Hacker News Reader

Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

The number of comments here that assume paper ballots are inherently unhackable is disturbing. Paper is a technology like any other and subject to being manipulated by clever folks. The only way to have secure, trustworthy voting systems is to have them constantly being designed, updated, understood and publicly auditable. The only downside inherent to digital vs paper systems is that they're more complex and harder for people to understand and therefore audit, but there are plenty of upsides and the downsides can be mitigated through education. Open source is absolutely important for the auditability of voting software, but the same openness and transparency is just as vital with paper. tl;dr, it's not hard to hack paper!

View on HN

I'd like to question your view.

First, you've omitted a major downside of digital vs. paper systems, scalability. Attacks on paper systems are much harder to scale, are more easily detected and more readily audited by staff who need no IT training/experience. There are other downsides, but scalability is a good example.

Second, the "plenty of upsides" are mere niceties. I don't know of any must-haves unique to digital voting systems. What do they offer that is worth their diminished security compared with paper ballots?

I put security of our electoral process at top priority. Given the difference in attack surfaces of digital systems vs. paper ballots, I can't see a case for the former.

The continuing parade of breaches of supposedly super secure systems indicates we don't yet know how to code systems for large-scale public applications where security is absolutely essential. Paper ballots are the best we have for now.

I think decent paper ballots combined with machine counting, combined with voter ID verification (yes, I went there), combined with some kind of reliability program for poll workers would be a full spectrum kind of solution. It's not one thing that is breaking down here, it's several.

We saw with the Wisconsin recounts that only a couple cities had questionable issues and not enough to change the outcome (this time).

We saw in Michigan and Pennsylvania recounts that something more troubling was going on with Detroit and Philly and the real truth got hidden from public view when the recounts were abruptly ended in those places. I think there was evidence for fraud in certain Detroit precincts, but since that fraud involved Democrats, the media was silent on the issue. It got swept under the rug very fast.

I bet if we look harder we find fraud in Dade County, the state of Nevada, the state of Colorado, and also likely Arizona. Lastly, if we are going to be completely honest, California is allowing illegal immigrants vote in large numbers. Mind you, I'm not anti-Democrat, I'm just anti-fraud.

Verifying ID is a huge step towards ending most of the problems we have. The rest is stopping ballot stuffing and corrupt poll workers tossing out ballots.

> combined with voter ID verification (yes, I went there)

In what place in the US can you vote without ID? Where? Point it out to me. You can't.

To vote, you already have an ID. It's called a Voter Registration Card. To get one, you generally have to cough up a bill, lease, etc. originally and then vote continuously over the years.

At this point, relative to "voting fraud" (the only thing "ID" will solve), you have:

1) No evidence of significant voting fraud anywhere (we lose more ballots to mismarking)

2) Significant evidence of partisan disfranchisement

3) Leaders having been caught ON AIR saying that disfranchisement was the whole purpose

Do you need someone to run up, kick you in the nuts, and yell "IT'S ABOUT DISFRANCHISEMENT" 3 inches from your ear before you get the message?

Now, if you want to talk about election fraud where the counting of the ballots is suspicious, we can chat.

https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state

"Under non-strict requirements, a voter who does not have the necessary identification may still vote without casting a provisional ballot.[1]"

> In what place in the US can you vote without ID? Where? Point it out to me. You can't.

Sure, it's almost everywhere.

For example, I recently voted in the 2016 presidential election. I voted in San Francisco. I didn't have to provide ID. I was allowed to vote despite claiming not to remember my own address. (Which I didn't, because I hadn't lived there for a few years. Voting continuously is certainly not a requirement.)

The normal procedure is that you go to the polling place, they ask you to point yourself out on their list of registered voters, and then you vote without authenticating your identity in any way.

Is this detailed/concrete enough for you?

What happens when someone else shows up and points to the same name? I think what should happen is that it should ask the second person for proof and if they can provide it, the initial vote has to be discarded. But how? How do we know which vote is by the first person?

I assume we don't want to keep track of who voted for whom (secret ballot).

President Obama was right when he said the fix to problems in our democracy is more voter participation. Imagine if close to 100% of those eligible to vote, registered and voted. Voter fraud would be insignificant.

Thank you for having the courage to voice a reasoned opinion on HN.

One thing that I think is overlooked with digital is the ease of it being replicated and backed up. Paper ballots can be destroyed.

I really like the systems where there is an original easy to use paper ballot, that gets fed into a scanner for immediate counting with the ballot being stored securely in a box below the machine. It seems that the ballot could also have a scanned image stored for posterity.

At that point all the digital information can be immediately backed-up, replicated, and so on. It seems like it's the best of both worlds...

