On Friday, the House of Representatives will hold a virtual hearing titled, “Exploring the Feasibility and Security of Technology To Conduct Remote Voting In The House.” Unlike the discussion for how Americans would vote anonymously in a primary or general election, this hearing narrowly discusses how our elected representatives can safely vote on legislative bills from a location other than our nation’s Capitol.
On May 15th, the House of Representatives broke with a tradition held for 231 years since 1789, when to cast a vote or fully participate in a hearing, lawmakers were required to be in person. The current notion of proxy voting, where if I lived in and represented Hawaii and you were representing Virginia, I could entrust you to vote for me so as not to make the long and less socially-distance choice of travel by plane.
However, the House now explores taking this concept one step further, and while for many corporations the idea of remote working, when possible, is considered a given based on the current state of affairs in our country, the fully remote option clashes against the long-standing traditions of what it means to represent our country.
Ron Rivest, Cryptographer and Institute Professor at MIT
Enter The Grandfather Of Crypto
Professor Ronald Rivest, who has been a ‘crypto’ Professor at MIT possibly before Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, was even born, will be testifying at the hearing tomorrow. Without any kind of spoiler alert, Rivest has already provided his verdict on the idea publicly in the press as well as in a draft of an academic paper titled, ‘Going from Bad to Worse: From Internet Voting to Blockchain Voting’.
Rivest, is a co-winner of the famous 2002 A.M. Turing Award with American computer scientist Leonard M. Adleman and Israeli cryptographer Adi Shamir. The award was based on his ingenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice by patenting a ‘Cryptographic Communication System and Method’, known commonly today as RSA encryption.
In his written testimony, Rivest indicates this accomplishment as well as how he has spent over two decades on voting security. Rivest reveals his background includes being, “… a member of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee from 2004—2009, advisory to the Election Assistance Commission; I chaired the subcommittee on Computer Security and Transparency…a founding member of the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project. And I am on the Board of Verified Voting, a non-profit promoting voting system security, especially through the use of risk-limiting audits.”
His testimony also states “… the House is in a good position: there are indeed suitable secure voting technologies available. The important reason why that is true is that House votes are NOT SECRET. Voting in the House is not based on secret ballots.”
Rivest’s MIT homepage recently released a draft of a paper titled, ‘Going From Bad to Worse: Internet Voting To Blockchain Voting.’ He has made no secret about his belief that blockchain voting should not be used in public elections. The paper explains that how blockchain may look attractive for electronic voting, “…e.g., using cryptographic signatures to make forging votes difficult, and using hashing and distributed consensus to maintain a ledger of votes that attackers cannot tamper with unless they co-opt much of the network.” However, the paper goes on to note, “… it is extremely challenging to make these techniques work reliably in practice while looking attractive for the use case of voting in elections.”
The paper goes on to stress that these are extremely hard concepts to put into practice and does not eliminate the concept of what it calls a ‘serious failure’. “In particular, blockchain voting systems are still vulnerable to serious failures, and the cryptographic and consensus guarantees of blockchains do not prevent serious failures.” Indeed, recently Russia started using blockchain technology offered by Kaspersky Labs, the security software company that the President kicked out of the United States due to its alleged ties and influence from the Kremlin. For policymakers, entrusting the vote in any kind of technology will need to be one that is all-American and air-tight in terms of avoiding meddling from Russia, particularly after 2016.
The Other End Of The Technological Spectrum
Newt Gingrich, former US Speaker of the House attends “Free Iran 2018 – the Alternative” event … [+]
While no match technologically for Rivest and other computer science luminaries, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich will seek to sway current Representatives to the threat of a ‘virtual legislative dictatorship’ should remote voting be allowed. “We have young men and women risking their lives all across the planet to protect freedom, but their elected leaders can’t risk being in a room with immediate access to doctors and remarkably little risk of anything bad happening. I am embarrassed for this House that such a proposal could even get to a hearing.”
The full hearing can be viewed tomorrow at 1pm ET as well as the testimony of what is a total of seven witnesses. Also testifying is William Crowell, Partner, Also Louie Partners; Jon Green, Vice President and Chief Security Technologist, Aruba Networks, Dr. Aviel Rubin, Professor and Technical Director, The Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, Dr. David Wagner, Professor, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, and The Honorable Cheryl L. Johnson, Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives.