Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

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> Alternatively, just use plain paper ballots.

Eh … I can't tell from the article entirely, but the picture of the machine looks very familiar (and the one in the paper even moreso), and if it is the same machine as what my precinct uses, they are paper ballots. (My state is highlighted in the paper as having been vulnerable, too.) See figure 6a in the paper, which is a good view of the paper ballot.

If I've the right machine, these are just paper ballots, marked with pen. The machine is just an automated vote-counter that can read the ink off the paper. I've always assumed these provide a rough, quick tally that can give information in elections that aren't close, while the real human tally follows up with the official count in due time. (I do not really see how an anonymized per-ballot record really proves election integrity, per TFA. Seems like the data could be faked, though it not matching the official count would also be suspect, too. … there is no substitute for poll watching?)

This (assigning a hardly-random number) is essentially tagging the ballot with a sequence number when you drop it in the box — an utterly unnecessary step.

(If your point is that the machine could simply be ditched for a locked wooden box … yes, quite possibly so.)

> Either upgrade your pseudo-RNG

It seems grossly negligent that a voting machine is using a non-CSPRNG.

> Dominion has not shared any details about the new PRNG.

Just remembered another report about a vote-counting machine with a security problem. Can't remember enough details to find the original report, but the guy found that the QR code the machine was scanning to read the vote did not have any kind of replay protection, and that although the ballots were printed on special paper, the machine did not have any verification of the paper being fed into it, and would accept plain photocopy paper. Meaning that all that would be needed to "hack" that particular machine, if the report was accurate, would have been to get hold of a ballot belonging to someone you know voted for your preferred candidates, and have it for 20-30 seconds of secrecy, long enough to make one photocopy before giving it back to the voter. Easy to do if the voter and the poll worker are in cahoots. And then you can run off 50, 100, 250 copies of that ballot and stuff the ballot box. Would be caught on a recount... probably. But it shouldn't be possible to do that sort of thing in the first place.

The simpler the machine, the better. As I said in my other comment, I'm about ready to go back to locked wooden boxes myself, opened and counted in full view with cameras rolling.

> And then you can run off 50, 100, 250 copies of that ballot and stuff the ballot box.

At least at my polling place (but I'd really hope this is universal), the machine (the ballot box, effectively) is in the middle of the room, and closely watched. You would not be permitted to stuff more than one ballot into it. (Not to mention this would be voter fraud.)

> Easy to do if the voter and the poll worker are in cahoots.

Again poll watchers are the answer.

> The simpler the machine, the better.

The simplicity of the machine does nothing for this attack? In fact a wooden box is perhaps most vulnerable. But, again, this is completely mitigated by poll watchers. (Not to mention such an attack would likely be mitigated by other voters simply going "yo, what are you doing?"…)

> Would be caught on a recount... probably.

… aside from perhaps a discrepancy between the count of voters who voted on the roll, and the number of ballots in the box (on the initial count), a recount isn't really catching this.

I suppose if I wanted to mitigate this, you could put a signed "This is the ballot for the 2026 election" (+nonce, so that if someone duplicates it, we can pick out the duplicates/replays) on the ballot paper, and attempt to control physical distribution of actual ballots. But now we need to generate a nonce, and we're right back to "I'm sure an LCG is sufficient, right?"

As long as the official count is actually done, then that's fine... but there's a natural human tendency to want to skip unnecessary work. And any polling place where the workers get lazy and just rubber-stamp the machine's counts have now made it possible for someone who hacks the machine to get away with it.

The machines should be kept air-gapped, not connected to the Internet, and all that. But again, human nature kicks in. There have been some poll workers who swore under penalty of perjury that in their polling place, there had been election machines that got an over-the-wire software update on Election Day. That's just... all kinds of wrong, if those reports are accurate. It doesn't prove cheating, but it does prove that whoever was in charge of that polling place should be fired. Because part of the job is making sure everyone knows the results are valid and accurate, and having voting machines connected to the Internet goes directly against "hey, you can see that no hacking is possible here". Doesn't matter how much the machine's manufacturer promises their machines are unhackable, the machines should not be connected to the Internet at all once they are actively being used for voting.

At this point, I'm ready to go back to paper ballots and a locked wooden box (kept in public view, and publicly verified to be empty before locking it up) myself. The simpler the solution, the better, is what I'm arriving at.

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