[IP] electronic voting in Japan

[David Farber]

________________________________________
From: Rod Van Meter [rdv at sfc.wide.ad.jp]
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 1:45 AM
To: David Farber
Subject: electronic voting in Japan

Dave, for IP, if you wish...

There is an article in today's Yomiuri Shimbun (Japanese edition only --
page one, actually) about the possibility of electronic voting in
national elections next year.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/politics/news/20071206it01.htm
(try feeding it to your favorite online translator for a Dadaesque
interpretation)

Electronic voting machines have already been tried here, in a few
prefectural (state/province) elections.  Apparently, all of the major
parties are in agreement on this.

I just got a glance at the print version, which had a picture; they will
be touch panel machines that offer you a simple choice, then I believe
print out a sheet for confirmation and actual submission.  I'm fuzzy on
these details, don't quote me there; the online article doesn't really
say.

The article asserts that vote tabulation time can be dramatically
reduced, which seems unlikely, since the Japanese system is already
amazing efficient: results appear in as little as twenty minutes after
elections, despite being hand-counted.  There is a separate ballot for
each office, so they can be quickly sorted into boxes based on vote,
then the box is counted.  (Don't ask me how they verify validity.)

I asked some students about this, and one pointed me at a paper:

The Security Analysis of e-voting systems in Japan
Hiroki Hisamitsu, Keiji Takeda
Carnegie Mellon CyLab Japan
1-3-3 Higashikawasaki-cho, Chuo-ku, Kobe city, Hyogo prefecture, Japan
650-0044
hhisamit at andrew.cmu.edu tkeiji at cmu.edu

Abstract To assess trustworthiness of e-voting practices in Japan,
security of e-voting systems and their operational procedures are
examined. Through these analyses we concluded that current e-voting
security is heavily depending on protection by operational process
rather than security feature of the system and it is confirmed that
the systems provide only limited security feature though there is
large room for technical improvement. Typical security issues are lack
of protection mechanism of programs and data on counting machines and
on tabulate machines. This vulnerability enables malicious poll worker
or manufacturer to insert malicious code to generate arbitrary
election result.

>From the recent IPSJ Computer Security Symposium.  The abstract is in
both Japanese and English, but the paper is only in Japanese,
unfortunately.

                --Rod

P.S. I ran the Yomiuri article through Google's translator.  It has
gotten MUCH better recently (six months ago it was laughable and
unintellible, now it looks like poorly-written English), and offers the
user the original by hovering the mouse over a sentence, and even allows
the user to suggest a better translation.  Nice!



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