Estonia is one of the best context :
In the 2019 parliamentary elections, 247,232 people, or 43.8% of all participants, voted over the Internet.
In the 2017 local municipal elections, 186,034 people voted over the Internet. This means that roughly 31.7% of participating voters gave their vote over the Internet
Estionia is going full speed into electronic and internet vote, but hey ! It was declared a success by Estonian election officials, so … it must be ok ! right ?!
The media and the processes matters equally, this is not an exclusive choice, you must have both right
Avoid U.S. Postal Service radiation scanning of mailed packages. According to the CompactFlash Association, X-ray scanners at airports will not damage CompactFlash cards but radiation scanning by the U.S. Postal Service may damage them. Because of this warning by the CompactFlash Association regarding mail irradiation by the U.S. Postal Service, it may be preferable to use a commercial service such as FedEx, UPS or other private carrier as an alternative to mailing Flash storage devices by U.S. mail.
A contracted delivery person for the US postal service was on the TV news just recently, describing the fraudulent trays of ballots that he delivered from New York, in to the polling places in Pennsylvania. He said that most of the trays looked different than just a small number of the trays. Most of the trays had perfectly marching ballots, like you would see if they all had just came off of the same printing press with no creases nor folds in them. A few of the trays had ballots with the normal folds and scuff marks and differences that one would expect to see in real ballots. They were all being delivered to the same site. In another news story, stacks of ballots were recently found printed, already filled-out, right off of the printing press. This corroborated stories of the total sum of votes cast being greater than the number of registered voters.
Maybe blockchain voting is the answer. You would install an app to your phone and would be issued an electronic voting token after verifying your citizenship and residency. Then after voting from your phone, you could check back later to examine your place in the block chain and see how you voted. Other than your own ballot, you wouldn’t be able to tie a name to any other ballot. The voting could start at 7:00 AM on election day and could end at 8:00 PM the same day. You would vote right from the ballot on your own phone. An hour after voting closes in the last time zone, the election results could ba announced. Committies of auditors of such a system could be comprised of people representing any constituency that wants to assign a representative expert to represent them. The actual code used in each election would be published to the public domain.
I read something funny the other day: In a Democracy, two wolves and a lamb might vote on what to have for lunch. In a Democratic Republic, the lamb comes well armed.
Because with this, you giving power to whom ever is behind Android to target 10% of the voters they have identified as non technical person and have no technical person close to them, and push a modified version of the voting app : your blockchain is useless if the vote put in it has been falsified
That’s one way how I would attack the vote, there are many more.
If you authorize this, why not a facebook or twitter vote ?
No voting system should be at the mercy of the G-MAFIA (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Apple)
I think you’ve made good points here for the most part. Yes, FOSS sounds appetizing, but again, that can expose bugs to would-be hackers. Your points about every system requiring some level of trust in the system is also accurate. It is a really tough social/technological dilemma to have a concrete solution for. If you ask me, there is no bulletproof method. Best thing I can come up with is say the last generation of mechanical punch card ballot machines, combined with a mechanical counter in some fashion. It would be more accurate than a pure hand count, but wouldn’t have the pitfalls of potential digital interference. Yes you may lose a vote here or there, but the implication of numbers being hacked and skewed on an electronic system at a larger scale is far scarier to me. I find it hard to trust software of any kind (FOSS or closed source) for anything when it comes to something as important as democracy.
Here is important detail. Recently I was renewing my ID, and along with it I’ve requested an electronic token. Here’s the thing: There was no possibility to generate my keys on my computer and then transfer them to the token. In all availabale scenarios, I had to trust some other entity to do it for me. It is only reasonable to assume that the state has retained a copy of my private keys, before handing them over to me, and so can impersonate me at will.
I have to trust the state to be honest.
I live in Poland and trusting the state to be honest is a tall order.
Educating people to understand the importance of not sharing the keys, not having them generated by the state, and finally providing people with means to generate their keys is even less possible at the moment.
i know there are people in the ‘state’ that are largely trustworthy (as far as human nature allows for that) but i also know that there are certain individuals who have a very significant influence on how things are run …
I think that in a blockchain system, the encryption aspect of the system is nearly full proof from cracking in unauthorized ways. I say “nearly” because Bitcoin has been cracked and stolen from in the past. But those holes have been patched and are “nearly” un-crackable now. Bitcoin is probably as secure now as our Federal Reserve money system in the US is. In fact the ability of some level of cracking being built in to the system is what makes blockchains more secure. No election at its very best anywhere has ever had that level of effective security that a good blockchain algorithm could bring.
