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For years security professionals and election integrity activists have been pushing voting machine vendors to build more secure and verifiable election systems, so voters and candidates can be assured election outcomes haven’t been manipulated.
Now they might finally get this thanks to a new $10 million contract the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched to design and build a secure voting system that it hopes will be impervious to hacking.
The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an Oregon-based firm called Galois, a longtime government contractor with experience in designing secure and verifiable systems. The system will use fully open source voting software, instead of the closed, proprietary software currently used in the vast majority of voting machines, which no one outside of voting machine testing labs can examine. More importantly, it will be built on secure open source hardware, made from special secure designs and techniques developed over the last year as part of a special program at DARPA. The voting system will also be designed to create fully verifiable and transparent results so that voters don’t have to blindly trust that the machines and election officials delivered correct results.
The systems Galois designs won’t be available for sale. But the prototypes it creates will be available for existing voting machine vendors or others to freely adopt and customize without costly licensing fees or the millions of dollars it would take to research and develop a secure system from scratch.
“We will not have a voting system that we can deploy. That’s not what we do,” said Salmon. “We will show a methodology that could be used by others to build a voting system that is completely secure.”
Kiniy said Galois will design two basic voting machine types. The first will be a ballot-marking device that uses a touch-screen for voters to make their selections. That system won’t tabulate votes. Instead it will print out a paper ballot marked with the voter’s choices, so voters can review them before depositing them into an optical-scan machine that tabulates the votes. Galois will bring this system to Def Con this year.
The optical-scan system will print a receipt with a cryptographic representation of the voter’s choices. After the election, the cryptographic values for all ballots will be published on a web site, where voters can verify that their ballot and votes are among them.
“That receipt does not permit you to prove anything about how you voted, but does permit you to prove that the system accurately captured your intent and your vote is in the final tally,” Kiniry said.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 16 2019, @03:32AM (2 children)
Simply to point this out to them would go a long ways towards, for example, leading Cheeto to hesitate on yesterday's threat to have the Military, the Police and the Bikers commit acts of violence against the left.
But what I'd like to see is FIPS Standard that abstracts this design, then for the Federal Elections Commission to require _Federal_ voting to be done on standards compliant machines.
Just Federal, so as to avoid states rights whinging.
Most local elections won't want to deal with separate equipment for state and local elections, so the problem will be largely solved.
As for those who continue to claim that "No one ever got fired for buying Diebold?"
They'll get the strictly _local_ government that they deserve.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @03:57AM
MDC voted for the side of beef!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:35AM
Write to your Senators -- or send them a video. You have 2. Unless you're dumb enough to live in Porto Rico. Or D.C. We used to have the Washington Senators in baseball, that one was a little joke. But, ask your Senators to stop the dangerous & disasterous Omni Bus Bill. Known as HR1. VERY COSTLY for our Taxpayers. Because it creates a special day when our government workers don't work. But, they still get paid. It's called a holiday. I gave them more than a month of holidays -- Shutdown. And they got very greedy, they went to their Representatives, made some very big donations. And got the horrible HR1 through our House. We must stop it in the Senate. And if that doesn't happen -- VETO. Mixed up way to say "vote." VETO is a lot of fun, I had a ball on Friday afternoon (I think of as, today). But it's something I want to do as little as possible.
We don't need HR1. We don't want HR1. Mitch calls it a Dem "power grab." He's so right. So right. All the things that are supposed to be great about it, we can do with this very special Voting Machine. High tech Voting Machine, it stops foreign governments from interfering in our Elections. Because, they can't see it. They can be standing right next to that one and not see it. It's called Stealth. China doesn't have it, Russia doesn't have it, our foe the E.U. doesn't have it. This is the same technology that Lockheed put in our incredible F-35. Now we put it in Voting Machine. And our Elections will never be stolen again!!! senate.gov/general/contacting.htm [senate.gov]