Group Sues To Stop German E-Voting

kRemit writes "The German hacker group Chaos Computer Club today sued the German State of Hessen to prevent the use of electronic voting machines (Google translation) in the upcoming elections on January 27. This comes as a follow-up to the Dutch initiative 'We don't trust voting machines,' which succeeded in banning the same type of voting machines in the Netherlands."

Comments

you can tamper with paper votes

[circletimessquare]

but it is cumbersome, slow, small in scale, and hard to hide

on the other hand with electronic voting (and to a lesser extent mechanical voting), you have an order of magnitude more attack vectors. you can also do a lot more damage with the slightest of effort, quickly, with a lot of volatility and potential for permanent obfuscation, destruction, or scrambling and outright manipulation. you can cover your tracks well too, and you can quickly survey the landscape and tweak votes in ways that are hard to sniff out later

paper voting is totally transparent to everyone involved. electronic voting is opaque. there is no verification, nothing of substance. nothing to see or touch

electronic voting is probably one of the greatest threats to faith in democracy in the 21st century. not a joke in the least

we need to lose this really bad idea asap

As simple as I can say this...

[explosivejared]

Hessen, and the rest of the Germany too, listen up! Pardon my German, but... DAS ELEKTRONISCHE WAHLEN IST SCHLECT!! Did you get that? Electronic voting is bad! I don't know how many discussions, lawsuits, and protests that blast e-voting's many shortcomings it is going to take before they become what they should be, landfill fodder.

Seriously, at best they are a waste of money. At worst, and probably most likely, they add all sorts of new vectors for corruption in a process that is inherently corrupt. Listen, most sane people realize that instant election results are not worth the dangers involved with excessive automation of the process. Keep to Occam's razor. The simpler the system the better. Pen and paper are ideal, but a punch card system is a fair choice as well.

All the arguments are hashed and tired. There's no sensible reason to move to electronic voting. It doesn't magically increase turn-out. It's expensive. I needn't go on. However, if anyone on the elections board or whatever decisional authority over elections is reading this, this is a good starting point for comprehending the e-voting situation as it stands as a piece of the larger issue of elections in general.

SAGEN SIE NICHT ZUM ELEKTRONISCHEN WÄHLEN!!

English Version Available

[KevinIsOwn]

Why link to a crappy Google translator version when a reasonably good english version of TFA is available? There are big flags at the top of the article, one for Germany, and one for English. I suppose the submitter didn't realize that funny blue and red flag was for Great Britain and meant English.

Electronic paper voting?

[pv2b]

There's generally not much wrong with paper voting, as long as the process is totally transparent, but there are a few ways you can cheat with paper voting, but generally it's a pretty good system.

There are a lot of smart people asking -- how can we make electronic voting as good as traditional voting with slips of paper? What if that's the wrong question? What if instead, paper voting could be made *better* with the advent of electronic technology?

There was an article a week or so back describing some place printing ballots on demand. What if paper ballots were printed on demand, but the people printing them are the voters? A machine could be hooked up to print a ballot when a voter presses the correct buttons, and would only print out one ballot per voter. The ballots themselves would also have a barcode on them with a code certifying which machine printed them. The printers would count how many ballots were printed, and if that number doesn't match the number counted, that'd signify a problem -- either the machines were tampered with, or the physical ballots.

Now, that'd still make it possible to print excessive ballots from a printer, but then the number of votes wouldn't match the number of voters, and thus, number of votes cast.

To fix that, you could use some kind of public key cryptography system. In order to vote, you are sent a voter registration card, which contains a single-use private key on a 2D-barcode, which in turn is signed by whatever authority compiles the eligible voters list. That private key in turn is used to sign a message that simply says "I voted" and nothing else. That would eliminate the possibility of faking lists of who voted, except if the private key itself was falsified to start with, or if multiple such keys were assigned per person.

But that's okay. Now there are only three possible attack vectors (that I can think of) -- key falsification (only possible if you're part of the authority that issues voter identities), key theft (possible if you rifle through the mail of whoever's identity you want to steal), and vote changing (would require tampering both with voting machines *and* with paper ballots).

The key theft threat can be mitigated by rigorous identity checks -- posession of the proper private key should not be sufficient to vote -- some kind of ID should also be neccessary, and the key falsification threat can be minimized by *very* rigorous inspection of whatever authority issues said keys, and the vote changing scenario is made more difficult than it used to be.

Now, such a system would probably never be implemented due to cost concerns. But it'd probably be better than the paper voting we have today, and it wouldn't break the secret ballot, nor would it make the system less transparent. It'd basically be the old system with a parallell electronic system to ensure whoever counts the paper ballots are honest. There are probably other flaws too, I don't know. :-)

John Gruber said it best...

[riscfuture]

Computer enthusiasts really like computers, so when they say, "No, I don't think it's a good idea to use computers for this," you should probably listen.

Re:You are ignoring the key issue that led to this

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoah there. Not all paper ballot systems are equal. In ireland, people use voting slips that are written on, not ambiguously punched. And hand counted locally, with adversarial counters (i.e. people of all party affiliations checking eachothers' counts). And the voting system is proportional representation, more complicated to count, but they still manage (the american/corporate-affiliated irish government of the time tried to introduce electronic voting the election before last, and failed due to the machines' demonstrable insecurity and unreliability).

Ireland has less people you say? True, but it still has millions, it's about the size of a US state. And these things scale well! They're amenable to hierarchical decomposition! Vote local, count local, subsubtotal, subtotal, total => result.

Human voting is a human process, and computers should stay the fuck out of it. It's incredibly more difficult to bribe _everyone_ involved in a human-counted election than to change a few lines in a closed-source unverified voting machine.

Re:You are ignoring the key issue that led to this

[chebucto]

A few points:

- Florida did not simply use paper ballots; it used mechanical voting machines to punch those ballots.
- Paper-punching machines are needlessly complicated, opening them up to unique kinds of disruption. Their performance in Florida may have been deliberately degraded: there are allegations that substandard paper was sent to that state by a voting-machine company for use in the machines (read more here)
- In voting, the simplest is the best: paper + pencil for the voter; trustworthy citizens for the counting. This is what we use in Canada; a country of 30m people, and we are able to announce election results the night of the election. There is universal trust in the voting process - though not, I am sad to say, in politics in general :)