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Discuss “Election results inaccessible due to tampering”
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May 02, 2007 at 11:00 PM
Am I the only one who is disheartened by the very poor image created by this whole election? I'm not talking about the possible disenfranchisement caused, or the lack of faith in representative government or anything like that - what I'm talking about is how such a simple thing could have been botched so badly at the world's best university for computer science. (Not to call e-voting in the general population simple, but come on - there's already an authentication/authorization system in place at CMU, the rest is quite simple.) I mean honestly, who was in charge of running these elections?
First, the elections had to be postponed because supposedly the server couldn't handle the load. Excuse me? Only 1900 votes were cast over a period of two days, and that was too much load? Was this running on a 486, or was the code really that bad? A static form was being displayed, and two values were being stored in a table in some database... that's hardly load intensive. And then to have lost the private key? (The article was rather light on actual details and, from a technical perspective, not at all satisfying, but I'm assuming that's what was meant by the article. If I'm incorrect in that assumption, I apologize, but the article could have been a lot clearer.) Why wasn't the public/private keypair created under the supervision of appropriate authorities (i.e. GSA president, Senate president) and then stored in multiple locations? (i.e. burn it to a CD-ROM and shove it in a doubly-locked (physically) box, give 1 key for the box to GSA president and 1 key for the box to the Senate president, or something like that, and store another copy off site). The fact that apparently no backups of the private key exist is rather sad. Backing up important data is something that we preach every day. Sure, there should have been adequate security on the box, and sure nothing should ever get corrupted, but things happen and that's why we teach people to make back-up copies.
Pardon me for venting, but I know that there were a lot of people who put a lot of effort into their campaigns. The fact that the technical elements of the election were so poorly conducted does a great disservice to those people who took a great deal of time out of their lives to run, and I can tell you that I likely will not vote in a September election. (And why delay until September instead of holding a vote next week? Alas, that's a topic for another post...)