Internet Voting | CTVotersCount.org

The United States should make ballots verifiable—or go back to paper.

Article in The Atlantic: The Case for Standardized and Secure Voting Technology

It’s time to fix the voting process.

American voting systems have improved in recent years, but they collectively remain a giant mess. Voting is controlled by states, and typically administered by counties and local governments. Voting laws differ depending on where you are. Voting machines vary, too; there’s no standard system for the nation.

Accountability is a crapshoot. In some jurisdictions, voters use machines that create electronic tallies with no “paper trail”—that is, no tangible evidence whatsoever that the voter’s choices were honored. A “recount” in such places means asking the machine whether it was right the first time.

We need to fix all of this.

Article in The Atlantic: The Case for Standardized and Secure Voting Technology <read>

It’s time to fix the voting process.

American voting systems have improved in recent years, but they collectively remain a giant mess. Voting is controlled by states, and typically administered by counties and local governments. Voting laws differ depending on where you are. Voting machines vary, too; there’s no standard system for the nation.

Accountability is a crapshoot. In some jurisdictions, voters use machines that create electronic tallies with no “paper trail”—that is, no tangible evidence whatsoever that the voter’s choices were honored. A “recount” in such places means asking the machine whether it was right the first time.

We need to fix all of this. But state and local governments are perpetually cash-starved, and politicians refuse to spend the money that would be required to do it.

Among many other needed measures promoted by nonprofit and nonpartisan Verified Voting, Congress should require standardized voting systems around the nation. It should insist on rock-solid security, augmented by frequent audits of hardware and software. Recounts should be performed routinely and randomly to ensure that verified-voting systems work as designed. The paper ballot generated by the machine should be the official ballot.

What Congress should emphatically not do is allow or encourage online voting. The sorry state of cybersecurity in general makes clear how foolhardy it would be to go anywhere near widespread “Internet voting” in the foreseeable future…

As we have long said in Myth #9, paper alone is insufficient: “Myth #9 – If there is ever a concern we can always count the paper.”

Is our election hackable or not?

We hear from Richard Clarke, President Obama, Pam Smith, and Secretary of the State Denise Merrill. We annotate Denise Merrill’s recent press conference.

Richard Clark, former White House senior cybersecurity policy adviser via ABC News: Yes, It’s Possible to Hack the Election <read>

Those experiences confirm my belief that if sophisticated hackers want to get into any computer or electronic device, even one that is not connected to the internet, they can do so. The U.S., according to media reports, hacked in to the Iranian nuclear centrifuge control system even though the entire system was air-gapped from the internet. The Russians, according to authoritative accounts, hacked into the Pentagon’s SIPRNet, a secret-level system separate from the internet. North Koreans, computer forensics experts have told me, penetrated SWIFT, the international banking exchange system. Iranians allegedly wiped clean all software on over 30,000 devices in the Aramco oil company. The White House, the State Department and your local fast food joint have all been hacked. Need I go on?…

Some systems produce a paper ballot of record, but that paper is kept only for a recount; votes are recorded by a machine such as an optical scanner and then stored as electronic digits. The counting of the paper ballots of record — when there are such things — is exceedingly rare and is almost never done for verification in the absence of a recount demand.

President Obama via NPR: President Obama: The Election Will Not Be ‘Rigged’ <read>

“Of course the election will not be rigged! What does that mean?” Obama said at a news conference at the Pentagon. “That’s ridiculous. That doesn’t make any sense.”

The president added Americans should not take Trump’s musings on this seriously. “We do take seriously, as we always do,” the president said, “our responsibilities to monitor and preserve the integrity of the voting process.”

Pam Smith, Verified Voting via NPR: Hacking An Election: Why It’s Not As Far-Fetched As You Might Think <read>

“Wherever there’s a fully electronic voting system, there’s potential for tampering of some kind,” said Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting. She says her nonprofit group has been warning about such tampering for years.

Smith says the Democratic Party hacks are another red flag that someone might try to interfere with election results, and that there are many ways to do that.

“If you can get at an election management system, you could potentially alter results, or muddy up the results, or you could even just shed doubt on the outcome because you make it clear that there’s been tampering,” she says.

