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from the Replace-or-not-to-replace?-Have-the-people-vote-on-it! dept.
The project Protect Democracy is suing the state of South Carolina because its insecure, unreliable voting systems are effectively denying people the right to vote. The project has filed a 45-page lawsuit pointing out the inherent lack of security and inauditability of these systems and concludes that "by failing to provide S.C. voters with a system that can record their votes reliably," South Carolinians have been deprived of their constitutional right to vote. Late last year, Def Con 25's Voting Village reported on the ongoing, egregious, and fraudulent state of electronic voting in the US, a situation which has been getting steadily worse since at least 2000. The elephant in the room is that these machines are built from the ground up on Microsoft products, which is protected with a cult-like vigor standing in the way of rolling back to the only known secure method, hand counted paper ballots.
Bruce Schneier is an advisor to Protect Democracy
Earlier on SN:
Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States (2018)
Want to Hack a Voting Machine? Hack the Voting Machine Vendor First (2018)
Georgia Election Server Wiped after Lawsuit Filed (2017)
It Took DEF CON Hackers Minutes to Pwn These US Voting Machines (2017)
Russian Hackers [sic] Penetrated US Electoral Systems and Tried to Delete Voter Registration Data (2017)
5 Ways to Improve Voting Security in the U.S. (2016)
FBI Says Foreign Hackers Penetrated State Election Systems (2016)
and so on ...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 22 2018, @03:28PM (1 child)
the biggest problem we are facing with intellectual property law in the modern age. Which is that public domain protocols, do in fact have value, and that the corruption of those protocols does in fact cause harm. Voting machines are actually the most glaring example of oversight in the way the USPTO and Copyright office consider public domain intellectual property.
There are only a few technically correct solutions to this problem, and millions of incorrect ones. If the buyer can't tell the difference, then the cheaper solution wins. Which is to say, that this is only ever going to get done correctly by the FOSS community, because the state is both unable and unwilling to do this correctly. The singularity of vision required to solve the problem, is statistically impossible in any comittee based organization.
The problem the state is perhaps able to fix, is that the USPTO and Copyright Office generally do not regard protocols as being protectable intellectual property. In this case, IF a FOSS project was built that turned out to be a bulletproof solution, the inevitable next step would be a third party fork getting produced that was insecure and corrupt. That fork would be touted as being the same or better as the actual secure solution, and our right to use a secure voting systems would boil down to a trademark and copyright spat.
The offending product would win in court in such a case. The insecure system would be considered "new art" by the intellectual property courts. Which is to say the state has no legislative basis for defending its citizens intrinsic right to a mathematically proven voting system under current law.
It doesn't matter what you build, if you can't defend it. And the state has made no real effort to provide for the common defense when it comes to public domain intellectual property assets. In particular those assets that assert the right to vote. This is not a matter of blame, but a structural failure in the way federal and state statutes function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @06:11PM
your post's stupidity is so depressing. your solution for the ills of government is more government?