Dutch E-Voting System Cracked

It was probably only a matter of time until electronic voting machines were cracked by several coders who seem to employ a healthy dose of scepticism towards black-box voting.



Basically, sceptics have been right all along, current e-voting systems are open to undetectable manipulation and allow remote reading of personal votes. It really IS the worst case scenario.

Ignoring overwhelming evidence, governments around the world continue to push unsuspecting citizens into a voting system that simply cannot be trusted, for reasons we can only imagine and with predictably catastrophic results. To be brutally honest i'm starting to wonder why they don't just toss individual votes altogether and fabricate a ballot's results instead, there is no way to prove anything in an electronic voting system, be it fraudulent or not.

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There's simply no way to work this out, apparently.

For millenia people voted with peices of paper, and even different coloured marbles as in Athens. Looks like we should be sticking with the old ways.

The solutions are simple, really. Shield the systems (I find it hard to believe that they can tell who voted for which candidate....), disallow any unauthorized access at any time, and unplug the network and phone lines from the system during the election.

As I have stated many times before, any group of competent undergraduate engineering students can easily solve any problems I have seen with electronic voting machines.

But the machines are allways going to be open up to manipulation. And worse than any other system, these machines are complex enough that they are able to make it near immpossible to detect the manipulation.

Just have people drop a peice of paper with a 'check' next to a candidate's name into a box. Its worked as well as any other system for generations.

OK, let's get controversial...
why the heck all the big secrecy about who votes for what anyway? honestly, the best solution in the modern age is open ballot elections where you officially vote for whoever you like & it goes down on record next to your name. this way elections can be close to 100% validated. with this system we could even vote from home. if you are embarrassed about who you vote for, maybe it's time to reconsider your choice!

and why limit our voting to just political candidates once per 3 or 4 years? we could have e-referendums on just about any policy issue, from nuclear energy to tax reform. with the internet in every home & every phone this would be pretty damn simple. eg) if this had been the case, australia would not have gone into iraq.

perhaps it's time to revamp modern democracy - make it more transparent and more prevalent, because let's face it, DEMOCRACY AIN'T WORKING!

Originally posted by Nygdan

Just have people drop a peice of paper with a 'check' next to a candidate's name into a box. Its worked as well as any other system for generations.

Couldn't agree more. The only problem is we live in a society that needs to know who won before all the votes are even counted. i.e. exit polling and projected winners. It could take days or weeks to count paper ballots by hand.

NY uses (up until this year) the mechanical throw lever machines with a paper tally print out, pretty foolproof. I dont know why we don't just update this technolgy. It gives real time counts with a clear paper trail.

Originally, voting was open. I'm not sure how they did it, but I think the citizens basically got together, and everyone said who they wanted to vote for, and that was it. However, open ballots are susceptible to vote buying and coercion. Someone can easily tell you to vote for someone or else. For instance a company could fire all of its employees, who voted for a specific candidate.

However, even more ominious is that politicians would know everyone who didn't vote for them. Some politicians might decide to stop providing government services to people, who didn't vote for them. On a local level, trash might not get picked up from people, who didn't vote the right way. On a national level, the IRS might only audit people who didn't vote for the candidate in power. A secret ballot means you can only do this on a group level, and if you region or ethnic group is going to oppose the candidate, anyway, there is little reason to be part of whatever small percentage votes for the candidate.

disallow any unauthorized access at any time

whos to say the authorized arent the problem? when it comes down to it, its not about the avg joe black hat getting into the machine, its about those with something to gain. put as much security on that puppy as you like but if those who run the machines arent on the up and up then human interaction is the exploit.