Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by twright0 on Thursday November 24, 2016 @03:43PM (#13032639)

In general, any process that allows an individual to verify their vote after the fact will enable coercion over voting. For example, in your proposal, an unscrupulous boss could make a demand before the election: "You must tell me the one-time ID you're voting with. If you choose not to, or if that ID doesn't show up in the registry having cast a vote for <candidate>, you're fired." I think that, no matter what the process is, if I can check how I voted I can also be made to check how I voted while someone watches over my shoulder and threatens consequences.

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by MichaelBurge on Thursday November 24, 2016 @06:07PM (#13033361)

One solution is to make blackmailing people's votes illegal. Then the risk of someone recording him with a phone or hidden recorder would discourage your boss from blackmailing you. You could also make it illegal to reveal your vote to anyone else, to make it easier to spot coercion.

In extremely dishonest countries where the local courts, police, and election officials are all corrupt, a large mafia-style presence could coerce a lot of people into voting a certain way. But if any of these are at all trustworthy, it seems difficult to coerce anyone. And even then, the mafia abusing too many people(>5%) would cause them to riot.

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by tajen on Thursday November 24, 2016 @06:47PM (#13033523)

@jjuhl answered that question somewhere else in the thread with homomorophic encryption (Numberphile : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRTvoZ3Rho ): The hash out of the machine doesn't tell who you voted for, but the sum of the hashes do tally properly. It's still unclear for me, but it's sure that there are mathematical solutions.

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by rpearl on Thursday November 24, 2016 @04:44PM (#13032974)

Potentially, a canary id, "show this one and it'll claim you voted for ____ and also alert the state election board that it was accessed"

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by bbcbasic on Thursday November 24, 2016 @05:45PM (#13033269)

That solves the boss problem. What about the government?

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by rpearl on Thursday November 24, 2016 @09:27PM (#13034036)

vote manipulation by a foreign government is solved by having a verifiable id/token in the first place.

vote manipulation by the government the election is happening for isn't really something you can solve because in that case the election isn't the problem.

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by knlje on Thursday November 24, 2016 @04:10PM (#13032782)

what if an ID was generated and printed just before voting with an option to print an arbitrary number of additional ID's of already voted people. the boss never knows what ID(s) he'd receive.

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by donw on Thursday November 24, 2016 @04:32PM (#13032913)

So you come into work on Monday thinking that everything will be peachy-keen, and get an all-hands email telling you that any employee that can not prove that they voted for the "correct" candidate will forced to resign.

Any system that can be abused, will be.

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by grzm on Thursday November 24, 2016 @09:31PM (#13034049)

Verifiable vote technology generally does not reveal who the vote was cast for, only that the vote was cast and included in the tally. This makes issues of coercion or vote selling moot.

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