Via Cold Fury, PJ Media writes about Redo Voting's Internet voting system.
tl;dr: Oh Hells No.
Longer discussion: it's QR codes on scratch off lotto style tickets, with a lot of crypto (SHA-2 512!) thrown in. I haven't dug into the details but there are at least two glaring security holes here:
1. Your ballot seems to be stored unencrypted (you get a PDF file of your vote). Sure, there's strong crypto (a SHA-2 hash of your ballot) to prove that it was your ballot, but anyone who gets into the data store will be able to post lists of who voted for whom. If you think about California's Proposition 8 and how Brendan Eich was fired from his leadership role at Mozilla, this is very bad juju.
Now maybe I'm wrong and the data is encrypted, but reading through their web site they don't say this at all. This seems a really important item for a company touting "Unparalleled Security".
2. Their ballot counting software is, well a server. Anyone who can hack the server can fiddle the results. Duh. When you think of Internet Security you have to think in terms of who the attacker might be and what their motivation might be. Given the huge financial benefits of winning a US national election (not to mention the geopolitical implications) you have to assume that the threat isn't script kiddies or hactavists, but rather foreign state actors. Or heck, domestic Three Letter Agency actors.
Do you think you can protect yourself against the NSA or the Russian FSB? I don't think I can defend myself from them, and I don't think that Redo Voting can, either. These attackers could easily justify funding tens of millions of dollars for a single attack - which could be as simple as bribing a system administrator to look the other way.
Game over, man. Never mind that some more thought would almost certainly come up with more problems, this is enough.
So no, this is not a good idea. It's actually a stupendously BAD idea, wrapped in crypto marketing fluff. Maybe I'm being unfair to Redo Voting, but all I have to go on is what they say on their web site. Quite frankly, it's very unconvincing. What we need is not technology that helps centralize the voting process "for convenience"; we need distributed systems that need thousands of people to subvert. Quite frankly, paper ballots are pretty hard to beat at this.
But if you like the fact that perhaps a quarter of the US population has serious questions about the integrity of the 2020 election, and if you would like to get that over 50%, then this is the bee's knees. Otherwise, run away. Keep running. Don't look back.
6 comments:
That's going to have to be a hard pass.
As in NO.
At this point I'm not even sure I trust paper ballots anymore.
The purpose of "online voting" is the same as "mail in voting". It's intended to facilitate cheating. The left didn't commit the Crime Of The Century in 2020 just to turn around and relinquish their grasp on power. Expect the amount of cheating in this and all subsequent elections to be astronomical.
There are LOTS of problems with this system1
One big one I haven't seen elsewhere is that it doesn't authenticate you as much as a Driver's License would, let alone better (which is what we really need).
A second one is that it doesn't address the issue with cluttered voter rolls - I haven't seen any serious proposals that do.
Like people haven't already absorbed the lesson of what happens when you order a president online?
Aesop, you get one from China.
It's a bad idea but 2020 proved that it is not needed to steal an election. 1960 proved it for that matter.
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