Denise Merrill, Connecticut Secretary of the State and President of the National Association of Secretaries of State, press conference as reported by CTNewsJunkie: Merrill Defends Integrity of Connecticut’s Voting System <read> With our annotations in [brackets]

I think it’s highly improbable at best that a national system of elections could be hacked. First of all there is no national system of elections,” Merrill, who is president of the National Association of Secretaries of State said Wednesday. “Our election system is extremely decentralized.” [This is a strawman. It does not take a national hack. In a close election hacking just one or two swing states could do the job. In fact, just a couple of polling places the winner of the Electoral College could have been changed either way in Florida alone. A single state could have made the difference in 2004 and 1960. ]

She said there is no credible cyber security threat. [This is just plain false in the light of all the know hacks of government, election, and corporate hacks. Perhaps it is taken out of context.]

In Connecticut there is no county government, so there are 169 towns who are all in charge of running the election and none of them are connected to the Internet. [All of them are connected to the Internet. Especially to the Central Voter Registration System, critical on election day for 5% to 10% of the vote. Also for the new end of day Election Night Reporting System. I applaud the Secretary for continuing to follow the recommendations of UConn implemented by the Bysiewicz administration to keep the voting machines from the Internet. Unfortunately that does not guarantee security. a) See the Stuxnet attack, it attacked Iran’s nuclear centrifuges which were isolated from the Internet. b) It is easy for single insider to hack the voting machines in a single town. Sadly, officials in each of 169 towns cannot approach the levels of security of Military, Government, or Corporate installations, all of which have been hacked by insiders and outsiders.]

“The idea that somehow there could be some national system hack is very unlikely,” Merrill said. [I agree, yet it is a strawman argument]

She said different states are using different kinds of election equipment, but Connecticut is using optical scan machines, which are not connected to the Internet.

Alexander Schwarzmann, head of the University of Connecticut’s Voter Technology Research Center, said there is no possible way to connect the optical scan voting machines to the Internet.

He said Connecticut’s optical scan machines also rely on a paper ballot so those can be counted independently of technology. [As we have said many times, it depends on who wants to look. Go to your town hall and ask to see and count the ballots.]

Merrill said there’s been a lot of pressure on the state to go to some type of Internet voting, but she has resisted. The state purchased the optical scan machines about 10 years ago and have developed an auditing process for the memory cards that are inserted into the machines…[As we have told the Secretary and others several times, defending against Internet voting has been her finest hour!]

Peggy Reeves, director of elections, said most of the mistakes made in elections can be attributed to “human error.” [Unfortunately, too often the SOTS Office and registrars assume that any differences in a post-election audit, without investigation, actually are human error in machine counts. Sometimes the scanners have counted incorrectly in Connecticut, sometimes local official pursue the problem and determine it was not human error in the hand count, but human error in the election process that lead to an incorrect count being certified for the election. Hacking, fraud, machine error, or errors in the process all must be investigated, resolved, and prevented in the future. ]

Merrill said she wanted to sit down with the media Wednesday to “reassure the voters” that Connecticut’s voting system is secure. [Overconfidence is a standard concern of security professionals as an indicator of security risk.]

As far as fraud is concerned, Merrill said the concern in Connecticut is whether people are appropriately filing absentee ballots. She said the law says a person must be absent from the state or unable to get to the polls from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. [We agree absentee voting fraud should be a concern. That is why we warn against all -mail voting, and no-excuse absentee voting.]

Also a Courant article covering the same press conference: <read>

…during a demonstration in Merrill’s office, Peggy Reeves, the state director of elections, showed how the machine is locked with a tamper-proof seal. The UConn Center for Voting Technology Research tests the memory cards the machines use before and after each election.

As we said in our comment on the article:

To be clear CT does not use “Tamper Proof” anything tape or seals. They are called “Tamper Evident”. What that means is that if officials follow good seal protocols and the seals are actually “tamper evident” as applied then officials should be able to detect if they have been tampered with.

Connecticut does not have, as far as I know, any such protocols. Many apply the seals in ways that could easily be compromised. NJ tried six times to create effective seal protocols and failed each time. Finally, seals are designed to prevent outsiders from tampering without detection by insiders. It would be much more difficult for seals to protect against insider access.

Also the Secretary of the State on Where We Live: <Listen>

We called in and discussed the Election Performance Index, areas it does not cover, and the cyber risks to our Election Day Registration System. The Secretary stated that we “Audit all voting machines”. That is incorrect. We audit 5% of polling place voting machines (until July 1st we audited 10%), never audit central count absentee ballot systems, and the audit, as conducted, is insufficient to provide the credibility Connecticut voters deserve. <See the observation reports at the Citizen Audit>

Online Voting Is Risky, Riskier than Online Banking

My letter to the Hartford Courant today.

To the Editor,

The article in the Sunday July, 10 Smarter Living Section, “Democracy in The Digital Age”, is a one-sided disservice to readers. The article, abbreviated from Consumer Reports original, provides a one-sided case for online voting. The article quotes the CEO of a company selling online voting at a huge expense to governments around the world. She touts the benefits without detailing the risks. The system she touts as secure, has never been proven secure. It has never been subjected to a public security test. Unlike the printed version, the original article at Consumer Reports details the risks of online voting…

My letter to the Hartford Courant today.

To the Editor,

The article in the Sunday July, 10 Smarter Living Section, “Democracy in The Digital Age”, is a one-sided disservice to readers. The article, abbreviated from Consumer Reports original, provides a one-sided case for online voting. The article quotes the CEO of a company selling online voting at a huge expense to governments around the world. She touts the benefits without detailing the risks. The system she touts as secure, has never been proven secure. It has never been subjected to a public security test. Unlike the printed version, the original article at Consumer Reports details the risks of online voting, quoting a nationally known voting integrity advocate and a recognized computer scientist specializing in electronic voting, . How ironic that the lead article in the same section, “Protecting Your Data”, points out how risky it is to do banking transactions over the internet from free wi-fi sites. If the unedited Consumer Reports article was provided, readers would have learned why, with all its risks, Internet banking is actually much safer than online voting.

Here is the “full” abbreviated Courant Article: <read>

Original Consumer Reports article quoting Pam Smith and Aviel Rubin <read>

The web: Hardly ready for Internet voting.

So many articles this week demonstrating that the web is not safe for voting. Especially when in the hands of under-resourced government agencies and political parties. (It is also unsafe in the hands of fully-resourced governments and cyber-experts.)

Singapore plans to take its Government offline.
Then we have an above average size government agency that cannot create a safe voter registration system.
Meanwhile the party that allows overseas voters to participate in its primaries via Internet voting has its own problems.

As CTVotersCount readers know, Internet voting should not be compared to a normal application. Its not like the risk of copying some public information, information that should be public, stealing a few million from a bank. Its about billions in government spending, changing election results and covering that up.

Singapore plans to take its Government offline (that is all employees to use a closed network). Der Spiegal <read if you know German>. The short version is they do secret banking like Switzerland and they do not believe they can protect their tax avoiding customers. On the other hand it might keep the public from finding out what they are doing in other government activities. I for one, would not bet on this working. There are a lot of holes and vulnerabilities in any system, especially when big $ are involved.

Then we have an above average size government agency that cannot create a safe voter registration system, i.e. Washington D.C. Washington Post: Glitch believed to be based in mobile app erases some D.C. voters’ party affiliation <read> D.C. is pretty good size, compared to the average of the 169 towns in Connecticut that would have been charged with implementing and protecting Internet voting if the General Assembly had had its way. P.S. Even with help, D.C. had its own problems with Internet voting <read>

Meanwhile the party that allows overseas voters to participate in its primaries via Internet voting has its own problems. Wired: Russia’s Breach of the DNC Is About More Than Trump’s Dirt <read>

Why Online Voting is a Danger to Democracy

An article by David Dill, founder of Verified Voting, from Stanford University: Why Online Voting is a Danger to Democracy

How could we be fooled?

Suppose masses of emails get sent out to naive users saying the voting website has been changed and, after you submit your ballot and your credentials to the fake website, it helpfully votes for you, but changes some of the votes. You also have bots where millions of individual machines are controlled by a single person who uses them to send out spam…

How bad could it be?…

An article by David Dill, founder of Verified Voting, from Stanford University: Why Online Voting is a Danger to Democracy <read>

How could we be fooled?

Suppose masses of emails get sent out to naive users saying the voting website has been changed and, after you submit your ballot and your credentials to the fake website, it helpfully votes for you, but changes some of the votes. You also have bots where millions of individual machines are controlled by a single person who uses them to send out spam…

How bad could it be?

Without being paranoid, there are reasons to believe that people would want to affect the outcome of elections. Right now, they spend billions of dollars trying to do it through campaign contributions and advertising and political consultants and all of that…What is the value of controlling the U.S. presidency? …

Professor Dill ends by explaining the current necessity of paper ballots:

We’ve had a long time to work out the procedures with paper ballots and need to think twice before we try to throw a new technology at the problem. People take paper ballots for granted and don’t understand how carefully thought through they are.

We would add that even paper is vulnerable. We like the public counting of the paper by optical scanners, followed by strong ballot security, meaningful post-election audits, and close vote recounts.

Brennan Center: Election Integrity: A Pro-Voter Agenda

Whenever we open a report with multiple recommendations we start from a skeptical point of view. We expect to agree with some proposals and disagree with others. A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice is the exception. We agree with every recommendation:
Election Integrity: A Pro-Voter Agenda

It starts with the right criteria, it has a great agenda, strong supporting arguments, and ends with an appropriate call to action

It starts with the right criteria it has a great agenda, strong supporting arguments, and ends with an appropriate call to action:

This history strongly suggests two overarching principles that should guide any further efforts to secure election integrity. Such efforts should have two key elements:

First, they should target abuses that actually threaten election security.

Second, they should curb fraud or impropriety without unduly discouraging or disenfranchising eligible voters.

Efforts that do not include these elements will just result in burdens to voters and little payoff.

One: Modernize Voter Registration to Improve Voter Rolls

Two: Ensure Security and Reliability of Our Voting Machines

Three: Do Not Implement Internet Voting Systems Until Security is Proven

Four: Adopt Only Common-Sense Voter Identification Proposals

Five: Increase Security of Mail-In Ballots

Six: Protect Against Insider Wrongdoing

We do not have to choose between election integrity and election access. Indeed, free and fair access is necessary for an election to have integrity. This report examined genuine risks to the security of elections, highlighting current vulnerabilities as well as those that will be faced in the future. Recommendations have been made about how to reduce each risk. We invite and urge policymakers to tackle these problems.

As examples, we particularly support its call for sufficient post-election audits and attention to detecting, preventing, and punishing insider fraud:

Require Post-Election Audits. Many machines now issue a paper record of a voter’s selection. But these records are of little security value without audits to ensure that vote tallies recorded by a particular machine match any paper records. Despite near universal expert agreement on the need for audits, some vendors have vigorously opposed these paper trails, contending that they increase costs and slow the voting process. Security experts also recommend that states pass laws for effective “risk-limiting audits.” These require examination of a large enough sample of ballots to provide statistically “strong evidence that the reported election outcome was correct — if it was.” Also, the audit process should not rely on any one individual who might be in a position to manipulate either the voting machine or the recount device. According to experts, these insider attacks are the most difficult to stop. Voting technology experts also say machines must be “software independent,” which is technically defined as when “an (undetected) change or error in its software cannot cause an undetectable change or error in an election outcome,” but practically speaking means that the election results can be captured independently of the machine’s own software. Auditors should be assigned randomly to further ensure the process is not being gamed. Finally, audits should be as transparent as possible. This not only is essential to garnering public confidence, but can show a defeated candidate that she lost the election in a contest that was free and fair…

It is not surprising that many instances of election fraud, both historically and in the present day, involve the actions of insiders. Recent abuses by insiders have included lawmakers lying about where they live, magistrate judges willfully registering ineligible persons, and legislators running fraudulent absentee ballot schemes. A pollworker in Ohio was famously found guilty of using her authority and training to conduct voter fraud and take certain steps to evade detection. Culprits have even included the chief election officer of Indiana. This is why election officials and workers should receive special attention because their insider status increases their opportunity to both abuse the system and avoid detection. Moreover, when organizational leaders are involved in wrongdoing, it can create a culture for fraud, encouraging others to commit misconduct.

Twice again, Internet/online/email voting not a good idea

“You can’t control the security of the platform,”…The app you’re using, the operating system on your phone, the servers your data will cross en route to their destination—there are just too many openings for hacker interference. “But wait,” you’re entitled to object, “banks, online stores and stock markets operate electronically. Why should something as simple as recording votes be so much more difficult?”…

“As soon as large numbers of people are allowed to vote online, all of the sudden the attack surface is much greater,”…

Handing over election technology to tech companies surrenders the voting process to private, corporate control. The companies will demand trust without letting the public vet the technology, peek into the source code or see behind the curtain into the inner workings of the programs that count the ballots

We have and others said it many times and many ways. Internet/online/voting is not safe for voting and maintaining democracy. Here are just two more articles to explain it again, a variety ways.

Scientific American: When Will We Be Able To Vote Online? <read>

Sooner or later everything seems to go online. Newspapers. TV. Radio. Shopping. Banking. Dating. But it’s much harder to drag voting out of the paper era. In the 2012 presidential election, more than half of Americans who voted cast paper ballots—0 percent voted with their smartphones. Why isn’t Internet voting here yet? Imagine the advantages! … It’s all about security, of course. Currently Internet voting is “a nonstarter,” according to Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of Johns Hopkins University’s Information Security Institute and author of the 2006 book Brave New Ballot. “You can’t control the security of the platform,” he told me. The app you’re using, the operating system on your phone, the servers your data will cross en route to their destination—there are just too many openings for hacker interference. “But wait,” you’re entitled to object, “banks, online stores and stock markets operate electronically. Why should something as simple as recording votes be so much more difficult?” Voting is much trickier for a couple of reasons…

So how does Estonia do it? It’s a clever system. You can vote online using a government ID card with a chip and associated PIN code—and a card reader for your PC. You can confirm the correct logging of your vote with an app. Parts of the software are available for public inspection. You can change your vote as many times as you like online—you can even vote again in person—but only the last vote counts, diminishing the possibility that somebody forced your selection.

Unfortunately, three factors weaken this system’s importance as a model for the U.S. First, Estonia is a country of about one million eligible voters—not around 220 million. Second, we don’t have a national ID card. Third, security experts insist that just because hackers haven’t interfered with Estonia’s voting doesn’t mean they can’t. In 2014 a team led by University of Michigan researchers found at least two points where hackers could easily change votes: by installing a virus on individual PCs or by modifying the vote-collecting servers. (The Estonian government disagrees with the findings.)

Meanwhile other countries’ online-voting efforts haven’t been as successful.

We do disagree with one point: “security experts insist that just because hackers haven’t interfered with Estonia’s voting doesn’t mean they can’t.”. We ask “How do they know? One of the huge problems is that the system could have been compromised undetected by those “virus on individual PCs or by modifying the vote-collecting servers”. This is covered in the second article:

Tech.MIC: Online Voting Is the Future — And It Could Lead to Absolute Disaster <read>

More experts and more reasons its dangerous to democracy:

It’s 2016. Why don’t we have an app on our smartphones that allows us to vote remotely and instantly?…

Why has it taken so long for online voting to enter the election? It’s not government laziness. It’s not that nobody’s trying to realize the promise of online voting. It’s that there’s a concerted effort to make sure online voting never happens…

What’s holding back online voting? In short, security risks. If we’ve learned anything from the past few years of cybersecurity scandals — like the Office of Personnel Management hack, the Sony Pictures Entertainment fiasco or the Ashley Madison breach — it’s that no digital system can be proven to be totally safe.

There’s a common refrain that digital voting experts are tired of hearing: “If I can bank online, why can’t I vote online?” If the internet is safe enough to store our money, shop, file our taxes and perform other sensitive tasks, why can’t it be used to vote?

The truth is, we don’t bank or shop safely online. Major retailers and banking systems deal with hacking, fraudulent charges and identity theft every day. Companies like Amazon are used to a small percentage of transactions being fraudulent. And when fraud occurs in a financial transaction, those problems can be fixed after the fact…

This is the problem voting has that banking and retail do not: the “audit trail.” If something goes wrong with a purchase, you can retrace that purchase between the bank, vendor and customer to see where something went wrong. But voting has to be anonymous: Once a ballot is cast, it can’t be tracked back to the original voter without violating the sanctity of voter anonymity.

“Voting is a situation with two hands,” Ed Gerck, a computer scientist who has been trying to solve the online voting problem from a logistical perspective since the ’90s, told Mic. “In one hand, you know who the voter is; they’re qualified, and they’re allowed to vote. In the other, you have the ballot, which must be correct. But you cannot link the ballot to the voter.”

The hand-off, where a person submits his or her ballot using a phone or a computer and sends it to a digital ballot box, is where mischief can occur, because hackers could theoretically manipulate votes without ever alerting election officials that the system has been compromised…

one reason these systems haven’t yet shown signs of being hacked is because no one cares enough to try. Federal elections don’t rely on them.

“As soon as large numbers of people are allowed to vote online, all of the sudden the attack surface is much greater,” David Jefferson, a computer scientist and digital voting researcher, told Mic. “If I thought we could allow it for a very small number of people who really needed it, I could live with that, but that’s not what people are advocating.”…

Handing over election technology to tech companies surrenders the voting process to private, corporate control. The companies will demand trust without letting the public vet the technology, peek into the source code or see behind the curtain into the inner workings of the programs that count the ballots…

Alabama’s system, Everyone Counts, has been put through rigorous testing from mammoth security companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers. Everyone Counts lets the districts that use it vet the technology themselves or hire an outside contractor to test the security of the system. Alabama’s system, as far as Alabama can discern, has been rock-solid for years. Everyone Counts has never put the system up for a public, free-for-all penetration test, but Merrill says he isn’t worried about a security breach.

The looming hypotheticals and doomsday scenarios are unprecedented in the United States. If there were a breach, it could come from someone outside of of U.S. jurisdiction, even a state-level foreign aggressor. That’s if we could verify it at all. Hackers are tough to track — we’re still left wondering who’s responsible for the 2014 Sony hacking fiasco. And unlike a bank transaction that can be corrected by instant accounting, imagine this same system applying to the presidential election. If Hillary Clinton wins in 2016 and, months later, the discovery of a breach reverses the results, what would happen? It would be a legal nightmare without precedent…

Still interested in risking your vote and your democracy via the Internet? Please read both articles in their entirety.

Iowa Caucus: Democrats to vote by “Magic Pony” Express

Des Moines Register: Democrats abroad can phone-in caucus votes <read>
No matter how much we warn about Internet voting, it seems nobody learns. In this case it is telephone voting, just as insecure. These days the phone goes over the same paths as the Internet:

The Iowa Democratic Party on Tuesday announced the first ever Tele-Caucus initiative. It will allow deployed service members and other Iowans living abroad to participate in the first-in-the-nation event.

The effort piggybacks on a satellite caucus initiative the party announced this fall. Both programs aim to expand participation in the Feb. 1 Iowa caucus to those who are normally unable to attend.

“This is to try and be more inclusive as a party,” Iowa Democratic Party Chair Andy McGuire said. “We want as many people as possible to participate in this caucus.”

We would add, perhaps there will be people participating they would rather not have, such as hackers.

The Tele-Caucus will be facilitated through a telephone consulting firm, Stones’ Phones.

?Founder of the company, Marty Stone, said participants will essentially phone-in their caucus vote by selecting a candidate with the push of a number on the dial pad. It’s compatible with any landline, cellphone, Skype or other program used for calling abroad.

Anyone planning to participate in the inaugural Tele-Caucus must register online, at iowademocrats.org/telecaucus, by Jan. 6. Those eligible should be registered to vote as a Democrat in Iowa and qualify for the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.

As with other such schemes, saying it is secure is not the same as it being secure. No word of actual testing and certification by third parties.

Just this week, we learned a new technical term, Magic Pony, in this article from the Intercept: Comey Calls on Tech Companies Offering End-to-End Encryption to Reconsider “Their Business Model” <read>

It is an educational read about the fallacies of the “Security” of placing back doors “only for the government” into encryption software. One of those things likely only to be used by the public. Anyone aiming at skulduggery would use encryption without backdoors, or avoid the Internet altogether.

Comey had previously argued that tech companies could somehow come up with a “solution” that allowed for government access but didn’t weaken security. Tech experts called this a “magic pony” and mocked him for his naivete.

Now, Comey said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday morning, extensive conversations with tech companies have persuaded him that “it’s not a technical issue.”

“It is a business model question,” he said. “The question we have to ask is: Should they change their business model?”

Sierra Club pitches nonscience nonsense for obscure company

It seems that for the Sierra Club, reason and science end at the edge of the environment. They are now touting a product for Internet voting from a company that simultaneously claims that they have a product that is “a revolutionary mobile voting platform designed to securely cast votes in elections across the globe.” while running a Contest awarding $230,000 to actually accomplish that “In this Challenge, we are asking Solvers for help in overcoming the significant obstacles that stand in the way of bringing safe, secure, and easy voting to people worldwide.”

The article link from the Sierra Club goes to Huffington Post: Why You Might Vote For the Next President From Your Couch [Update: Link has been removed from Huffington Post and updated at the Sierra Club] <read> Read what you can about the company, Votem here: <read>

For many years my career in Computer Science involved evaluating software from large and small companies for use in a large company. Later for close to a decade I worked for a couple of small startups, building and marketing data communications software. One of those was successful, started by an engineer with a working product in demand before the doors opened. The other, was started by a serial entrepreneur, who I later learned was also a serial failure. He was good at getting venture capitol and publicity for attractive concepts, lacking feasibility.

My BS detectors go up when I see a company web site touting their revolutionary product, completely missing information on the company structure, missing information on principles, with no customer success stories, and touting their expertise at getting media placement! I am disappointed that the Sierra Club is sucked in.

Electronic voting is far from ready for prime time. I see that the Challenge and award is just for paper designs to solve some of the many challenges of electronic voting. Here is what top security scientists, computer scientists, and voting experts report after an exhaustive study: https://www.usvotefoundation.org/news/E2E-VIV-press

I wonder who Votem will have evaluate the submissions? If their system is already secure as their web site claims, why do they need this help?

My BS detector is confirmed by their blog trashing science and scientists?
http://votem.com/blog/

I see the first entry cites errors by Einstein and others, and claiming therefor that those skeptical about Internet voting are wrong:
http://votem.com/internet-mobile-voting-is-unachievable/

The world is full of experts. Very intelligent and well-meaning people make predictions about our world every day. And because we are all human, many experts get it wrong; and some in a very big way.

Just the same we can point to industry “experts” who have made many “errors” which coincidentally helped their products. We recall the doctors claiming the safety of tobacco, the claims that our nuclear waste problems would be solved years ago, that fracking is safe, that we would all be driving in flying cars by now, and now that some computer systems are unhackable. There are a lot more startups on the scrap heap along with failed corporate and government projects, that Einstein predictions.

The second blog post is entitled “Beware of The Experts”. The third claims support of Republican presidential candidates.

It is as if Sierra wrote positively about a Challenge by a startup energy services company to award prizes for white papers describing how to do safe fracking or building safe oil pipelines, touting they were just around the corner, leaving the impression that we might as well not bother with green technology investment and conservation.

Cyber risks of Internet voting and electronic voting

Two articles this week on cyber risks, one refuting Colorado’s Secretary of State on online voting. Another articulating the risks of hacking electronic voting in general.

Stay tuned and stay involved!

Two articles this week on cyber risks, one refuting Colorado’s Secretary of State on online voting. Another articulating the risks of hacking electronic voting in general.

From the Colorado Statesman: Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams obscured key facts in online-voting commentary <read>

Last week’s guest commentary by Secretary of State Wayne Williams in The Colorado Statesman obscured some important facts. He was responding to criticism of his new rule establishing criteria for the casting of election ballots by email.

