E-Voting Expert Testifies

Christopher Soghoian writes "Johns Hopkins University professor Dr. Avi Rubin (of previous e-voting fame) yesterday testified before the Maryland House Ways and Means Committee. An article in the Baltimore Sun describes his testimony, as well as that of the director of the state elections board, Linda Lamone. Mrs. Lamone was highly critical of Dr Rubin's testimony, stating that he was doing 'a great disservice to democracy. They're telling the public: Don't trust them, don't trust the voting equipment.' This begs the question: Is it better for security researchers to avoid publicly criticizing e-voting flaws? Is public faith in the system more important than overall system security?"

Comments

E-Testifying company alters results

[Anonymous Coward]

The E-Testifying company which handled his testimony, also owned by an E-Voting company, has changed what he said! The testimony now reads "E-Voting is great. We should all move to E-Voting now. I for one welcome our new E-Voting overlords."

How do you implement trust?

[Pig Hogger]

How can you implement trust in a given system?

Doubters have to be able to scrutinize the way the system works. So, in order to be trusted by as many people as possible, the system should be understandable by as many people as possible.

As soon as you have any kind of black box whose functionning cannot either be seen, or plainly understood by people, there is room for doubt.

This is why a hand-counted, paper-based ballot system is the most trustable one possible: it doesn't take a computer scientist to understand how it works and how it could be rigged.

Re:How do you implement trust?

[richg74]

This is something I have been arguing since the whole kerfuffle over E-voting began. Any normally intelligent persons can understand the security / threat model for paper ballots and a ballot box. I would be willing to bet that only a tiny minority of election officials -- even those responsible for selecting the machines -- actually understand the model for the electronic device.

Mrs. Lamone's response is unspeakably condescending, but I think it also unconsciously reveals this: 'please, don't make people ask all these awkward questions about the system -- because I don't know how to answer them.'

Linda is nuts.

[twitter]

The director of the state elections board, Linda Lamone lost my trust when she refused outside help with her voting machines:

"I don't think Diebold would allow it," she said. "It's their proprietary code."

Bam, there it is, she's put some kind of faith in IP above her elected duty to safegaurd elections. It's peposterous that elections officials don't have access to the actual method of vote counting and everything else the machines do. With transparancy you don't need faith in a system, you can have reasonable trust that what you saw and know will work.

Dibold has made themselves a proxy for voting. If you removed the electronic components the flaw becomes apparent. Imagine Dibold hired people to sit in a booth and write down your vote where you could not see what they wrote! After that, the representatives would take the votes in closed bags to a place where they would count them and give the results to the elections commisioners. The electronic system has even larger flaws because it's easier to comprimise thousands of computers than it is to comprimise thousands of people, but no one would trust the low tech analog. Defending faith is such a system over the actual integrity of the system is nuts.

You can have an electronic system with a publically inspected paper trail. If the system is not free or open it can't be trusted because you don't know how it works. It's that simple.