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DARPA Is Building a $10 Million, Open Source, Secure Voting System (vice.com)
samleecole writes: For years security professionals and election integrity activists have been pushing voting machine vendors to build more secure and verifiable election systems, so voters and candidates can be assured election outcomes haven't been manipulated. Now they might finally get this thanks to a new $10 million contract the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched to design and build a secure voting system that it hopes will be impervious to hacking.
The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an Oregon-based firm called Galois, a longtime government contractor with experience in designing secure and verifiable systems. The system will use fully open source voting software, instead of the closed, proprietary software currently used in the vast majority of voting machines, which no one outside of voting machine testing labs can examine. More importantly, it will be built on secure open source hardware, made from special secure designs and techniques developed over the last year as part of a special program at DARPA. The voting system will also be designed to create fully verifiable and transparent results so that voters don't have to blindly trust that the machines and election officials delivered correct results.
The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an Oregon-based firm called Galois, a longtime government contractor with experience in designing secure and verifiable systems. The system will use fully open source voting software, instead of the closed, proprietary software currently used in the vast majority of voting machines, which no one outside of voting machine testing labs can examine. More importantly, it will be built on secure open source hardware, made from special secure designs and techniques developed over the last year as part of a special program at DARPA. The voting system will also be designed to create fully verifiable and transparent results so that voters don't have to blindly trust that the machines and election officials delivered correct results.
That is very important and didn't see that listed in there in the top level checkoff marks.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Or, not? WTF?
Oh please, Texas just paid out a couple million because they decided that people couldn't become citizens, and never bothered to cross-check with naturalization files.
Oops.
And hey, beltway bandits need to eat, too.
building us a voting system?
That would be like the Fox counting the Chickens.....
Rick B.
Vote by mail is growing rapidly and in many places exceeds polling place voting. VBM increases voter turnout and solves so many problems that polling place voting probably isn't worth salvaging.
Mod parent as funny :)
Open source software does not mean you get to make code changes in THEIR source code. You can only see it and fork-it and make your own evil voting software.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
This special 'secure' open hardware: Will you actually ensure there is a reference platform available, for less than say 500 usd to the average consumer, so that we can develop on, test, diagnose, and verify this hardware ourselves, or use it to ensure the security and authenticity of our own application code?
If not, then it is just a 10 million dollar sham. The software, even if perfectly secure by itself, is not trustworthy unless the underlying hardware is trustworthy, and the underlying hardware isn't trustworthy unless everyone can buy an example of it, ideally right off the production line, and swap/not swap their example for one of the government units, helping to ensure that the entire government run hasn't been compromised itself since they knew the start/end manufacturing serials for their own batch of units.
Obviously they would still need to verify some number of those units to make sure they weren't backdoored (although doing it at the assembly location/warehouse on one big event day would handle it nicely. Once that step is done and the traded serials can be verified in the field, we will have almost trustworthy electronic voting. Particularly if each machine cryptographically signs its voting lists when finished, and ideally provides the voter a hash to verify their vote matches what they input while retaining their anonymity until and unless they need to contest a miscast vote.
What's next, letting EVERY citizen vote?
The voting system will also be designed to create fully verifiable and transparent results so that voters don't have to blindly trust that the machines and election officials delivered correct results.
And ... it comes with a free unicorn!
The only way we can achieve secure voting is to get rid of this stupid notion that voting has to be done in secrecy. Once we do away with that, we could all literally watch our vote get counted. But as it stands, the very nature of secrecy leads to insecurity.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/12/republicans-finally-have-a-voter-fraud-scandal-and-none-of-them-want-to-talk-about-it/
Having studied this issue for a very long time I'm perpetually frustrated with the Computer scientists constantly injecting overly clever desiderata that can only be implemented at the sacrifice of core requirements of voting systems.
the core requirements are
1. Secret ballot so no one can tell how you voted.
2. Secret ballot so you cannot prove to anyone how you voted even if you want to. (too often ignored)
3. transparency at a level where an ordinary person can reasonably see how the security works
4. Robust against operator errors. Mistakes happen, power gets lost, protocols are not followed.
5. Resistant to cheating.
6. in the event of a failure, Ballots must be re countable-- preferably at a precinct level
What the computer scientists is inject nice-to-have but unnessassary desiderata, like "crytpographic proof your vote was counted" and encrytption. These, to date, always sacrifice one of the requirements. For example, many (not all) proof of vote systems will violate 2, allowing you to prove how you voted. indeed many touch screens allow proving how you voted using a video inside the voting booth (whereas paper ballots have to be publically deposited and videos can be prevented). Many (not all) cryptosystems reduce the number of people who know the keys but this comes at the price of concentration where a few people can change all the ballots without detection, whereas distribnuted precint counting makes whole sale attacks hard.
