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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

Open source voting software will never replace proprietary voting software, because open discussion of voting software security will reveal that it's impossible to build hack-proof voting terminals.

Paper ballots are a superior technology.

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You can stuff ballot boxes, that's where the term comes from. Nothing is "hack-proof."

I think it's funny that people are freaking out on HN about this. The hacks at Defcon all took a long time to do, and I believe all required keys to the machines, and all were done on older voting machines. There has been no evidence of people hacking machines during the elections. Stuffing ballot boxes and other forms of voting fraud have been around for a long time, and nothing we do is going to stop it 100%.

Also voting machines generally have paper copies that print off the back of the machine that are anonymized but can be matched if foul play is called into question, at least in my area. Couple that with monitors that stand near machines or walk around and I feel pretty comfortable with electronic voting.

The only plausible hack would be an inside job, but I too find this difficult to believe. It would takes tons and tons of people to hack the machines if it required physical access. You'd have to hack ever machine, and even when you were done there are so many districts it would be nearly impossible to swing the election in any meaningful way.

The point is that paper ballots are harder to tamper with. To the point that at scale it becomes impossible to rig an election in the vast majority of cases.

Some things don't need a technological solution. Pen and paper and thumb dye generally work just fine.

And what seems most important to me, the failure modes are obvious.

Any school teacher who's collected tests from naughty 10 year olds can imagine all of them. These are the people who volunteer to show up and watch the process, in every district.

It's not enough to have a very low rate of cheating. The legitimacy of the process depends on this fact being clear to everyone. The fewer over-educated specialists you have to trust to be sure of this, the better.

When you say the hacks took a long time, are you talking about the time to study and understand the machines or the time a prepared tampering would take?

Let's think through the process of "ballot box stuffing".

You'd need to put enough ballots in the box to sway the count in your favor, while being watched by multiple people from both "sides" who all don't trust one another.

But let's assume you are able to do that somehow (hey, maybe you paid them all off?). Great! You've swayed the counts in one precinct... In 2012 there were 2712 voting precincts in Virginia... So to sway one state, you'd need most likely thousands of people working together and not one of them can reveal the whole plan. And that will get you one state, so multiply it by 50 to really sway an election (yes, i know you wouldn't need all 50, but ether way it's still way beyond realistic). At that scale it seems like it would be easier to just convince people to vote with you.

And you'd need to do all of that without leaving any kind of paper trail. Paper costs money, printing costs money, it's not going to be cheap or easy to hide making all those ballots. Someone is going to notice. And all it takes is one slip up, and it's all over.

Nobody is saying pencil+paper voting is perfect, just that it's the best thing we have at scale, and it's extremely difficult to "hack" without someone noticing.

> multiply it by 49

Increase by 49 or multiply by 50, no?

thanks, I fixed it!

Exactly, software hacking voting machines scales much easier.

And yet in spite of the difficulties, it happens.

Even so, I’m in favor of paper ballots - I think voting machines are nothing more than rent seeking by their manufacturers.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/11/us/how-johnson-won-electio...

It's important to note I think that the article is talking about a party primary not the actual election where the increased scrutiny and number of interested parties increases several times.

Party primaries generally happen when other, more local offices and initiatives are in the ballot, and often the primary for the other parties as well. It is exceedingly rare (at least in California) to have a single item ballot. It’s arguable that the local / state items are more important to most voters than the party primary, so there would still be plenty of scrutiny.

That varies a lot state by state. Here in NC for instance pretty much everything is on the main November ballot and the primaries are just primaries. We don't really have things like ballot initiatives or referendums though.

You wouldn't need to swing even half the states. Swinging a single key state like Florida could have a major impact on an election.

> In 2012 there were 2712 voting precincts in Virginia... So to sway one state, you'd need most likely thousands of people working together and not one of them can reveal the whole plan.

But you are still talking about thousands of people, MAYBE hundreds if it's a close election and you are really really strategic.

