Slashdot Mirror
Punchscan Wins Open Source Voting Competition
An anonymous reader writes "Punchscan emerged victorious at the open source university voting systems competition, VoComp. For their efforts, they will receive the US$10,000 prize provided by ES&S (which has recently been named in a scandal in Florida). The second-place team put up a good fight: 'Per Ron Rivest, one of the contest's judges, the runner-up team, the Pret-a-Voter team from the University of Surrey in the UK, gave Punchscan a tough run for the first-place money until the Punchscan team dug through Pret-a-Voter's source code and found a significant security flaw in their random number generation. Oops.' It will be interesting to see if these systems ever make it into the mainstream. Kudos to ES&S for showing their forward thinking in this area, as the other voting machine vendors, such as Diebold, did not support the competition."
A system with a significant flaw in security comes second?
Does this explain the last two presidential elections?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
The only problem I see with this system, as it was with the hanging chads, is that people with poor vision or low brain power will be easily confused by the way the choices are out-of-order. Maybe they could use colored letters to make it easier to match them up, or even use pictures, e.g. a dog for Clinton, a snake for Giuliani.
To quote a now dead, but once very powerful man: "He who votes decides nothing. He who COUNTS the votes decides everything."
It's charming to see people coming up with Open Source voting and other governmental tools, but extremely naive to think that they'll ever be implemented. Even if they make their way into governmental dialog, they'll be co-opted by Diebold, et.al. in the 11th hour before any policy is changed.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
We need more than preaching to the choir - everyone should link to this from their blogs, post it as a bulletin to their friends on Myspace, etc. etc. etc.... the more people hear about these things, the more likely it will be that we actually start using OSS-based voting machines on a large scale.
3 2 1, GO!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
"Any random voter could go home and make a fake receipt to claim the results were tampered with."
TFA explains how that would be pointless, since the pairing of letters with names is different on each form. The receipt doesn't tell you anything about who you voted for, only what letters you chose. And if their point was to try to change an election, they would need a large group of people to be in on it to guarantee their desired outcome, and the larger the group, the more likely their fraud would be to be exposed.
It's called oversight. Punchscan makes it easy for every single voter to ensure that the items they marked are exactly what was entered into the database. People can even download large randomly-selected chunks of the database to help ensure integrity. Read Wikipedia for more of the security features.
After seeing the machines, the 6 judges cast their votes electronically. The votes were 2 for Pret-a-voter, 3 for Punchscan and 107,345 for Diebold.
How did they count the votes to determine who won?
That "unless" part is the biggest problem with this approach. Digitally signing the ballot eliminates the anonymity of it. On measures that are controversial or highly contentious (stem cell research, gay marriage, abortion, legalization of drugs, to name a few), people need to be able to cast their votes without fear of reprisal or being ostracized be their community. If I'm digitally signing my ballot, that creates a solid link between me and my votes, which may make me reluctant to vote in ways that don't conform with the views of my neighbors.
Of course, the Government has a solid reputation of keeping secrets, so there's no chance that the ballot data could be stolen, hacked or otherwise compromised, or have their contents improperly made available to the general public. And encryption never, ever gets cracked. And the public would never fall for any tricks to get them to divulge their passphrase or surrender their key (for example, a phishing site claiming to be a Voter Verification Portal). Nope, the security here is 100%, nothing to worry about, just go about your business....
as the other voting machine vendors, such as Diebold, did not support the competition.
Of course they didn't support it. The first or second place projects in the competition are both better than the crappy voting system marketed by Diebold and they are *free*. If your competition is free and it is better then you are in a world of hurt. Diebold is the classic example of a company which didn't make a very good transition of expertise in physical real world security products to software products.
And if their point was to try to change an election, they would need a large group of people to be in on it to guarantee their desired outcome, and the larger the group, the more likely their fraud would be to be exposed.
More to your point, if you could organize that many people to swing the vote a certain way, couldn't you have just gotten those same people to vote your way at the start without any fraud?
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
While the Punchscan system appears to resolve the problems of auditability and vote tampering quite well, the issuance of a ballot receipt - no matter how indirect - allows verifiable vote buying.
The system also does not resolve one of the key points of HAVA - which, while deeply flawed, addresses some very deeply held concerns of disabled voters. That problem is one of ballot access - Punchscan is not disabled-friendly.
Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry -- Mark Twain
We do it in Canada, and since counting ballots scales perfectly well, no matter how many people you have, there are no problems. The more ballots you have to count, the more people you have to count the votes, the more people you have to watch the counting, to ensure that it's done properly. I don't understand why we need any other way. For hundreds of years (if not longer) paper voting has worked just fine. Why all of a sudden are we trying to fix something that was never broken.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Well, this flaw found in the second place team's code is the perfect example of why e-voting software should be open source. If it was hidden, odds are that flaw would never be discovered; and might not require a deliberate attack to cause problems in the future.
There is a strong correspondence between e-voting and encryption technology. The assumption for all encryption technology is that evesdroppers will always know your method (i.e., the source code), so instead you make that knowledge useless by using encryption that require a secret key.
One reason an e-voting system would need a random number is to generate some kind of key sequence. So a flawed random number generator is serious indeed.