Category: Voting
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What the Assessments Say About the Swiss E-voting System
(Part 4 of a 5-part series starting here) In 2021 the Swiss government commissioned several in-depth technical studies of the Swiss Post E-voting system, by independent experts from academia and private consulting firms. They sought to assess, does the protocol as documented guarantee the security called for by Swiss law (the “ordinance on electronic voting”,…
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How the Swiss Post E-voting system addresses client-side vulnerabilities
(Part 3 of a 5-part series starting here) In Part 1, I described how Switzerland decided to assess the security and accuracy of its e-voting system. Swiss Post is the “vendor” developing the system, the Swiss cantons are the “customer” deploying it in their elections, and the Swiss Parliament and Federal Chancellery are the “regulators,” …
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How NOT to Assess an E-voting System
by Vanessa Teague, an Australian computer scientist, cryptographer, and security/privacy expert. (Part 2 of a 5-part series starting here) Australian elections are known for the secret ballot and a long history of being peaceful, transparent and well run. So it may surprise you to learn that the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) is…
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How to Assess an E-voting System
Part 1 of a 5-part series If I can shop and bank online, why can’t I vote online? David Jefferson explained in 2011 why internet voting is so difficult to make secure, I summarized again in 2021 why internet voting is still inherently insecure, and many other experts have explained it too. Still, several…
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A PDF File Is Not Paper, So PDF Ballots Cannot Be Verified
A new paper by Henry Herrington, a computer science undergraduate at Princeton University, demonstrates that a hacked PDF ballot can display one set of votes to the voter, but different votes after it’s emailed – or uploaded – to election officials doing the counting. For overseas voters or voters with disabilities, many states provide “Remote Accessible Vote…
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ES&S Uses Undergraduate Project to Lobby New York Legislature on Risky Voting Machines
The New York State Legislature is considering a bill that would ban all-in-one voting machines. That is, voting machines that can both print votes on a ballot and scan and count votes from a ballot – all in the same paper path. This is an important safeguard because such machines, if they are hacked by…
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“Signal Loss” and advertising privacy on Facebook
The 2021 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology, a major award administered by a Japanese foundation, goes to Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, a Chinese computer scientist who earned PhDs from Harvard and the University of Illinois before being a professor at MIT, Stanford, and Princeton and then becoming Dean of an important theoretical computer science education program…
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Another 2020 lawsuit over internet voting
Last week I summarized 4 lawsuits filed in 2020 over internet voting, in VA, NJ, NY, NH. Then I learned there was another in North Carolina. In 2020 the North Carolina Council of the Blind sued the State Board of Elections, demanding that the Board offer “alternative format absentee ballots allowing private and independent method…
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Four 2020 lawsuits over internet voting
Citizens with disabilities (and voters living abroad) must have the substantive right to vote—that’s the law. Sometimes that turns into a demand for internet voting. But as I wrote earlier this year, internet voting is dangerously insecure, it’s not what most voters with disabilities want, and there are much better ways of accommodating voters with disabilities,…
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It’s still practically impossible to secure your computer (or voting machine) against attackers who have 30 minutes of access
It has been understood for decades that it’s practically impossible to secure your computer (or computer-based device such as a voting machine) from attackers who have physical access. The basic principle is that someone with physical access doesn’t have to log in using the password, they can just unscrew your hard drive (or SSD, or…