
Remember Zip Disks? These Election Departments Do - ohjeez
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-disaster-recovery/remember-zip-disks-election-departments/
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mikestew
_bought its voting equipment in 2002_

Who the hell was buying new systems in 2002 that relied on Zip disks? Have
them taken out back and shot. If they're dead, dig them up, kill them again.
By 2002, most of us had figured out the unreliability of Zip disks, and the
industry had pretty much moved on by then. Except the people selling voting
systems, apparently.

(For the youngsters, I'd guess that the use of Zip disks took a pretty good
nose dive around the end of the 90s. By 2002, the only users left _should_
have been those with an existing investment in Iomega's removable disk
system.)

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dfox
In fact, the disks themselves are surprisingly reliable, the totally
unreliable part of the system are the drives, with the quite unfortunate fact
that broken drive can create disk that breaks other drives.

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curun1r
He also could be confusing Zip disks with the Jazz disks, which were only
slightly better than writing your data to /dev/null.

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dredmorbius
Writing to /dev/null had the advantage of being far faster, and far more
predictable.

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eridius
You could say that about literally any storage mechanism. Writing to /dev/null
will always be faster and more predictable, no matter what the alternative is.

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aidenn0
but Jazz disks didn't have any better data retention than writing to
/dev/null, whereas most alternatives do.

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dredmorbius
Bingo.

Cheaper, too.

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Thlom
Why not paper ballots? The trust is greater (you can't hack a piece of paper),
it's idiot proof, can be counted electronically and hand counted in the case
of dispute or even as part of procedure.

And much easier to expand to more polling stations as you don't need any
voting machines on site. Just paper and a secure box to put it in.

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cbanek
Of course you can hack a piece of paper. You can add more pieces, add
misleading pieces, fake pieces, etc. And even with a secure box, there's
always the risk of conspiracy to remove votes.

Do I think this kind of thing happens? No. But encryption could be used to
make the trust of voting even better, if done correctly. This would allow
secrecy of votes, the ability to verify the validity of a vote without seeing
who they voted for, and the ability to bundle the votes together and hash
them, for example.

Paper scales great, until you need to collect and retain it.

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Klathmon
But those "paper hacks" take man-power, physical resources, time, and a lot of
people.

To do any of those across a state you are looking at at LEAST a few hundred
people. Nation wide? Thousands. In a perfect world.

With electronic voting, all it takes is one person at some point in the chain,
or at best a handful of people.

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cbanek
Why not have everyone in the chain sign? The point is you'd have to have a
secure chain from the voter all the way to registration. I don't see how the
number of people in the validation chain would change.

The only real problem is a technological problem, like a bug or improper use
of encryption. Especially if you're only trying to validate the results, and
not trying to have secrecy. Each person signs / records the hash of the votes
they're validating is. Combine those hashes together and sign that to validate
at higher levels, or use something more fancy. It would be obvious if
something got changed due to malice or fraud.

What would this one person do exactly to sabotage the system?

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Klathmon
One person can design a button which votes wrong 1/30 times. One person can
exploit a bug in the encryption implementation that allows you to access
metadata about who voted for what. One person can design the UI of the voting
booth to vote incorrectly in some cases. (and if you don't believe this is
possible, take a look at some of the "underhanded c contest" [0] winners and
how insanely simple some of those exploits are, and how powerful they can be).
One person could write malware to search and phone home with any private
voting keys that it can find and on election day that person can vote many
times.

We as a species can't even write a secure SSL implementation, and you think
that we would be able to write a bulletproof voting cryptosystem that can be
used by every single person?

But even aside from that, what happens when a person loses their key? Are they
disenfranchised for life? If there's a way to regenerate keys, what is
stopping someone from regenerating a few extra every now and then and voting
with them? How do people without a PC vote? Remember, voting isn't like a
website or application. 100% of people need to have the ability to vote. If
your system disenfranchises even one person who should legally be able to
vote, it can't work.

Paper is near perfect already. It takes a monumental amount of resources (and
one hell of a literal paper trail) to sway a paper vote in any meaningful way.
It's easy to count (you already vote in small counties and districts, just
count them there and pass the numbers up the chain), and it's fairly quick
(the US counts the votes for the presidential election by the end of the
night! That's crazy!)

With an electronic system, you need people to audit it. That means that only
developers would be able to vet the voting system. Your "average joe" wouldn't
be able to verify if his vote was cast, he would need to rely on others. And
what percentage of developers know encryption well enough to be able to safely
audit a cryptosystem? 10%? 1%? That's a hell of a lot of power to be putting
in a small group of people's hands.

With paper, anyone can verify. Any language, any "economic class", the
illiterate, anyone. You can walk down and sit next to the ballot box in your
district, and watch that thing all damn day. You can count along with everyone
else at the end of the day, and you can sleep well knowing your vote was
counted, as you watched it, and you can do the math yourself and make sure of
it.

