There have been lots of tales from America about problems with electronic voting machines in the mid-term elections, but my favourite example is this one – where a candidate was recorded as getting zero votes even though he’d gone and voted for himself.
Two things are common across many of the stories – the absence of a proper paper-based audit trail to check things if the machine comes up with a suspicious result and the reluctance on the part of officials running elections to believe their machines may have got it wrong. They are both important factors to look out for if your local council in the UK is thinking of trying a voting pilot using machines for next May (and indeed to look out for in Scotland with its electronic counting – not quite the same as electronic voting, but also important to get right – coming with STV).
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4 Comments
Electronic counting doesn’t necessarily pose quite the same problems as long as there is some sort of access to the raw ballot data. This needn’t be full publication – I have argued elsewhere – that candidates should be permitted to submit their own software which will run against the same ballot data, and thereby verify the accuracy of the official software.
The process by which votes are captured electronically and routed to the software is still potentially a weak link. But at least with paper ballots there is an audit trail.
Two things are needed for secure voting by means of an electronic voting machine.
(1) a paper receipt of your vote, encrypted so that it is impossible to see how you have voted unless it is matched up with another encrypted paper which is printed out at the same time and kept in a secure box.
(2) a paper copy of your vote which you check and place in a ballot box (rusty or otherwise pace Mrs Blears) and which can be counted in the event of a problem occuring with the electronic count.
It is also of course vital that the electronic machines are in secure places (traditionally known as polling stations).
Tony Greaves
Even then it isn’t at all difficult to hack an electronic voting machine to produce a receipt different from the vote which is recorded into the electronic system.
In the words of an IT security expert creating a secure voting machines network wouldn’t just be difficult – it would be the first totally secure network in computing history.
Open source would be a partial solution but has some practical problems over checking it.
Worth bearing in mind the US Navy communications system was almost totally compromised (to the extent that they had to replace the whole lot) for about 20 years due to spies giving the encryption codes to the Soviets.
could we offer to lend them colin? He’d bring a sense of gravitas to the proceedings…..