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[smjjames]

And it'll be expected that Trump and Trumpites will scream 'RIGGED!' at the top of their lungs when the machines malfunction like that.

Trump isn't known to apply Occams Razor to anything.

[martinuzz]

I don't understand in the first place that you use voting machines instead of pen and paper. Any 1st year IT student can tell you that not a single electronic device can ever be completely safe from hacking. At least not until quantum computer encryption becomes a thing.
Attempts by the government at digitalizing the voting system over here have, thank goodness, been thwarted by the voice of reason from IT professors and experts.

[TheBiggerFish]

Whatever happened to good old paper...

Or decent machinery like a tablet with the wifi turned off...

I don't understand in the first place that you use voting machines instead of pen and paper. Any 1st year IT student can tell you that not a single electronic device can ever be completely safe from hacking. At least not until quantum computer encryption becomes a thing.
Attemps at digitalizing the voting system over here have, thank goodness, been thwarted by the voice of reason from IT professors and experts.

What if it's airgapped?

[martinuzz]

Whatever happened to good old paper...

Or decent machinery like a tablet with the wifi turned off...

I don't understand in the first place that you use voting machines instead of pen and paper. Any 1st year IT student can tell you that not a single electronic device can ever be completely safe from hacking. At least not until quantum computer encryption becomes a thing.
Attemps at digitalizing the voting system over here have, thank goodness, been thwarted by the voice of reason from IT professors and experts.

What if it's airgapped?

If it's airgapped, open source, and triple doublechecked, yeah, maybe.

That would not be possible in the EU though. A large public project like designing such a system would need to be put out on the open market for commercial parties to compete, completely in line with the basic neo con principles of the EU that if you leave it to the market, you will get the best services at the lowest price. We'd end up with some Bulgarian programming company writing our election software under closed license

[smjjames]

I don't understand in the first place that you use voting machines instead of pen and paper. Any 1st year IT student can tell you that not a single electronic device can ever be completely safe from hacking. At least not until quantum computer encryption becomes a thing.
Attemps at digitalizing the voting system over here have, thank goodness, been thwarted by the voice of reason from IT professors and experts.

After the whole hanging-chad debacle of 2000, we started trying to find other alternatives such as going electronic. But we've learned (the hard way) that the machines have problems with reliability. Not so much as problems with hacking than hardware and software issues.

Whatever happened to good old paper...

Or decent machinery like a tablet with the wifi turned off...

I don't understand in the first place that you use voting machines instead of pen and paper. Any 1st year IT student can tell you that not a single electronic device can ever be completely safe from hacking. At least not until quantum computer encryption becomes a thing.
Attemps at digitalizing the voting system over here have, thank goodness, been thwarted by the voice of reason from IT professors and experts.

What if it's airgapped?

If it's airgapped, open source, and triple doublechecked, yeah, maybe.

What is 'airgapped'?

[Frumple]

Pen and paper isn't exactly much safer, mart. In any case, most of the reason so far as I'm aware is more or less just time. Your over there is a metric humpton smaller and more compact, heh. Beyond that there's been general digitalization movement for the government for a while now, aiming to cut down on costs and errors (in paperwork, etc.). Last I checked it's been doing a decent job of it, too, though there's still a long way to go.

[mainiac]

Paper could be fraudified as well. The protection is that local election officials would all need to be in the conspiracy. Too many people.

[Max™]

What is 'airgapped'?

No wireless access, no physical link, all data has to be transferred with an act of physically moving it somewhere.

[martinuzz]

Paper could be fraudified as well. The protection is that local election officials would all need to be in the conspiracy. Too many people.

This. Called risk spread.

[Lord Shonus]

I don't understand in the first place that you use voting machines instead of pen and paper. Any 1st year IT student can tell you that not a single electronic device can ever be completely safe from hacking. At least not until quantum computer encryption becomes a thing.
Attempts by the government at digitalizing the voting system over here have, thank goodness, been thwarted by the voice of reason from IT professors and experts.

