Hack the Vote! How Easy it is and What Could be Done to Prevent it!
Eau Claire Wisconsin Real Estate
I have seen about a dozen articles in the past week that have done nothing to make me feel good about the election process being left in the hands of machines. Absolutely nothing has been done since the last election to ensure that these machines would be secure. On top of that many states and counties don’t even have a paper trail left behind so if there were discrepancies discovered nothing could or would be done about them. If that isn’t enough to scare you just wait, theres more.
Recent studies have shown that these machines can be manipulated in a variety of methods that not only leave the voter with no knowledge that something malicious was done, the data itself can be further manipulated. Basically this means that without someone physically counting each ballot there simply is no assurance that the data is even correct! Like I said before since many states do not require a paper trail it is impossible to know whether or not the data is correct or not.
Here is a recent article on the subject.
Well what can be done about it? Probably nothing for this election. The powers at be have decided we should not be privy to this information, as if whether or not the upcoming is fraudulent or not is insignificant! E-Voting is supposed to have “security, privacy, integrity, and accountability. Of course, our current e-Voting systems promise these things, but then hide the where-and-how inside an information black box.”
Well here are some ideas on what can be done:
E-voting Alternatives that are Actually Secure
Tom Corelis (Blog) – October 24, 2008 10:08 PM
Up-and-coming alternatives to fickle touch-screen voting systems, combining low- and high-tech
It’s been a while since I’ve written about e-voting here on DailyTech. Given that the 2008 presidential election is coming up – or is already in progress in some states – it certainly seems like a good time to sit down for a little refresher, doesn’t it?
Accusations of foul play are already flying. As expected, fallout from the U.S. government’s sordid love affair with these newfangled e-voting machines surfaced earlier this week, this time in the early-bird State of West Virginia: voters say the machines are switching their votes, and officials are both sadly and predictably discounting their claims.
There are other stories, of course, but I’m not here to talk about them.
Instead, let’s talk a little bit about the future: namely, the fact there are a number of very smart people officially on the job for proposing a better, more secure presidential election in 2012.
An article in The Economist points out three different proposals for how an e-Voting system might be carried out, each one very different from the others but simultaneously identical in its emphasis on the four things important in any good election: security, privacy, integrity, and accountability.
Of course, our current e-Voting systems promise these things, but then hide the where-and-how inside an information black box. The proposals I am about to describe are backed by vetted techniques in encryption and security science, and do not make use of exotic or closed-source technologies.
The first proposal, currently under development by UK University of Newcastle upon Tyne computer scientist Dr. Peter Ryan, involves a two-part ballot that is torn in half when the voter is finished: the half with the names is kept, and the half with the votes is handed in. The candidates’ names is written in a randomized order, and each possible order is represented equally among all the ballots distributed; the votes, on the other hand, are read with an optical scanner and include a barcode, or some other form of computer-readable identification, with information pointing to the ballot’s original order. This technique has the advantage in that the ballot cannot be read by humans beings who might be inclined to manipulate its results.
You can read the rest of the article here.
I am all for technology. I love every bit of it but the current system is troubling at best. There is no reason to not leave a paper trail and one can only infer from this that the reason for not leaving a trail is because when someone manipulates the data they don’t want to be caught! Why else?
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