[Cryptography] practical verifiable systems -- forensic and otherwise, cheap and otherwise

[Bill Frantz]

On 3/3/15 at 1:14 PM, jthorn at astro.indiana.edu (Jonathan 
Thornburg) wrote:

>On Mon, Mar 02, 2015 at 01:09:57PM -0700, John Denker wrote:
>>Here's another example dear to my heart:  Vote-counting
>>equipment.  ...
>
>It seems to me that any system involving a scanner and software is
>much *less* secure than an all-paper scheme (with humans counting the
>ballots at the polling site after polling closes, watched by multiple
>other humans from different parties) (multiple other humans have of
>course also checked that the ballot boxes were empty at the start of
>polling, and have watched the ballot boxes all day):
>* scanner+software --> vulnerable to a variety of software attacks
>--> a single software attack can potentially
>compromise the count at every polling place
>across the country
>* all-paper + human watchers/counters
>--> vulnerable to "up-the-sleeve" and other
>"stage-magician" tricks
>--> those attacks require a trained/skilled attacker
>at the (each) polling place, and hence are very
>hard to run -- and keep secret -- at a big enough
>scale to affect national results

Verified Voting <http://verifiedvoting.org/> has spend a lot of 
time and effort in this issue. It is much more complex than 
appears at first.

My favorite attack on paper systems was a piece of pencil "lead" 
glued under a finger nail on one of the vote counters. If he 
encountered an ballot voting for the "wrong" candidate, he 
simply used the pencil lead to add a vote for another candidate, 
making the ballot a spoiled ballot and negating the vote for the 
wrong candidate.

I like the system that uses a scanner, but takes between 1 and 5 
percent of the precincts and does a full manual audit of their 
paper ballots and electronic results.

YMMV.

Cheers - Bill

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