With something electronic, at the very best you end up needing the same number of people at the same amount of locations. But this time instead of having to stuff a bunch of ballots into a box without anyone seeing you, you just need time alone with a machine at any point before voting or even during voting. (and I'll honestly admit I don't know which of those is easier, but that's before we get into all the other issues with electronic voting)

I think there is a possibility that electronic voting could be better at some point in the far off future, but in reality and right now, the benefits don't even begin to outweigh the negatives.

You can stuff ballot boxes, but it's hard to do it in a way that isn't transparently obvious that it has occured.

> The hacks at Defcon all took a long time to do

90 minutes or less, from unprepared attendees, some of which didn't even know they would be seeing a voting machine that day [1].

> Also voting machines generally have paper copies that print off the back of the machine

This wasn't always the case, and a few bad elections happens from 2004-2006 as a result. There is also not a guarantee the voter has checked/understood the paper receipt. Overall the concept helps quite a bit.

> The only plausible hack would be an inside job

Polling station staffers are volunteers, and there are lots of them. Not particularly difficult.

Voting machines themselves are known to store results in unencrypted, easily editable MS Access databases. This allows editing/suppression of votes en masse with no trail. If said attacker can find a way to also tamper with the paper receipts (print a different result that the voter doesn't notice, or don't print at all, or make the printout unreadable), mass shenanigans could ensue.

All this just to say, "hey, it uses paper for verification on the backend, so it's fine." But we're paying companies to develop insecure machines, training voters to trust them, and bringing the integrity of our democracy into question along the way.

Just fill out a piece of paper. It's not that hard to count the votes.

1. http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/defcon-hackers-us-voting-machi...

> impossible to build hack-proof voting terminals.

Suppose they do build a hack-proof voting terminal - how can you tell that's what you're voting on, and not a compromised machine with identical appearance? De-cap all the chips and put them under an electron-microscope?

This, this, this.

I work in hardware verification and have worked in software verification in the past.

I still wouldn't trust voting machines that I had verified myself. How could I tell my program apart from software that "looked" right?

I can't fathom why anyone who is honest wants to bring electronics into this.

In the past, I was a strong proponent of digital networked voting systems in general, as a means to bring us closer to direct democracy. I had hoped that we would be able to vote on specific issues, continuously, with little ceremony or friction. I thought that we might be able to make it as simple as hitting a +/- X button, where X is your current share of the decision (you have a pool of votes for many subjects).

The thought was, that even though a system like this could not be understood by current people, future people would have a reason to learn the technology, as they learned about vehicles and the web, because it shapes every facet of their society, in real time. It would also give us a clear case for legislating software and hardware security standards. Not my area of expertise, but do you think that standards could be devised and mandated to make hardware verification feasible, at least for medium-tech applications?

So, that's how honest people desire technological progress in the voting system. Now, I can see that we need to keep these endeavors low-key, while we cross the gap of failure between "interesting" and "robust". It could take us generations to cross that gap. Let's just keep all this experimental stuff in the digital currency / digital contract field, for now, and tell the dreamers to be patient, rather than insisting that we abandon the whole idea.

It's quite easy to make them disappear or bulk fill them. Like bank notes, paper ballots can be counterfeited.

Canton of Geneva have open sourced their voting app. https://github.com/republique-et-canton-de-geneve/chvote-1-0

Of course there will never be a perfect way. However, I have a feeling that by multiplying voting methods, fraud impact can be contained. Mail vote increases the number of people voting and have the same positive effect (drowning a fraud in valid results).

I doubt this is the case at least in the US. Polls are staffed locally by volunteers who are quite often members of the local community. Others can (and do) stay and witness the counting of votes when polls close. I think it would be pretty obvious if what got posted didn't line up with what you witnessed first hand just a few hours before, especially when you can walk down the street and ask your sister what she counted.

I believe that in the UK, the number of ballots given out at the polling station is strictly counted, and when the ballot box is opened, the first check is that the number in the box matches.

I'm not sure what they do if someone has taken a ballot but not put it in the box.

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