There is no legal value to storing the individual ballots after an election result has been certified.

Thanks, you're right... but at least until that date.

The important difference is that paper "hacking" scales as O(n) while computer hacking scales as O(1).

If you hack election software, you can change thousands or millions of votes as easily as one. The physical nature of paper means you have to work for each ballot.

Yea but to his previous point, the auditability of a digital system could be much more sophisticated then paper

That difference may not be accurate, though. It's assuming there is a way of networking between the machines and that code will be portable enough to affect N number of machines. I don't think either is necessarily true.

Even for the paper side. Most paper ballets are counted by machine so they could easily be tampered with at the count or when they're printed having a similar scale.

> Most paper ballets are counted by machine so they could easily be tampered with at the count […]

Do you have a source for that statement? In Germany, ballots are counted by people making tally marks on paper.

Hmm, not off hand. I'll see what I can find. It was my understanding from the hanging chad situation in Florida years ago that, at least in the states, most are initially counted by machine.

Edit: Here you go. I couldn't find research or a study regarding it but this is probably good enough and was always my experience when I voted by paper: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/vote-counts-ballot-get-counted...

>Most paper ballets are counted by machine

And recount-able by hand in case there is doubt.

We count them twice by hand here in Sweden and we get the preliminary result just a few hours after the polls close, so I do not see why one has to use a machine.

> I do not see why one has to use a machine.

One reason is that Americans vote a lot more than Swedes. Here in California I have probably ~100 elections to vote in for each I had in Sweden.

> while computer hacking scales as O(1).

Not necessarily. I'm not cryptography expert, but I suspect some kind of proof-of-work system can be used for ballots.

Perhaps, but they have bulk insertion.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3796116/Putin-s-part...

And as you add more manpower to your attempt to defraud a paper-ballot election, you increase the number of co-conspirators. As you add co-conspirators, the likelihood of being undetected drops dramatically.

> paper "hacking" scales as O(n)

It's quite common to drop handfuls of paper. And really, the grouping comes down to transportation issues as well; when you move ballots in boxes and trucks, 0(n) becomes less accurate.

There were numerous issues with the security, packing, and handfuls of paper in 2000.

> tl;dr, it's not hard to hack paper!

True, but it is significantly (as in several orders of magnitude) harder to hack paper at a national scale than it is to hack an electronic voting record at a national scale.

Hacking paper requires people physically interacting with that paper to subvert it. That amounts to 1+ person per box of paper votes.

Electronics just needs the one person who discovered and exploited the vulnerability.

I think we can assume quite a long chain of people per box.

And it quickly becomes unmaintenable, "three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead".

Indeed, my back of the napkin was ~1+ conspirator per ballot box, assuming many boxes per polling place.

Making a conspiracy like that work at US scale would require a small country's worth of conspirators which really, really wouldn't be able to hide from the light of day for very long.

Except we aren't talking about independent or private actors. We are talking about the Russian government. Infiltrating and manipulating nationwide votes becomes a real possibility with resources of that scale.

It would take an immense amount of reorganization of trust, but open hardware verifiable (both in person and on some kind of trustless ledger akin to a blockchain) voting systems would be more secure against such national actors, because there would be no back room to burn the paper in. If the machine is public and you can trust it, and you can trace the results nationally to insure the results were accurate, you have more security than you have now.

That's total out and out bullshit and I'm surprised anyone dared post that on here. We're intelligent people you know and the "Muh Russia" narrative is not only dead, it is also buried. It was an out and out lie that only got traction due to the media being completely partisan and focused on creating outcomes instead of doing their job which is to objectively report on current events.

Also, you can't just stuff a ballot box--the number of people voting has to match the count of registered voters, so if you are stuffing you have the problem of also dealing with somehow getting rid of the legitimate ballots.

> harder to hack paper at a national scale than it is to hack an electronic voting record at a national scale

To hack the U.S 2016 votes you'd only need to flip a few counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Fl.

You don't even have to modify the paper often. All that's really needed is for observers from any interested party to be allowed, which they are in the US. Then to affect anything above the city level an attacker has to bribe or coerce hundreds of people to turn a blind eye to things against their own political interests. They can watch polling places to spot ballot stuffing and counting places to spot count issues/fraud.

The mainstream digital voting method, that is a digital only ballot totaling everything is basically impossible to audit. It shouldn't be used anywhere.

Yet, there are ways to make digital voting auditable. There is an inherent conflict between a system being auditable and anonymous. You can't completely satisfy both, but paper satisfy none, so there is plenty of margin for improvement.

No one has indicated they're unhackable. The argument is that ballot stuffing is pretty well understood how to mitigate enough that it's not a factor in altering outcomes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com