- Research
- 20/03/2019
Prof Talk | Red pencil goes into the ‘kliko’ bin
Unfold an impractically large paper sheet, color the checkbox with a red pencil, fold the sheet back into somewhat manageable proportions and drop it in the so-called kliko bin. That is how we will cast our vote during today’s provincial election. In a time of digitalization, voting with a pencil seems unnecessarily inefficient. But the question is whether digital voting systems can be made safe enough not to pose a threat to our democracy. TU/e software and security experts Mark van den Brand and Berry Schoenmakers nevertheless believe the red pencil is on the way out.
For about thirty years it was possible to vote electronically in the Netherlands. Questions about the security of the secret ballot and the controllability of vote counting led to the return of the red pencil and paper in 2009. Since then, much work has been done to secure the safety of software systems used in the voting process – and in the counting process as well. Because adding up the manually counted votes of individual polling stations and calculating seat distribution have been digitalized once again. But, says cyber security company Fox-IT in a research rapport that was presented last Thursday, “despite adjustments made by the Electoral Council, the current software cannot withstand today’s threats.”
“No software system will ever be a hundred percent threat-proof,” says TU/e Full Professor Software Engineering and Technology Mark van den Brand. “But with many tests and evaluations we can produce a voting system that is safe from a software-technical point of view. The main challenges lie in countering external influence of voting behavior.”
Secret ballot
Berry Schoenmakers, an Associate Professor of Cryptographic Protocols who has been doing research on electronic voting for the last twenty-five years, agrees. “The secret ballot, which makes it impossible to link a cast vote to a person, makes the problems of security extra complicated. That restriction does not apply to the counting of votes, so there are more possibilities, such as blockchain technology. We are trying to find out whether this modified form can be used for voting as well, without affecting the secret ballot.”
Both scientists like to think in solutions and expect the red pencil to disappear in the future. Van den Brand: “The fact that we’re still voting with a pencil is very old-fashioned. The physical act of digital voting can be made practically threat-proof for sure. It is important to retain an analog verification step in the process though, for instance with a printed card that needs to be dropped in a ballot box. That way, both the voter and the person who counts the votes maintain control over the process.”
Schoenmakers adds: “With the current digitalization on all fronts and the technological innovations in cryptology and security, it’s just a matter of time before electronic voting becomes reality. Of course, elections are controversial, much is at stake. It’s still a matter of risk analysis. You can’t just determine scientifically whether digital voting is safer than voting on paper, there’s a whole political discussion behind it as well.”
Magnifying glass
Schoenmakers is in favor of making the window of opportunity for potential hackers as small as possible. “For instance, don’t vote throughout the entire day, but during a period of one hour. That also has a positive effect on influencing among voters. For actual online voting, we also need to find a safer infrastructure for authentication, better than Digital Identification (DigiD), maybe connected to biometric systems.” And, Van den Brand concludes, “Perhaps we shouldn’t look at digital voting through a magnifying glass so much. Simply to remain critical in a healthy way is good enough.”
Discussion