8 ms·

The Indian Voting Machines are the answer. No operating system, no passwords, no connections, no bruteforcing anything, system on a chip, so widely distributed

• db1234 2y ago
  Regarding Indian voting machines, there is also randomization involved at various levels during distribution making it difficult to game the system but still I always wonder if there is any way to hack the system. I hope people in charge have a process to continuously evaluate the security procedures and improve it.
  • recursivecaveat 2y ago
    I never understood the desire to have any kind of machine at all. Paper ballots are a perfectly efficient and scalable system used for many large elections. Even if complicated machines are theoretically safe against malfeasance, keeping it simple increases public confidence.
    • samarthr1 2y ago
      Scale is a bit of an issue. We need results in as short a time as possible, ws have about 100 crore registered voters, of whom about 70% on average vote, meaning that the ECI must process 70 Crore votes, in under 10 hours. Making that happen in a free and fair way is a logistical challenge, one that we undertake every 5 years. One more large advantage of EVMs is making booth capture very expensive (because EVMs have a inbuilt rate limit, but a ballot box does not). At any rate, with VVPAT being there, it adds another layer of security.
      • echoangle 2y ago
        For everyone wondering: 100 crore is 1 billion, 70 crore is 700 million. Why do you need the result in under 10 hours?
    • cafard 2y ago
      I should say, the speed of tabulation. An American election can include ballot lines for president, senator, member of congress, state senator, three state representatives, a county councilmember or two, a member of the board of education etc.
      • Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
        More bits of paper. The ballot papers around here are bloated oversize monstrosities (picture A3 sized) due to the number of parties and candidates but you get a separate one for each election. Unfortunately not every area is paper only.
        • Ekaros 2y ago
          Here we don't even put names on the ballot, instead there is number assigned for each, this scales up to hundreds of candidates. This does prevent write ins, but I see no reason why you could not have own ballot for each purpose and then say colour code them and append letter or two in front of each candidate for each election.
          • iphoneisbetter 2y ago
            [dead]
          • erik_seaberg 2y ago
            I don't see how the median voter can be confident in making no mistakes. Not even programmers are willing to write out a list of opcodes anymore.
      • anon291 2y ago
        If the speed of tabulation is the main reason then why are results no longer known by election night? They're saying it might be days again. When we had paper ballots, we knew that night. (For America)
        • gruez 2y ago
    • unethical_ban 2y ago
      Scalable? Not for same-day. I'd be fine waiting a few days if needed, though. Heck, early voting means I wait for weeks now. Ranked choice voting is essentially doing multiple elections at a time, having to recount portions of votes every time a candidate drops out. That's a lot easier with computers. I think the totals from every precinct could be made public in a way that they are verifiable from a central database, where the numbers add up to the total for the state and eventually federal count. This is probably already happening, but people don't seem to think so.
      • bpye 2y ago
        The UK manages to produce results within a few hours and all ballots, at least for general elections, are hand counted. I agree that for voting systems other than FPTP it is more work and may take longer - but it’s not an intractable problem.
      • wreckdropibex 2y ago
        Same-day? It is not a problem at all. For example Finland calculates enough paper ballots in hours to give a definitive result, I am sure there are other countries that manage it as well. Your imagination is stuck in the world of voting practices of your side of the pond.
    • jfengel 2y ago
      Tell me you're under 24 years old without telling me you're under 24 years old. The US 2000 election was a fiasco of the failures of paper ballots. Officials spent weeks scrutinizing ballots and to this day nobody thinks they got it correct to within the margin of error. That's when electronic machines came in. They are not necessarily better, but nobody who lived through that nightmare thinks fondly of the clarity of paper ballots.
      • SoftTalker 2y ago
        Those were punch card ballots and trying to determine if indented or “hanging chads” were votes or not
      • rcxdude 2y ago
        That was punch-card ballots, which are also crap. Most of Europe uses a piece of paper you mark with an 'X' in pen or pencil.
      • bigstrat2003 2y ago
        > They are not necessarily better, but nobody who lived through that nightmare thinks fondly of the clarity of paper ballots. I lived through that, it wasn't that big a deal, and I still think fondly of the clarity of paper ballots. No system is perfect, but paper ballots work and work well.
    • crooked-v 2y ago
      In the case of India, keep in mind that the country still has a significant illiteracy rate (about 20% as of 2018) and plenty of people who have literally never used a paper form in their lives. One of the key design goals of the machines is to try and reduce the education needed as much as possible while still keeping things more private and efficient than voice votes.
• albert_e 2y ago
  Curious to know more. Is there a good source of information on the security of the hardware and software used for elections India. As an Indian citizen I see the casual lack of security mindset in large swathe of things implemented by both public and private actors. Many things get better only though iterative failures and corresponding reactive fixes. What type of failures and improvements have happened here, or instances of demonstrated hardness against those with motivation and access to machinery.
  • samarthr1 2y ago
    IIRC it uses tamper evident hardware. There was an interview with one of the Profs who designed the EVMs here.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • viewtransform 2y ago
    Electronic Voting Machine/Elections in India https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlHJZrXrnyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlHJZrXrnyQ The Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) do simple counting of key presses and keep tally of the totals. The machines are not reprogrammable, run on alkaline batteries and have no WiFi/Bluetooth, USB or ethernet.
