One thing I would like to add is there needs to be the human element of trust and penalties for screw ups and fraud.
Consider the banking industry. There are many rules, systems, and controls to prevent fraud and the emptying of bank accounts by criminals. This is the banking industry's gravest responsibility.
And when data is compromised, a high price is paid in lost reputation. Executives are fired, the bank's stocks tanks, and customers leave banks for those that are more trusted.
By contrast, look at the cryto-currency world like Bitcoin. Bitcoin has sophisticated tech features like Block Chain to preserve a record of all transactions.
However, fraudsters seem to prefer to rob crypto-currencies because it's easier. The people they attack are often wealth individuals who participate in on-line crpyto-currency forums.
It's explained very well with good examples in a story on Krebs on Security about SIM Swapping.
Fraudsters take the path of least resistance. Banks are very hard to breach. However crypto-currencies are not guarded by any people or responsible institution behind the currency. It's outside government regulations, transactions can not be reverse, and crpyto is an easier path to money laundering.
Bottom line: people in the election protection business (our Secretaries of State and Governors) need to pay a high price in reputational damage and even jail time for failure to ensure the integrity of our voting system.
A technical solution alone is great, but it must be backed up with a strong human responsibility and skin-in-the-game approach.
Absolutely agreed. Penalties for gaming and defrauding the system must be great enough to discourage those wanting to do so.
A technical solution alone is great, but it must be backed up with a strong human responsibility and skin-in-the-game approach.
Also agreed. My purpose in writing this up is to demonstrate a possible technical solution to how to gain and enforce confidence in the system. I figure a lot of folks at individual polling locations might not understand why the number strings must match. However I think they can be convinced that to maintain integrity, they must match, for whatever reason.