Is he right?

this.

It is simply impossible to create an electronic voting system which guarantees at the same time:

1. no way to tell who voted for whom
2. no way for unauthorized people to vote / for authorized people to vote more than once
3. no way to manipulate the vote count

Anyone who advocates electronic voting is an idiot who doesn't know what he is talking about at best and wants to commit voting fraud at worst. When anyone in your voting district wants to introduce electronic voting, oppose him.

>elevator software
Ever hit the 'close door' button and the doors don't actually close?

He's a programmer explaining why electronic voting isn't a good idea from a programming perspective.

youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

Wrong as fuck. Use a unique ID like a social security number and check it to make sure it's valid, and check it hasn't voted more than once. Check that the name matches the social and it's foolproof unless the hacker gets access to your servers, in which case you're fucked. But if they can do that, they can probably also hack your air traffic control systems and elevator control systems. So this whole comic is just that - a fucking joke.

You either accept that well built software can be pretty secure, or you accept that it's not secure. You can't say that air traffic control systems are totally secure and a voting system isn't.

Also there are plenty of reasons to sabotage an air traffic control system or an elevator system - if you're a terrorist for example. It's not like air traffic control systems or airplane autopilot systems or whatever are only vulnerable to coding errors and other unintentional accidents or something.

Voting is a waste of time. (((They))) already decided who's going to win.

Yes, and it applies to computing in general. The technical foundation of computing isn't built on sand but on fecal matter. Even your neighbour can smell it and it often already collapses during construction.

All you have to do is treat the votes/data like a person- use the same level of rigor as you would for a mission critical or safety critical piece of software.
But ask yourself, what percentage of software "engineers" actually know how to use procedures like d0178?

Justifying to oneself to commit voter fraut is incredibly easier than justifying murder

>two things that literally run on software are safe
>hurr software sucks!!!

>especially enterprise level programmers.
that

Tom Scott might be a good communicator, but he has no idea what he's talking about.

How is that a counterargument? "Someone could probably hack our air traffic control system, but I mean come on, who is going to justify murder to themselves? I'm sure no one is crazy enough to try that"

Were you alive during 9/11?

> unless the hacker gets access to your servers you're fucked.

...and that's why e-voting is a bad idea.

And you are also fucked if anyone with access to the server is crooked, because then that person can change the votes and there is no way to prove it.

>Check that the name matches the social and it's foolproof unless the hacker gets access to your servers, in which case you're fucked.
After the Equifax breach,I don't see how this would be a valid method for verifying anything.Hundreds of millions of citizens data has been compromised.Or was it a back up plan for when the Russian Hackers thing has been beaten into the ground?I don't trust anything anymore. :(

Air traffic control systems aren't totally secure, they can't be but we have to expect that. Paper voting is more secure than computer voting and both things serve the same purpose, they do the same thing as an idea, when literally hundreds of billion can be on the line in a big election you should be making it as hard as possible to rig it. MUH ADHD I need to see the results 2 seconds after polls close isn't a good reason to downgrade the security on something so important.

No, that's not why e voting is a bad idea. That's why any software involving communication over a network, including air traffic control, is a bad idea. I'm not saying e voting is a good idea. I'm just saying if you think it's a bad idea, you should also think air traffic control is a bad idea, because it, too, is inherently insecure.

Wait so, why /wouldn't/ using blockchain for voting be a good idea?
>public record of voting history
>everyone has to agree on what said record is
>decentralized so no servers to hack into
What's the problem here? No voting anonymity?

Wait, really? Like for serious!? Because I want to get out of hardhat work into IT. My biggest fear is getting out of school and not knowing anything. If this is the norm, I can totally do it, user.

Voting systems crash and lose data all the time

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If you want to sacrifice anonymity, then e-voting isn't a problem. Just have a public database where everyone can look up who voted for whom. You can't miscount votes because people will complain when the database entry for them suddenly says something different.

But do you really want to make voting public? Do you want to lose your job because your boss doesn't like who you voted for?

I feel like if we implement some kind of government trusted layer between the act of voting on the blockchain and the person's identity, it would work. We already trust the government to keep that secret anyway.

Anonymity in voting is a big deal, without it you can be threaten into voting for something because your vote is public. Beyond that blockchain is able to be hostilely take over if someone with intent controls 51% of the computation power.

