electronic voting in Japan

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Nicolas Christin" <nicolasc () gmail com>
Date: January 23, 2008 9:48:33 AM EST
To: dave () farber net, rdv () sfc wide ad jp
Subject: Re: [IP] electronic voting in Japan

Dave,

This is from a pretty old thread, so I do not know if it is still
relevant to IP'ers, but please feel free to share if appropriate.

Speaking with colleagues here, I realized that there is actually an
English version of the report on Japanese e-voting machines that Rod
Van Meter had mentioned in his post.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/l005775305672333/

The full text is accessible only if you or your institution has access
to the Springer library. (CMU, for instance, does.)

Best regards,
Nicolas

On Dec 6, 2007 8:19 PM, David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:
> ________________________________________
> From: Rod Van Meter [rdv () 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 () andrew cmu edu tkeiji () 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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