
Why experts are overwhelmingly skeptical of online voting - nuker
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/why-experts-are-overwhelmingly-skeptical-of-online-voting/
======
mlazos
Lol honestly I don’t trust anyone who says their system is secure. The idea
that some random company that built an android or iOS app with an aws backend
magically has no vulnerabilities is laughable, especially after they had hard
coded credentials in their repo. The more the ceo says it the more he loses
credibility. I might trust a big 5 company to implement this, _might_. But
generally until our systems are secure by default I don’t think anyone could
do this right, and there are so many resources going into hacking it it will
take a lot of guarantees for me to start to feel better. Mail in voting is
simpler and much less vulnerable to scalable hacking.

~~~
philihp
As you should, when these systems are closed sourced. Would you trust an open
source system, though?

[https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard](https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard)

~~~
rbecker
Open source is not enough, since you have to trust the compiler and hardware
the system is running on as well [1,2]. But from the page you linked, the key
benefit of that system isn't that it's open source, but that the results are
_verifiable_. I.e. you can check that the results are trustworthy, _even if_
you don't trust the code or machines it's running on?

[1]
[https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html](https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine)

------
rbecker
It's simple: you can't tell the difference between a compromised and a secure
system. Not by looking at it, not by taking it apart. Nothing short of
checking each bit with an electron microscope will do (can't trust the disk
firmware not to lie, after all). And unlike with banking, you can't tell from
the results either.

------
throwawaysea
What makes online voting so hard when we regularly trust online systems with
our finances?

~~~
aarong11
There is a monetary incentive for the company running online systems such as
banks to keep things secure(ish). They are made by mostly technically savvy
people and in general are audited properly.

Electronic voting goes to the lowest bidder. They have no incentive to keep
things secure and test it properly as that would cost more and cut their
middle line. It just needs to work and look secure.

~~~
salawat
Don't think fiscal incentive assures good implementations. If it really did,
places like Experian wouldn't keep getting caught with their pants down. It
really just incentivizes hard to audit ones, and extensive legal engineering
more often than not as the mathematics dictate. Sometimes it's cheaper to
erect legal barriers than to actually dove the problem.

This is what separates "business" from "academia", and unfortunately when the
stakes are as high as politics, the business good enough solution leaves too
much open to doubt for a healthy civic trust to form.

