Microsoft announces electronic voting system

[IncongruousGoat]

44 minutes ago, steve_v said:

So the SDK is open-source, sure. It's also MIT licenced so there's no guarantee it will stay that way once it's in a finished product, which IMO largely defeats the point of open-source software.I'd be pretty surprised if the manufacturer (Microsoft or otherwise) puts the complete source for the finished system on github, it'll be the reference code with some extra secret proprietary sauce or unobtainium component I'm sure.

Well, the way they're talking about it makes it seem like it's going to be a pretty comprehensive black-box sort of SDK, which means that the frontends that will be built for it are going to be pretty trivial. In either case, the SDK itself is free & open source, so I'm sure that someone will come up with a free frontend for it sooner or later.

49 minutes ago, steve_v said:

Besides, this is Microsoft we're talking about here. I thoroughly expect some kind of treachery, probably the "It's open source, but we made it nearly impossible to get it compiled yourself, so just buy systems from our partners." kind.

Maybe, but, again, I'm going to wait until we actually have our hands on the thing before I start passing judgement.

Also, I think you underestimate the dedication of the kinds of people who get strange things to build in strange environments.

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, IncongruousGoat said:

To elaborate a little more: what this thing does is provide a system that, strictly in parallel with a paper ballot system, electronically records all the votes in a (nominally) secure fashion using the power of cryptography. It then (again, in parallel with the paper ballots, which throughout all this have remained completely unchanged) provides A: individual voters with a mechanism by which to check if their vote has been registered and counted correctly, and B: a mechanism by which arbitrary third parties may validate the election as a whole, both without violating voter privacy and without providing avenues by which to interfere with the vote. Let me once again note that none of the above in any way, shape, or form changes the process or procedure around paper ballots, and cannot be used to change any votes that were written down on said paper ballots.

At least, this is what Microsoft claims that their system does. As I said earlier, I'm going to hold off on either advocating for or against it until I know exactly what it does under the hood.

A parallel system would increase security. I would make it hard to manipulating the boxes. is this would show up on the electronic vote. That is unless you also have this and made it match, who would be very hard to do. This would be useful in places there its plenty of fraud then voting. Yes one issue is that many of these places its the government who do the fraud to stay in power and would be unavailingly to increase security, rater suspect security is low on purpose, but refusing to do so would have an political cost. 

[Nivee~]

10 hours ago, Cassel said:

What if the employee operating the copying procces wants his candidate to win and falsify voices when copying to the server?
What if the owner of company had one employee mount a chip that changes the vote on the voting device?

Company? No, every bit of the EVM machine is built by the ECI. Not the 'administration' but the ECI. 

10 hours ago, Cassel said:

I'm asking again. How do you know that what you get on the printed paper has been saved in the database? The fact whether data is sent to the server through the network, or whether it is copied manually from each machine does not change the fact that the machine has to collect data from the voting somewhere.

Like I wrote in my previous comment, representatives from each political parties are required to test if the votes are being registered correctly. If there are no discrepancies during that testing phase, there won't be any during the actual voting. And remember, those political parties have a MUCH larger stake in this than random strangers typing on an online forum, and they are ok with this.

10 hours ago, Cassel said:

There are no people who have no views and are independent. Everyone works somewhere, wants his views to win voting or can be bribed or intimidated. You were worried about being able to intimidate millions of voting citizens, but you do not care about the fact that you can intimidate a handful of people watching over the correctness of voting? Who created it Central (Federal) authority?

Who made it a Central(Federal) authority? The Constitution did. It is backed by the judiciary, and should need arise, it can help the Election commission directly or regulate it, if it's going astray.(which has never happened yet, The ECI has maintained its sanctity for the last 70 years) No administration has the  ability to interfere in ECI's internal affairs.

And about intimidating people and the human factors in general, is it not possible for the same to occur in a ballot box system? 

11 hours ago, Cassel said:

you have no control over whether your voice has been saved or not. In the paper system, if you threw your vote, you can be sure that he is in the ballot box.
In my country we have transparent ballot boxes, so you can see how many voices there are in the ballot box and there are also cameras that you can monitor over the Internet during the voting and counting votes by the committee.

You know what? Jon Stewart, a famous American political satirist did a video on Indian Electoral process. Maybe he can convince you, if not me.

And perhaps, you can't get a feel of our situation from your perspective. There's no stopping me from destroying the contents of the ballot box and filling it with another fake sets of votes. How would you take precautions against that?

11 hours ago, Cassel said:

Who makes updates on these machines? Does it happen in one central place? Who will read the results of the votes?

The Election commission. No. The Election Commission.

I would like to reiterate: An EVM is the exact same as a ballot box. If you wish to raise issues against EVMs like corruption and dishonesty, then please consider that it's possible in ballot system as well.

[Nivee~]

14 hours ago, Kerbart said:

Not were I grew up. At the end of election night, they ballot boxes would be emptied in public, counted, and tallied up in a publicly verifiable way. And usually citizens would hang around to view the process, because, you know, democracy.

I don't know where you grew up, but it seems like a nice, homely place. But please don't impose your visions of an ideal society on our society. Because trust me, when you have 1.2 billion people competing for a limited amount of resources, everyone else is the enemy, and it's 24/7 hunger games.

If public were allowed to hang around, to watch the counting process here, it would be a freaking bloodbath, a security nightmare..

14 hours ago, Kerbart said:

Technological systems are black boxes. We can’t see what happens inside them. You have to rely on experts who assure us the machines are safe and cannot be rigged.

You use lifts, right? Isn't it risky, compared to stairs? What if someone with a grudge decided to tamper with the lift, leaving you stranded, or worse, snap the cable and foil the emergency brakes? 

Please learn to trust machines a bit. Or else we might just go back to the medieval times. Your toaster can give you a shock, for all that we know..

14 hours ago, Kerbart said:

my home country, those machines were “hard wired, impossible to tamper with.”

Hackers managed to get their hands on one, and that night, on national television, one of those hard-wired, impenetrable machines was shown playing chess.

It's a CPU, you could make it operate a roomba if you extracted it from a device. I am pretty sure if hackers manage to get their hands on one of the cpus used in our EVMs they can get it to play chess as well, but that experiment does not prove that the VOTES were tampered.

In fact, the Election Commission of India allowed individuals and Organisations to try to prove that EVMs can be hacked. No one was able to prove it. Perhaps that just means that our EVMs are better than yours??

14 hours ago, Kerbart said:

It’s not like we need electronic voting, there are secure, simple paper ballot systems out there. Makes you wonder all the more what the motivation for electronic involvement in the voting system is.

Good for you if you don't. But we have to count 800 million votes and deliver the results in a sensible period of time, counting ballots by hand is just impractical.