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Electronic Voting Researcher Arrested In India
whatajoke writes "Hari Prasad, a security researcher in India who had demonstrated the vulnerability of electronic voting machines used in all elections in India, was arrested by the police on charges of stealing an electronic voting machine. The election commission of India has maintained that EVM are non-hackable. The election commission had previously provided access to the device to the security researchers for a day and asked for a hack in only that time."
Maybe, just MAYBE the companies want the machines to be able to be hacked by the Right People. So when word gets out that these machines have flaws that anyone with the right tools and knowledge can control it makes things harder for the company, and those Right People get miffed.
1) The voter gets to see the vote being cast.
2) Auditors and manual re-counters get to see the exact same thing the voter saw. This means it must be a tangible artifact.
3a) Audit all elections "to 5%" or "to the margin of victory" whichever is less. This provides a very high confidence any fraud wasn't enough to sway the elections nor was it enough to sway more than 5% of the tally. Do the same if any candidate is "close" to a significant threshold number, such as the number of votes needed to avoid a runoff.
3b) Random audits "to 0.5%" or some other high confidence interval sufficient to expose and deter general game-playing by a candidate who lost so bad that the cheating didn't help him. If a losing candidates know they have a 1 in 10 chance of getting a "very close audit" they won't try to play games.
4) Automatic recounts using different equipment PLUS a more thorough audit on any close election.
5a) Manual recounts on any close election on the request of the candidate who is within the "margin of possible error/fraud" that the audits show could exist.
5b) Manual recounts on any election where any candidate is very close to a significant threshold number.
It's not hard folks. Machine-readable paper ballots typically meet 1 & 2. The rest is a matter of spending money after the votes are initially tallied, not a function of the voting machines.
Auditing an election of, say, 3M voters where one candidate allegedly beat the other 50.5% to 46.5% to 3% for minor candidates need only determine that there's less than a 5% chance that the true election result had the winning candidate with 50%+1 votes to avoid a runoff. With a paper ballot satisfying #1 and #2 and generally accepted statistical analysis, this won't require a recount of nearly the entire pool of votes, only a random sample from each ballot box sufficiently large to rule out the need for a runoff.
If on the other hand the alleged winning amount was exactly 1,500,001 out of 3M votes, or if it was 1,499,499 and the winner wanted a recount to avoid a runoff, a full manual recount would likely be necessary.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think the key is to always have a fresh, young government. That's one possible way to help keep the level of corruption low, creating a new government every so often (say 20 years or so). Our 200+ year old system has long since overstayed its welcome, becoming impossibly corrupt and ineffective at meeting the needs of the people.
Caveat Utilitor
Security is hard and electronic voting machines are not a mature product. Give it 50 years and probably electronic voting machine security will have improved.
If anything, US and Europe is showing the signs of the once OK governments becoming unbearable. Sure, revolutions change government and rarely set up ones that are better, the reason is that revolutionaries themselves make for terrible peace time governments, the revolutionaries should take down one government and replace it with a new one that is NOT part of the revolutionaries. Of-course this is a rarity.
However, all the governments that exist today are all going to be replace probably within the next 50 years.
You can't handle the truth.
Officials in most parts of Asia are prepared to hire a killer to murder the one that make them lose face, that is what is going on here, he is lucky to be alive today.
Losing face is the thing that provokes most anger in especially Asian countries.
Oh yes... I do agree with your insight regarding the US.
Its beyond offensive and disgusting that any post that defends and advocates terrorism like the above does is moderated insightful.
The moderators should be ashamed of themselves here.
Who's advocating terrorism?
The founding fathers for one:
"Occasionally the tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants."
— Thomas Jefferson
Slot games *can* be hacked, which is why there are multiple levels of brutes, pit bosses, etc. watching to make sure you don't have the opportunity to.
The thing that makes slot machines secure is the layers and layers of people watching the process.
But even all that only protects the owners of the machines from hacking by you. It doesn't go the other way around. Now, how do you suggest building the analogous into the voting system while still keeping voting anonymous?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
In 2002 Dutch government resigned as they have accepted partial responsibility for Srebrenica Massacre.
Mind you, this was a government resigning over something that happened long before they were in office and over an act that they did not instigate.
So not only did the government step down, it took on their shoulders what they felt was NATIONAL shame.
Sort of like what should the current US government resign over the My Lai Massacre.
Except US soldiers actually massacred the civilians there, while Dutch soldiers only failed to protect the civilians.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens