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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

“Right now there are no mandatory federal cybersecurity standards for elections...”

And that's a good thing. Each state/county/city can implement the election however they want which makes it practically impossible to rig the vote. If we all used the same system/procedures/process then hacking the election could scale much more easily as the same tricks that works in Manhattan would work in Montana.

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That would only makes sense to me if rigging only one state was near useless. It's very much not. If you rig say, Florida, there's a fairly high chance of deciding the election.

I don't think the machines matter as long as the vote can be replayed/recounted without ambiguity.

An idea: https://medium.com/@dotnetmike/touch-screen-voting-should-be...

It needs a paper record, this needs to be the source of truth.

Not just a paper record. A hand marked paper record. If it doesn't go through a computer first it can't be altered. There are several states that do it this way. It's a "Scantron" style ballot. Fill in the vote, run it through a tally machine and save the ballot. The tally machines could be messed with, but if there is evidence of tampering with the tally there is always the authentic original ballot.

Yes!

If you've got a paper record, just use that instead of the machines.

Machines just add more opportunities for fraud.

That's traditionally been the problem with voting machines: a "recount" just re-read some tally.

Combine this with voting machine companies being opaque, not recognizing obvious flaws and their executives promising to deliver states to particular candidates (https://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm), and you begin to feel that all the suspicion is justified.

> as long as the vote can be replayed/recounted without ambiguity.

Isn't this the core problem with most electronic voting as currently implemented in the US? I mean, that no such guarantee exists?

In fact they all use voting machines from the same few vendors and mostly running Windows, so there are plenty of common vulnerabilities.

Also, in the US, hacking a single large state can swing a federal election.

It's not a good thing when the state has ineffective processes that rely on the vendor's assurances if it has any standards at all. If the feds were imposing a preemptive monoculture that'd be bad. But that's not at issue.

This gets repeated a lot, but it directly contradicts another bit of common wisdom: security by obscurity isn't.

Not only are we vulnerable to a few key districts tipping elections, nation state actors should find it absolutely trivial to build a comprehensive program targeting the full spectrum of voting machines used in practice.

That's almost like saying that if there isn't a company-wide security policy, every department will implement security whatever way they want, making company-wide data breach impossible.

Or you can design a system that’s the same for everyone because it actually works.

Like, you know, observable paper ballots.

Hand marked is better than just observable. Takes the machine out of the equation except for the tally and the tally could be confirmed with multiple machines.

There should still be minimum security standards required.

Air gapped counting machines with hand marked ballots is a good start.

The federated security you describe holds as long as the Electoral College holds. If elections are decided by popular vote, just one or two hacked/corrupt county-administrated systems could decide national elections.

This statement confuses me. What one or two counties contain the majority of the US population? If elections moved to a popular vote, it would be much harder to rig the election because you'd need to manipulate the whole country, rather than a few key states.

The popular vote difference between candidates sometimes comes within 0-2 million votes. LA County has 10 million people, and there are over 40 other counties that have more than 1 million people. If elections are decided by popular vote, then just LA County alone, or a combination of the others, could artificially add or flip enough votes to overcome that 0-2 million vote difference.

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

Would it really be so bad for people in LA County to have as much of a vote as the rest of the country? If we switched to a popular vote, I bet the number of voters would shoot way up, which is undoubtedly a good thing!

We already have a problem with counties reporting more registered voters than should be possible, and a problem with poll workers who vote on behalf of missing voters after the polls officially close. Currently the damage is limited to flipping one state.

If we used a popular vote, a malicious county could supply an extra 50 million votes. Just one corrupt county could change the election results, even when the results would not have been close, and there is nothing that could be done about it after the election day.

That would take us back to the (original) Tea Party. A few cities would rule the country. Large groups generally magnify the effects of groupthink and become unstable if left to make the decisions for everyone else.

The US Election Assistance Commission develops testing and certification standards for voting equipment. They also certify 3rd party laboratories that certify equipment. States are not required to use the recommendations but some states have passed laws that only certified equipment be used.

https://www.eac.gov/voting-equipment/system-certification-pr...

To some extent, yes. But you can still have centrally-imposed rules that improve security for specific voting methods.

Perhaps votefrauding swing states would be an easier target, much easier than targeting all states..

You don’t need to corrupt all of the voting processes though, you only need to do it in a few key states. Funnily enough, the states you’d need to do it in would be the poorer ones who’d have no ability to discern a good voting solution from a bad one.

The real solution is to use paper. There’s no way to fuck with a paper ballot system other than to go to every polling station and fuck with their counts - an expensive and highly visible attack.

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