129,085,403 votes were cast in the 2012 Presidential Election. That is roughly 8 times the total population of the Netherlands. Counting all those votes accurately would take a huge investment in manpower and a great deal of time; the former would be rather expensive while the latter would mean that an extremely important question would hang in the balance for days or even weeks. Until relatively recently, votes were cast on mechanical machines, but hardware problems in the 2000 election led to those being phased out in favor of the newer electronic ones. The electronic ones print out a paper ballot anyway (which you are supposed to verify before casting your vote - you can reject it a few times and vote again in case of any errors) to create a paper trail, so any electronic errors would be caught in any election close enough for them to matter.

[smjjames]

I don't understand in the first place that you use voting machines instead of pen and paper. Any 1st year IT student can tell you that not a single electronic device can ever be completely safe from hacking. At least not until quantum computer encryption becomes a thing.
Attempts by the government at digitalizing the voting system over here have, thank goodness, been thwarted by the voice of reason from IT professors and experts.

129,085,403 votes were cast in the 2012 Presidential Election. That is roughly 8 times the total population of the Netherlands. Counting all those votes accurately would take a huge investment in manpower and a great deal of time; the former would be rather expensive while the latter would mean that an extremely important question would hang in the balance for days or even weeks. Until relatively recently, votes were cast on mechanical machines, but hardware problems in the 2000 election led to those being phased out in favor of the newer electronic ones. The electronic ones print out a paper ballot anyway (which you are supposed to verify before casting your vote - you can reject it a few times and vote again in case of any errors) to create a paper trail, so any electronic errors would be caught in any election close enough for them to matter.

Otherwise known as the Hanging-Chad debacle. Although I thought people were punching the holes out themselves, not machines.

Part of the problem (although it can also be regarded as a plus) is that there's also no single standardized method of voting (which you probably have in Netherlands), methods vary from state to state and precinct to precinct. Not sure if that's actually an issue though, the 'no standardized system of voting which is used everywhere'.

Something something something "hanging chads".

Yep.

[Starver]

What is 'airgapped'?

No physical/logical connection to anything outside the system. To whatever degree one deigns necessary.  Dedicated landlines between nodes would be one extreme (whilst a verified secure VPN running atop of public communication systems might be sufficient to others.)  It could involve zero data connection (eyeballed screen data is typed up on a more public system for publication) or a sneakernet connection used to transfer the final/intermediate/staged data masses from the secure system onto the 'realworld' ones.

[smjjames]

What is 'airgapped'?

No physical/logical connection to anything outside the system. To whatever degree one deigns necessary.  Dedicated landlines between nodes would be one extreme (whilst a verified secure VPN running atop of public communication systems might be sufficient to others.)  It could involve zero data connection (eyeballed screen data is typed up on a more public system for publication) or a sneakernet connection used to transfer the final/intermediate/staged data masses from the secure system onto the 'realworld' ones.

'sneakernet', I like that word used for physical transfer.

[martinuzz]

129,085,403 votes were cast in the 2012 Presidential Election. That is roughly 8 times the total population of the Netherlands. Counting all those votes accurately would take a huge investment in manpower and a great deal of time; the former would be rather expensive while the latter would mean that an extremely important question would hang in the balance for days or even weeks.

Absolute population numbers should be irrelevant. You can count 1 billion votes just as fast as 1 million votes, as long as the ratio of counters : voters remains the same.
Sure, there'd be some delay from conferring the results from all teh counting hubs to counting central, but that should not be days or weeks. Having a larger population would actually be an argument in favour of counting with paper and pen, because more risk spread.

The electronic ones print out a paper ballot anyway (which you are supposed to verify before casting your vote - you can reject it a few times and vote again in case of any errors) to create a paper trail, so any electronic errors would be caught in any election close enough for them to matter.

While the system sounds good, it would still be vulnerable to the situation described by Max

I like to think Soros could afford to have it display one thing and record another, you don't do voter fraud in a way that makes it obvious to the voter while they're doing it.

[Rolan7]

Hacking into these machines requires unmonitored physical access.  Yeah the Diebold machines were vulnerable...  If you picked the lock open and plugged in a USB stick.  Kinda fucky that they had active USB ports during the election (I assume), but that's an easy security hole to patch.

Without USB, we're talking about removing the hard drive and doing crypto analysis on it.

And for fuck's sake, no wireless!