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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: 2) by dry on Sunday March 05 2017, @05:54AM
Your method is good as long as the election officials, the military in your example, are impartial. The weak point is the ID part. The right wing government here was set on repressing votes from voters who might not vote the right way, which is the right wing way. They almost got my wife. She's always used her maiden name to vote, as her ID is in that name, along with some bills. We checked online that she was correctly registered and the report was that she was. On voting day it turned out that she was registered in her married name, with all her ID in her maiden name. Luckily it was quiet at the polling station and the returning officer was willing and after an hour of arguing on the phone to Ottawa, she got to vote.
Control the registration and ID requirements and you can repress voters such as my wife who is a minority who is more likely not to vote right.