Why does the US provide all critical electronic design knowledge to the world?

[SiliconWizard]

But if it's written in Rust, it will be safe.

[bd139]

The consequences of a failure of electronic voting (especially in terms of security) are tremendous compared to most other computer security issues.  Let's say a foreign adversary wanted to tamper with UK elections.  And let's say their candidate won, is that candidate going to support any investigation into tampering in the vote?  Of course not.

Most computer security specialists are agreed that there is no safe way to do internet-based voting that would be understandable by the majority of the population.  It is possible to come up with all sorts of chain-of-trust methods where e.g. Alice and Bob sum their keys together and hand them over to Clive who counts the result but when your average member of the electorate isn't clued up on what a private key is - and crucially, how important it is that the key remains totally secret - failures will occur. Remember the average voter probably puts a post-it note on their monitor with a password or hint on it. 

Paper voting is the only secure way - it's impractical to tamper with the ballot in any measurable way given the number of people who would need to look the other way - all the counting can be done in public - and it's impossible to tamper remotely.

As a computer security expert, this is complete bollocks.

There plenty of non-repudiation based models around this.

As for ballot tampering, in areas with proportional representation, discarding or intentionally miscounting entire wards of ballots is common.

Well, I am familiar with computer security though I work on the embedded side more.  Please cite resources that claim you can provide secure elections over the internet.  Numerous experts in the field have concluded that there is no safe way to do country-scale balloting this way.

Just one example - https://www.aaas.org/epi-center/internet-online-voting

Remember the key characteristics of a voting system.  It must be:

• secure - cannot be tampered with by a third party
• verifiable - the chain of trust must be clear, it must be possible to see that a vote has not been tampered with
• secret - no ballot can be associated with any voter (to prevent bribery or coercion)
• understandable - an average-intelligence person must be able to vote without complex processes being involved

So far, no system has managed to achieve all four objectives.

Remember, any voting system will be subject to attack by adversaries with incredible resources, nation-state level.

Secure -> paper votes are not secure. There are various attack vectors involving stolen and disposed of ballot boxes, miscounting, misreporting.

verifiable -> paper votes are not verifiable. There is no chain of trust at all. None.

Secret -> https://www.businessinsider.com/occupied-ukraine-forced-vote-gunpoint-russia-elections-putin-reports-2024-3

Understandable -> Statistically speaking, throwing some noise from idiots in doesn't necessarily change the outcome. My aunt even voted for the wrong party at the general election because she got confused.

[bd139]

But if it's written in Rust, it will be safe.

  fn main() {
        const LOL: *mut u64 = 1 as *mut u64;
        unsafe {
            std::ptr::write(LOL, 0);
        }
    }


 

[themadhippy]

secret - no ballot can be associated with any voter (to prevent bribery or coercion)

wrong.next time you go to vote watch  the  process  from handing over your polling card to receiving your ballot papers

[bd139]

secret - no ballot can be associated with any voter (to prevent bribery or coercion)

wrong.next time you go to vote watch  the  process  from handing over your polling card to receiving your ballot papers

I literally posted an example of that not being the case.

You think all elections are fair?

[SteveThackery]

You think all elections are fair?

I think the vast majority of elections in Western democracies are fair, yes.