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.

Comments

This is the attitude of many security experts

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re: This is the attitude of many security experts

[religionofpeas]

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.

Re:This is the attitude of many security experts

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Re: This is the attitude of many security experts

[orlanz]

Yes paper can be destroyed, replaced, and added to, impacting the outcome. But the impact will be at most ONE small district. And you would need to do this at multiple voting centers. There are 435 districts in the US. Great path if you want to rig your very local election.

But going to major cities or state levels... the amount of money you would need to spend to significantly impact such elections would be a waste of funds and a high risk for capture through multiple attempts. It would be far more cost effective to spend that on ads to sway public opinion or a candidate directly.

At the federal level... easier to buy out the Electorial College. That may seem difficult but nothing compared to what you propose.

With electronics, you have a centralized, standardized, single target. But this target would have multiple stages to attack, any of which can yield control of the entire system.

It is possible to create a good enough electronic voting system but we just don't have anyone nearly competent enough to do so. Our current system of hundreds of thousands of cogs watching each other is more than good enough at the moment.

Re: This is the attitude of many security experts

[religionofpeas]

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.

Re: This is the attitude of many security experts

[Ol Olsoc]

Paper ballots can easily be destroyed, damaged, or faked. It's way too easy for someone to sneak in an extra box of fake ballots to rig an election. It's a shame that people like you who should know better are proposing to make it easier for criminals and foreign powers to rig elections. We would be far better off using blockchains to store votes and using that to ensure security. It's unfortunate that you and so many others are standing in the way of progress and better security.

Looks like we have prefect doing it's job as the enemy of good.

Besides, there is a world of difference between the effort it would take to coordinate a nationwide paper ballot hack. You would have to have a whole lot of people with physical access to the ballots, and a well coordinated ability to do the dirty work without detection, versus a few people sitting in a nice office somewhere altering the results.

Your blockchain idea is another example of how the next solution will be the secure one. Then the next one after that, then the one after that.

Nope, there is no way that we should allow voting to be yet another casualty of the Internet of Things debacle.

Re:This is the attitude of many security experts

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

Re: This is the attitude of many security experts

[swillden]

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.

In addition, cryptographic security researchers have constructed a cost-effective, scalable, paper ballot system which makes this sort of fraud (and others) detectable.

Paper, backstopped with math, is unquestionably the most fraud-resistant way to conduct elections. Pure electronic voting systems are perhaps the best way to enable fraud.

There is a valid argument for the use of electronic voting machines for accessibility. Large touch screens are easier to use, especially for people with disabilities, but they should merely be an interface to collect information for printing on a human-readable paper ballot.

I'm both a computer scientist and a computer security expert. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who understands computer security who would honestly support direct recording electronic voting.

"The"?

[RyanFenton]

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

Re:"The"?

[Mal-2]

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?

Unfortunately, the flipped statement is also true. The overwhelming majority of people opposing the current implementation of computerized voting are computer scientists who have even casually looked at voting security. This makes for a fairly small group, and they deserve the assistance of those of us not qualified in CS but who think they're almost certainly right.

Re: I am a computer scientist...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: I am a computer scientist...

[Ecuador]

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.

Re:Paper has no advantage over digital records

[religionofpeas]

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.

Canadian paper ballots are amazing

[berj]

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...

"The"

[bistromath007]

All computer scientists worthy of the name prefer paper voting.