The trusted layer is the problem. Who would you trust to maintain it? How would you even know if your government manipulates it just to stay in power even longer? Who watches the watchers?

So, what I'm hearing is Monarchy is definitely the way to go. Either that or get rid of the Jews.

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The irony here is all modern life are run by computers. Whether its the stock market, the energy distribution, nuclear power, coal power, air planes (yes airplanes), rockets, missiles, your media player, your iphone, your banking, etc.

Yes. Like most skills, you can easily obtain entry level positions without much experience so long as you're willing to learn and they've got the time to teach.

The post you're replying to isn't disputing that

>Beyond that blockchain is able to be hostilely take over if someone with intent controls 51% of the computation power.
Yea but
1. this is unlikely to be achieved if the rest of the computing power comes backed from the government and
2. this would be unable to be achieved without everyone knowing, and therefore rendering the take over useless.

I feel like the exact same problems come up with traditional voting and making sure the government is trusted with that information though.

The way to go is to keep using paper ballots and to allow public spectators to monitor the counting.

Vote-by-mail master race reporting in.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/georgia-defends-voting-system-despite-243-percent-turnout-in-one-precinct/

Eh. The problem is more networking. You can "computerize" voting pretty easily if you're just replacing paper with machines and not introducing networking; there's just little to no point in doing so because there's very little improvement over paper but it would still cost a lot of of funding.
While there's a whole shitload of software involved with things like aircrafts and rockets, they have to pass through a certain level of rigor before they're approved and, more importantly, aren't connected to a public or large network.

There have been several times in bitcoin's (for instance) history where a single mining pool has had the majority of computation and that is with the whole world mining decentralized. Any election is going to have a lot less computation thrown at it than bitcoin does worldwide because the incentive to mine isn't as strong (unless of course, you want to rid it), so getting majority power would be even easier than what has happened in the past with cryptos. If the government has majority computation it's not decentralized, they can control who wins.

Blockmeme voting is just a giant waste of electricity that doesn't actually solve anything

I think there's a trade-off though. We'd have a hard time running nuclear power plants without software but voting works fine without introducing technology. I guess the idea is do the benefits of electronic voting outweigh the risks?

>Also there are plenty of reasons to sabotage an air traffic control system or an elevator system - if you're a terrorist for example.
A couple of million in ransom/a few dozen/hundred dead vs trillions upon trillions of dollars and you can start whatever war you want because your guy controls an entire country, which one has a bigger incentive?

Both have their issues. Paper ballots aren't inherently more secure than machines. Hacking a machine requires at least some insider technical knowledge. Hacking paper ballots requires a pencil.

But that doesn't really matter. The real threat to our elections is the maintenance/cleaning of our Voter rolls, or the lack thereof. If a voter dies, moves out of state, etc. in a surprising number of cases, that information does NOT make it back to the registrar. Without voter ID laws, in some states, there's literally nothing stopping a person from walking in, claiming to be one of those voters, and getting a ballot. It's virtually undetectable and impossible to fix even if they did catch it.

>There's just little to no point in doing so
That's not true. The main thing that will happen with a computerized voting, ala smartphone app, would be increase in votes. Most notably the younger generations.

The resistance to this potential outcome is one of the key things holding it back. Making voting accessible means more people vote. Some don't want this as this would mean they would lose their majority.

Fuck that just go full on dictatorship*.
*so long as it's my guy in charge.

>Flying isn't safe because of the planes
FUCK you

t. aerospace stress engineer

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>would be increase in votes. Most notably the younger generations.
God help us.

/thread
It would protect you from outside interference but not from insider interference. NSA and the CIA would probably make sure that whatever was created, has a their backdoors in. I don't want the government to have more power than what it already has. Only two countries that I know of use machines to vote, one is a failed State and the other one, well, do I even need to mention Venezuela ? They have already attempted 2 false-flags AND have manipulated elections ever since Chavez was in power.
Check all the people who replied to you.
All I saw during that day was a false-flag. No one has any reason to hack into air traffic control. Plenty of reasons to hack a bank, if you are capable. Why are you so keen on justifiying something clearly inferior? Do you want us to appease risks to National security?

>Walk into voting gymnasium and line up to check-in.
>Receive paper slip with randomly generated password.
>Walk over to any one of x computers and authenticate with name and password.
>Fill out your votes in a simple application
>Click big button that saves, removes your authentication, and 'logs out'.

