Microsoft anounces encrypted voting system

[soldar]

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2019/05/06/protecting-democratic-elections-through-secure-verifiable-voting/

Today, at the Microsoft Build developer conference, CEO Satya Nadella announced ElectionGuard, a free open-source software development kit (SDK) from our Defending Democracy Program. ElectionGuard will make voting secure, more accessible, and more efficient anywhere it’s used in the United States or in democratic nations around the world.

My opinion is that encrypted voting systems have been possible for a long time but people do not trust them because they do not understand them.

[soldar]

David Chaum introduced (invented?) "blind signatures" in 1983.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature

[Stray Electron]

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2019/05/06/protecting-democratic-elections-through-secure-verifiable-voting/

Today, at the Microsoft Build developer conference, CEO Satya Nadella announced ElectionGuard, a free open-source software development kit (SDK) from our Defending Democracy Program. ElectionGuard will make voting secure, more accessible, and more efficient anywhere it’s used in the United States or in democratic nations around the world.

My opinion is that encrypted voting systems have been possible for a long time but people do not trust them because they do not understand them.

  Brought to you by the same people that gave us Windows, the most bloated, buggy and virus prone software in HISTORY! Oh, and let's not forget how windows 10 is stealing everything that we type into a PC and is shipping it off to MicroSoft in Ireland.

   People understand encryption just fine, they just don't TRUST MicroSoft!

[daqq]

https://xkcd.com/2030/

[soldar]

Brought to you by the same people that gave us Windows, the most bloated, buggy and virus prone software in HISTORY! Oh, and let's not forget how windows 10 is stealing everything that we type into a PC and is shipping it off to MicroSoft in Ireland.

   People understand encryption just fine, they just don't TRUST MicroSoft!

Blind signatures were invented in 1983 by not-MS and got no traction.

MS is now introducing a new open-source system which has had no time yet to be implemented in real life.

[soldar]

https://xkcd.com/2030/

Good one!

[Domagoj T]

Tom Scott has something to say too:

[apis]

My opinion is that encrypted voting systems have been possible for a long time but people do not trust them because they do not understand them.

Transparency is important. Everyone understands how paper ballots works, from start to finish. It has worked just fine for hundreds of years. It doesn't need fixing.

[windsmurf]

Transparency is important. Everyone understands how paper ballots works, from start to finish. It has worked just fine for hundreds of years. It doesn't need fixing.

Automated Ballot counters are still in the mix, with hackable software/data. 
Humans are still in the mix with corruptible influence, etc.

Just sayin...

[nctnico]

My opinion is that encrypted voting systems have been possible for a long time but people do not trust them because they do not understand them.

Transparency is important. Everyone understands how paper ballots works, from start to finish. It has worked just fine for hundreds of years. It doesn't need fixing.

Transparency hits the nail on the head. The problem is that whatever is digital cannot be re-counted like a physical paper ballot. Of course there is a whole flurry about hacking and being able to spy on how and what people vote but the main issue is and remains that paper ballots are physical things.

[rdl]

Yeah, right. Microsoft, exactly the company to trust with something like this.

[apis]

Automated Ballot counters are still in the mix, with hackable software/data.

Here at least, all votes are counted by hand more than once and by different people.

Humans are still in the mix with corruptible influence, etc.

Which is why voting fraud happens and why as much transparency as possible is a good thing.

[ElectronicSupersonic]

  We have presidential elections coming (this weekend). I personally don't trust local voting system (paper based) or any voting system for that matter. Neither I trust politicians - both those that are in place now and those whoo will replace them. Born in soviet union, I've seen different people in charge (and different systems they kept in place) and I came to the conclusion, that politicians can't be trusted regardless of the system or people in place. The state is run by people they say, only these people are "the people". 

As they say in Russia (pardon my half assed translation - it rhymes perfectly in Russian):
Vote you do or vote you not,
Fuck you get no matter what

Any voting system where humans are involved (mainly on the receiving end) can and will always be susceptible to "influence". Since there is no biological beings (on this planet) that are capable of creating voting system for humans, humans do that themself, with predictable results obviously. 

[soldar]

Transparency is important. Everyone understands how paper ballots works, from start to finish. It has worked just fine for hundreds of years. It doesn't need fixing.

Living in caves worked fine for hundreds of years and didn't need fixing. We still fixed it.

The problem is that whatever is digital cannot be re-counted like a physical paper ballot.

Absolutely not true. Digital ballots are discrete "files" which can be counted as many times as you like. They could even be printed on paper if that satisfies anybody.

Many posts here confirm the unreasonable distrust. If techies and representatives of all participant political parties say they trust the system why would I not? If all parties say they can check the results and they trust the system why would I not?

Again, this is a case of ignorance and distrust. Paper ballots can be manipulated even more but we are familiar with them.

[daqq]

Paper ballots can be manipulated even more but we are familiar with them.

I'm not sure that's true. Our counting is pretty transparent, can involve people from all sides of the political spectrum etc. While I'm sure there's place enough for some mischief, I can't imagine doing it on a mass scale.

At the end of the day, if you don't trust your government enough to provide a proper counting of votes, what makes you think that it would count them properly when software is involved?

Again, this is a case of ignorance and distrust.

Distrust yes, ignorance, not sure about that one. Just look at personal data leaking left and right, hacks big and small all over the place... and when you open your dictionary in Slovakia and look up the equivalent of fuckup you will find "see: government IT project". Not sure about the rest of the world.

[maginnovision]

As far as the software goes... Since it's open source people are free to pick it apart and find flaws and fix or at least suggest fixes. You don't have to trust Microsoft explicitly. Like most of these things it'd probably have a limited roll out. Could do it here in California during presidential election. If it doesn't turn out blue you know it was hacked.

[Stray Electron]

My opinion is that encrypted voting systems have been possible for a long time but people do not trust them because they do not understand them.

Transparency is important. Everyone understands how paper ballots works, from start to finish. It has worked just fine for hundreds of years. It doesn't need fixing.

   Bingo!  And if a paper ballot needs to be "encrypted" you place it inside of a paper jacket.   Not everyone "understands" computers but everyone over the age of 5 understands a simple paper ballot. 

[Kjelt]

Would anyone have trusted it more if it came from Apple, Amazon or Google ? 

[bd139]

The XKCD is right. And there's a good reason that no one seems to understand which is distribution of trust.

A paper ballot by nature has distributed trust. You would have to corrupt a significant number of people to sway a vote outcome and every aggregation point and that is extremely difficult (unless your name is Ergodan or Duterte)

A software ballot by nature has centralised trust. You only have to corrupt the source or the aggregator. Single point of failure.

If we zoom out somewhat, really the issue is that the whole election concept is biased towards voting in one arbitrary power rather than proportional representation thus minor count differences and sways can tip a whole system over rather than being an acceptable error percentage. This means that the entire ballot voting system requires crazy amounts of security and attracts crazy amount of compromise attempts. It's self defeating and usually ends up in a two party race which everyone loses.

tl;dr: humans are idiots.

[soldar]

Like paper ballots ever stopped rigging elections. It is an established tradition in some parts.  "Vote early and vote often!"
https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20161019/downtown/vote-rigged-elections-history-fraud-stolen-trump/
https://www.salon.com/2016/02/14/election_fraud_chicago_style_illinois_decades_old_notoriety_for_election_corruption_is_legendary/

Not to mention some other countries where the practice of rigging elections is well established and maintained. Paper ballots can easily be rigged.

In fact, electronic voting could be made more secure than paper voting.

And, again, nobody has to trust anybody. Representatives of parties can check that everything is working correctly.

[Mr. Scram]

The point is that paper elections need a bigger and more obvious effort to be rigged. Paper elections require many people distributed across many places to be impacted, while electronic voting can be easily influenced by a single person. Probably as important is that anyone can attend paper voting and counting and see irregularities. With electronics, there's little to see and more specific knowledge is required.

As long as any and every electronic system turns out to be full of holes sooner or later, electronic voting being safer than paper is out of the question.

[apis]

If we zoom out somewhat, really the issue is that the whole election concept is biased towards voting in one arbitrary power rather than proportional representation thus minor count differences and sways can tip a whole system over rather than being an acceptable error percentage. This means that the entire ballot voting system requires crazy amounts of security and attracts crazy amount of compromise attempts. It's self defeating and usually ends up in a two party race which everyone loses.

Actually most countries use proportional representation. It's mainly the UK and the former British colonies that use first past the post voting.

[bd139]

Sorry to be clear on my point, proportional representation should only account for the ratio of winning party members in a council at the end of the process. There should be no absolute winning party or political ideology post election and no damn figurehead.

[magic]

Seems like a great thing to try right in time of rising political tensions and accusations of election fraud. Nevermind some Russian hackers caught in the networks of a voting machine vendor in America around 2016. (Supposedly didn't gain access to actual voting machines though. This time.)

people do not trust them because they do not understand them.

Rendering them useless.

David Chaum introduced (invented?) "blind signatures" in 1983.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature

OK, how is that supposed to work in practice? You write your ballot to a file and have it signed anonymously by some authority to ensure what actually? You hand it to, well, whom? Who counts it and how, why would you assume it will get counted at all?

People understand encryption just fine, they just don't TRUST MicroSoft!

Less than 1% of 1% understand anything about crypto and less than 1% of those I would expect to get anything like that even remotely correct. I'm a software developer

If techies

You know, YouTube headquarters has recently been shot up for political bias. Maybe Microsoft will fare better. Maybe.

and representatives of all participant political parties say they trust the system why would I not? If all parties say they can check the results and they trust the system why would I not?

Yes, that's what we currently have with paper. Question is, will you get those parties to trust you and your computers?

As far as the software goes... Since it's open source people are free to pick it apart and find flaws and fix or at least suggest fixes. You don't have to trust Microsoft explicitly.

You have to trust somebody that the code Microsoft published is actually the same code which runs on some opaque machine somewhere. That the machine hasn't been backdoored, hacked, subverted, etc.

[soldar]

As long as any and every electronic system turns out to be full of holes sooner or later, electronic voting being safer than paper is out of the question.

Banks move millions every day on the Net with digital signatures.  People have millions in bitcoins and they seem to be safe. If you find a hole which would allow me to get a few thousands please let me know by PM because I am interested.

Any new system cannot be asked to be perfect, only to be competitive with what it is being compared to.

IMHO, electronic voting can be made secure enough and has advantages like internet voting and it will be implemented in due time, sooner or later. One day people will laugh at the idea of voting by mail.