Snip

You only have to see how Obummer was elected, not once, but TWICE to see how voter fraud works.

Why Internet Voting cannot work

Electronic voting and computerized tabulators are already bad enough, but no matter how many times Internet Voting schemes are proven to be hackable, there are those who continue to push for such systems anyway.

Even while worldclass computer scientists and security experts continue to advise against it in no uncertain terms, and repeatedly demonstrate how such schemes can be manipulated (by both outsiders and, far more easily, by insiders), profiteers and (often) partisans continue to call for Internet Voting and continue to pretend that it can be done securely.

Late last month, just before a new Internet Voting scheme made by a company named iVote was set to be used in Australia’s New South Wales, a “major security hole” was discovered that, according to the Australian Broadcasting Company’s report, “could allow an attacker to read or change someone’s vote.”

“The analogue would be pulling someone’s postal vote envelope out of the post, pulling out their vote and finding out how they intended to vote and then putting a different ballot in instead,” said one of the researchers, University of Melbourne computer scientist Dr. Vanessa Teague, who discovered the vulnerability. “They could potentially do this in an automated way to a very, very large number of votes,” she explained, and voters would never know it had happened.

Following the New South Wales election at the end of March, as UK’s SC Magazinereports, “As many as 66,000 votes in the New South Wales state election 2015 could have been tampered with.”

The magazine, which describes itself as a publication “for IT security professionals”, cites a comment from the Schneier on Security blog noting that those taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of iVote’s system “could already have helped certain powerful people remain in power. Votes could be switched, polls could be manipulated, the media could be fooled and democracy destroyed.”

Naturally, the officials responsible for deploying the system in the first place were incensed at the revelations and attempted to attack the motives of the computer scientists, forcing the non-profit, non-partisan Verified Voting Foundation, for whom the scientists serve in a volunteer advisory capacity, to respond in kind.

In an open letter to the director of the New South Wales Electoral Commission, Verified Voting President Pam Smith was forced to remind him that “There are many unsolved problems with Internet voting that make it infeasible to carry out securely at this time.”

“There’s no way to independently confirm [an Internet Voting system’s] correct functioning and that the outcomes accurately reflect the will of the voters while maintaining voter privacy and the secret ballot,” Smith writes. She also adds: “The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal agency directed by the US Congress to examine and set standards for online voting, has concluded that secure Internet voting is currently not feasible” and that “senior cyber security officials at the US Department of Homeland security have warned that online voting is inadvisable and premature.”

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While Teague and the University of Michigan’s Dr. Alex Halderman alerted NSW officials of the vulnerability in time to make last minute changes to the system, there is no way to know if other vulnerabilities still existed. Thus, weeks later, SC Magazine’s report on 66,000 votes cast in the election which “could have been tampered with.”

Once again: ‘Democracy’s Gold Standard’

What happened in New South Wales reminds us, once again, that Internet Voting can’t be done securely. But, even if it is, somehow, done securely — and can somehow also be kept secure even from insiders, as the lottery story reminds us — the even bigger problem remains that nobody can know if an Internet election has been carried out securely. That inability to know erodes confidence in democratic elections as badly as if they actually had been manipulated by outsiders or insiders alike.

So, to sum up: Internet elections cannot be made secure, particularly from insiders who, no matter what, can get away with gaming the system (in ways that are very likely to go undetected by the public) and, even if any particular election has been kept secure, the public needs to know that it has been kept secure.

Oh, and — since so many Internet Voting profiteers try to offer this particular angle to offer (false) assurance to the public — the ability to verify that your own vote has been recorded accurately by the system does not assure election results are accurate or offer any real confidence to that end to voters.

That’s true for a number of reasons, but in brief: A system that allows you to check how your vote was recorded would a) also allow you to sell your vote and b) may show you how you voted, but can’t assure that the final reported results of the election actually included the vote as you intended it. In other words, you can be shown anything in regard your own personal vote, but a system that doesn’t let everyone, after an election, to assure that every vote was counted as cast by every voter, is a system that fails the needs of a truly democratic election in which the public can have full confidence.

After covering this beat for more than a decade, so far, the only system we’ve been able to find that meets those basic requirements is a system which includes hand-marked paper ballots, counted publicly by hand, at each precinct, with results posted decentrally at the polling place before those hand-marked paper ballots are moved anywhere. We call it “Democracy’s Gold Standard”.

Anything short of that is either a scam, or a system that undermines the most basic values of electoral democracy.

http://www.salon.com/2015/04/15/the_great_american_voting_scam_how_political_insiders_are_gaining_the_power_to_steal_our_elections/

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