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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.
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.
All computer scientists worthy of the name prefer paper voting.