Thread by @nullary

A talk about voting systems 👀 #kawaiicon

https://twitter.com/jpdanner/status/1184632714399342592

What does a voting system need?
- secrecy
- integrity
- verifiability (persuading those who doubt)
- availability
#kawaiicon

Remote vs supervised voting.
#kawaiicon

Challenges:
- emphasis on availability to avoid simple bad news stories

- remote (postal/online) requires individual to take steps and protect their secrecy

Risk of a voting system depends on the effort needed to have impact at scale #kawaiicon

Why do people push for online voting?

- turnout: but no evidence it helps

Turnout depends on people caring about the vote (eg Scottish independence, high turnout) #kawaiicon

Postal voting fraud?

(If that’s happening, wouldn’t the same attackers target online voting too?)

Cost saving?

But online voting is expensive to run #kawaiicon

End of postal service?

Seems pretty unlikely we'll lose the ability to send physical things across distances... #kawaiicon

Online voting needs properties that are hard to build and test for reliability

#kawaiicon

But online voting is in use. If people are not understanding the problem, how well are they implementing a solution?

#kawaiicon

Audit shows a range of problems with the iVote system used in NSW
#kawaiicon

Western Australia ran their election through inCapsula.

Certificate not controlled by their election authority.

Interesting mix of domains on the same certificate.

Users identifiable with a years-long persistent cookie

#kawaiicon

The system was meant to separate voting and counting

But use of cookies on the TLS proxy broke this separation

#kawaiicon

Auditors referred to inCapsula's reputation.

But that reputation changed - we know they were breached!

NZ census also used inCapsula for the census

#kawaiicon

To sum up, expert advice is being ignored.

Online voting systems are being built in ways that make basic mistakes, and repeat those mistakes year after year.

(The same principles apply to postal voting too)

#kawaiicon