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The Intercept reports
The nation's secretaries of state gathered for a multi-day National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) conference in Washington, D.C., this weekend, with cybersecurity on the mind.
Panels and lectures centered around the integrity of America's election process, with the federal probe into alleged Russian government attempts to penetrate voting systems a frequent topic of discussion.
[...] One way to allay concerns about the integrity of electronic voting machine infrastructure, however, is to simply not use it. Over the past year, a number of states are moving back towards the use of paper ballots or at least requiring a paper trail of votes cast.
For instance, Pennsylvania just moved to require all voting systems to keep a paper record of votes cast. Prior to last year's elections in Virginia, the commonwealth's board of elections voted to decertify paperless voting machines--voters statewide instead voted the old-fashioned way, with paper ballots.
[...] Oregon is one of two states in the country to require its residents to vote by mail, a system that was established via referendum in 1998. [Oregon Secretary of State Dennis] Richardson argued that this old-fashioned system offers some of the best defense there is against cyber interference.
"We're using paper and we're never involved with the Internet. The Internet is not involved at all until there's an announcement by each of our 36 counties to [the capital] Salem of what the results are and then that's done orally and through a confirmation e-mail and the county clerks in each of the counties are very careful to ensure that the numbers that actually are posted are the ones that they have," he said. "Oregon's in a pretty unique situation."
[...] In New Hampshire, the state uses a hybrid system that includes both paper ballots and machines that electronically count paper ballots with a paper trail.
Karen Ladd, the assistant secretary of state for New Hampshire, touted the merits of the system to The Intercept. "We do a lot of recounts, and you can only have a recount with a paper ballot. You can't do a recount with a machine!" she said.
America's paper ballot states may seem antiquated to some, but our neighbors to the north have used paper ballots for federal elections for their entire history. Thanks to an army of officials at 25,000 election stations, the integrity of Canada's elections is never in doubt.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by VLM on Tuesday February 20 2018, @02:11PM (3 children)
Hardware write protection via a switch was a thing on the Altair back 40 years or so.
Immutable data is also a high level language construct, see Clojure. There are multiple problems with doing this immutable:
1) Shutting off the garbage collector for forensic reasons will require a wee bit more memory and its gonna be slow to copy entire data structures every time you do something
2) You can write the worst styles of Fortran / Basic / Perl in Clojure its just not idiomatic good Clojure anymore. So you can do imperative, everythings-mutable coding in Clojure if you abuse the language badly enough. I mean, obviously, you can write a software simulator of a Z80 that runs MS Basic in Clojure and it'll work and easily do things the "wrong" way.
3) Its easier to implement massively redundant small systems than one highly complicated large system. Make two dozen competitive systems and deploy them in parallel and after each election statistically rub them up against each other to find problems, way cheaper and more reliable than trying to make the one true unbreakable system. Where I live we already run two systems in parallel, the same physical vote gets optically scanned by closed source probably hacked hardware and then volunteers from both parties (well, any party, really) spend some time after the election hand counting to verify the machines. Despite the machines being hackable easily, they aren't because the SHTF if they're discovered the next day in hand count.
Also its easier to hack the election by busing in illegal aliens to vote or have dead people vote or whatever, than it is to write code. For us it would be easier to write code than to bus in 100s of illegal aliens but for 99.99% of the population its easier to drive a bus than write code. Thats why "Tech" web sites have a somewhat irrational fixation on hacking elections via writing code; for us its easy. Presumably there's a human chemistry pharmacology board out there fretting and hand wringing constantly about a theoretical "right wing drug" (oral testosterone? Or left wing drugs could exist too, estrogen I suppose) being dumped into the water supply before elections to influence voting for nefarious purposes and it would be so easy for the average organic chemistry mad scientist to synthesize up a couple kilos because ya know that kind of work is their boring day job and they're very good at it, although as said above for 99.99% of the population it would be a heck of a lot easier and more technologically realistic to drive a bus full of illegal voters to a polling site so thats why drugging the water supply to influence elections is technically possible, but impractical and not a real threat. Its very hollywood to suggest "they" or (((they))) encouraged the "lead in the drinking water" fiasco in Flint MI to tip election results to the Democrats, likewise a bit hollywood to suggest lots of people can blink a LED on an arduino so a subset of them could really F with electronic voting.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday February 20 2018, @02:56PM
I think the "fixation" on hacking elections is a lot more justified than you make it out.
Busing in illegal voters requires that you find lots of people willing to commit a serious crime in front of lots of witnesses. If it happens there will be lots of available evidence of the fact. If you aren't being shown the actual, solid evidence, it's probably just scaremongering.
Dead people voting may not be quite as obvious - it might involve similar fraudulent voters, but more likely it'll probably involve ballot stuffing at some point when the voting machines or ballot boxes are under-supervised - but that's easy to avoid if you actually implement decent chain-of-custody over the boxes/machines (and if you *don't* have that, then your vote is completely untrustworthy regardless of anything else).
Hacking though can often be done from 5,000 miles away with no evidence, or at best, by anyone competent left alone with the voting or tallying machine for 2 minutes at any point prior to the election. Either way, if it's done even halfway competently there'll be no evidence it happened other than a discrepancy with exit polls.
And yeah, for 99.9% of people, maybe the bus thing would be easier - but it's also very risky. Meanwhile that remaining 0.01% translates to 4 million potential hackers in the US alone, several of whom are already in the pocket of one criminal enterprise or another (political parties of all stripes included), and any *one* of which could potentially hack *every* remotely hackable voting machine in the country, as well as training anyone capable of using a screwdriver how to apply a ready-made hack to those machines that need physical access to compromise.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 20 2018, @03:33PM
Even if we just restrict ourselves to the developed world, that's well over a billion people. 0.01% of that is still 100,000 people. I think the man power can be managed, especially if the voting gear is designed to allow for hacking.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @09:55PM
That would be a federal felony.
If it was happening, the prisons would be full of such offenders.
Oddly (going by your speculation), no such condition exists.
Secretary of State Kris Kobach of Kansas (KKK) spent a bunch of time and money attempting to demonstrate that that sort of thing was happening.
We previously had a related story which included the results of that.
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