SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the Replace-or-not-to-replace?-Have-the-people-vote-on-it! dept.
The project Protect Democracy is suing the state of South Carolina because its insecure, unreliable voting systems are effectively denying people the right to vote. The project has filed a 45-page lawsuit pointing out the inherent lack of security and inauditability of these systems and concludes that "by failing to provide S.C. voters with a system that can record their votes reliably," South Carolinians have been deprived of their constitutional right to vote. Late last year, Def Con 25's Voting Village reported on the ongoing, egregious, and fraudulent state of electronic voting in the US, a situation which has been getting steadily worse since at least 2000. The elephant in the room is that these machines are built from the ground up on Microsoft products, which is protected with a cult-like vigor standing in the way of rolling back to the only known secure method, hand counted paper ballots.
Bruce Schneier is an advisor to Protect Democracy
Earlier on SN:
Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States (2018)
Want to Hack a Voting Machine? Hack the Voting Machine Vendor First (2018)
Georgia Election Server Wiped after Lawsuit Filed (2017)
It Took DEF CON Hackers Minutes to Pwn These US Voting Machines (2017)
Russian Hackers [sic] Penetrated US Electoral Systems and Tried to Delete Voter Registration Data (2017)
5 Ways to Improve Voting Security in the U.S. (2016)
FBI Says Foreign Hackers Penetrated State Election Systems (2016)
and so on ...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by drussell on Sunday July 22 2018, @03:16AM (2 children)
Democracy 101:
Open enough polling places so that ALL of your citizens can vote easily and quickly at a polling place close to where they live. Have enough election officials available to properly tally a simple paper and pencil vote which is easily traceable, re-countable, etc.
That's the model that we use here in Canada.
Don't spend tons of money on unreliable, hackable, expensive crony-friend-company-supplying voting "machines" when you can just hire and train enough of your citizens to actually properly man polling stations for your electorate to vote efficiently at. It is a few weeks work to be trained and certified to take part in things like enumerating voters or working a polling place, but it is money well spent on a few part time jobs every few years instead of wasting money on dubious commercialized, for-profit voting machine purchase scams and shenanigans. :facepalm:
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday July 22 2018, @05:21AM (1 child)
It's reasonable, and when we did that, election fraud also happened. It *is* a harder than trivial problem. But the real problem seems to be that they don't want to solve it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday July 22 2018, @10:09PM
Yea, even in our system there are weaknesses such as the absentee voters who don't usually matter but here in BC last election they did matter. Election was close enough that it took a month to finish counting vs the usual couple of hours and then the government had to be voted out by the 2nd and 3rd place parties who between them had one more seat.
Another big difference is that most of our elections are simple. One Federal election, one Provincial election on a different day in each Province, both where we just vote for a representative. Municipal are more complex.
This allows different political parties at the Provincial level and even regional parties at the Federal level and here, no parties at most of the municipalities.