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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."
It's a lot more effort and you have a paper trail. With a machine all you have to do is rig the counter.
With rigging a paper election, you have to manually eliminate the paper trail, which is significantly more difficult than changing some bytes. Most people don't have a problem with electronic voting as a method. They have a problem with the absolute lack of a paper trail in so many of these systems.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
...is the voters.
Modern voters have grown up in a society that is expert at manipulating peoples will. Through control of the education system, advertising and mild censorship in the name of 'decency', most of the people voting today have been molded into being good, compliant voters who will never oppose the status quo.
Most people aren't strong enough to question their programming. Most simply slip into one pigeon hole or another and lap up the media viewpoints assigned to that pigeon hole (all framed so as to allow the basic principles of society to remain unquestioned)
Meanwhile, the environment dies, human beings starve and sicken in ever greater numbers, and carefully nurtured greed is all that consumes western man.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
"Because it's so hard to simply rig the final result of counting"
Actually, yes, that is hard when you have observers and counters of all political colours involved. Compared to a hack or a fix in firmware of a whole set of machines that renders the fraud very hard to detect, yes, it's very hard to get the complicity of thousands of people from different parts of the political spectrum.
As much as I love the idea of executing anyone who attempts to rig an election (For exactly the reasons you specified), what better way would there be to get rid of the opposition than to frame them for rigging the election?
That way, you not only discredit them for years to come, you actually permanently remove their opposition and are left with a very one-sided governmental system.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I don't understand why is that even educated people miss the point. The whole fucking point of an election is that it has to be transparent and auditable. By transparent and auditable we don't mean to an electrical engineer and a computer scientist, but to a sane adult citizen!
How would you go on about auditing a voting machine, even if the design is open? You'd have to either trust a government or civilian organization to do the auditing or do the auditing yourself, requiring months if not years to verify the design and then verify that the machine you got in the voting district behaves like it is designed to behave! This raises the verifiability bar many orders of magnitude above simple pen and paper.
Remember, during an election, citizens and groups of society are in _conflict_. You can't trust* the government, you can't trust individual groups. What makes or breaks democracy is whether you, as a citizen, can verify independently at least the transparency of your local voting station, because if you can, you can be reasonably certain that other people will do the same in their respective areas and that the general elections are not rigged!
* Remember, democracy has to start somewhere. If you trust the government to conduct the voting process, then you're placing the means of controlling the government's composition in the hand of itself. The risk and temptation is just too high to do that. One thing that should not be government responsibility, but more of a civic duty is voting. In the absense of that, the bare minimum is to let the government conduct the elections, but at least verify it! When the government both runs the elections and through government is the only way to verify the transparency of an election, then that's not democratic anymore.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
"Just make it available online"
And open it up to being hacked even more readily?
"so everyone can log in and check how/whether his/her vote is counted (after the elections)"
So that thugs/corporate masters/Mugabe can sit people down and check they voted 'correctly'?
"Paper trail is no easier to check. "
Yes it is, because the trail is there. With "Push button, increment counter" machines it's a different story.
"Do you propose to check all the votesheets manually?"
What do you think happens in a recount when the vote is contested?
"I think it's infeasible, you will need a computer anyway"
How do you think we did it before the rise of computers?
I really don't get why it's seen as so hard. Here, I'll make one up for you right now; this process would run for every voter. Each vote is not linked to the individual, so the vote remains secret, but is simple to trace:
- "Please enter a 6 digit random number" = X
- "Please enter your vote" = V
- INSERT INTO Votes SHA1HASH( X || Now() ), V
- "Here is a printout summarising your vote. The long number
may be used at a later date to confirm that your vote was
correctly recorded"
Now - how hard was that? Then you supply a website were the voter enters the long number and it shows me my vote. If what shows on the website is not equal to what I thought I voted for any significant number of people, then vote rigging has occurred.
There are a whole load of variations, but the principle would be the same in all. The voter can confirm that their vote was correctly recorded independently. The vote is stored using a secret number that is supplied/known only to the voter.
Carpe Daemon
Nothing is unbreakable. Except One Time Pad, if used correctly.
When you succeed in manipulating a ballot box, you have manipulated exactly one ballot box with a good chance of being catched in the process, if you try the same with electronic voting machines you can manipulate dozens, hundreds or even thousands at once without anybody having a chance of noticing anything.
Observers aren't looking at everything all at the same time.
True. But, to rig an e-vote, you can affect multiple voting locations (changing 10 votes in a hundred precincts looks less suspicious than changing 1 precinct by a thousand votes) with a single attack. To achieve a similar affect with ballot-stuffing, you'd need to stuff ballots in multiple locations, thereby increasing the chance that an observer will spot you.
Not to mention that ballot stuffing can be detected after the fact: "Why do we have an electoral roll of 5000 people, and 6000 votes?". For an electronic system, you can change, rather than merely add, votes.
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.
If you want self-determination, you need courage. It doesn't come free. Personally, I'd rather die standing in front of a mob screaming bloody murder with a weapon in my hands than be ruled in this way.
As it stands, I don't work for bosses whose politics I don't like. I quit. Always have, always will. If I don't like what a group is doing, I don't give them one iota of my strength. In the absence of a system that grants any individual real political power, sometimes the best a person can do is refuse to be of any help.
Americans have always been such a bunch of hypocritical cowards. Joseph McCarthy didn't teach you anything, and the rest of the world is still dealing with your failure to take responsibility for your country.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth