Group Sues To Stop German E-Voting 92
kRemit writes "The German hacker group Chaos Computer Club today sued the German State of Hessen to prevent the use of electronic voting machines (Google translation) in the upcoming elections on January 27. This comes as a follow-up to the Dutch initiative 'We don't trust voting machines,' which succeeded in banning the same type of voting machines in the Netherlands."
Ha! (Score:2)
Hacker v Cracker (Score:2)
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So I guess we should all just start calling our monitors the "computer" and the box that actually contains the computer the "hard drive," since 99% of the general public thinks that's correct? Oh, and I'm trying to download a program in Excel, when what I really mean is create a spreadsheet?
No thanks. I think I'll just continue to educate people who don't know any better as to what
you can tamper with paper votes (Score:5, Insightful)
on the other hand with electronic voting (and to a lesser extent mechanical voting), you have an order of magnitude more attack vectors. you can also do a lot more damage with the slightest of effort, quickly, with a lot of volatility and potential for permanent obfuscation, destruction, or scrambling and outright manipulation. you can cover your tracks well too, and you can quickly survey the landscape and tweak votes in ways that are hard to sniff out later
paper voting is totally transparent to everyone involved. electronic voting is opaque. there is no verification, nothing of substance. nothing to see or touch
electronic voting is probably one of the greatest threats to faith in democracy in the 21st century. not a joke in the least
we need to lose this really bad idea asap
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If it used a 0-day exploit, and had a way to get through NATs (piggy back on a website request or something), then you couldn't trust any tallies or votes done on anything that touched the internet.
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You shouldn't be able to cheat at all in elections. You cannot ignore something because you could only cheat "a little". If it comes to a close call every single vote counts.
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I disagree. Vote counting is always a "pretty close approximation." Not just from the fact that machines and humans both fail in different ways, but also because some voters will be unexpectedly sick on election day, or be killed in traffic accidents, etc. Some will not be voting based on correct, complete information (in fact, that describes us all). Worse, some will change their minds at the last minute for trivial or irrelevant reasons. These people are, literally, noise that makes the whole process
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same is true of e-voting. Do you know the path of the results from the paper votes to TV results? History shows their are so many ways found to hack paper ballots, be it creative printing, creative handling, or messing with phone lines used to transmit, or losing a box, or even substituting a box for another (you give the real voters the counterfeit ballots, and boxes. You fill in the real ballots and boxes.)
With e-voting their
Theoretically possible? Yes. (Score:2)
Fundamentally, the problem is that if the mechanism for counting votes is hidden, then the results can't be trusted. It could, potentially, pass every test but when a crucial date rolled around, or a switch was set, it could act in a very different way.
And it's not just the program. Every step of t
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How it works: The ballot papers are emptied into the middle of the table. Everyone pulls out all the papers with a figure "1" next to their name, counts their pile and writes down the number of votes. Everyone then passes their pile of papers to the left, counts the ones from the person on their right, and so on. When each person has counted e
And Yet... (Score:1)
The way things are going at the moment I wouldn't be surprised if either or both are eventually proven true.
Heroes (Score:2)
E-vote tampering is not science fiction. It's an inevitable fact.
Scale matters. (Score:2)
Quantity has a quality all its own.
Many people seem to have the mistaken impression that electronic voting doesn't change anything fundamental about vote fraud, it just changes how it happens. But, if the change is big enough, it becomes qualitatively different as well.
You are ignoring the key issue that led to this (Score:2)
Re:You are ignoring the key issue that led to this (Score:5, Insightful)
Ireland has less people you say? True, but it still has millions, it's about the size of a US state. And these things scale well! They're amenable to hierarchical decomposition! Vote local, count local, subsubtotal, subtotal, total => result.
Human voting is a human process, and computers should stay the fuck out of it. It's incredibly more difficult to bribe _everyone_ involved in a human-counted election than to change a few lines in a closed-source unverified voting machine.
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Australia uses a similar system for casting votes and counting. Ticking or numbering boxes with a pencil is way different to having a machine punch holes in a paper ballot, and avoids any hanging chads or any of that crap.
As for scalability of counting, in Australia we get the election result on the night (except for seats which are incredibly close) a few hours after polling booths close.
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And the voting system is proportional representation, more complicated to count, but they still manage
I'm a fan of paper, but you're wrong to say that the proportional representation system is more complicated to count -- it's simpler. There are more parties, sure, but fewer separate decisions. My ballot (in the US) can have as many as 80 separate choices on it, because we vote for individual positions at the city, county, state and national level all on one ballot. In addition there are city, county and state ballot initiatives as well as retention votes for judges and some other appointed officials.
