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Avi Rubin Has Some Optimistic Words About E-Voting
An anonymous reader writes "For more than a decade, Aviel "Avi" Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in the US and an e-voting activist, has been a vocal critic of e-voting systems. In this interview Rubin talks about the recent US presidential primary election cycle and his thoughts on e-voting going into the November US elections."
Nothing is unbreakable. Except One Time Pad, if used correctly.
I have been a "presiding judge" and let me tell you that where are multiple people watching what's going on all the time.
Which means that while manipulating paper-ballot systems is possible, it is by no means easy. Furthermore, paper ballot systems are intrinsically decentralized: To manipulate an election, one would need to manipulate the ballot boxes in multiple precincts, requiring the cooperation, or at least failure to observe suspicious activity by a much larger number of insiders.
Compare that to the implicit centralization of counting that occurs when a given county or state purchases its voting machines from a single vendor. A far smaller number of bad actors is required to do real damage with evoting systems, and worse yet, it's essentially impossible to recognize easter-egg or other malicious code, particularly with respect to proprietary systems.
This being slashdot, I assume you are already aware of the essential impossibility of detecting malicious easter eggs through classical black-box system testing techniques. Given that the proprietary vendors consider their code to be a State Secret (IMHO out of embarrassment over how piss-poor it tends to be given its criticality to democratic decisionmaking), black box testing is all the boards of election and their independent testers can use.
Consider further that boards of elections and secretaries of state have very limited time, funding to and technical skill to validate hardware and software systems that the vendors really don't want pried open for a look-see.