Councils warned electronic voting will not be secure

Thursday, 27 September 2018

Local government officials say they need to prepare for the time when NZ Post won't be up to the job of handling postal elections.

Plans to allow online voting in next year's council elections have run into a wall of opposition from technology experts, who say internet voting can't be secure.

Local Government New Zealand will issue a tender for an online system that would be used in nine council elections, including in Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington, alongside postal voting.

The decision to shop for an online voting system comes amid growing international concern about election interference by foreign powers in the wake of the United States 2016 presidential election and Britain's Brexit vote.

On Thursday, at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, US President Donald Trump accused China of preparing to subvert the United States' November mid-term elections.

A landmark two-year study led by the combined US national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, Securing the Vote: Protecting US democracy, concluded this month that US elections should only be held using paper ballots.

NZ local government officials have been working closely with the New South Wales Electoral Commission whose own e-voting system, supplied by Spanish company Scytl, has been under review in the wake of security concerns.

* Mail-based voting system is out-of-date

* Online voting by 2016 'possible'**

Internet voting should not be used as 'no known technology guarantees the secrecy, security, and verifiability of a marked ballot transmitted over the internet', according to the 160-page report, which was produced by computer science and cyber-security experts, lawyers and election officials.

Testing alone could not ensure systems had not been compromised, it said.

President Trump has accused China of interfering in the US midterm elections that will take place in November.

Marguerite Delbet, general manager of democracy services at Auckland Council and spokeswoman for the online working party that approved e-voting in principle, said it would only go ahead if the cost was acceptable and if councils could provide 'sufficient assurance that the risks will be managed'.

Delbet said the 'reliability and availability' of the postal system was declining significantly, deliveries were slowing and postal costs were increasing, so councils needed to prepare a viable alternative to postal voting.

'Every election we have had issues with delivery. In Grey Lynn in 2016 we had a whole area that never got their ballot papers.'

It was getting 'harder and harder to find a post box' and the postal costs for next year's Auckland election would be up about 50 per cent on 2016, she said.

New Zealand Post general manager of business performance Mark Baker said 'if NZ Post's performance is being used as a reason as to why we have to take elections online, I probably wouldn't support that view'.

Baker said NZ Post aimed to deliver 99 per cent of mail within five or six days.

With postal services in decline, local government officials argue they need to start exploring other options while they have time.

'There might be changes in service standards because if you have got no volume going between Kaitaia and Invercargill for example, that would be a different picture. But we don't see our target against the service standard going down because we are not about selling something we can't stand behind,' he said.

The working party looking into e-voting has been advised by consultant Ian Brightwell, who served as chief information officer of the New South Wales Electoral Commission until 2016, Delbet said.

'He is working alongside us on the project and we have been in direct contact with the NSW Electoral Commission who have been very helpful in sharing their experience.'

Waikato University cyber-security expert Ryan Ko has been researching how to improve online voting systems and says existing commercial systems are not yet fully secure.

The New South Wales (NSW) government has been using a system called iVote to allow blind people to vote in state elections since 2011 and has since extended eligibility to voters who had registered to vote early.

IVote was developed by Spanish company Scytl which says its technology was used by more than 53 million voters in the 2016 US presidential election, at which Trump was elected.

Australian National University professor Rajeev Gore and computer scientist Vanessa Joy told a NSW parliamentary committee in 2016 that they had found a serious security hole in the iVote system used by NSW.

Joy said the flaw and another vulnerability both allowed 'an internet-based, man-in-the-middle attacker to subvert the voting session entirely', in a way that would not be detectable to the NSW Electoral Commission.

A panel of experts appointed by the NSW Electoral Commission was due to complete a report into iVote in May.

Commission spokesman Brendan Wong said on Wednesday that the report had been delivered to the state government but it was not yet clear when it would be made public.

Auckland Council would not confirm whether Scytl might be invited to bid to supply the New Zealand council system, citing confidentiality.

James Valentine, chief technology officer of Wellington IT company Fronde, was among dozens of technologists who took to social media to oppose the local government plan, tweeting there were 'lots of concerns' including security and ballot secrecy.

'I'm a digital-first kind of guy – but I'm far from comfortable that electronic voting, and in particular online voting, is a good idea.'

Former State Services Commission deputy commissioner and government chief information officer Laurence Millar tweeted 'just don't do it, it is a really bad idea'.

Ryan Ko, head of the Cyber Security Lab at Waikato University, said no existing commercial systems to allow online voting were '100 per cent secure'.

Ko developed a model for a more secure online voting system in an academic paper last year, but that acknowledged there were still problems that would need to be addressed before it was at least as secure as paper voting

There was evidence that online voting increased voter turn-out, so it was 'a balance', Ko said.

He subsequently clarified that his view was that there was evidence that countries attempted online voting to increase voter turn-out, though it would be difficult to attribute an increased voter turnout to just the implementation of online voting.

Delbet said only a subset of voters in Auckland would be allowed to vote online.

'We are thinking at this stage vision-impaired, overseas voters and people in one area of Auckland.'

Online-voting was not a 'silver bullet' for declining levels of voter participation but Delbet hoped it might slow down that decline.

She agreed it was conceivable foreign agents would try to subvert any online voting system that councils adopted, if only to test their own capabilities.

'We fully expect that people will try and tamper with it and we are very aware that those threats will be coming from all around the world.'

But she said no form of voting was totally secure.

'I am one of the most ardent defenders of democracy in terms of my beliefs. If we are not satisfied we can provide a system with a level of security that is comparable or better than postal voting, we won't do it,' she said.