Re:You are ignoring the key issue that led to this (Score:5, Insightful)
- Florida did not simply use paper ballots; it used mechanical voting machines to punch those ballots.
- Paper-punching machines are needlessly complicated, opening them up to unique kinds of disruption. Their performance in Florida may have been deliberately degraded: there are allegations that substandard paper was sent to that state by a voting-machine company for use in the machines (read more here [votetrustusa.org])
- In voting, the simplest is the best: paper + pencil for the voter; trustworthy citizens for the counting. This is what we use in Canada; a country of 30m people, and we are able to announce election results the night of the election. There is universal trust in the voting process - though not, I am sad to say, in politics in general
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The way to eliminate the problem of machine unreliability is to mark the ballots by hand and count them by hand.
Florida System Machine vs Human (Score:1)
Th
Florida voting problem... Not. (Score:1)
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Do you believe the government is in such good control of the news media so see to it that this doesn't happen?
In some countries it takes two weeks to announce the results. How come we can't be patient in the U
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Sure, he's principled and honest. His principles are just opposite mine.
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NH Primaries Voting Franchise Monopoly (Score:2)
As simple as I can say this... (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, at best they are a waste of money. At worst, and probably most likely, they add all sorts of new vectors for corruption in a process that is inherently corrupt. Listen, most sane people realize that instant election results are not worth the dangers involved with excessive automation of the process. Keep to Occam's razor. The simpler the system the better. Pen and paper are ideal, but a punch card system is a fair choice as well.
All the arguments are hashed and tired. There's no sensible reason to move to electronic voting. It doesn't magically increase turn-out. It's expensive. I needn't go on. However, if anyone on the elections board or whatever decisional authority over elections is reading this, this is a good starting point [schneier.com] for comprehending the e-voting situation as it stands as a piece of the larger issue of elections in general.
SAGEN SIE NICHT ZUM ELEKTRONISCHEN WÄHLEN!!
People know, Politicians not (Score:2)
In this case, they want to use voting machines that the CCC has a [heise.de]
English Version Available (Score:5, Informative)
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Which just goes to show once again that in web design representing different language versions by flags is a bloody stupid idea.
And yes, this is off topic, but the above can't be pointed out too often, so I'm willing to take that karma hit.
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[english] [french] [spanish] [german] [dutch] [japanese]
I confidently predict that at least one AC will not be able to spot what is wrong with this.
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Because perhaps at the time he submitted this news to /. no english version was available? I know a lot of (german) sites which publish the german news story as soon as it's available and than later on translate (part of their) stories into english.
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Voting machines or voting computers? (Score:1)
The fact these devices are not simple mechanical aides, but complex, impossible-to-verify black-box computer systems is stressed.
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All references to voting machines are scrapped from our voting regulations (dec 10 2007) and all electronic voting equipment have their validation revoked (sept 2007)
Electronic paper voting? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a lot of smart people asking -- how can we make electronic voting as good as traditional voting with slips of paper? What if that's the wrong question? What if instead, paper voting could be made *better* with the advent of electronic technology?
There was an article a week or so back describing some place printing ballots on demand. What if paper ballots were printed on demand, but the people printing them are the voters? A machine could be hooked up to print a ballot when a voter presses the correct buttons, and would only print out one ballot per voter. The ballots themselves would also have a barcode on them with a code certifying which machine printed them. The printers would count how many ballots were printed, and if that number doesn't match the number counted, that'd signify a problem -- either the machines were tampered with, or the physical ballots.
Now, that'd still make it possible to print excessive ballots from a printer, but then the number of votes wouldn't match the number of voters, and thus, number of votes cast.
To fix that, you could use some kind of public key cryptography system. In order to vote, you are sent a voter registration card, which contains a single-use private key on a 2D-barcode, which in turn is signed by whatever authority compiles the eligible voters list. That private key in turn is used to sign a message that simply says "I voted" and nothing else. That would eliminate the possibility of faking lists of who voted, except if the private key itself was falsified to start with, or if multiple such keys were assigned per person.
But that's okay. Now there are only three possible attack vectors (that I can think of) -- key falsification (only possible if you're part of the authority that issues voter identities), key theft (possible if you rifle through the mail of whoever's identity you want to steal), and vote changing (would require tampering both with voting machines *and* with paper ballots).
