Organizers and participants at the DEF CON Voting Village found cyber vulnerabilities in everything from voting machines to e-poll books, but there is no time before the November elections to fully implement their findings.
Just a slight Correction to the title.
The nations best *ethical hackers found these issues.
No doubt these guys are amazing, but they only represent the good guys, or the folks trying to fix this. The bad guys didn’t report any of their findings at defcon.
It’s kinda like calling the World Series the World Series when only a couple of nations compete.
Electronic voting will never be safe. A combination of electronic and physical systems might be the best. Like putting in your vote on a screen but also have a punched card that can be physically verified by the voter before submitting the card as well. Thus there is an easy electronic count and a physical card that cannot be easily hacked if there is a need for a recount.
But there are many ways to skin a cat, and even physical votes like in Venezuela can still be overturned if you have the corrupt men and men with weapons if you argue.
35 million people spread out in the second biggest country globally and our voting is done in a day with folding tables, paper, pens and volunteers counting.
I hope we don’t get the machines. They seem slow and inaccurate. :-p
A piece of paper isn’t exactly perfectly secure either. Most hacking ends up being manipulating people rather than machines.
Well manipulation of people is my example with Venezuela with guns and corruption. but it is a small country. What about a 150 million or more country, what would be easier, manipulation of paper votes across the country involving a lot, and I mean a lot, of people using ballot stuffing and count rigging or getting a small hacking group years in advance to plan and execute a voting machine manipulation without anyone noticing
The issue with electronic voting is changeability of electronic data. You‘d need to employ the bad word (blockchain) to make sure you can backtrace every single vote to the booth it was taken from. Someone with more experience in blockchain or voting might disagree but you do get a real ledger which is a good start.
Are there countries that have e-voting on a national level apart from Estonia? They had it since 2005 without any major issues.