Tokens could be issued on thumb drives for non-technical people or a person could vote through a web browser on a PC. Or they could show up at the polls, insert their thumb drive, and enter their password and then vote there. The elderly and handicapped could ask trusted family members to log in through the internet later to see if their vote looks like it represents their choices after the election is over. And just like your bitcoin account, no one could login without the right password. Also, since elections are infrequent, you could change or reset your password for each election. Crackers would only have a twelve-hour window within which to both steal both your token and then after that, to figure out what your password is. At worst, a few people might get hacked out of the entire population during any election. Blockchain also has the benefit of permanently retaining any history in an unchangeable way. So if an election were to somehow be stolen, everything could be fully re-created without any loss of data (no dumping of paper copies would help). The checksum information would have to balance through a chain encompassing every vote cast and would be impossible to falsify.
The software could remain open source still. I can tell from what some people in this thread say, that they still do not understand the concept of open source. Just having the source code never gives anyone an advantage over any others, for as long as the code remains in the public domain. The secrecy of compiled code never gives any hackers any kind advantage. Just when you think you’re the smartest one in the room, you always find out that there is someone smarter than you, somewhere in the world and with the prospect of prison time looming, it’s just easier to be honest.
Securing a vote requires different mesures compared to securing a bitcoin wallet
And I think you missed my points :
Your block chain is useless if I falsified the data before you put it in the block chain.
Your open source is useless if the hardware used or the executable running has been modified
I am astonished by the confidence you have about this, have you ever done some research about how much flaws have been found in blochains those past years ?
And you are comparing a system used in every day life to a system which will be used 1 or 2 or 3 time a year, it gives you much less room to find flaws, or repair the damage done.
Hacking a technology, gives you a fast and automated ability to reach millions of votes and may not be traced
It’s much harder with paper because it involve much more people, leaves much more traces, and takes much more time and ressources to perform only a tiny fraction of the automated one.
Another point, I’ll make against blockchain : is it full proof against the growing quantum computing ?
A lots of security technologies are relying on the fact that regular computing sucks at resolving some mathematical problems
Problems solves in days by regular computing, will be resolved in seconds with quantum computing
By acknowledging computer vote as a secure system now (which is not), you may screw the futur generation in 50 or 100 years, because the systems will become more and more complex (to strengthen, you need more simple, not complex)
Choosing ease-of-use over security is the best way to loose your democratic vote
I’m sorry, but … what is that ? I don’t want to be rude, but… are you living in a fantasy dream ?
You know that there are laws against killing each other ? did them stop people from killing each other ?
You know that a foreign country don’t care about your interior laws ? Do you really think no country are messing with other countries elections ?
I agree that there should be a fully auditable election process. Given the current alternatives, I would prefer paper ballots, but if we are going to have electronic voting machines, I would prefer that they only run on FOSS and have free/open source schematics that can be reviewed by any concerned citizen.
Some FOSS components have been incorporated into voting machines, according to this article, but I distrust any system where ordinary citizens can’t verify how it functions. The closed audits by security experts didn’t discover the flaws in the Swiss voting system via the internet. It was only when the Swiss code was leaked and the code could be examined by the community that the flaws were discovered, so I don’t trust a closed audit to be as good as the public review of the code that is possible with FOSS.
There is a bunch of FOSS available for voting, but I can’t find any voting machines that have free/open schematics. The Prime III developed by Dr. Juan Gilbert is FOSS that can run on standard hardware and Microsoft’s ElectionGuard has been demonstrated running on a Surface and an Xbox, but I would like to see a voting machine with auditable hardware as well. It would be fantastic if someone started a company to make that sort of machine.
In my opinion, a good electronic voting machine should immediately print out a paper ballot with the selections marked by the voter. The voter can then scan the paper ballot to verify that it is correct and then drop it into the ballot box. In an audit or recount, the paper ballots can be hand counted to verify that they match the vote total that was tallied electronically.
@StevenR, I am skeptical about this incident, because I can hardly find any media coverage of it by what I consider to be reputable media. The best coverage that I can find of this incident is this article by the Michigan Star, which is part of the Star chain of conservative online news sites for different states.
