin early to deal with this volume, with the entirely foreseeable result that counting took far longer than necessary.
- snowwrestler 6y agoThere has been progress since 2000. While some states still have electronic-only voting machines, the trend seems to be away from them toward paper mark-and-scan. In addition there is greater awareness of the value of risk-limiting audits. Heck, Georgia is voluntarily hand-recounting their entire presidential ballot. And the debacle in Florida in 2000 has arguably led to better ballot design as well. I took the CISA statement to be relative to this progress, not a statement of absolute quality.
- Animats 6y agoTouch screen systems were encouraged by the "Help America Vote Act", which was supposed to make voting easier for disabled people while making it less reliable for everyone else. The best technology was probably the big mark-sense forms, where you filled out a huge paper ballot on card stock, and then took it to the ballot box and put it in a slot on the side. The box pulled the ballot in with rollers, scanned it, and dropped it in the sealed translucent box underneath, where you could see it, blurred. So there was an immediate electronic tally, and paper ballots for re-counting. Ballot printing was a big cost with that system, but the machines were cheap.
- ilyagr 6y agoFrom the article: "Pennsylvania, Georgia and South Carolina are on course to replace all paperless voting machines by 2020, while Arkansas, Virginia and Delaware have already completed this process." We're lucky; they made it just in time. Imagine if this was a potential concern for Georgia or Pennsylvania right now. To save you a click, the 8 remaining states are Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky and New Jersey. I hope Texas and Indiana, at least, follow suit soon.
- koenigdavidmj 6y agoI’m in Kansas—we had a mark-and-scan thing this year. Maybe it’s not that way statewide?
- rendall 6y agoCan I read your thesis?
- nogbit 6y agoI did an undergrad in Cybersecurity. Every system can never be fully secure, so election systems therefore can’t be an exception. I did physical security in the USAF long ago, same, you can’t be fully secure. Layers, more of them, help to secure a system.