Los Angeles County to Intoduce VSAP E-Voting System: NOT Hand-Marked, NOT Paper, NOT Hand-Counted in Public
No doubt Los Angeles County’s VSAP (“Voting Solutions for All
People”) rollout will not be covered as a debacle. The real question is:
If there were a debacle — like, say, a case of election fraud — would
we even know? Doubtful. Just what we want in a voting system! In this
post, I’ll give a brief overview of issues with electronic voting. Then
I’ll look at VSAP as an institution. Next, I’ll show why the VSAP system
is not only insecure, but likely to make money-in-politics even worse
than it already is.
We’ve covered electronic voting before — see here, here, and here — and if you want to understand why hand-marked paper ballots, hand-counted in public (HMPBCP) is the world standard, you can read them, especially the first. In this overview, I’ll make a few high-level observations about electronic voting in general.
Digital systems can never be shown not to have bugs. As Computer Science Elder God Edgers Dijkstra
wrote: “Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but
never to show their absence!” Many bugs in many important programs
persist for years before they are discovered. A list
would include Flash in IE6 (persisted 12 years), OpenSSL (15 years),
LZO data compression (18 years), and bash (25 years). None of these
examples are outlier programs or trivial; they are all used by millions,
essential to enterprises, networks, etc. Each of these bug is an
insecurity waiting to happen. And that’s before we get to Trojan Horses,
which are bugs introduced deliberately by a developer for purposes of
their own. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that any voting system
decision maker who advocates electronic voting is doing so for reasons other
than security, given that HMPBCP is available, which amounts to saying
that such a decision maker regards a certain amount of exploited bugs —
election fraud — as acceptable.
Now, of course we all use programs all the time: We have programs to
turn on our lightbulbs, call cabs, download pr0n, etc. I’m using a
program now to write this post! However, if we put voting machine
software on the same plane as commercial software, we’re arguing that a
central-to-mission function of democracy — the vote — is on the same
plane as the very convenient ability to check the contents of our
refrigerator from our cellphone. Lest I be thought curmudgeonly in this,
recall the example of Bolivia,
where one reason the vote was challenged was the use of an unauthorized
server for data transmission of the count. Contrast that with the
recent vote in Hong Kong, where there were many images of people marking
paper ballots, and of people counting them, in public (in fact, of
people demanding to be let in to observe). Imagine if electronic systems
had been used: First, the Mainland would have had every incentive to
have compromised the software, and might well have done so successfully;
second, electronic systems, because they are always buggy, are
always open to challenge. The fallout could have been extremely ugly at
the geopolitical level. Nor would the people’s will have been
respected.
Read more
Sunday, December 1, 2019
Los Angeles County to Intoduce VSAP E-Voting System
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Labels: E-Voting, Election Fraud, Los Angels County
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