If you read the report by the Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), which was submitted as expert testimony to the Bailey v Antrim County court case, it lacks the details to back up many of its assertions. I looked into the ASOG, and from what I can find about it, it doesn’t appear to be a credible security firm. After reading Politifact’s analysis, the Michigan State Attorney General’s office statement about the case and Dominion Voting’s statement, I believe that Russell Ramsland is using the ASOG as a means to propagate partisan misinformation.
Dominion claims that the problems with the Antrim County voting machines were caused because their code wasn’t updated according to the proper procedure and they would have counted the vote correctly if they had been updated properly.
I expect this court case to end up like the others, where there wasn’t credible evidence to back up the claims of voting fraud. At this point, the Trump campaign has lost 59 out of 60 of its post-election lawsuits. The one case that the Trump campaign has won was whether the Pennsylvania Attorney General had the power to declare that voters could verify their address until November 12 or until November 9 as the law stipulated, which had almost no effect on the final vote tally.
The unfortunate effect of these lawsuits is that anyone who criticizes the voting system immediately gets associated with people like Ramsland and dismissed as nuts. It makes it even harder to reform the system when one party feels like it has to defend the existing system and justify it, because the other party is claiming massive voting fraud without the evidence to back it up in court.
All of these problems seem to be caused because of a lack of trust, which is the real issue. The lack of trust exists because the software, firmware, and hardware are all strictly proprietary and kept secret and are not subject to any audits by anyone that both sides can trust. Dominion is a Canadian company with some ownership and financing interests in China.
When it comes to the dismissing of the poll-fraud related court cases, what we are seeing is really sad. Fraud laws vary from state to state. But the elements in each case are similar and have a few elements that can be extremely difficult to prove. For example: here in Arizona I am an officer of a public charity. We had another officer/board member resign and afterward use her connections as an Officer of the Corporation (the Treasurer) to continue representing herself as still being with the charity as a means of stealing thousands of dollars every month, for herself. We had mountains of documentation (proof) as to exactly what she had done. We were shocked at how easy it was to prove things as we gathered the evidence against her. She even put critical information in to the public records herself as she went. And yet we had both her resignation letter and corporate bank account numbers of her accounts that neither we nor the rest of the board had no ownership in nor any access to nor control over ourselves. So we couldn’t prove an ‘intent to deceive’. She did everything so openly that we couldn’t prove that she intended to deceive anyone (even though she had deceived a lot of people). Without being able to prove that she intended to deceive anyone, we couldn’t prove fraud either criminal nor civil. It took two years and a lot of money in a civil suit to stop her. She continually cited ‘lack of proof’. So all we had against her was a civil case of “appropriation”. In the pre-trial conference, the Superior Court judge met with us first and seemed shocked when he realized what was happening. Then he met with her for only roughly five minutes and returned to tell us that she had agreed to all of our terms (to simply stop the fraud going forward). I was shocked and said “wow, how were you able to do that?”. The Judge said with a firm look on his face “I can be very persuasive”.
The United States Supreme Court did the wrong thing in the case of the 2020 poll fraud suit filed by the state of Texas. They were afraid to fight tyranny in the very face of it. Every state has legal standing when fraud in another state takes actions that adversely affects them. I watched the testimony that aired on C-Span about the words spoken as quoted in this article below. This morning I checked back and the original article and video clip has disappeared and Snopes denies it ever happened. The story linked to below only tells about the story without the televised video that I saw with my own eyes.
Just found the original video:
Regardless of what is true or false, this wouldn’t be happening if everyone had the ability to see and audit Dominion’s proprietary software.
Actually, in the Netherlands we went back to manual counting of votes. One of the arguments was that for every citizen it must be fully understandable and verifiable how the voting process works.
A judge ruled that the use of the voting machines was illegal. For the elections in 2008 the red pencil and paper voting forms were re-introduced. Since then, we have been voting by pencil and paper, and manually counted the votes in the Netherlands.
Another argument against voting machines was that the privacy of the voter could not be guaranteed. In the Netherlands it is required that you can cast your vote without that someone can see or otherwise derive what you have been voting.
See also: http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English
Damn ! Didn’t know that about Netherlands, that’s what I love to h̶e̶a̶r̶ read !
Got questions for you : do you know if there were more or less voters after the change ? did it bring more confidence into the process ?