Serial numbers on ballots, to the voter, appear to offer a way to track their ballot to them. Even if you tell them the cypto prevents this an ordinary person cannot possibly tell that. Ballots need to be indistinguishable.
Thus I worry that people doing this are trying to "improve" something with "more features" that already has a good solution. namely hand marked paper ballots and optical scan.
when an optical scanner breaks down you can still collect the ballots. People can still vote. And you don't get long lines when you are short on equipment or the power goes down because all you need is more pens and desks. Optical scans are easy to recount by humans at a precint level.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
byte ^ cipher_or_key_byte
or let everyone on the planet harass you for your vote cause that's what they do
Good, fuck that unconstitutional bullshit
I've posted this before, but it's worth saying again.
In the early 2000s, there was a GNU project to build a secure online voting system. They ceased work in 2002, citing the project as being at best difficult and at worst, impossible. They quoted Bruce Schneier, one of the foremost experts in computer security as saying "a secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers... [B]uilding a secure Internet-based voting system is a very hard problem, harder than all the other computer security problems we've attempted and failed at. I believe that the risks to democacy are too great to attempt it."
I see no evidence that Schneier has changed his mind or that any other comparably qualified expert has suggested he's wrong.
The real issue with electronic voting isn't even the hackability of the system. Or the fact that an exploit scales to an entire country. The real problem is that there's no assurance anymore. A very simple process turns into something opaque.
For you americans who don't understand how voting is done properly in the rest of the world, it goes like this:
You put an X in the circle or box of your choice (sometimes several X in several boxes, but nothing too complicated). Then you seal that paper in an envelope or you simply fold it. Then you drop it into a box. That box is watched over by volunteers from all the major parties and basically everyone who cares to spend his time checking that the election is done properly. These same people at the end of the day open the box and count the votes.
At no point is anything not accounted for. At no point is there an attack vector. The whole thing is so simple that an idiot can understand it and that's the point - because it means that every idiot or non-idiot can check it and verify that all is well. Think the box has been tampered with? Go and check the box. Think the paper is special? Go and check the paper. Think some votes were thrown into the box at the beginning of the session? Check the box at the beginning, then seal it, and at the end count the number of paper slips against your very simple tally sheet of people who voted.
There are ways to fuck with the system, of course, there always are. But the low-tech approach also means they are low-tech and can be spotted. Tell me how you'll find the kernel-level backdoor in the voting system that knows which bits to flip in-memory without leaving any traces on the disk. And the number of people capable of validating a system at such a level are low enough to be pressured or bribed.
A highly distributed low-tech system is exactly what we want for something like elections.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'd bet 100 dogecoins that they're using blockchains. Trendy. That part about transparency kind of tips it off. Whatever happened to paper ballots, anyway?
Have you read my blog lately?
1. There is very little evidence of illegals voting.
2. How is this stealing if it's done by the states?
3. Enfranchising citizens is bad?
Oh, it's much, much worse. You really need to look at the big picture. It is a known fact that their chemtrails trigger enzymes they injected into your bloodstream when they vaccinated you, that turn you into a mindless drone who will vote for any candidate the deep state Ivy-league Fake News Illuminati tells you to. Our only hope is that the courageous Russian freedom fighters will oversee our elections from outside the left wing mind control zone and ensure that saviors like Trump get elected. They are trying to stop this with their "secure voting" nonsense, but it's a desperate last-ditch attempt that will surely fail.
Or maybe they're just trying to make voting systems more resistant to tampering. But only the crazies believe that.
Therefore I do not trust your voting system that I do not fully grok, and/or of which I cannot inspect every detail of the proceedings in person.
And I trust people that do not understand this even less.
The anonymous nature of the ballot means that discovering fraud after the fact is nearly impossible.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Illegal Aliens are not Citizens
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
True.
The real problem with Hardware in general is that Physical Access trumps almost all security.
There needs to be standards and accountability controlling unsupervised access to the machines (and auditable controls governing access to any code that goes onto them). There needs to be some way for an independent third party to determine that the machine has not been tampered with through some mechanism, though that is true for all voting machines.
And it is still subject to the whims of the people in power and national security - if you can't examine it in detail - how secure is it really?
