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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Estonia's e-voting system has well-known flaws: http://estoniaevoting.org/

Voting requires authentication, verifiability and anonymity.

Online electronic voting only allows you to pick two.

They may be lo-fi, but paper ballots work very well here, and engineering a secure Internet voting system which maintains these attributes is a difficult problem.

The people who understand computer security and voting systems well will never design an Internet voting system, because they know it can't be safe. Unfortunately, that means we're left with systems deployed by those who don't understand these well.

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But traditional, non-cryptographic paper ballots allow you to pick none of those things.

Traditional ballots don't really provide any authentication. If you check your mail and find a blank ballot addressed to someone who used to live at your address, you can vote twice. Nobody will know unless that person comes looking for their ballot.

Traditional ballots don't really provide any verification. Sure, two weeks after election day I can look up the code printed on my ballot to see if it's been counted. But there isn't any way to verify that it's been counted correctly, nor is there any way to prove that the system isn't lying to me.

Traditional ballots don't really provide any anonymity. In addition to the aforementioned number printed on the ballot, my return address and signature of displayed on the outside of the envelope. I'm told that whoever or whatever opens the envelope won't look at the ballot inside, but I have no way of proving that.

Authentication, verifiability and anonymity are all properties that can only be implemented with together with the aid of cryptography.

Authentication & anonymity are only not provided under your particular system. An in-person voting system, with unmarked ballots being delivered only after authentication by the election officials, do provide both features.

And what cryptographic system provides a proof that your vote is counted for the total?

There are a number of ways to do it, see the article linked below. Not all of these methods actually require use of a computer to cast a vote, which is why I said traditional paper ballots earlier. This of course still leaves the problem of authentication, which can only really be done with a computer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_...

>engineering a secure Internet voting system which maintains these attributes is a difficult problem.

It's not a hard problem, it's an _impossible_ problem.

If there's any security hole between the BIOS, CPU, firmware, OS, app, a state-sponsored attacker will get it.

The US got into air-gapped systems. You think China (or Russia, Iran, ISIS, Europe, Anonymous, you name it) won't break in?

And what do you do if you discover that there was external vote manipulation? Hold re-elections?

And how easy is it for someone to delete, say, a couple thousand votes in a strategic state? It's hard to physically do it without evidence and a conspiracy, but if a hacker (or a simple bug) gets in, all bets are off.

That's why the paper-trail is so important

If you apply zero-trust (as you are here), then its also _impossible_ to assure all those attributes are present in the current voting system. So I see no harm in attempting to solve for "better" or even "equal but more convenient" than the current. -Which does not technically rule out _some form_ of internet voting.

current voting systems actually work very well with zero-trust.

- You enter into the voting booth with your ballot and cross off your preferred candidate or party. No trust needed.

- You fold it together and put it into a ballot box. No trust needed.

- The ballot box is sealed and driven to a counting station. This is done under supervision of all stakeholders, meaning that cheating is extremely hard because your political adversary is present.

- The ballot boxes are unsealed and the votes are counted. Note that the votes are counted by all stake holders (typically one or more people from each party) making it hard to cheat.

- The final vote is passed on.

None of the above steps require trust in any one person or entity, and the probability of cheating (if the procedure is done correctly) is quite low. If there is some anomaly the votes are saved so they can be counted again.

Literally, all of those trusts in that scenario are with 'people' which are indeed quite easy to corrupt (or fail without awareness). Possibly more so than potential crypto and chain/ledger based systems.

And again if "probability is low" is the bar, then we can surely keep _exploring_ Internet voting systems without engendering rejection as academicly 'impossible' for the whole concept.

Well, you can pick: full verifiability, full authentication, and anonymity-as-long-as-you-dont-share-your-vote-receipt, which might work in some settings where the social norm against something like vote buying is strong enough that the party that tried this would end up with more of its own voters deflecting than opposing voters selling their vote to them.

But there is one more problem: most verifiable voting protocols are fiendishly complex for the average voter to validate, specially if they need to keep in mind how to verify things in a way that is robust to their devices being compromised. If you were holding an election where only people with a crypto or security systems Ph.D. voted and where they would rather punch you in the face than sell you a vote for 1 million USD, then you could have very secure online voting. The real world is a little bit more complex than that... one of the main advantages of paper ballots is that the technology involved is quite widely understood.

>most verifiable voting protocols are fiendishly complex for the average voter to validate

It's easy. You get a large screen "Thanks for voting, hope you trust us!"

When you use a SaaS, you have to trust the provider.

You jumped from "hard to verify" into "hard to vote" with no explanation there.

There's little problem in an election where only people with knowledge of cryptography can verify the official results.

Not quite. Ok, I might be exaggerating with the CS Ph.D. requirement for the average voter, but there are two steps:

1) Verify that my vote was correctly encoded and cast as intended. Every voter must verify this. It can be as "easy" as: printing a hash produced by a voting terminal/device you trust (which doesn't need to be government provided), submitting the resulting encoded vote into a (untrusted) government website where you authenticate with a smartcard, and then later comparing your original hash against a hash published in a newspaper... This exceeds the level of sophistication/care of most voters in any large country.

2) Some organization must check a large trail of signatures, zero-knowledge proofs of correctness, re-encryption mixnets, etc, etc. This can be done well enough as long as every political party and election watchdog has one or two crypto professionals in their employ.

I am not really worried about #2, even though it is harder, I am worried about #1. The important part is that all the checking of the world regarding #2 is useless without at least a representative subset of voters performing #1 (~1% would be enough, but only if distributed uniformly at random, otherwise you can flip votes from the population(s) least likely to check).

Yes, #1 is a bit too hard for everybody to do it. Yet, you can help some random set of your friends, while I help some random set of my friends, we add some neighbors at random, and much quicker than you thought, there will be a representative set of verified votes.

No, you won't. You will get a representative set of "votes for voters who have at least one friend who went to college or had the resources to be a computer geek growing up". Then if I want to manipulate the election, I will just flip votes from elderly lower income voters in rural communities and likely not get caught at all.

For an analogy: I grew up in Mexico during the 70 years PRI rule, and I can tell you in my city, in my polling station, with watchers from all major parties and a few ONGs, it is actually very unlikely that anyone stuffed the ballot. But in a rural area, where Spanish is not the primary language and the poll watchers were all from one party or few enough to be for sale... well... My point being that a similar scheme is quite possible when the barrier is "computer literacy" instead of "rights literacy" or plain old literacy (in the country's majority language, I mean). Either way, the smaller the group of people who understand how the election works, the easier it is to disenfranchise people.

The author has barely anything to say himself about this study. Instead, he hides behind the Estonian government's self-serving response, which seems to depend on a heavy dose of wishful thinking. His proclivity towards avoiding the difficult questions suggests to me that he is incapable of considering the serious concerns raised by this report with adequate rigor and objectivity.

Well, no.... they teach how to do anonymous, verifiable elections when you get a computer science degree. Computers can do it.

How? Do you log in? If you do, how do you prevent tracking/logging?

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