Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board Security experts have warned that electronic voting systems are decades away from being secure, and to prove it a team from the University of Michigan successfully got the foul-mouthed, drunken Futurama robot Bender elected to head of a school board. In 2010 the Washington DC election board announced it had set up an e-voting …
Hmmm...
Nope, that system didn't work so well in the Iowa caucuses, where you nominally have similarly oriented partisans working to select their nominee (that is, reduced inducement to corruption of the process). On the night of the election all the LSM outlets announced Romney was the winner. A week later it turned out to be Santorum because some of the trusted counters couldn't be arsed to turn in their paperwork.
“They found that the cameras installed to watch the voting systems weren't protected, and used them to work out when staff left for the day and so wouldn't spot server activity.”
Straight out of a Hollywood movie. Actually it sounds like that was a totally unnecessary flourish, but who could resist?
It doesn't matter how secure such a system is, but how easily you can check it. The usual pen and paper based system can easily be checked. You can detect tampering trivially without any special knowledge.
It can be understood by everybody and checked by everybody.
Plus its cheap and gets results quickly.
So why even think about electronic elections?
First of all, I trust electronics more than I trust people. I don't know what happens to my paper vote after it gets placed in the magic box. I do know that some of these magic boxes are sometimes found after the election is over, containing a bunch of uncounted votes.
Secondly, by cutting costs (both on the counting side, as well as for me, the voter), maybe we can hold _more_ elections, letting me vote on issues rather than on some pretty face with a slick tongue.
Today I do not have to visit my local bank and fill up my wallet with cold cash. I use a credit card instead, and more importantly: I can pay bills using their Internet solution.
In my country of residence, I use the same electronic ID to access my bank as well as various state services (e.g. accessing the DMV records, paying my taxes or book an appointment with my doctor).
If there is a hole in that system, then my bank account would be empty now. Well, truth be told, it is nearly empty, but for different reasons not pertaining to security issues.
"First of all, I trust electronics more than I trust people."
If there was some way of designing, making and using electronics without using people, this would make sense. As it is, there isn't, so your choice is untrustworthy people with electronics, or untrustworthy people with bits of paper.
They could have made their study a little more interesting. I assume that since the code was released for public testing, that the code was unlikely to see further detailed inspection. I might have added a discrete bit of work that would sit there until election day, add Bender to the actual list of candidates, and allocate plenty of votes to him. Would make for interesting watching when they wanted to release the final tallies :)
I think you missed this part of the article:
>>"It was too good an opportunity to pass up," explained Professor Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan. "How often do you get the chance to hack a government network without the possibility of going to jail?"<<
But if you call the risk of going to jail 'a little more interesting', you are right.
"Financial attacks by hackers are relatively easy to detect – because at some point money has to leave the system. But if an election is hacked then we may never know, because it's a one-time action that typically isn't checked after the results have been announced and officials elected."
And herein, stated more succicntly than ever before, is the entire problem in a nutshell.
What's REALLY important in the world?
these e-voting systems would print out a copy of the person's vote for them to check and place in a ballot box so physical recounting is possible.
They don't do that?
It still wouldn't help with removing/changing candidate names from the ballot paper as in the article example though so, as above, old school pen & paper for me.
Easy enough to fix. Below the touch screen / set of buttons for voting, is a transparent plastic window. Behind this is a receipt printer, like those used in checkout tills. When you make your selection, this prints your choice, displaying it so that you can verify it. This then feeds the roll of paper into a sealed box, so the next voter cannot see your choice. The sealed box then contains an audit trail of every vote passed.
You are also right about anonymity int he UK. The voting card has a voter number on it, which is written on the counterfoil of the ballot paper. Anyone who has access to the list of voter numbers and names, and also the counterfoils, and the ballot papers can trace a vote back to its origin. This does require physical access to both the ballot paper, and the counterfoil, which I would imagine would be securely held, and presumably eventually securely disposed of.
"Easy enough to fix. Below the touch screen / set of buttons for voting, is a transparent plastic window. Behind this is a receipt printer, like those used in checkout tills. When you make your selection, this prints your choice, displaying it so that you can verify it. This then feeds the roll of paper into a sealed box, so the next voter cannot see your choice. The sealed box then contains an audit trail of every vote passed."
But this isn't possible for an online system.
To: Anonymous Coward
who wrote:
> Sorry, but it needs to be anonymous; I wouldn't want my vote to be traced back to me in the
> UK, never mind somewhere like Iran!
Sorry to burst your bubble.
It has been widely known for decades that The Establishment uses the _unique_ pinhole punched pattern at the top of every ballot paper to identify those who vote anti-establishment e.g. anarchist, communist etc.
Its been going on since long, long _before_ there was 'special branch' and long before the creation of 'anti terrorist' smokescreen.
If you don't Know your history ....etc.
Technical details of the hack aside, the paper explained, "Why internet voting is hard," especially, "Tensions between ballot secrecy and integrity." Implementing both secrecy and integrity seems very difficult in any electronic system, but we've mastered both in a paper ballot.
I mean a real paper ballot, that uses "X" for an anonymous signature.
And I couldn't help but notice this little jab: "[...]despite the use of the term “commercial [off-the-shelf software],” includes most everyday open-source software."
In exchange I offer this little jab: "You can't blame Microsoft for this one."
Yep, and after he put in a competent Super, test scores started going up and even more surprisingly, getting students back from private schools, even some of the affluent white ones. First thing the new mayor did was fire the competent person. Fortunately for citizens in DC, the changes wrought meant he had to at least keep someone who would keep the process going forward instead of completely reversing like he was supposed to do to line the pockets of his union masters.
They need to do the same thing they do on Nevada state voting machines -- random inspections, any discrepancies found and the machine is shut down and investigated, background checks on all devs, board of inquiry for the public to use, and more. Nevada voting machines are more secure because of this, and because there's serious penalties for fuffing about with them.
It's reasonably easy to make a secure, verifiable e-voting system: print receipts, allow verification by the voter later, establish some standards and support multiple vendors. See my web page http://www.billdietrich.me/Reason/ReasonVotingMachines.html Thanks.
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