DNC rigged their primary to make Sanders lose.
Evidence of rigging a national election vs your BS. But go ahead and ignore it like a good little liberal.
To be honest, this doesn't sound like something in DARPA's normal wheelhouse. It's not really "defense" nor "advanced."
Are we using DARPA as a slushfund now?
States decided to join the union because the electoral college arrangement at the time gave individual states more of a say in how the country would be run. If the electoral college is eliminated then states should have the right to decide if they want to remain in the union or secede from the union.
Illegal Aliens are not Citizens
Neither are legal ones. What's your point?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I don't understand how nobody ever mentions this but voting machines can't be both anonymous AND verifiable.
The only way to check on the count is to ask the machine itself so it's no verification at all.
That should be obvious to anyone thinking about it for more than 2 minutes.
But whatever a man can make, a man can break.
E Proelio Veritas.
No one was removed from any roles and no one was disenfranchised. the list was merely intended to be the basis for investigations.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
States also joined with the arrangement at the time that they could keep slavery. Things change.
Even so, it was always possible for the populous states to have a popular-vote covenant. So the small states should have known that when they ratified the constitution.
Giving the answers to questions is shady, but not illegal. Whereas Trump money laundering for the Russian mob and accepting hacker help from Vladimir Putin, then kissing Putin's cock on television and lying to the US voters?
That's treason. Rope is coming.
https://blog.torproject.org/deterministic-builds-part-two-technical-details
You're correct with point one; there's little evidence here, a little over there, a little everywhere. A constant string of arrests and court cases, but no, no one precinct is responsible for millions of fraudulent votes.
They're not that stupid, nor do they have to be. Grab a hundred illegals, lose some ballots in the shuffle, find some in the trunk of a car during a recount and baby, you just stole a district.
That's why registration is important, that's on place you can much more easily catch those problems. And you need anonymous ballots for a free democracy.
The 1960 John F. Kennedy vs. Richard Nixon election is widely acknowledged to have been rigged
There have been no changes in the law to prevent exactly the same thing from happening now and there are no efforts to determine if it still happening.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
trump will still win.
First you say the problem is proving your vote was counted. And when that is refuted your comeback is to say there's excess registered voters. That's a logical disconnect and doesn't support your original assertion. You are just flinging mud at the wall and avoiding reason
Colluding with the Boston Harold to run stores written by Clinton campaign is ok? Not reporting that as an "in kind" donation to her campaign is legal?
I think we have different definitions of legal and not legal. Mine is based on black and white laws written down and passed. Yours is based on what you hope.
Funny how they are attempting to charge Trump for doing the same thing with the National Enquirer, but don't have evidence of him doing it. I guess you assume laws apply to GOP but not DNC.
You didn't mention "blockchain", no funding for you. ;-)
1. First machine is a touch screen. Voters make selections on screen.
2. Once done a paper ballot with their selections is spit out, and they can visually check the ballot
3. Second machine is a optical reader from a different vendor, and must use a different OS from the 1st machine. Paper ballot is inserted and read.
4. Results from both machines are fed to a computer to be compared. If they match, vote goes through. If they do not match, vote is scrubbed and voter asked to try again.
You have verification from two independent systems AND a paper ballot at the end.
You are welcome.
Holy shit, SCORES? Literally DOZENS? Obviously this is a clear and present danger to our democracy! Yikes!
Yeah, because a handful of votes at the "correct" time and place can't have disproportionately wide ramifications ... oh wait
... oh wait.
Now replace parent with employer, phone pics of paper ballot or paper verification for a "bonus".
Or replace employer with a political operative paying out cash.
Its not like these weren't problems in America's past
I have personally seen shuttle buses of non-English-speaking illegals being taken to more than one voting location in Spokane WA. In other words they voted more than one time, and should not have been allowed to vote in our elections at all. I have heard this practice also takes place in Seattle. They were not even trying to hide it - I asked what they were doing and they told me. I wanted to see where they came from so I followed one of the buses, which just went to another voting location - three different ones that I saw before needing to get back to work.
Until the media stops ignoring this kind of thing I think it will just get worse. Time for voter ID laws.
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
You mean like put it in a vault like an ATM? I don't know how people survive in the real world without trusting electronic funds transfers. Money is a little more important to most people than a single vote in a single election and yet nobody is putting on their tinfoil hat about that.
