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posted by
mrcoolbp
on Friday April 24 2015, @11:50PM
from the never-trusted-those-things-anyways dept.
from the never-trusted-those-things-anyways dept.
From the Wichita Eagle:
A Wichita State University mathematician sued the top Kansas election official Wednesday, seeking paper tapes from electronic voting machines in an effort to explain statistical anomalies favoring Republicans in counts coming from large precincts across the country.
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Statistician Sues Election Official over Voting Machine Anomalies
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* m2 stares at the monitor... it looks like a hamburger...
m2 - that's a bad sign
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tftp on Saturday April 25 2015, @02:02AM
These cases only reinforce the argument that all e-voting machines should use open-source operating systems and that the source code of both the OS and the voting software ought to be easily downloadable for inspection and analysis.
This will not help, as you have no way to verify that the software running the machine is not tampered with, or that it was compiled from unmodified sources that you were reviewing earlier. Or that the hardware is executing the program correctly. Or that the touch screen is not off by quarter of an inch. Or that the tape printer that shows you a printout does not modify the data. You can hide an elephant among several microcontrollers that are invisible to a software reviewer.
A complex voting method results in many vulnerabilities. A simple method, like counting of physical objects, is more reliable.
If you are intent on electronic voting, it is necessary to ensure that the vote is unchangeable. Someone has already mentioned the blockchain - and indeed that would be a very hard nut to crack if someone wants to change the results later. Perhaps you would be given a certain token; you plug it into your smartphone or a PC and generate a vote; then you submit that vote into the blockchain and wait for confirmations. A token could be a high density QR code, for example.
In terms of digital currency, at the polling place, after checking your right to vote, you'd be given several different digital coins. each valid for one election/office. You can spend each coin by "paying" to the account of the candidate that you support. You can do it from home, though the polling place might also have a few computers set up - but it would be recommended to vote on your own hardware. The unissued coins will be then submitted to special addresses to demonstrate that they haven't been used "to stuff the box." Some small number of coins will never show up anywhere - because, for example, the voter chose to not vote.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mth on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:50AM
A desirable property is if no voter can prove who they voted for. This reduces the ability to bribe or coerce people to vote for a particular party or candidate. That might not be possible if you hand out tokens to be used outside of the polling place. In fact, even if the vote itself could not be traced to the token used after voting, if the token is handed out someone could look over the voter's shoulder as they vote or simply take the token.