[LINK] ACT election 2020: Electronic voting system flawed in 2020 poll, experts say

[Stephen Rothwell]

Hi all,

On Fri, 27 Nov 2020 09:08:19 +1100 Tom Worthington <tom.worthington at tomw.net.au> wrote:
>
> On 26/11/20 9:24 am, Kim Holburn wrote:
> > https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7027348/act-electronic-voting-system-flawed-experts-say/ 
> >   
> >> Flaws in the ACT's electronic voting system could have changed the 
> >> result of the 2020 poll, cyber security experts say. ...  
> 
> Yes! By rights, I won the ACT election! I wasn't on the ballot and was 
> thus robbed of my rightful place as POTACT (President of the ACT)! ;-)

:-)

> More seriously, who is the expert and where do I get a copy of their report?

These are the same people (person?) who managed to identify themselves
from "deidentified" data released by the Health department to
researchers.

> 
> The ACT government could make the system open for inspection without the 
> need for legislation. But if the system is not open now, how did the 
> expert find flaws in it?

ACT Elections make all the ballots available, so they wrote their own
counting software and compared their results to those published by ACT
elections (my understanding, at least).

"In the report titled, Errors in the ACT's electronic counting code, Dr
Teague and Andrew Conway found three errors with the electronic vote
counting system.

The report found the system incorrectly grouped votes transferred after
a candidate was excluded, which caused tallies to be wrong by more than
20 votes."

From https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6952696/cyber-experts-call-for-more-transparency-on-act-electronic-voting-system/:

"Vanessa Teague, chief executive of Thinking Cybersecurity and adjunct
professor at the Australian National University's College of
Engineering and Cyber Security, says it shows Elections ACT isn't being
as transparent as it should be."

-- 
Cheers,
Stephen Rothwell
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