The key is for the computers to be on an isolated intranet with MAC filtering, for no ports on the computer to be easily accessible, and for the users to have no permissions except for that one simple application.
Hard drives are collected at the end of the day and securely transported just like the paper would have been.

If you can get that part standardized and working flawlessly, THEN effort can be put into securely sending an authenticated encrypted dataload from each secure intranet to a secure central database across a network. Since the communication can be almost entirely one way and extremely strictly well defined, it wouldn't need to worry about a majority of the networking woes that exist with normal computing because it doesn't need to support the wide breadth of varied shit normal computing does.

And of course, DAL A all that shit; complete MC/DC code coverage.

Election security for electronic voting machines is a bit of a nightmare. You can chalk it up to a combination of shoddy software systems and uneducated election officials.

I recently attended a talk given by somebody who had been looking to review and suggest updates for our state's voting process. Here's a few of the alarming things he found:

-- Data for each election had to be loaded onto the vote tabulators using a laptop sine the tabulators were air gapped until election day. The laptop in question was not air gapped itself and had no security software installed, not even basic antivirus.
-- The process for loading election data onto the tabulators had to be made available to the public. The documents listing out the process contained the passwords needed to log into all of the tabulators.
-- On election day each tabulator would connect back to the election commission to send the results. This connection was made over public cellular networks.
-- Tabulators were delivered to each election site the day before the election. Tabulators were physically secured using a lock and key to prevent access to any of the data components. Once delivered, many tabulators were left in unmonitored public areas overnight.

When tried to present his findings to the board of elections they treated him with suspicion and hostility. He was seen as somebody who was unnecessarily rocking the boat.

Given the incredibly high failure rate in IT projects, yes.
The failure rate is pushing up against 75%.
Most involved in IT projects don't feel that they are equipped, informed or involved enough in the project's success.
Managers who have been promoted because of time served rather than experience gained, personnel depts that don't understand the project's aims, changing parameters (projects are dynamic) for no good reason... it all adds up.
You should add overconfidence and arrogance to the list.

software "engineering" isn't as thorough as real engineering
it would require a lot of understanding of hardware and low-level details (the way the old programmers did) but at this point in time, that would take dedicating a lifetime to the field, rather than mass-producing coders and code monkeys for startups.

it is truly a marvel any of it works at all.

computing should be redone that way. wannacry, spectre, and meltdown should be wakeup calls for industry. if not, one day you'll wake up, and the grid might be down indefinitely and the population will starve when a little hack breaks everything.

This. Voting is already bad enough as it is. Throwing more technology at it isn't going to make it better FOR THE PEOPLE.

>That's not true.
It is true. You've removed the conditional part of my statement. What you're arguing against has nothing to do with my post.

well, it's diebold, so...

>tfw my country uses meme voting machines
>tfw the gobnerment says it's 100% hackproof, basically a state of art tech, a gift from God himself
save me from this nightmare anons

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That's like a joke, people draw them in form of comics, OP.

>software "engineering" isn't as thorough as real engineering
It is any time you can directly cause a human to die. Look up military standard d0178 and other similar ones. If even a DAL of C was applied to all commercial software projects imagine how much better everything would work.

When the plane was made 30+ years ago and is patched together with 100mph tape and glue he has a point.

Blockchain does not solve that issue at all. Blockchain solves the issue when there is no entity which has incentive to perform a 51% attack. For something like an election, you can bet your ass someone will take over the network.

This. Also, when written by a competent programmer, a voting system should have few if any vulnerabilities that would allow it to be hijacked in the first place. However, I have not seen a team in years where at least half weren't TCS or Infosys gomerils with fake resumes and paper mill degrees.

It's less sabotage and more the fact complex software has a lot of bugs and vulnerabilities.

air traffic control doesnt need to be perfectly secure because there are mechanical backups.
there is no mechanical backup to an e-vote. paper votes and e-votes are total replacements for each other, and e-votes are the less secure option. why would you want the less secure option other than to exploit it?

when was the last time that happened
was it by accident or was it deliberate
what was the intention of the majority holders

>Throwing more technology at it isn't going to make it better FOR THE PEOPLE.
voting id technology and then you got yourself a deal

>hey guys the vote was clearly 51% attacked by us so i guess you accept the results huh?
what did the 51%ers mean by this

Considering the stakes, sabotage would likely be a huge concern too.

blockchain part is bs but the rest is true, the industry is fuckin shit

>comparing physical machinery that has to be directly interacted with to be damaged to an internet-connected computer running software that can be updated without anyone knowing by a single person on the other side of the country that helped create it and still has access

Yeah, that's a fair comparison. I swear he gets dumber every year.
Machine-counting is only acceptable provided you have physical ballots to fall back on should anything go wrong.
Fully-electronic voting is dangerous and should be illegal.
Pokemon-go to the polls, faggot.

