Essays in the Category "Elections"
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American Elections Will Be Hacked
It’s over. The voting went smoothly. As of the time of writing, there are no serious fraud allegations, nor credible evidence that anyone tampered with voting rolls or voting machines. And most important, the results are not in doubt.
While we may breathe a collective sigh of relief about that, we can’t ignore the issue until the next election. The risks remain.
As computer security experts have been saying for years, our newly computerized voting systems are vulnerable to attack by both individual hackers and government-sponsored cyberwarriors. It is only a matter of time before such an attack happens…
Hackers Are Putting U.S. Election at Risk
Russia has attacked the U.S. in cyberspace in an attempt to influence our national election, many experts have concluded. We need to take this national security threat seriously and both respond and defend, despite the partisan nature of this particular attack.
There is virtually no debate about that, either from the technical experts who analyzed the attack last month or the FBI which is analyzing it now. The hackers have already released DNC emails and voicemails, and promise more data dumps.
While their motivation remains unclear, they could continue to attack our election from now to November—and beyond…
By November, Russian Hackers Could Target Voting Machines
If Russia really is responsible, there's no reason political interference would end with the DNC emails.
Russia was behind the hacks into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network that led to the release of thousands of internal emails just before the party’s convention began, U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly concluded.
The FBI is investigating. WikiLeaks promises there is more data to come. The political nature of this cyberattack means that Democrats and Republicans are trying to spin this as much as possible. Even so, we have to accept that someone is attacking our nation’s computer systems in an apparent attempt to influence a presidential election. This kind of cyberattack targets the very core of our democratic process. And it points to the possibility of an even worse problem in November—that our election systems and our voting machines could be vulnerable to a similar attack…
Candidates Won't Hesitate to Use Manipulative Advertising to Score Votes
Advertising in the 2016 election is going to be highly personalized, targeting voters’ personal information to sway their decisions
This presidential election, prepare to be manipulated.
In politics, as in the marketplace, you are the consumer. But you only have one vote to “spend” per election, and in November you’ll almost always only have two possible candidates on which to spend it.
In every election, both of those candidates are going to pull every trick in the surveillance-driven, highly personalized internet advertising world to get you to vote for them. Or, if they think you’ll vote for the other candidate, to stay home and not vote.
In 2012, Barack Obama deftly used both social media and his own database of supporters to outmaneuver Mitt Romney, …
How Secure Is the Papal Election?
Spanish translation
Portuguese translation
As the College of Cardinals prepares to elect a new pope, security people like me wonder about the process. How does it work, and just how hard would it be to hack the vote?
The rules for papal elections are steeped in tradition. John Paul II last codified them in 1996, and Benedict XVI left the rules largely untouched. The “Universi Dominici Gregis on the Vacancy of the Apostolic See and the Election of the Roman Pontiff” is surprisingly detailed.
Every cardinal younger than 80 is eligible to vote. We expect 117 …
E-Voting Certification Gets Security Completely Backward
Over the past several months, the state of California conducted the most comprehensive security review yet of electronic voting machines. People who I consider to be security experts analyzed machines from three different manufacturers, performing both a red-team attack analysis and a detailed source-code review. Serious flaws were discovered in all machines, and as a result the machines were all decertified for use in California elections.
The reports are worth reading, as is much of the blog commentary on the topic. The reviewers were given an …
Vote Early, Vote Often
In the world of voting, automatic recount laws are not uncommon. Virginia, where George Allen lost to James Webb in the Senate race by 7,800 out of over 2.3 million votes, or 0.33 percent percent, is an example. If the margin of victory is 1 percent or less, the loser is allowed to ask for a recount. If the margin is 0.5 percent or less, the government pays for it. If the margin is between 0.5 percent and 1 percent, the loser pays for it.
We have recounts because vote counting is—to put it mildly—sloppy. Americans like their election results fast, before they go to bed at night. So we’re willing to put up with inaccuracies in our tallying procedures, and ignore the fact that the numbers we see on television correlate only roughly with reality…
Did Your Vote Get Counted?
This essay also appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Last week in Florida’s 13th Congressional district, the victory margin was only 386 votes out of 153,000. There’ll be a mandatory lawyered-up recount, but it won’t include the almost 18,000 votes that seem to have disappeared. The electronic voting machines didn’t include them in their final tallies, and there’s no backup to use for the recount. The district will pick a winner to send to Washington, but it won’t be because they are sure the majority voted for him. Maybe the majority did, and maybe it didn’t. There’s …
What's Wrong With Electronic Voting Machines?
In the aftermath of the American presidential election on 2 November 2004, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerised machines lost votes, subtracted votes, and doubled some votes too. And because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted.
While it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of this presidential election, the internet is buzzing with rumours and allegations in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual state’s election, but the next few weeks will reveal whether any of the information crystallises into something significant…
Getting Out the Vote
Why is it so hard to run an honest election?
Four years after the Florida debacle of 2000 and two years after Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, voting problems are again in the news: confusing ballots, malfunctioning voting machines, problems over who’s registered and who isn’t. All this brings up a basic question: Why is it so hard to run an election?
A fundamental requirement for a democratic election is a secret ballot, and that’s the first reason. Computers regularly handle multimillion-dollar financial transactions, but much of their security comes from the ability to audit the transactions after the fact and correct problems that arise. Much of what they do can be done the next day if the system is down. Neither of these solutions works for elections…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.