Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

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Researchers overlook more important issue. As the government controls the servers, it can impersonate any number of users.

Users submit an application to vote remotely through a government-controlled site and confirm it by receiving a SMS with code. It is obvious that government is able to submit such an application to its own server without bothering the real user.

The users vote remotely and confirm their identity by providing a code from SMS (again) and the government can just look at the code on the server. It isn't important what cryptography is used there. You don't need to guess random numbers when you have root access to the server.

The observers are supposed to see a tape where some hashes will be printed when someone votes. Maybe they will be allowed to see the registry of voters who chose to vote remotely, maybe they will not be allowed.

I cannot prove this, and this is my personal opinion, so you shouldn't believe me, but I think the government wants an opaque procedure to produce legitimate looking election results with desired outcome. With paper voting, there are too many points of failure: it is difficult to throw the ballots in the box when there is a vigilant observer. Remote voting doesn't have such flaws.

If there was a fraud, it would be difficult to explain to a non-programmer. They don't understand anything, they just see how the program says "hash doesn't match". But maybe it is just a program written by foreign agents (and stored on foreign "Github" servers) producing fake results. For comparison, with paper voting anyone can understand that there is a fraud if you show them the video.

Also, the government party is slowly losing its rating and starts losing regional elections. Remote voting might be a cure for this undesired situation.

And probably any other government (for example Estonian) that implements such an opaque system has similar aims.

Excuse me, please, are you living here? Do you really think there is a possibility the majority (or even 10%) of voters will vote digitally? It's so out of character of Russian voters, that I honestly suppose you're a Prigozhin's troll.

I was pointing out that the system is not protected from malicious actions of administrators. What method of voting will the real voters choose doesn't matter here. The government can choose it for them.

The turnout for elections into Moscow Parliament in 2014 was 21%. 79% of voters didn't vote which means that the government can falsify their votes in remote voting and nobody notices.

This time because of protests the turnout might be higher, like 30% or 40%. This still leaves 60% of people who won't vote and whose votes can be used for falsifications.

I’ve never been to Russia and don’t know the Russian attitude towards tech or voting. But I’m confident that if the US had a system like this and made a reasonably usable phone app to be the front end, almost no one under the age of 60 would bother to wait in line for a physical voting booth ever again.

>would bother to wait in line for a physical voting booth ever again

As someone living in a state with mail-in ballots, it still boggles my mind waiting in line for physical voting is a thing. Mail-in ballots seem to be the best of all worlds. It's easy. I have time to do the research for who I want to choose. It's all backed by USPS so it's pretty damn secure- as secure as everything else we trust in the mail.

Mail-in means you can be coerced to vote a certain way by someone in your household. It also means someone might be able to get a hold of your ballot papers and vote in your name (there are Austrian politicians who have been convicted for doing just this). The postal service might "lose" ballots depending on whether they come from minority neighborhoods or other characteristics (in Austria, mail-in ballots have the voter's name on the outside). This is different from normal mail since if the postal service regularly lost your mail you would notice and complain; can you tell of your mail-in vote has really arrived? Votes might also be "lost" after they arrive wherever they are meant to be counted; letters presumably need to be guarded for several days, as opposed to votes put in a ballot box and counted later that day (this was one of the factors in the Austrian constitutional court cancelling one round of the most 2016 presidential election).

There are certainly other failure modes. In the last Hungarian parliamentary election the ruling party got less than 50% of the votes overall but literally 99% of the postal vote. That seems rather fishy to me.

Anyway, if you have long lines, that means the people organizing your elections are not doing their job right. There need to be more polling places. Other civilized countries manage this, the US would only need to take their democracy seriously.

Yeah. Washington state is all mail-in ballots, once you try it, other ways just seem stupid.

Aren't mail-in ballots too easy to falsify? You take a database of voters and send mail under their names.

They have proven not to be. Here you sign them and add phone number or email. An advanced state could copy my signature but they verify I am a voter so double voting would be detected.

Also paper ballots make it possible to recount or verify something if the race was really close.

You get the "I Voted" sticker to show off with.

https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI

codedokode's concerns are spot on. You, on the other hand, do sound like Prigozhin's troll.

I shouldn't have used that language, not proud of myself.

However, codedokode's concerns are utterly irrelevant. Vast majority of Moscow voters won't use this system, neither care whether the election is scientifically legitimate. Those who do have a presumption of guilt wrt Voting Committee (for a thousand good reasons). As a Moscow sociologist put it: "a political party with 30% support aims to get 90% in the City Duma. How would they do that? Obviously, by cheating and violence".

Thus, codedokode's concerns have no meaning inside Russia, and outside they serve only the purpose intended by the creators of all this: for foreigners to scorn imperfect system, and be relieved when they update it to something passable, for the same ultimate effect - steal the election.

Also the attack described by the research could actually be a good thing. Decrypting votes would allow to discover fraud, in case if it happens.

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