In it, Secretary Williams implies that the federal government expanded voting by email. He writes, “The federal government, along with the Colorado General Assembly, expanded the electronic ballot transmission for military and overseas voters.” In fact the federal government has neither endorsed nor expanded the return of marked ballots over email…

Secretary Williams claims that of the nearly 3,400 ballots sent back electronically in 2014 there was not a single report of tampering. This raises two issues: First, “no report” is meaningless when tampering of online ballots can be done undetectably. Experienced hackers can penetrate a system for a very long time without detection, as seen in recently publicized successful attacks on the FBI and Pentagon. A Colorado voter whose email ballot has been altered would never know; the elections office also will never know…Second, for years there has been no state rule to guide these vulnerable voters through this security minefield, nor to spell out the very narrow parameters required by law, needlessly putting many more than even those 3,400 votes at risk…

Given our shared concern is for ensuring the safe return of military and overseas voters’ ballots, the record of other states can be instructive. Minnesota and Wisconsin consistently lead the nation in the rate of military and overseas ballots returned, and neither permits online ballot return

Read the article for more.

From WhoWhatWhy: Foreigners Could Hack U.S. Elections, Experts Say <read>

What if a foreign head of state had the power to handpick our next President? It sounds like the plot of a movie, but it actually might be in the realm of possibility.

Most people take our elections for granted. The few who don’t often suspect that one party might be trying to steal votes from the other. But they don’t envision that the theft could be coming from outside US borders.

What experts are telling us, though, is that our voting machines are so insecure that all elections, whether at the national, state, or local level, are vulnerable to being attacked by hackers in other countries.

We’ll add that maybe foreigners might scare some of the complacent, yet all these attacks could be done by Americans bent by many similar motives and more.

We also add a specific added threat on our shores of insider attack – those with access the the system who can, desire, or are intimidated into changing the results.

For example, Russia may want to prevent a hawk like John McCain, who wants weapons in the Ukraine and faces a tough battle for his job next fall, from getting reelected.

Israel’s leaders believe that the Iran nuclear deal would doom their country, so if they thought they could get away with it, would they try to put in office US representatives who share that view?…

This begs the question: Given that the security at some of our most protected institutions can be breached, and given that US elections pose an enticing target for our adversaries, what would prevent a foreign agent from hacking our ballot boxes?

The answer: Not much.

Experts indicate that the election systems in place today do not provide the adequate protection that would be able to stop a foreign hacker — a hacker anywhere, in fact — from rigging our races. Even worse, these attacks could go undetected…

Since such attacks can easily go unnoticed, evidence of remote hacks is scarce. But it’s likely they’re happening more than we know, considering that unencrypted connections over the open internet aren’t too hard for a knowledgeable college student to breach…

One report [on Internet voting], produced by computer scientists at the request of the Pentagon, examined a pilot iVoting project and concluded that an internet- and PC-based voting system presented “fundamental security problems” that couldn’t be fixed without a “radical breakthrough.”

Cyber attacks, the report concluded, “could occur on a large scale, and could be launched by anyone from a disaffected lone individual to a well-financed enemy agency outside the reach of U.S. law.”…

Despite its seemingly safe appearance, there are subtle ways the eVoting [polling place and central count voting] process could be susceptible to attack. For, in many cases, these systems actually do connect online.

John Sebes, CTO of the Open Source Elections Technology Foundation (OSET), told WhoWhatWhy that the most significant logistical issue for local officials is something called the election management system, or EMS.

As a component of the overall apparatus, the EMS is used for election data management and data entry — most likely on a PC in an elections office. Sebes said that, in theory, EMSs are never supposed to be online, but sometimes they get connected anyway. Not only do hackers then have the potential to breach election data on the PC, but malware could affect the removable media when it is taken out of the PC and inserted into the voting machines.

For now Connecticut is relatively safe from outsider attacks domestic and foreign.

While the Legislature voted for Internet voting, Secretary of the State Denise Merill maintained her staunch opposition, pointing out that Internet voting would violate our state constitutional requirement for a secret ballot. Fortunately, a constitutional amendment to change that died between committee and the floor, in 2014. It should stay that way.
Right now we do not connect our optical scanners to external equipment. In fact, their external ports are sealed. Memory cards are never in a device connected to the outside world. We do all our election results summary by addition and transcription from the printed scanner tapes. However, the Secretary of the State’s Office has plans for acquiring GEMs systems for municipalities to speed the electronic calculations of results. If, and its a big “if” right now, the GEMs systems are pristine, never were or never will be connected to the Internet, we would remain relatively safe from outsider attack. Stay tuned and involved!

Remember that we are still at risk of insider attacks, where our only protection would be adequate ballot security, audits, and recounts.