Wait? You claim to believe in black&white laws. And, you make a stink over Clinton and Boston Globe and how wrong and illegal it was. But, in the same breath, you then cry when itâ(TM)s Trump and the National Enquirer?
It might seem unfair that when the House and Senate were GOP controlled, Clinton got off. But, now that thereâ(TM)s A split congress and scrutiny is on Trump, you whine?
Which is it? Do you want to see laws regardless of political party or financial means equally enforced or not?
I have personally seen shuttle buses of non-English-speaking illegals being taken to more than one voting location in Spokane WA.
Is there a particular reason you decided to join their conspiracy instead of reporting it?
Also, do your telepathic powers only reveal citizenship status, or can you get other information?
Alternatively, and far more likely, you're lying.
He thinks it's "The Boston Harold" - too fucking hilarious. Uneducated Republicans go from not knowing how to spell basic shit to not knowing they're traitors. First world illiterate problems.
Has anyone considered the idea of having a computerized input create a paper output? The machine capturing the input from the user wouldn't even necessarily have to store any information (other than the bare minimum for the system to work). The output could be in a grid form, such as a 2D barcode, ensuring consistency in output format (thereby making optical scanners already in use for paper ballots easier to work with) and reducing paper usage. It doesn't solve everything, but it DOES allow for a more digestible interface (for those keen to the movie Idiocracy) and consistent output (no half-marked replies or "dangling chads"...I shudder to even use the phrase).
I read this entire comment thread and was both surprised and disappointed at the lack of the obligatory xkcd.
Open Voting Consortium was working on this issue for a long time.
I think it was mainly Alan Dechert driving it and it ran out of gas due to lack of support and funding?
Wiki --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Voting_Consortium
The DARPA system also uses paper ballots as an intermediary (prints the ballots, then inset into scanner for tabulation.) If you're personally delivering it, the only advantage a "vote by mail" ballot has over this system is that someone else can fill it out for you/observe your vote. Which is only an advantage if you're selling your vote
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Source?
Evidence?
After two years of this unbelievable extensive investigation, so you a shred of evidence to back up your absurd conspiracy theory?
So, you read the article and quoted it here. Except #4 doesn't happen automatically (the optical reader tabulates, checked against a human count of the paper ballots). And the whole system is made by one company.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
a new $10 million contract the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched to design and build a secure voting system that it hopes will be impervious to hacking.
They're spending $10M on paper ballots and human eyeball counts??
There is massive evidence that illegals vote, they admit it ! This is a far bigger problem of foreign interference in our elections than anything "Russia" did.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/26/texas-officials-flag-tens-thousands-voters-citizenship-checks/?utm_term=.7b53be140cba&noredirect=on
You can find the .pdf of this peer reviewed academic paper that finds they do vote, they admit it.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379414000973
"Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections?
Jesse T. Richman a, *, Gulshan A. Chattha b, c, 1, David C. Earnest b
a Department of Political Science, Old Dominion University, BAL 7000, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA b Old Dominion University, USA c George Mason
Over 1000 voters voting in Virginia are non citizens
https://publicinterestlegal.org/files/Report_Alien-Invasion-in-Virginia.pdfUniversity, USA" Electoral Studies 36 (2014) 149e157
Hell, everyone in Chicago know that dead people vote, and California just admitted thousands if illegals were registered to vote with their motor-voter rules
You are believing the Democrat main stream media's lies about this. This is a massive problem, repeatedly lied about in the media. Wake up !
Hell, everyone in Chicago know that dead people vote, and California just admitted thousands if illegals were registered to vote with their motor-voter rules.
and witnesses to watch over the local count.
Candidates suggest some of their own trusted witnesses, gov has a few witnesses, civil society has some witnesses.
Then count the nations votes in front of many witnesses.
Everything adds up as each vote is seen and counted in front of many people.
No code, computers to vote with are needed.
Computer systems are liked by failed nations governments that want to subtly flip votes.
Use paper to vote and photo ID every citizen.
Enjoy some democracy without computers and illegal immigrants voting.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
About Faking Time,
What Surprised me, is not one opensource company has done this.
Bingo.
Contract used to entice was electoral college.
For whatever reason.
Change the terms and the non changing entity gets to choose whether to let it slide or whether to walk away .
Easy to see groups of 4-5 states reforming smaller country in the case of revoking electoral college.
Keep sucking on the FoxNews teat, imbecile.
It's easy, I'll do it for free. Reason why no one succeeds is because the powers don't want democracy
Great Idea! Good luck getting past the crooked politicians! The last thing it seems either of the major parties want is a fair, user level voting system. They both seem to want a system they can rig to the candidate of their choice rather than spending the time to actually find a person qualified to run!