The key theft threat can be mitigated by rigorous identity checks -- posession of the proper private key should not be sufficient to vote -- some kind of ID should also be neccessary, and the key falsification threat can be minimized by *very* rigorous inspection of whatever authority issues said keys, and the vote changing scenario is made more difficult than it used to be.
Now, such a system would probably never be implemented due to cost concerns. But it'd probably be better than the paper voting we have today, and it wouldn't break the secret ballot, nor would it make the system less transparent. It'd basically be the old system with a parallell electronic system to ensure whoever counts the paper ballots are honest. There are probably other flaws too, I don't know.
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The first problem that e-voting is supposed to solve is to get the votes counted quicker. Remmber that in 2000 Gore was announced as the winner first. Do you really think that can be allowed to h
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If you're (re)counting votes and can't explain differences in the counts, then you're doing it wrong.
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There was an article a week or so back describing some place printing ballots on demand. What if paper ballots were printed on demand, but the people printing them are the voters? A machine could be hooked up to print a ballot when a voter presses the correct buttons, and would only print out one ballot per voter. The ballots themselves would also have a barcode on them with a code certifying which machine printed them. The printers would count how many ballots were printed, and if that number doesn't match the number counted, that'd signify a problem -- either the machines were tampered with, or the physical ballots.
Wouldn't this violate voter privacy? If the only paper ballot you have matches the actual vote case, you could take a snapshot of it with your cellphone and show to the guys who paid for your vote. A major point with secret ballots is that you do not have a paper trail, so you can lie to anyone instructing you to vote for a certain party.
You would need to have the machine print arbitrary ballots, which would of course cause problems if there is a paper recount after the machine count failed, and you mana
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Excellent point! Hadn't thought about that.
You could take a snapshot with a cell camera today, but there's no way to prove that was the actual vote you cast. If no other ba
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Two of your suggestions are open to this kind of attack:
1) On-demand printing of ballots with barcode: you could make steps to create a nice system whereby no aud
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John Gruber said it best... (Score:5, Insightful)
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GermanE or GermanY? (Score:1)
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Re:The best hackers complain best hackers control. (Score:2)
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The Real Plot Regarding E Vote Not what you think (Score:1, Interesting)
THE TRUTH may very well be that E - Voting is a threat to the current power structure (they know this) a system that disallows or stops the influence of special interests and or the delusions of individu
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I'd like to hear your description of "properly implemented". Remember that you have to reconcile three things: voter verification, accurate counting, and secret ballot. (Pick two.)
And by the way: Poorly implemented, it does just the opposite. Diebold's systems -- excuse me, Premiere Election Systems -- can have the vote compromised by anyone with access to the appropriate excel/Access database. (Might actually just
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We could also print out additional receipts for some other party to audit the system.
I have designed a universal information architecture / system that engineers Big Br
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Alright, let me get this straight: Are these "public databases" exposed, in full? Are they simply every single vote, and who it was for?
If so, that kills your anonymity/secrecy. It now becomes possible for people to literally and directly buy votes, because they
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Just displaying the person's vote you asked for and a row of "final totals" across the bottom of the screen would probably get past most people -- even if the "final
24c3 lectures (Score:4, Informative)
one about electronic voting in the netherlands (english): http://outpost.h3q.com/fnord/24c3-torrents/24c3-2342-en-it_was_a_bad_idea_anyway.mkv.torrent [h3q.com]
another about electronic voting vulnerabilities and the status in germany (german): http://outpost.h3q.com/fnord/24c3-torrents/24c3-2380-de-nedap_wahlcomputer_in_deutschland.mkv.torrent [h3q.com]
This is about open source (Score:1)
Until now elections in germany are held in public. This means that anybody can come in and watch the votes beeing counted. However with the voting machines used the people are requested to believe the government that they operate correctly. This trust should be based on secret reviews of the machines hard and software conducted by the government.
The CCC argues that his does not qualify as a public e
open source voting machines are intransparent (Score:2)
also, the argument actually is about that those machines can be easily manipulated. a public counting process is only to ensure that there is no manipulation, therefore ensuring government legitimacy.
you are wrong.
Use old paper system, but electronics also detect (Score:1)
Use them.
But underneath them, have an electronic sensor system that detects the votes.
This eliminates the problem of stuffing paper ballots as in Chicago's past and Kenya's yesterday;
and eliminates the problem of electronic machines giving whatever numbers the last programmer wanted,
not what the voters selected.
That's a double check.
No voting system should be allowed that is less trustworthy than the old paper system.
If we allow voting to