Before Argentine Congress, Macri's e-ballots shown to be vulnerable to hacking via smartphone.

[forest444]

Testifying before a select committee in the Argentine Lower House of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies, programming specialist Javier Smaldone demonstrated that the "Unique Electronic Ballot" proposed by President Mauricio Macri can be easily hacked by any basic smartphone currently on the market.

Using his own Samsung Galaxy phone with a basic Android operating system (the most common type currently sold in Argentina), Smaldone demonstrated how a sample electronic ballot sheet provided by the Interior Ministry can be easily read by merely waving a smartphone across the ballot - even through clothing.

Doing so, Smaldone demonstrated, automatically uploads the entire ballot and a voter's choice in each race, requiring only a simple application.

The Unique Electronic Ballot (Boleta Única Electrónica) is the centerpiece of a electoral reform package sponsored by Macri. Introduced in June, the bill calls for replacing the existing paper ballots currently in use in most provinces with a fully electronic system before the 2017 mid-term elections. Electronic voting in Argentina was first used in Salta Province in 2009, and extended to the Buenos Aires mayoral election last year.

The Macri administration touts electronic voting as a way to achieve greater “transparency and agility” during the vote count. Proposals for electronic voting came under fire last year, however, after a Buenos Aires IT security professional (Joaquín Sorianello) discovered and reported vulnerabilities in the electronic system used in the Buenos Aires mayoral elections (which the ruling party candidate narrowly won).

Once the vulnerabilities - including exposed SSL keys and ways to forge ballots with multiple votes - were reported to the manufacturer of the voting machines ("Magic Software Argentina&quot and the media, Macri - who was mayor at the time - ordered Sorianello detained and his computers and electronic devices impounded.

According to testimony by local cybersecurity expert Alfredo Ortega, the servers controlling the Buenos Aires mayoral vote were also reportedly hacked from sites in New Jersey and Texas. The effects of this action on the final result, Ortega reminded lawmakers, will never be known with any degree of certainty.

At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.politicargentina.com/notas/201608/15766-un-especialista-mostro-en-el-congreso-una-de-las-fallas-de-la-boleta-electronica.html&prev=search

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Smaldone's demonstration. It's in Spanish; but it speaks for itself.[/center]

[Moliere]

1. This is a feature, not a bug

[forest444]

2. Well, sure.

But if a ballot is being to designed to be scanned this easily, like one might scan a receipt with a barcode, that's a problem.

For starters, it violates voters' right to a secret ballot (Article 37, in the Argentine Constitution). According to Smaldone, a political operative would only need to wave his phone in front of the ballot box to upload its entire contents - and possibly alter the ballots themselves.

The tabulation process itself, by the way, was also shown to be easily hacked. Last year's mayoral election in Buenos Aires was, in fact, shown to be hacked from New Jersey and Texas (!), as well as domestically. Only close monitoring by specialists from NGOs and the University of Buenos Aires, for instance, prevented over 20,000 extra votes from being counted for Macri's candidate in one district.

Macri, I might add, retaliated by trying to have those expose the vulnerability jailed. Wouldn't you know it, his hand-picked candidate (a kind of Paul Ryan of Argentina) defeated his opponent by just 2.7% in the runoff.