Defcon 29 (2021) Voting Village notes

I watched all the talks, some cought my interest and I took notes.

Defcon 29 (2021) Voting Village speaker abstracts and bios

Defcon 2021, welcome to Voting Village (NO CONTENT)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIua4a_Jj-U

Hacking to Save Democracy: What Technologists Need to Know About Election Administration

Eddie Perez (OpenSourceElectionTechnology/TrustTheVote)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cmGTuepFBQ

onsite machines often use removable media for data transfer (and software update)

80% of the market is two vendors, 95% in top 3 vendors

15-year unpatched windows 2000. LOLSOB!

separate Federal and State certifications

Federal "US Election Assistance Comission" certifier & standards org

9 vendors are certified

(~40 State rules)

Certification may be on one strict version - No updates! Not even security patches!

trustthevote.org/EA-resources

A Deep Dive on Vulnerability Disclosure for Election Systems

Tod Beardsley (Rapid7, Texas)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsLgWinw3Fs

security.txt tells people how to contact you for security disclosure

SEO: vulnerability disclosure security $ORGNAME

Federal "US Election Assistance Comission" certifier org

9 vendors are certified

5/9 have a 'vulnerability disclosure program'

Wireless Odyssey or why is the federal government permitting devices with wireless networking capability in federally certified voting machines?

Susan Greenhalgh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MyyW9Q3nQk

she's on a huge rant against having any wireless connectivity possibility in election devices ... and that's going to get harder as more and more things have it by default. e.g. Couldn't build with a Rasberry Pi or any common tablet. This will increase expenses!

I disagree. Software disabling of radios is enough. Nothing can turn them on from the outside. If you can get in and turn them on to enable a hack, you have already hacked the device.

A Journalist’s Perspective on Fake News

Bob Sullivan (NYT/Duke)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GplLmG6JHm8

'psuedo event' news

boring.

Are Barcodes on Ballots Bad?

Kevin Skoglund

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqgr488aKj4

[my hot take before listening: YES]

ES&S 2011-2014 introduction of assistive voting machine

ES&S, Dominion, Unisyn

ES&S Code128-C - 6 digit candidate identifier which maps to timing mark grid bubble coordinate

vote in barcode and vote in text

Dominion QR-code (or multiple QR codes)

QR-code binary mode, densely packed

vote bubbles are a bit stream, bit per bubble

HMAC signature

Unisyn

receipt tape

custom barcode ('compressed' vote bubble grid)

also some Code128

barcodes ARE FUD PRONE!

and unneccessary

Dominion switched from barcode to marking bubbles at Colorado request

Hack the Conspiracies

Barb Byrum (County Clerk of Ingham County Michigan)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2nKLZu8_R8

~1500 local election regimes in Michigan

rundown of bogus election FUD

Kickoff Remarks (recorded in-person in Las Vegas)

Harri Hursti

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzTko6PzI64

Inventory of hardware they had on hand to take apart and hack

Keynote Remarks

Commissioner Thomas Hicks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ2Z--ONVDk

EAC

Secrets of Social Media PsyOps

BiaSciLab

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pse_lOyT14

How to Weaponize RLAs to Discredit an Election

Carsten Schürmann

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8yUes4Uyg4

a surprisingly small number of ballots can be sampled to validate an election. This could be a source of FUD.

High Turnout, Wide Margins

Brianna Lennon, Eric Fey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB0eDqriQMk

elections officials run a podcast about how elections work

https://anchor.fm/highturnoutwidemargins

Keeping Your Information Security Policy Up to Date

Sang-Oun Lee (Chicago election official)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIW-HHIumVk

Social Media Security = Election Security

Sebastian Bay (Swedish Defense cybersecurity)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xl9lopy_Uo

For only 300 euros they were able to buy fake engagement on social media platforms and drive up their message.

fb getting better

twitter best at anti-abuse

instagram much easier to manipulate than fb

tiktok is the newb, easiest to manipulate, might be getting better

New Hampshire SB43 Forensic Audit

Harri Hursti

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSHQK2zZxwk

Windham, NH election Audit May-June 2020

Many systems with published vulnerabilities from 2007 are still in use in 2020.

Many NH elections are hand counted! (smaller towns)

300 vote discrepancy between machine and hand recount (out of ~10,000 total votes). Weird partisan pattern in that gap. Race was 8 candidates, pick 4.

AccuVote optical scan (very old). Totally weird 80186 embedded system. ~143 kB for kernel and app. (security through obsolescence?)

two hand counts agree, 4 different machines get varying results.

In a few races, machines consistently under-recognize votes

(Some scanners have bulit in 'features' like punch-hole-removal that can screw with ballot scanning!)

mailing out vote-by-mail ballots through a paper folding machine

folds across bubbles cause misread

ballots re-counted 6 months later counted better because they had been flat in stacks

'offset printing powder' fouled a ballot scanning machine

extensive check of tech hacking found none; just physical oops screwups.

Why Hacking Voters Is Easier Than Hacking Ballots

Maurice Turner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F5noztGSFw

Datas for Dadas

I got curious and started digging through the Social Security Administration's baby name database.

They registered 3,305,259 baby names during 2020. E.g. there were 17,547 babies named Olivia and 19,690 babies named Liam. They also record these babies as F or M so we know that Olivia was 17,535 F to 12 M and Liam was 19,659 M to 31 F.

