Security analysis of the Dominion ImageCast X
freedom-to-tinker.com
freedom-to-tinker.com
Election security is a confusing business. It is, by design, the only thing you should not trust your government with, because your trust in the government comes from the election process.
If you trust your government with the election, that's a circular trust problem and it's abused to the maximal extent possible.
Which is why voting machines can't be secure, ever. Nothing the government does can truly convince the lay person it can trust a government provided voting machine, because in the security settings of election, the government is the adversary.
It is actually the only time you should consider the government as an adversary and malicious - because that is when you verify and force it to be good.
It matters less to win the election than to know that the government is accountable to the majority. I prefer the opposite political side to win in an accountable and trustworthy way (such as that I know their interest align with the majority of the population) than to have my side win and then answer to no one.
In Australia, I believe that the officials and processes are highly trusted by the general public (or at least by those who participate in it).
This (anecdotal) perception of trust has been earned through various means: a famous ad campaign in the 80’s featured John Farnham’s “You’re the voice” promoted an individual’s agency and participation, and a fairly hilarious Twitter account provided much needed outreach to a wider audience. There’s a somewhat impish yet popular pundit named Anthony Greene who has earned a reputation for delivering enthusiastic and entertaining analyses and observations during each election.
The volunteers and temps who run and scrutinise elections are also just regular folk, and the commission exercise transparency and due diligence where necessary. They’re also independent of the government in so far as they do not implement policies like other departments: they merely activate the electoral procedures, once they have been triggered by an act of parliament.
The thought of a sitting government or their agents affecting the outcome of an election is really only plausible in the context of branch stacking, or engineering the timing to suit their strategic interests. Murdoch media is viewed as a significant threat to democracy.
The view that ‘all government elections are run by the government so they can’t be trusted’ is bordering on conspiracy theory logic. In many jurisdictions, they are executed by good people working for agencies that operate at arm’s length, with effective measures to prevent, deter and avoid misdeeds.
In an election where each vote is counted by hand, it's indeed quite hard and implausible for the government to conspire to rig it.
If, however, the government presented you with a process which had very few points of failure - a single person counting tens of thousands of votes using machines, or mail ballots where all the workers never needed to see the voter, and rely on government supplied information to validate the person exists - these do not require huge conspiracy but only a select few.
It is indeed bordering on conspiracy theory, and the border is exactly on proper process.
Another way to "measure" the security of an election process, is instead of looking at votes gap, look at how many people are needed to conspire to change the results. If your answer is very few, for example, a hacker with access to voting machine, the worker which counted thousands of votes, or the voting machine manufacturer, or the dude with the mail ballots database, it is a possible conspiracy, because it is possible that very few people aren't honest.
A properly designed election process really does require an implausible conspiracy to rig.
An improperly designed election, is almost like a backdoor, and the conspiracy theory defense no longer works.
By the way, there's another side to the coin: in a properly designed election, fraud claims simply do not happen, because it would take hundreds of individual and independent claims of fraud, to be able to claim that the results should be different.
Because the most simple solution, hand counting, works, if the government fails to give you proper verification, it is already the government's fault.
This is also the explanation that should be given in any functioning democracy. You shouldn't need PR campaign or media to establish trust in elections. Well designed democratic elections, by design, the losing side as a verifier can tell they were fair by the protocol itself. The losing side can try to see how many parts of the process they don't trust, and almost always in normally decentralized election, they could discount those parts and the results would barely change.
If your government fails this verification, skips the rational explanation and instead gives you cliche media campaign, and uses an inherently bad process, that's the part where you should already stop and distrust it.
At that point, the government already broke through all the security boundaries of the election process, and it's impossible to know that they didn't exploit it.
They are public servants, not political servants.
Also, the challenges of observability aren’t insurmountable in a digital system. They can be addressed through independent oversight and trusted platform concepts.
People counting votes do make mistakes too. That’s why a vote isn’t counted by a single person - it’s counted by several to avoid human error.
and yet history tells us that governments do conspire and that the times we've been made aware of it happening after the fact are likely not the only times it has happened.
In the case of voting machines the government doesn't even need to be directly involved. If all of the code used isn't open source and publicly available, if the hardware is closed and inaccessible to the public for auditing and review by experts, and if there is no paper trail to interdependently verify the results then the entire system is impossible to trust by design.
And the challenge of observability is that your adversary here, Eve, or the government, is the one providing the information. Therefore you can't rely on that information in the verification.
Human error hardly matters. And normal elections shouldn't have razor thin margins, razor thin margins are already evidence of tampering.
The irony is that instead they use the razor thin margins to justify ridiculous methods of counting.
Several people are used to counting to prevent malicious opportunities, not innocent errors. Innocent errors have zero probability of changing anything.
For instance: election administration should use the Australian Ballot system (private voting, public counting), ballots cast at polls sites, ballots tabulated onsite the moment the polls close. Election workers composed of members from all parties (and independents), who must jointly certify the tabulation and chain of custody.
And so forth.
As a hot take, your pessimistic comment is not constructive, and only serves to further undermine confidence in our democracy.
Source: Am a recovering election integrity activist. I spent a decade of my life on this issue. It's so utterly exhausting to rehash, from scratch, this topic every four years.
This is extremely disturbing. Why is this not a scandal?
Absolutely is a scandal but it is being censored on the common social media. Being able to see the scandal would require you to goto different social media.
But what's the severity of this compared to actual caught cheating? Or how about the voting spots which outright refused republican challengers from entry? or how about the voters who were wearing maga hats and such who were told they couldnt vote there, pets were allowed to vote though.
As an outside observer, Georgia doesnt have free and fair elections.
FFS, no political messaging at the voting booths.
you mean the consistent GOP runners who keep getting busted for cheating? Wonder why we never heard anything from Trump's election investigation committee? Because they couldn't actually find proof of cheating
> pets were allowed to vote though
proof? that's a new one to me
These vulnerabilities are concerning (as is GA's inexplicable decision to defer patching them), but as the article notes: no evidence has emerged that anyone has actually leveraged these weaknesses to compromise the results of elections in Georgia.
[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.24...
This research proves that was simply nonsense.
I've talked to many extremely smart people who have a blind spot the size of an electoral system on this issue.
Much like funding healthcare or education, or drug policy, this is a solved problem, with known effective solutions. We just don't do it. It's bizarre.
Like - these same very smart people I talk to will laugh at Carlin's jokes about how the system is rigged; big club that we're not in; have to be asleep to believe it, etc. But on this issue their brains turn off, like a switch. Goddam spooky is what it is.
Rather than hypothesizing a conspiracy, I think the most parsimonious explanation is just that humans are short-sighted and don’t want to spend resources on “unlikely to happen but bad if it does”. On this, perhaps we get what we deserve not what we need.