One of the scarier notions on this planet as we speak is the prospect of American voting machines being compromised at scale: voters thrown off rolls, votes disregarded, vote tallies edited, whole elections hacked.
That’s why the nation’s lawmakers and civil servants flocked (comparatively talking) to Def Con in Las Vegas this week, the place hackers at its Voting Village do their greatest to show the potential vulnerabilities — together with, in some circumstances, distant command and management — of voting methods.
There are a number of methods to assist safe voting. One, fortunately, is already in place; the decentralization of methods such that each state and county maintains its personal, offering a bewildering panoply of various targets, relatively than a single tantalizing level of failure. A second, as safety guru Bruce Schneier factors out, is to eschew digital voting machines altogether and follow good old school paper ballots.
But paper ballots don’t assist a lot when you use machines to tabulate them, and people machines are compromised — so it’s particularly worrying if these are, in engineering parlance, black packing containers, i.e. machines which offer visibility solely of their inputs and their outputs, not their internal workings.
An answer to this black-box drawback is to both tabulate by hand, or instantiate a separate audit course of after every election. That means independently sampling and hand-counting a small fraction of the votes, making certain that the audit result’s statistically in step with the general tally — and if it isn’t, rising the pattern measurement, as much as and together with a full recount.
The election menace mannequin is broader than you may suppose. Researchers can, as an example, remodel poll pictures in order that votes transfer imperceptibly. Which is one among many the explanation why paper ballots are so essential. I’ve some excellent news there: as Politico’s wonderful voting machine interactive reveals, most US states have and/or are shifting to paper ballots (and a lot of the the rest had been/are going to largely vote for the occasion apparently against democracy anyway.)
The audit state of affairs, although, is … extra sophisticated. Only 25 states require any audits of federal elections, as an example, and solely a few of these audits have tooth. Witness Verified Voting’s very good interactive explainers of publish election audits and state audit legal guidelines.
I don’t wish to reduce the importance of safe voting machines and the Voting Village hackers’ work. It’s as essential as everybody says. But as any safety professional will let you know, protection in depth is commonly much more essential than the energy of any particular person layer.
Secure machines, which generate particular person paper ballots, to be hand-tabulated and/or audited — that’s the type of protection in depth we would like, and personally I’m a little bit involved that the ultimate moat, the audit, doesn’t get the eye it deserves. To quote, of all folks, a Republican president: “Trust, but verify.”
