We just had the most secure election in history this year. An election that many were worried would be mired in interference by a foreign power has concluded, in a very orderly fashion, without any signs of fraud or wrongdoing on the part of any party. This very important election has now cemented who the government of this all-important nation will be for the next four years.
I’m talking, of course, about the 2020 Taiwan Presidential Election held in January earlier this year. China sure wanted the Kuomintang (KMT) to win, but the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will remain in power to defend the pivotal nation of Taiwan from China for the next four years.
But how did Taiwan do it? And, more importantly, how did the US fail to do the same so miserably?
I’ve been following the US election very closely since election day on November 3rd. Today, I will discuss all the ways NOT to have “the most secure election in American history.”
Let’s count! It’s easy!
There are many, many, many ways that the US handled their 2020 presidential election poorly. But, since this is a technology-focused website (but really just because there are way too many ways it was done wrong), we’ll focus on the electronic voting systems that were used.
One of the things the US does is using electronic tabulation machines to count votes. The problem with automating the vote-counting process with machines is: how do you know the machines are counting accurately and fairly? Watch the below video to see how votes are counted in the US.
Now compare that to this next video of how votes are counted in Taiwan.
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: Wooow! I didn’t know humans could count! Bears can’t do that. I think.
Oh, humans can definitely count. And as you can see, they can even all count together to make sure that the vote is counted fairly and accurately. Everyone from a 5-year-old to a centenarian can do it. Meanwhile, as the American lady in the previous video said, machines are good at a lot of things, but counting ballots filled up by inconsistent humans ain’t one of them. This means that you end up needing humans to fix the errors that the machines make. More work and expense, when the machines are supposed to make sure there’s less work and expense.
But that’s not where the security concerns begin. I just showed you the two videos above to demonstrate the huge difference between how the US and Taiwan administer their elections. Here’s where we start dissecting “the most secure election in American history.”
You can’t count without the internet
The internet is a dangerous place, folks. Hackers, malware, pedophiles, and criminals, all lurk on the internet. So… it’s the perfect place for a voting machine to be!
But how big of a problem is this whole internet-connected voting machine thing anyway? Well, months before the US election, in January, several news outlets reported that thousands of voting machines were connected to the internet via wireless modems, even though there was no election going on at the time. At least 35 voting systems in at least 11 different states; including the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida; had voting machines connected to the internet through cellular data. One voting system in particular, ES&S, the most widely used voting system in the US, had 14,000 of these.
Being connected to the internet is bad enough – anybody on the planet could have hacked into these machines – but many of them were also connected, not via Ethernet cable or Wi-Fi, but via cellular data. Cellular data signals can be man-in-the-middle’d by devices called Cell-Site Simulators. These Cell-Site Simulators pretend to be cell towers, and forward your cellular data traffic to a real cell tower. They can also alter the data as it passes through them, so they can alter the vote counts of these voting machines on election day, if their wireless modems happen to connect to a Cell-Site Simulator instead of a real cell tower.
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: Oooh! Oooh! I have something to count! And I wanna’ see if I can count! So we have two ways to cheat an election that uses electronic voting machines: (1) Hacking a machine on the internet, and (2) MITM-ing a machine from miles away!
Oh, keep counting, buddy. We’ve got a long way to go.
Keys to the kingdom election
You might think that for a hacker to change your vote on a voting machine, he’d have to perform some hard and skillful work finding and exploiting a vulnerability in the machine. Well, you’d be right, but not if the machine is supposed to be remotely controlled and the hacker just steals the encryption keys to get remote control.
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: (3) Steal the keys to the backdoor!
And while encryption keys are sophisticated and fancy, a good old-fashioned ball-point pen can be just as effective.
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: (4) Lockpick the front door, with a pen!
And sometimes, there isn’t even a lock on the door.
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: (5) Let yourself in, no keys required!
Forget the keys; just buy a house!
You would think that specialized and highly sensitive equipment like voting machines would be very hard to get your hands on to take apart and learn how to hack. You’d be wrong.
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: (6) Buy a machine and start voting!
And not just that. The video above said that you can buy voter registration machines as well.
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: (7) Buy a machine and start registering yourself as a voter, again and again!
Machine error or human error?
When things go wrong, who do we blame? Do we blame the machines, or the humans operating them?
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: (8) Chaos and confusion! Man vs. machine!
How about when a voter makes a mistake? Should we toss their vote out, depriving them of their right to vote? Or, shall we, say, “fix” it?
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: (9) Voters make mistakes, but it’s nothing we can’t fix! (FIX!)
Speaking of being fixed, the polls are always wrong, aren’t they? But… how wrong?
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: (10) Algorithms, algorithms, algorithms, really sneaky!
Trust the experts
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: Hey, hey! I made it all the way to 10! Bears can count too! We can help count the vote!
Indeed, you can help count the vote, so long as the voting system is simple enough to comprehend. The biggest problem with electronic voting systems, in my opinion, is that they’re just so complicated. Very few people have the technical know-how to secure the machines, detect tampering, and operate the system. And that’s where the real crux of the matter is: elections should be inclusive, both in terms of who gets to vote, and who can verify the results. It ain’t a democracy if everyone gets to vote but only a very few select people can verify it.
And though you might think that you can trust those few people with the technical skill to verify the results, there being fewer people who can verify the results also means that there are fewer people who need to be compromised in order to shift the results.
Let’s take a real example, with Mr. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan. You might remember him from one of the videos above. If not, here it is again.
That was him on November 5, 2016, just three days before Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton on 2016’s election day, November 8th. What did he say after that? Well, on November 23, weeks after election day, he published a lengthy Medium post discussing his concerns with the security of the 2016 election. Specifically, he said the following:
Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked. But I don’t believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other. The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
J. Alex Halderman, 2016
So, in summary, back in 2016, Mr. Halderman had concerns before and after the election because he had been studying the voting machines and found them to be pretty insecure.
How did he feel in 2020 though? Well, here he is again on October 26, 2020, just eight days before the 2020 election on November 3rd.
Well, he’s still pretty worried, as he should be! He’s even involved in an election lawsuit against a state this time! So how did he feel about the election, after the election, on November 14? He must’ve been sounding the alarm like crazy!
…
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: Well, that’s a huge change in attitude…
Indeed. Over a period of just a few weeks, he went from worrying about “severe problems on election day” to:
It would be very complicated to do that in an election scenario like the presidential election we just saw. States have safeguards in place that complicate that. Our intelligence community and law enforcement are monitoring would-be attackers so that we can be ticked off in advance if they were to try to strike.
J. Alex Halderman, 2020
ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ: Hmmm… Welp, I guess as long as Trump loses, we can trust the experts!
Never trust the experts, Kuma. Never trust the experts. And the reason why you don’t want to trust the experts is because they are a small group of people that can be targeted and influenced, and their knowledge is so highly specialized that very few people can question their opinions.
Transparency means that a large number of people can comprehend what’s going on. That’s what you want: everybody understanding what’s going on. And complex machinery like electronic voting systems are not transparent to anybody but a few.
Everyone can count the vote
I started this article talking about what I consider to be the most secure election in history. I picked the recent Taiwan election for that title because Taiwan is under constant attack from China, both politically and economically, and, in the near future, possibly militarily. For such a tiny island-nation to withstand this kind of foreign interference from a gigantic rising superpower right next door – and to keep this resistance up for decades – is no small feat to scoff at.
This year’s election in Taiwan was an act of defiance to China’s coercion. All of China’s money and power; all spent to sway the Taiwan election; all thwarted with simple, old, reliable, ink and parchment.
That is how you run a clean, fair, and transparent election.
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