I knew it! And those incompetent Democrats, with their illegal vote buying scams, still couldn't manage to win the popular vote. The crazy, almost literally unbelievable thing, is how they managed to get millions of illegal immigrants to vote in a massive conspiracy and not a single one of those illegals has been bribed to admit it and provide proof.
Certainly, it must be illegals voting, because no registered voter would not have voted.
Also, use tin foil for your hat, aluminum doesn't work! The lizard people can still see your thoughts!
You're overreacting. There's a vaccine for chemtrails.
He thinks it's "The Boston Harold" - too fucking hilarious. Uneducated Republicans go from not knowing how to spell basic
Uneducated Russians ...
FTFY
Doesn't matter how secure the vote counting is if it's the voters that have been hacked.
C'mon. By now every child knows it is not possible. Not matter how much money one throws at this.
That was hilarious... I think. Honestly, things are to the point now where I can't even be sure if you're joking. I sincerely hope you are.
Might makes right irrelevant.
Oh yeah - they couldn't HACK paper ballots and steal elections, i.e. undermine democracy.
The Robinson Method of voting is fraud proof, needs no electricity, and provides instant results, as soon as the final vote has been cast. Unfortunately the website is now down due to a MYSQL problem:
http://www.paul-robinson.us/index.php/2008/10/25/the_robinson_method_a_really_simple_way_?blog=5
If that site ever comes back up, you'll find a simple and trustworthy method for voting.
The entire election system was rigged, the moment they started to use electronic voting, it's so obviously designed to defraud the American people.
Thank you for the input, comrade.
F-off you Russian troll! Nothing you said is true.
I am all about tech and computers. It's my life.
All voting should be done on paper ballots at a polling place with proper oversight.
Anything else cannot truly be trusted and is a threat to democracy.
Like I'd trust any software from Oregon, the same state that introduced voter fraud by mail, and which Sens. Merkley and Wyden want to see exported nationwide?
FACT: there is no such thing as 100% secure software. Not Fakebook. Not Twitter. Not even Cisco firewalls with their backdoors. Let's go back to in-person voting by precinct using ID, staffed by neighbors, where everybody knows your name ... and face.
Solved.
Large print versions for people like me. Larger scan-tron circles too please. Suggest a specific marker to make filling the bubbles a 2-3 touch thing based on the size of the marker.
The hard part is having the correct version of the paper at the correct location.
But if you vote early like me, that doesn't matter. The biggest hassle to voting early is the postage. They use heavy paper stock, so putting the vote inside an envelop, inside an envelop with all my private data on the outside means it weighs almost exactly 1 oz. I weighed mine last fall. It was just a tad under 1 oz, but the outside envelop claimed, incorrectly, that additional postage would be required.
Voting machines just need to be like a chromebook. TPS chips, read-only OS and data files with the ballot DB being the only thing that isn't read-only.
It must produce human readable paper output that gets put into a ballot box as leaving the location. The paper and voting record in the DB need a crypto-generated-number so they can be matched later. No paper, no vote.
Democracy gets immediate results, which can be human audited for accuracy and public trust is restored. Just don't let them use thermal printing that lasts less than a year. Outsiders need to be able to independently validate, using the paper only, the votes for at least a year.
And stop putting political parties on the ballots. I'm voting for the human, not the party. The parties have way too much power in US elections. This isn't good for democracy. Everyone sees this, except the parties, of course.
As for voter ID. Just mandate that everyone, everywhere, bring their voter registration card with them. That is just as much hassle for everyone. I'd have to search for mine.
Internet-based voting needs to be against federal law. This is a stupid idea and always will be a stupid idea. It is just too easy to DDoS internet connected systems. Also, the whole "anonymous ballot" fails with internet voting.
I'm available for consultation at $300/hr at your location, or $100/hr remotely. I really hate to travel. 25+ yrs experience in huge and tiny-scale systems, including flight control and guidance.
We need anonymized networked implants that only collect an individuals votes and report them anonymously and securely. This is the only way. It will improve voter turnout to 100% everytime, and it will make it impossible for an election to be stolen.
I suppose accurate mind-reading-votes satellites supported by groundbased database is probably a more elegant solution.
There. Pay me the 10 million you dumb fucks.
The RNC rigged their primary to ensue Paul lost to Romney.
They're all a bunch of crooks. Both sides.