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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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I have been trying to get people I know in my state to request an absentee paper ballot for each election and use it to cast their vote. The process here is very easy, with virtually no tests for actually needing to vote absentee. Perhaps this should be done nation wide as much as possible. If the VOTERS overwhelmed the ballot boxes with absentee paper ballots that might just send the message that computers should not be used for voting!
My state still uses the old Diebold DRE machines that CAN NOT be audited. I was on the evaluation group when they were chosen after the 2000 election and was a lone voice pointing out their lack of security and impossibility of being audited or having a valid recount.
Whatever actions you perform on the paper votes to optimise the security of the system can be done on digital records too.
A layman could inspect a polling station, and witness the paper ballot counting to confirm everything is done accurately. The same layman cannot inspect an electronic voting machine and confirm it has counted all the proper votes.
The ballots we use up here (and the system we use to count and track them) are amazing.
The voter goes to a table where the ballots are handed out by elections officials. The ballot has the candidate's names in alphabetical order and a removable counterfoil that has a serial number that matches against the book that the ballot was torn from. The official puts their initials on the ballot and hands it to the voter. The voter goes behind the screen and marks the ballot and folds it. The counterfoil and initials are still visible.
The voter hands the ballot back to the offical who checks both the signature and the serial number on the counterfoil (this ensures the voter has returned the ballot they got). The counterfoil is then removed and now the ballot is completely anonymous. The voter then gets the ballot back and she places it in the ballot box in front of the official.
When it comes time to count the votes, the elections officials count all of the ballots in the presence of other non-partisan officials as well as the candidates themselves or their representatives -- a vote isn't recorded until everyone has seen and verified the ballot. Once everything is counted and verified (does the number of ballots counted match the number given out and returned by voters, etc) the tally is made on paper and the ballots themselves are sealed up and passed up the chain. They are kept for 7 days in case a recount is needed.
The great thing about this system is that it scales to any population size since the ballots are counted right there at the polling station, box by box and verified on the spot.
It's certainly not perfect and there are some opportunities for tampering but nothing even in the same universe as the kind of wide-spread hacking that can occur with electronic systems.
more detail:
http://www.elections.ca/conten...
http://www.elections.ca/conten...
Or vote with computers, but produce paper (and show the voter the printout behind glass for verification) as a backup. Whatever method you use, it's critical to produce a paper ballot which is either created or verified by the voter. With that, at least you can go back and look for fraud.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
And what if that layman wants to unfairly affect the results?
The layman is only allowed to watch, not touch.
At the end you have to trust in something/someone
No, because you can go to the polling station yourself, and be that layman.
a properly designed electronic system can perform lots of checks, backups, logs, perfectly-understood-by-laymen reports, etc.
How can you tell it's actually properly designed ? You have to assume the worst, namely that it was purposely designed to rig the election, and fake the checks, backups, and logs.
Or how do you think that virtually everything works in the world?
We do what we can. Elections have some unique aspects that make it necessary to be extra vigilant. The anonymity of the process makes a proper audit very difficult, and the stakes are huge.
However ballots have to be machine countable.
No, they don't. Manual counting works quite well.
Observers who oversee (but cannot inferfere with) the counting and double counting works great in many countries. And they even get their results quicker than the US, both for small and large districts.
automatically generating printed copies of all the votes such that people interested in crosschecking the results might count all of them manually
And what are you going to do if the voter claims that the printed vote is wrong ?
a format with many more advantages
There's only one advantage: it's faster. The whole election circus takes months. We can wait another day for the votes to be counted.
because of unreasonable fears
There's nothing unreasonable about fearing tampering with elections.
>Or vote with computers, but produce paper
I disagree. If the computer is handling the voting, it's easier to corrupt the process, and an equipment malfunction means the poll is closed.
Paper and pencils - vulnerable to fire and theft, but not much else. (And yes, pencils, because they don't dry up in storage, their marks don't run if the ballot gets wet, and you can still see traces of the old mark if someone tries to erase and replace it)
The editors seem to think a computer scientist would be expected to think digital only voting is a good idea.
Do you know anyone with expertise in computer science or engineering who thinks paperless voting is a good idea? I mean excluding people who work for companies that make the machines? Can you name even a single respected independent computer security expert who favors the damn things?
The overwhelming consensus among people who know anything is that paperless voting is a terrible idea.
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First, machine counting is more accurate than hand counting.
No, it is not. With hand-counting, the votes are always counted multiple times by different people. That gives greater accuracy than a machine that will make the same errors over and over again.
Your comparisons to other countries are not valid (you didn't even cite a single example to compare).
That's deliberate. If I did mention a single country, someone would jump in and say "oh, but country X is different because it has [fewer people|more people|bigger districts|smaller districts]".
It won't take you long to find countries where machine voting is illegal, and election results are still available the same night.
And the onus should be on those who claim that machine voting increases speed to provide evidence for that, because not counting with a machine is the baseline.
Look at the time needed just to hand count a few counties in Florida in Bush v. Gore.
That was hand counting machine votes, you dolt. "Dimpled chads" or misplaced optically readable stamp marks is not a problem where the votes are designed for human and not machine parsing.
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
Please define "secure". The anonymity of voting goes against normal computer security, where A to B and B to A are always traceable.
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