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The Computer Scientist Who Prefers Voting With Paper (theatlantic.com)
Geoffrey.landis writes: The Atlantic profiles a computer scientist: Barbara Simons, who has been on the forefront of the pushback against electronic voting as a technology susceptible to fraud and hacking. When she first started writing articles about the dangers of electronic voting with no paper trail, the idea that software could be manipulated to rig elections was considered a fringe preoccupation; but Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election have reversed Simons's fortunes. According to the Department of Homeland Security, those efforts included attempts to meddle with the electoral process in 21 states; while a series of highly publicized hacks -- at Sony, Equifax, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management -- has driven home the reality that very few computerized systems are truly secure. Simons is a former President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); and the group she helps run, Verified Voting, has been active in educating the public about the dangers of unverified voting since 2003.
It's way too easy for someone to sneak in an extra box of fake ballots to rig an election.
It's hard to rig an election with a single box of fake ballots. It's also hard to bring in thousands of boxes without anybody noticing.
Shouldn't it be "the overwhelming majority of computer scientists who've even casually looked at voting security" in favor of paper ballots over the current implementation of computerized voting? Hasn't this been the case for well over a decade?
Ryan Fenton
One of the requirements for a proper voting system is that ordinary people can understand it and oversee its correct implementation, so that they don't need to take someone else's word for it. Computers are basically out by definition.
Actually... hybrid is best. Vote with paper, scan and tally with computers. If there is any doubt, you have the original paper watched over by election officials to verify.
Simons is one of the most prominent such, but definitely not the only one. This has been a vocal point being made by computer scientists and other security experts since at least the late 2000s.
Why on earth is this modded at 1? The ease with which computerized voting systems can be compromised has been shown over and over again, that I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the access was planned.
Paper is not perfect, but at least it makes it a little harder to compromise.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Computers have bugs, both software and hardware. They also may have backdoors installed by the company building these machines. By using these devices, you're handing over control over important events to a few people, the exact opposite of a democracy.
Votes should be and anonymous, hidden from everyone, including computers. Even if the machines don't tamper with the votes, there is a high possibility that they can make voting non-anonymous.
Paper voting is simple, transparent, anonymous, and hard to tamper with on a wide scale. Computer voting is complex, non-transparent, non-anonymous and subject to vote tampering on a wide scale.
The sad part is that it's not only security experts who should be saying this. Voting should not only be accurate, but that accuracy needs to be verifiable by laymen, and they should be able to understand the end-of-end process to tally and verify the count. Voting by computer violates that principle on a fundamental level.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I am a computer scientist, and I can confirm you are full of shit. Electronic voting only works in theory (and not even in a more complete theory that takes into accounts all actors involved in implementation & usage of such systems). In practice, you should only use technology to count physical ballots efficiently.
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There are plenty of instances of tampering with paper ballots. Can you provide a single instance of an electronic voting machine actually being tampered with during an election?
You've summarized the problem. Electronic voting allows for undetectable manipulation.
This. I think almost anyone with the slightest knowledge of embedded software and security practices would prefer paper over electronic. If working in this industry has taught me anything it's that security is based mostly on hoping that no one will ever have access to your hardware for long enough to find flaws in it. Sure, there is some layer of security usually, but developing those properly is hard, and usually someone somewhere punches a hole in it so they can do practical things, like program the device with an initial firmware, or debug it. Then we haven't even discussed all the flaws that just sneak in as coding errors.
You need to add human nature to the mix. Think of money. Think of gerrymandering. Humans will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that their side wins, including making it difficult for the other side to win.
A very hypothetical but plausible situation:
Joe Blow voting machines incorporated has a bit of an inclination toward one party or another. Well, one party or another would like to make certain that their party wins. So maybe 20 million dollars changes hands and is stored in some offshore bank.
JBVM simply adds backdoors that will slightly alter the results, weighted in favor of the group that gave him the money. I think it was Carnegie-Mellon U who originally came up with a hard to detect vote alteration method during one of their hacks of voting machines.
The ease with which electronic machines can be hacked makes it hard to believe that it hasn't occurred already.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I have been complaining for many years, ever since my State ditched the simple and effective "punch cards" and went to horrible touch-screen computer voting. It removed every trace of auditing capability and introduced a system that not only could be horribly abused or hacked, but also made it easy to track the identity of who voted- clearly violating the principles of confidentiality of voting.
Finally, this November, my State switched to paper ballots. The voter is registered as usual, then given a generic paper ballot, and just marks on the paper what they want, and the voter inserts it into a machine that reads it and stores the sheet of paper securely. Cheap, simple, easy-to-use, 100% verifiable, and anonymous. I only hope that every State follows such an example.
The next challenge is to get ranked/IRV (Instant Runoff Voting). Then things can really start to change for the positive.
http://fairvote.org/
People seem to praise paper ballots like they are flawless but they forget that ballot box stuffing and corrupt vote counters existed before we invented the computer.
What we need is a hybrid system of human readable votes and computerized automation. While generally hyped as a technology a information for a blockchain could be stored both on the paper ballot and voting machine memory to ensure no votes had been inserted, erased or altered. Using this methodology with a series of isolated single microcontroller systems not just air-gapped but lacking the basic hardware needed for network communication would combined with signed binaries and radiation-hardened software (yes, that's a thing) would radically improve security.
We have the technology to fix this problem and remove all single points of failure but have yet to do it.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Do I have this right? We have "progressive" organizations (called such in the article) that fought hard for electronic voting machines. Trump gets elected. Now they want paper.
There's been suspicions among "right wing" groups that these "progressives" have been using absentee voting and electronic voting machines to make vote fraud easier. The progressive candidates get their head handed to them on a platter in an election a year ago and NOW they think electronic voting is a bad idea?
There's a part of me that thinks these people that have been participating in voter fraud realized that the opposition could in fact be also participating in fraud. To actually prove there was fraud though requires a paper trail. Electronic voting means no paper trail.
Regardless of why these "progressive" groups got the message I'm just glad they did.
I'm not saying any fraud has in fact happened, only that everyone seems to be accusing the other of participating in fraud.
(What makes these people so "progressive" anyway? What are they progressing towards? Progress implies a path to take, or some goal to achieve, I'm not sure what that is though.)
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
All computer scientists worthy of the name prefer paper voting.
It's really "information theory and practice". If people whose first idea usually is to use a computer tell you not to use a computer for an information gathering and processing job, you should take heed. You know they have tried everything to make it work with their favorite tool, but they still ended up recommending against it.
The idea of totally electronic voting tells me that people care about their vote about as much as they care about their privacy. We see how poorly secured and hackable all of our systems are everyday. If someone wants a computer screen to facilitate the creation of a paper ballot and (Maybe) to provide an alternate count to check against I think most IT professionals would support that.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain