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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: 5, Insightful) by MadTinfoilHatter on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:21AM (4 children)
There is no such thing as a secure voting system that involves computers. Computers are oustanding at election fraud, which is why they should be kept as far away from actual elections as possible. Here is a secure voting system for you that costs a whole lot less than $10 million: Pen and paper. Also obligatory xkcd. [xkcd.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:35AM
Having coded online billing systems since it was a thing, I tend to agree. Unless anyone who wants to can audit any machine at any time, you're having to put trust into a machine that may or may not even be running anything remotely resembling the code it's supposed to be running. Given the hardware rootkits in all major CPUs that could make even auditing at will pointless, I'm disinclined to think anything with silicon more complex than a transistor should ever touch voting data or records.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Saturday March 16 2019, @05:02AM
But... bu... b... Blockchain!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @08:50AM
There's one area where pen and paper ballot is weak to tampering and that is counting.
It could be a good idea to have a machine tallying votes from physical tokens so that the officials can just phone home the totals.
Phoning home something is inevitable even if using pen and paper but if it's just the totals, it's way less data to secure.
The tally machine doesn't need to be connected to anything, or to even have any outside interface. Just a slot for the tokens or slips and a reset button behind a locked panel. Heck it could even be mechanical. Something like a coin slot machine with a slot for each candidate (the slots are just numbered, candidates get assigned a slot randomly by the voting area personel). With a mechanism preventing from casting until the personel sees you exit the stall and pushes a lever.
Anyway making the mchines open source but not using that and telling companies to make cosed source based on it is just kicking dead whales down the beach.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday March 16 2019, @03:14PM
I saw the headline and was ready to repeat my long stated objection to machines involved with voting. But this one looks like they have at least addressed the major issues. The only jobs the voter facing machine is doing is presenting the choices with a better UI and adding the cryptographic receipt. You can still clearly see your selections on the printed ballot and they could be hand recounted. The receipt acts to prevent discarding of votes, which is one big factor in vote fraud by corrupt officials. The other machine is just an optical counter built around open hardware and software to make it easier to audit for correctness. Still problematic in that no actual voter can perform an audit without risking compromise of the machine, a catch22.
So a step forward, but I'd still feel safer with elections run like the ones the U.S. Army ran in Iraq. Even without the crypto.
Settle voter registration well ahead of time, issue good solid photo ID. All voting in person on election day, no exceptions. Poll watchers from all parties permitted to witness from begin to end. Begin with a clear plastic tub on an unadorned table with a slit cut in the lid. Voters are checked against the registration lists, mark a paper ballot and dip their finger in the infamous purple ink as they drop the ballot into the box. When the polling station closes the box is opened on the spot and counted before the witnesses. The count is called in to the central authority and unalterable from that point. The election is done, everyone goes home.