Paper works.

[0] [http://www.underhanded-c.org/](http://www.underhanded-c.org/)

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cbanek
Any system has flaws, that's for sure. I'm not saying either that everyone
should have a key, or how that key would be distributed. I haven't even
thought of what the system would look like. I don't think this system would
need to be online either.

But yes, I think such a system could be developed. And yes, I think the
results could be audited. We have code running nuclear facilities, fighter
jets, and other sensitive parts of our government.

In terms of how easy it is, just look at how hard it was to get recounts of
votes, not to mention the 'hanging chad' situation, where people were arguing
over what the paper votes were. Even the UI on the paper is very important to
the whole experience to not confuse the person.

Right now your average joe isn't able to verify if their vote is cast on paper
I believe. You have the number on your ballot, as least in nevada on a
receipt, but validating that (or at least in a meaningful way, seeing the
paper) is almost impossible.

For local elections and non federal elections, I think the system would be
easier to mess with, due to the fewer number of people involved in the system.

Overall I'm not saying paper is bad, or that tech would be easier - voting is
incredibly complicated. But I think it's entirely possible to design a good
system. Personally I think the mail-in ballot systems are the best, but of
course I'd like to have some way of checking on that, which isn't easy.

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Klathmon
I guess I just disagree. I just don't see what a safe secure electronic voting
system would give us over the current paper system that makes it worth the
downsides.

And just to clarify, "validating" your vote is very simple. You just need to
watch the box all day. You can (at least in my area) arrive at the opening of
polls, inspect the ballot box, watch it get locked, then sit there and watch
that thing all day. You could have 10 people, 100 people, all on different
"sides" all watching the same box. Then when it comes time to count, you count
along.

By being there the whole time, you validate with your own eyes that nobody
stuffed the box, and that every vote was counted.

Sure, there are "attacks" that can be made against that, but they are very
complicated and risky, and again even if you pull them off, you've just
"hacked" a single district in a single county in a single state. You'll need a
LOT of those to win an election, and not a single person involved can ever
speak of it.

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angry_octet
This reminds me of an effective technique for hacking an election: keeping the
people who would vote against you from coming out to vote at all. For example,
by threatening a law and order crackdown in the area. Busting people for minor
traffic infractions, checking if they have outstanding warrants, etc. This is
greatly facilitated by per-booth vote tallies, and pushing people to use a
local booth.

It might be that electronic voting would allow voting from many places, and
hence alleviate the problem. But I'm guessing there will still be restriction
of polling booth locations to make it inconvenient for some people to vote.

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kome
Pen and paper is a cost effective solution to all this technological crap...

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walrus01
Canadian federal elections are 100% pen and paper stuffed in cardboard ballot
boxes.

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sowbug
Zip disks were so awesome at introduction. Huge, rewriteable, removable,
portable, and cheap (both hardware and media). And this was in an era where
28.8k modems were considered fast, so local storage mattered.

But the day I burned my first CD-R a few years later in the mid-1990s, I felt
like a god among mortals. Zip disks were mostly obsolete after that.

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kalleboo
For the same price, I had the choice of buying an external SCSI harddisk, a
Zip drive, or a Syquest drive. (Syquest soon went bust so at least I dodged a
bullet there)

I went for the Zip drive and used it as basically an external harddisk. For
the computer I had at the time (a 68K Mac), it was actually perfectly
performant as a harddisk replacement - I had one disk of games, one disk of
Office, etc.

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tomclancy
How they have not suffered the "click of death" is a miracle.

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LeoPanthera
Zip 250 (and above) drives do not have that problem. The Zip 750 drive can
read Zip 100 disks, but not write to them.

If you work in IT, a huge percentage of your knowledge (much like the above)
becomes redundant with every year that passes. I think this is true more for
IT than any other industry.

I feel old.

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pacaro
I think that the fundamental problem is not the one technology. Election
systems have this odd requirement (compared to most stuff we build) they are
used both very intensively and very infrequently. These 15 year old systems
have probably been used less than 30 times. From a procurement perspective it
seems wasteful to need to replace something after so little use, but so many
of the computer systems that we use have anticipated lifespans of only a
handful of years.

I suspect that an electromechanical system that records votes onto a medium
that can be easily interfaced with technology du jour (and audited by humans
when necessary) would have an expensive but long lived set of components that
deal with the large numbers of voting actions, and then the ticker tape (e.g.)
output can be read with a device that plugs into an off the shelf computer

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pirocks
Why is this marked as flagged? Is it advertising?

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ebbv
It's an extremely low quality article with no real content or educational
purpose and a clickbait-y title.

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barbs
I've seen far worse on the front page that didn't get flagged...

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ebbv
Me too but that doesn't make this article any less terrible.