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>So, what I'm hearing is Monarchy is definitely the way to go. Either that or get rid of the Jews.
Why not both?

>Our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die.
IT isn't used to having.. stakes.
When civil engineers fuck up bridges and buildings fall over and people die.
When doctors fuck up people die.
But most programmers have never had those stakes, and never spent classes in school having it beaten into them that fucking up will mean they:
1. never work in the industry again.
2. go to jail.
They work on pet projects and business software.
Then some jackass hires them to build code to operate a multi-ton vehicle at highway speeds on public roads. And they do what they've always fucking done: produce code that compiles and figure they'll fix the issues as they're found.

Devs don't handle stakes well, whether that's the freedom of a nation of the safety of people.

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>Use a unique ID like a social security number
But that's racist.

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Has less to do with hacking the voter software and more to do with how trivial it becomes to cast literally millions of votes using stolen identities. Plus you lose your paper trail and concentrated all authority into the hands of god knows who that's in charge of the technology and as we've all seen, government contractors and employees are riddled with political activists that are more than willing to commit felonies for a political agenda.

Did you forget about the Equifax hack just a year ago that leaked the names, addresses, and social security numbers of 143 million Americans?

Yeah and airliners crash all the time too. Anything that is heavily used will have quite a few cases of failure. Hell, even paper voting has plenty of issues. Hanging chads, anyone?

Can confirm. Majority of us have been winging it since day one. Myself obviously included.

That is true, most programmers I know rely on duct tape and paperclips to hold their software together.

are you Brazilian too?

>Walk into voting gymnasium and line up to check-in.
>Receive paper slip
>Walk over to any one of x voting booths
>Fill out your votes in a simple piece of paper
>Drop ballot in box, exit the voting booth, and leave
This is the exact same thing you described except without tech. How does tech make it any better?

Easier to count, easier to store and analyze results, more secure, MUCH cheaper in the long run, completely unambiguous (see: Bush v Gore)

That's actually done on purpose for most clients.

>more secure
Please tell me how a voting program is more secure than pieces of paper in a box.

It takes less time to break into a metal box than it does to hack a securely hash system

> a securely hash system
A... what?

A securely hashed system
user are you familiar with data encryption?

That's retarded. I just hammer the pieces together until they stick. Sometimes I accidentally use the claw part of the hammer but what works works.

"Hashed" isn't some magic encryption scheme that does everything you need when you need it. You don't explain how the votes are stored beyond "they're hashed." How do you turn the hashes into tallies (which, if it can be reversed, disqualifies it from being a "securely hashed system")?

Breaking into a metal box disrupts a few thousand votes, hacking a securely hashed system disrupts every vote.

The same way the FBI and CIA store all their data on us
That said, anything is susceptible to social engineering (ie. don't hire retards and follow protocol at all times)
Depends on which box you break into user
Hell Russia could plant vote counters in every county
That is just as likely as them breaking in via programmatic means

yes, sadly

I mean, consider the fact that every single airliner is only flying because its software works with many degrees of redundency.

Then consider the fact that...

WEVE BEEN WINGING IT SINCE DAY ONE MOTHERFUCKERS HAHAHAHA AND YALL LET US CALL OURSELVES ENGINEERS HEHEHEH

and seriously Randall Munroe is a mook

> The same way the FBI and CIA store all their data on us
In other words:
> I don't know, but I know it can be done because the government can do something unrelated
In other words:
> magic

No. He’s just still assblasted that Hillary lost.

>something unrelated
personal data is personal data user

This literally describes all of human invention

F-15's deal with deliberate attacks.

>Hell Russia could plant vote counters in every county
Aside from the
>Russia
meme, there's more than one vote counter and they'd likely be heavily monitored. If it's anything on the level of end of school tests then the votes will be counted multiple times by different people and outlier markers get examined.