Error? Or Fraud? (Could it be....SATAN?!?!?)

[farchivist]

In the ongoing saga of the Wisconsin GOP/union battle, a new wrinkle is on the latest battlefield. This past week was the scene of the election of a Wisconsin Supreme Court judge. The incumbent is one David Prosser, a conservative who is generally considered to be aligned with Governor Walker. The challenger was the state Assistant Attorney General

Comments

[mrbogey]

I think we can go a bit simpler and still be extremely secure. Giving the voter too much and having too many steps introduces the risk of human error gumming up the works. Ask any office drone how many tricks they take to bypass security practices that seem well meaning but are so onerous are complex that no one follows them... ie- complex building entrance rules end up with people stuffing a brick in a backdoor to keep it open.

Have a printer next to each touch screen voting booth that prints out an encrypted hash with a time stamp as part of the algorithm. The hash will contain all the encrypted info of who received a vote. That way if there is an accusation of hacking to change the inputted database than you'll have a paper record with an encrypted hash. Try hacking that. You'd have to do a man-in-the middle or some other hack that gets it before it gets added to the database.

But wait, there's more. That database since it has a time-stamp can tell if someone stacked the machine with votes before the election officially began or be checked to see if an oddity that indicates fraud such as a repetitive number of matching ballots cast in quick succession that would indicate someone standing there and "stuffing" the machine. All you'd have to do is feed the paper read-out into an OCR scanner and you should have a duplicate of the database.

That way a quick heuristic program could catch anything peculiar so investigators can deal with likely voter fraud quicker and more precise.

Of course there's still the possibility of a hack that cheats the input. You could always have the machine have a feedback page that takes the hash and converts it back to a ballot that a person can verify by looking at on the screen.

I think at that point, it'd be impossible short of having a widespread and open attempt at fraud to cheat the ballot box.