Energy Policy Geekery and Cutting CO2 Emissions

2018 US CO2 emissions:

1.2 trillion tons CO2 from transportation fuel (gasoline/diesel)

1.2 trillion tons CO2 from coal for electricity

0.6 trillion tons CO2 from natural gas for electricity

(And more, but those are the biggest identifiable chunks that stand out, the biggest usage sectors of oil, coal, and gas.)

So, electrifying cars and trucks would be cool and we should do that too, but making the power grid sustainable is something we can do with big policy hammers.

sources:

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/petroleum.pdf

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/natural_gas.pdf

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/coal.pdf

https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references

Open Source Voting Machines

Below is an automatically laid out ballot, a ballot that was printed, marked, scanned, and then realigned to match the original, and the bubbles found in the image. This is all possible through open source software I've written in 2020.

The source is up on github in a couple chunks:

https://github.com/brianolson/ballotstudio

https://github.com/brianolson/ballotscan

It's mostly Go code with some Python for PDF rendering because I found a handy library for that. There's a TODO list with things like:

• Put a proper header on each sheet
• Include how-to-vote graphics
• Full unicode font support (CJK, etc)
• Scan a whole stack of paper and emit well formed cast-vote records
• Support judge-retention issue types (yes/no should a judge stay on)
• Support Ranked Choice Vote bubbles

So, there's a ways to go before it can be deployed to actually count votes, but I think there's a good core of functionality there. If someone wanted to run a no-frills vote of one ballot type that fit on one sheet of paper I could probably finish that amount of infrastructure in under a month. Otherwise I think my goal is to get this ready for a real election for fall 2022. There should be a long timeline of demos and tests before we trust a real election to this, but also the trust doesn't have to be 100% because the ballots are still just marks on paper and we can always hand-count them, and that's a good thing.

2020 Alaska Better Elections Initiative

A ballot initiative in Alaska passed in November 2020 changing their election system (and adding a bunch of campaign finance watchdog measures). The new system is a top-four primary (vote for 1, top four go on) followed by a four-way Instant Runoff Vote (IRV) general election. IRV is known flawed and a pick-one vote with more than four choices isn’t good either.

They also included vote-suppressing language where if a voter ranks more than one choice at the same rank their vote is disqualified if that tie becomes their top vote (if you cast a tie for 2nd but your 1st wins, you’re fine, but if your 1st doesn’t win your vote is gone) ([1] p.9 section 15.15.350.e.1). This is unnecessary. It would be trivial to cast a half-vote for each choice of the tie, or to temporarily set aside the tie-ranked ballot which could come back if half of the tie-rank got disqualified in an IRV round.

2022 should show us the system in action.

[1] 2020 Alaska Better Elections Initiative http://www.elections.alaska.gov/petitions/19AKBE/19AKBE-TheBill.pdf

Every Vote Is Sacred

There are Dems in the world

and Republicans

Greens, Libertarians, and then

Those who pick no party at all, and

let's hear from a-all of them

I'm an American

And have been since the day I was born

but lots of folks make their home here

they're keeping the melting-pot warm

You don't have to be a six-footer

You don't have to have a great brain

You don't have to have any clothes on

Americans count all the same

Because

Every vote is sacred

Every vote is great

When we all are vot-ing

we make our shared fate

[children's choir reprise]

Every vote is sacred

Every vote is great

When we all are vot-ing

we make our shared fate

[girl]

Women haven't always

been granted the right

now that we can we should

vote like it's your fight

[children]

Every vote is wanted

Every vote is good

Every vote is needed

from your neighborhood

[mum]

pundits on the TV

talk but do not know

it's up to you to say

how the vote will go

[misc]

Every vote is sacred

Every vote is great

When we all are vot-ing

we make our shared fate

Every vote is useful

Every vote is fine

We need everybody's

Mine!

and mine!

and mine!

Every vote is wanted

Every vote is good

Every vote is needed

from your neighborhoooooood!

Condorcet Cycles Less Than 1 Election in 1000

How often do condorcet cycles happen? Probably less than 1 election in 1000.

I used two voter models to simulate elections.

Unifom random preference model: Each voter gets a preference [0.0..1.0) for each each choice.

Spatial normal random model: Voters and choices exist in N-dimensional space and are distributed on the same normal distribution. Voters prefer choices based on closeness in space.

Both models produce some sort of close election where any choice has the same probability of wining. I think intuitively the uniform random model is less like reality. Real voters don't have independent variables for their preference for different choices but actually choices are likely correlated: Someone voting for a far-left choice is more likely to have a moderate-left choice as their second choice.

I manually ran a handful of trials this morning and got some first immediate patterns.

The uniform random model resulted in 20-30% of votes going to condorcet cycle resolution.

The spatial model resulted in 1 in 1000 or fewer votes going to condorcet cycle resolution.

Simulated election had 1000 or 10000 voters, 5 or 7 choices, and 2 to 7 dimensions. Dimensionality had no consistent effect on likelihood of cycle.

Next work could be to regularize the search on a few parameters and plot the results, but right now I feel pretty good based on the spatial model that I can say that condorcet cycles should be rare. These are artificially close elections. Normal elections will be even less likely to have a cycle.

Test program source:

https://github.com/brianolson/voteutil/blob/master/go/cyclething/cyclething.go