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In an age of superfast computers and interconnected everything, the only sure way to protect the integrity of election results is to return to paper and pen. That is the view of Sijmen Ruwhof, an ethical or "white hat" hacker, who last month revealed that the Dutch election's commission computer software was riddled with vulnerabilities.
In a shock announcement just weeks before the March 15 elections—seen as a bellwether of the rise of far-right and populist parties across Europe—Dutch officials announced they were abandoning the computer system in use since 2009 to return to counting ballots by hand. It was Ruwhof who discovered the problem. At the request of Dutch broadcaster RTL he spent just one evening examining the OSV software, developed for the Dutch government by a German company, via an online YouTube explanatory video, finding 25 weak points.
[...] "If you want to protect your system against state sponsored hacking, ditch your computer. You cannot trust it," he said. Computers are "highly sophisticated spy devices" and they "are everywhere in our society"—with more and more devices from our cars to our coffee machines becoming interconnected.
Countries who want to use computers for vote counting should build their own system from scratch. And they can't use existing operating systems for fear someone could have written a backdoor into millions of lines of code. "You have to write your own operating system, you have to design your own hardware and you must understand that the election process is of the utmost high integrity. So you really have to have the highest standards for security," said Ruwhof.
Ruwhof's original blog post: How to hack the upcoming Dutch elections – and how hackers could have hacked all Dutch elections since 2009
[Video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ofvgCk8fPQ (in Dutch)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheLink on Saturday March 04 2017, @10:40AM (4 children)
One of the most important objectives of an election system should be to convince enough of the losers that they lost. If the elections aren't convincing they're a big waste of time and resources (or a way to soothe a Dictator's ego).
Computer-based/black box systems aren't good at this, there's no transparency. In contrast it's fairly convincing when your side's own observers see that all votes are put in transparent boxes that aren't touched by anyone else, the votes are counted in front of everyone and each ballot paper is shown to all observers. And... most of the votes aren't for your side...
Skilful magicians might be able to tamper with the results but you'd need magicians at every polling station. Whereas with computers you don't need as many "magicians" to rig stuff.
Even cryptographically sound systems are inferior. Doesn't matter that you can verify online that your vote is still exactly what you voted, how do you prove the final total announced/displayed actually included your vote? It'll take even more fancy cleverness that's hard to explain to the average voter. And then there goes your "convincing" bit.
Pencil and paper scales well. The more voters you have the more volunteer vote counters you have. Unless your education system is that screwed up - in which case your "democracy" might be screwed anyway.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2017, @11:00AM
You should import Russian magicians, we've got plenty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2017, @12:47PM (2 children)
There's still a problem with this approach - you're trusting the observers to be merely observers.
Back in the late 1800s, the US actually had a system similar to what you describe - if you wanted to vote R you put your ballot in one box, if you wanted to vote D you put your ballot in a different box. It was immediately obvious to each observer how you voted. The problem comes in when the observer reports back to other "interested parties" how you voted. For instance if you didn't vote the way your boss wanted you to vote, you might suddenly find yourself without a job. If you didn't vote the way your union representative wanted you to vote, you might have an "accident".
Fraud was rife. Rutherford B. Hayes was sometimes known as "Rutherfraud" B. Hayes because of all of the shenanigans that went on. The 1896 election is also another prime example of what can go wrong.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fritsd on Saturday March 04 2017, @03:36PM
No, the voting and the counting is not done at the same time :-)
First they vote, and the anonymous (folded, or in an envelope) ballot is placed in the ballot box. There can be multiple ballot boxes if there are multiple different elections at the same time, e.g. local / national / Europarl.
AFTER the voting is officially over, the vote counter volunteers count them. Watched over by anyone (e.g. political party fanatics) who wants to ensure that every vote is counted correctly.
The protocol is designed in such a way that most people of average intelligence can understand the procedure. On purpose!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday March 04 2017, @10:04PM
That's a stupid system, and they must have been absolute reckless morons for going ahead with it (or be highly confident that they could twist numbers to their side).
Take a transparent urn. Put two to ten people who hate each other to watch it (better these days, put a couple webcams too). People put their paper vote in an envelope, which they drop in the box.
If all the hateful people declare that they didn't see anyone cheat, open the box and make them count the pieces of paper together, as many times as it takes to get them to agree on the numbers, in full view of cameras.
Publish results in newspapers and on the web so anyone can see that the reported numbers match the count.
Labor-intensive? Slow? Cost of democracy. Dictators are cheaper adn quick at telling you who won, if you prefer.
Didn't have to make anything up. That's how I vote in Backwards Western Europe.