• brandonmenc 2y ago
  [flagged]
• Molitor5901 2y ago
  I think random, serialized paper ballots are the way to go. When the polls close you know the serial numbers of every vote cast, so no new serial numbers should be added to that unless a very good reason. Keep them or destroy them afterwards is another issue, but it's a step in the right direction. I have some distrust in the American voting system, first with the computerized systems, but also that federal elections are run at the state level. With so many states and jurisdictions, I can't help but feel that fraud is happening. If the federal elections process was truly federalized, and funded if it is not already, managed and controlled by the federal government, then I think there could be greater control and security.
  • zie 2y ago
    Go be a poll worker in your local election. See if you change your mind.
  • saxonww 2y ago
    What do you do when duplicate serial numbers start showing up? I'm assuming you won't know who was issued which serial number, and if it's truly randomized you wouldn't even know where they were sent.
    • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
      Then you have clear proof of election fraud and the FBI, NSA, etc can get to work. Invalidate the election results and do a new one.
      • macintux 2y ago
        > Invalidate the election results and do a new one. The chaos that would ensue from this is staggering.
        • zo1 2y ago
          Much better to just deny it till after the new government is in, then make a nothing-burger out of all the news that is reported "afterwards"? Meanwhile, 50% of your country is disenfranchised for X-years because it was "less chaos" to just accept the vote and move on.
• readthenotes1 2y ago
  It's a matter of when, if, and, if we will ever know
• endgame 2y ago
  Just use paper, and count by hand on the day. You need to present an election system that will convince Joe Q. Public, who is almost certainly not as tech-literate as this forum, is probably not even white-collar or university educated, and likely also suspicious of globalisation. "Tamper-proof Indian system-on-a-chip" does not have that property. Otherwise you get increasingly unhinged arguments over the election results until something breaks.
  • CaliforniaKarl 2y ago
    Unfortunately, hand-counting causes more errors than electronic counting, except in very small communities. Ref.: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hand-counting-ballots https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hand...
    • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
      It's not so much about errors tbh - paper votes can be re-counted as often as needed. The fear is that voting machines are insecure, its input or results tampered with, and then you can't do a recount. Unless they generate a paper receipt as well that the voter has to confirm before the vote is counted.
      • cwalv 2y ago
        The machine prints a paper record at the same time. Couldn't they just read off the paper record as easily as recounting paper ballots?
        • dragonwriter 2y ago
          The voter-verified paper record for use in audit (including recount) purposes has been a federal law requirement in effect since January 1, 2006, for voting machines (adopted under the Help America Vote Act of 2002.)
      • CaliforniaKarl 2y ago
• kkielhofner 2y ago
  > The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a matter of when, not if. The US election system is very distributed and fragmented - there is virtually no standardization. Even in the tightest margins for something like President you'd need to have seriously good data to figure out which random municipality voting system(s) you'd need to target to actually affect the outcome.
  • ForHackernews 2y ago
    Ironically America's fragmentary and incoherent electoral system makes it extremely hard to steal an election there.
    • CaliforniaKarl 2y ago
      You say "fragmentary and incoherent", I say "decentralized".
      • goodlinks 2y ago
        Decentralised could be each counter putting 5000 or so ballots into piles with people wandering around witnessing for various parties all working a rigid process accross the nation. Each count publically announced in the room before witnesses. Totally standardised, coordinated, and decentralised. But fragmented (structuraly) or incoherent. But agree would be a million times worse with a single electronic system
    • chrisco255 2y ago
      The 2000 election was decided by 500 votes. You think it would be unfeasible to flip 500 votes in a critical swing state with such a system?
      • SubiculumCode 2y ago
        Moreover the problem there isn't the distributed/local control of voting, but the College.
• next_xibalba 2y ago
  Is this type of system not vulnerable to a supply chain attack?
• neverartful 2y ago
  When I was a kid living in Louisiana (a state well-known for political shenanigans), they had big mechanical voting machines for elections. The machines were very large and heavy and were stored in warehouses. Probably not much fun for the workers who had to move them to/from storage to polling places (they did have wheels though). Anyways, you would walk into it and throw a big mechanical lever that would close a privacy curtain behind you. Then you would have to manually turn an individual mechanical switch for each choice. When finished voting, you would throw the big mechanical lever back to the original position. Moving the lever back would cause all of your votes to be counted, reset all voting switches, and open the privacy curtains. There were mechanical counters for all possible voting options. Then, when the polls closed the votes would be read off the counters (and presumably verified by multiple individuals) and then reported to the whoever they reported the results to. This was before the internet, but the same machines could (and should) be used in the internet age. There's nothing to hack into electronically as the voting machines contain no electronics (at least for communications, for sure). The only big downside is that the machines have to be stored somewhere and they take up a sizable space. Also, they incur expenses to be moved from storage to polling places (and back). Someone will bring up voters with disabilities, but there were voters with disabilities back then too. I'm sure there was a protocol for accommodating voter disabilities. All in all, I think it's a sensible and pragmatic solution to thwart hacking and hopefully garner more confidence in voting integrity.
  • ndiddy 2y ago
    Mechanical punch-card voting machines fell out of use after the 2000 election showed that they're more error-prone than either electronic voting machines or paper ballots.