by Charles Miller

I am writing this in New York City where this afternoon I enjoyed sort of a man-on-the-street interview with a local whose attention was attracted by my hat. Over cups of coffee my new friend and I found ourselves agreeing completely that (1) Mexico is a great place and (2) the technical side of U.S. elections is a huge mess.

Like me, this New Yorker is involved in the tech industry, albeit neither one of us in the technical side of ensuring secure elections. We were both aware that electronic voting machines used all over the U.S. have made us a laughing stock among the world's other democracies.

In an earlier column or two I have detailed how every year there is a computer hacker's convention named Defcon in Las Vegas where white-hat hackers show off their expertise, many auditioning for jobs in the computer security field. They try to hack voting machines, in an effort to demonstrate where improvements in security are needed. In one competition, 35 out of the 39 participants in the 6-17 year old age group succeeded. Every single voting machine was hacked, and hacked by children!

In the U.S. there are more than 350,000 voting machines in use. This equipment is manufactured by companies including Diebold, Election Systems & Software, and Sequoia. The response from the manufacturers to this hacking of their machines was to attempt to eliminate the competition by sending threatening letters to anyone selling used voting machines claiming, falsely, that this was illegal. The manufacturers hope that the next Defcon conference will not have any voting machines available for their hacking contest, thereby preventing the exposure of their repeated failures.

This reality seems to conflict with Department of Homeland Security's ex-security chief Chris Krebs who after the last presidential election said it "was the most secure in American history." The honest truth is that nobody knows if the election was secure or not. Republicans do not know, Democrats do not know, and anyone, including me, who says otherwise is misinformed. This is because the existing system has no transparency.

My new New York friend and I understood that technology does have an answer to this problem and we shared our frustration that nobody aside from the tech-savvy seems to recognize this.

Fifteen years ago the existing technologies of increasingly faster computers, the internet, cryptography, and blockchain came together when a brilliant inventor solved the "double pay" problem. Solving the double-pay problem meant that nobody could spend the same cryptocurrency twice; but just as important this means the same blockchain record keeping methodology can guarantee that nobody uses the same airline ticket twice, or sells the same car twice… or VOTES twice!

We have the technology available to make elections safe, secure, and transparent. However; the makers of the technology used to record, tabulate, and report votes are standing obstinately against transparency. Every time that veil of secrecy has been pierced by the children at Defcon, the machine's security has been exposed as woefully inadequate. The software of all these voting systems should be open for public scrutiny so that the security problems can be found and corrected.

It is time to bring openness and transparency to all our elections. You cannot have a healthy democracy if the people cannot trust the voting process.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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