[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What is your opinion on electronic voting?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: What is your opinion on electronic voting?
Here in Brazil there is somewhat of a debate if electronic voting
(for presidency, senate, everything) is a good thing. We have been
using it since 1996 here, and most people are fine with it. There
is no evidence of fraud since then, but I don't know how easy it
would be to know for sure. I've seen some opposition to it, like
Tom Scott's videos[1][2], but I also remember seeing knowledgeable
people being in favor of it (though I can't remember where). I have
a programming background, so personally I lean against it, but I
don't know enough about security at this level to have a meaning
opinion. I would like to know what everyone here thinks, especially
those with a career on cyber-security. P.S.: I'm not talking about
online voting here, which is a whole other can of worms. I'm only
referring to electronic machines used to vote, without any internet
connection. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI [2]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
Author : strcspn
Score : 7 points
Date : 2022-09-14 22:21 UTC (40 minutes ago)
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Involving a bunch of people is a security feature. Perhaps the
| only one that works consistently.
|
| The only reason to move to electronic voting is to reduce the
| number of people. Ie. an attempt to reduce the security of the
| election.
|
| Additionally your voting system has to he simple enough for
| transparency to be effective. Ie. a non-compromised voting system
| must be distinguishable from a compromised one by the average Joe
| or it will get replaced by the compromised one.
|
| No electronic voting system passes this test.
|
| By all means use a computer to help (ie. optionally mark the
| paper with a computer, or do some zero knowledge vote
| verification thingy or count the marks automatically as a pre-
| count), but it should never interfere with the basic process of
| put mark on bit of paper, put bit of paper in box, have human
| tally marks in box.
| tarakat wrote:
| Not even formally verified open-source compilers can be trusted
| (and for the record, in practice, voting machines do not reach
| anywhere near such level of security):
| https://cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Reflect...
|
| Then you also have to trust the entire supply chain (software AND
| hardware):
| https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/adding_backdo...
|
| Because the prize is so great, the system has to withstand
| decades-long attacks by global superpower-level actors. And
| unlike a bank account, you don't know when you've been hacked.
|
| Once compromised, a smart attacker will stay within the public
| poll's margin of error - which is much greater for small, local
| elections through which most politicians have to pass. Think 30%
| or more, in countries where people have little to fear from
| answering such polls truthfully. Or venture outside of it,
| deliberately making the election look stolen to throw a country
| into chaos.
|
| No system that relies on an un-auditable black box for security
| can be trusted with elections. This is so blindingly obvious,
| anyone that says otherwise, no matter how credentialed, is either
| deluded, corrupt, or malicious.
|
| All this risk, and the benefit is.. what? Countries all over the
| world manage to vote and tally the results quickly using nothing
| but paper.
|
| > I'm only referring to electronic machines used to vote, without
| any internet connection.
|
| If you don't trust the chip fab, how do you check there is no
| connection? I suspect antennas can be hidden incredibly well, and
| there are countless side-channels that can be used for
| communication. And even without antennas, machines are not safe:
| _It is typically introduced to the target environment via an
| infected USB flash drive, thus crossing any air gap._ -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
|
| Do you trust every PC and every USB drive that comes into contact
| with the voting machine? And every PC _that_ PC came into contact
| with, and so on?
|
| Edit: To clarify, paper isn't immune to tampering. But crucially,
| tampering with it is much harder to hide, and it _doesn 't
| scale_. Not unless you already have loyal agents controlling most
| polling stations in a country - at which point, no voting system
| can save you. But even then, _hiding_ your activity will be hard,
| unlike if you only have to flip a few bits.
| type0 wrote:
| My opinion is simple: it shouldn't exist in democratic
| institutions. It is fine if you vote among the members of your
| hobby organization.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think electronic voting is a disaster waiting to happen.
| zxwrt wrote:
| You can't hack the paper, but you can hack the machine, no matter
| how secure it is...
| Thorentis wrote:
| Well, it's also much harder to crack down on voter fraud like
| voting on behalf of dead people. I would say paper voting has a
| larger attack surface _for the average voter_.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Those things are overwhelmingly less common than you are
| pretending, make very little difference, are substantially
| easier to prevent than attacks on electronic voting, and are
| trivial to detect.
| ksaj wrote:
| I personally think the risks are less than for bank machines. But
| only if lessons learned in the development and maintenance of
| bank machines is fully embraced for the voting machines.
|
| There are some banks that let you deposit cheques without needing
| to type anything - they use OCR to find the amount, then verify
| with you, then allow you to print a copy of the cheque with the
| receipt. There is no reason this same technology can't be used in
| voting machines, with the difference being that the visual proof
| is kept internally instead of being printed out. That visual
| proof is what is needed in case of a Trump-style fishing audit.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-14 23:02 UTC)