CT Blue

What is it about American election officials? Are they all corrupt, or are they simply incapable of seeing the obvious. Check this out:

Voatz, a mobile voting app that’s already been used in several elections in the United States, has more than a dozen critical security flaws, according to a newly released audit. The audit also shows Voatz publicly refuted an MIT report that found flaws in its app even after it received confirmation that it was accurate.

The audit, which was prepared by cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits for Voatz and Tusk Philanthropies, which has partnered with Voatz on some of its pilot voting projects, found 48 technical vulnerabilities, 16 of which were “high-severity issues.”

…

The audit notes that many of the vulnerabilities Trails of Bits reported to Voatz were only partially fixed, unfixed, or considered by Voatz as acceptable risks.

…

“Voatz doesn’t make any sense as it’s currently designed. Architecturally, it trusts a central server with everyone’s votes,” Matthew Green, a cryptographer and computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University not involved with the Trail of Bits report, said. “A person who compromises that server or any of the client-side software has virtually free reign over an election.”

Green added: “If this was a hot dog stand, it would be closed by the health department.”

Acceptable risks! Amazing.

Is there anyone too blind to see that conducting elections over the internet is an invitation to steal said elections? Paper ballots, counted by a machine in no way connected to the internet is so much obviously safer. I suppose a mobile app would be more convenient, but there are multiple ways to make our present voting system more convenient. There is really only one conclusion one can draw from the fact that such an app would be utilized anywhere: that the state officials involved wantelections to be stolen, because they expect their political party (guess which one?) to benefit from the theft.