No IV system can exist today without being subverted according to academic and industrial/engineering perspectives--we know how to get there but we don't know the path to take. Working with a group of world-class experts. Kiniry led the technical team and writing of a report at Galois, "The Future of Voting," published in July of this year, a project of the U.S. Vote Foundation, a "specification and feasibility study." The focus is on "E2E-VIV," End-to-End Verifiable Internet Voting, a concept that has existed for decades, Kiniry said. "However, most of the required computer science and engineering techniques were impractical or impossible before recent advances. Designing and building an E2E-VIV system in the face of enormous security threats remains a significant challenge," according to the report, which was published in two versions, one for the general public and one for experts. Further sections consist of expert statements on EI and a usability study.
"End-to-end verifiability, security, usability, and transparency are only four of many important requirements of E2E-VIV," according to the report. It must also be able to fend off inevitable attacks with malware of every description. VERIFIABILITY means that the voter can find out for certain that his/her vote was counted as case. SECURITY means that the complex machinery cannot be hacked into and that voters' choices will be private, undetectable by others. USABILITY means "user-friendly," ideally resembling systems we're used to using or else easy to learn--that is, if we go the smart-phone or PC route or even I-vote at public terminals. TRANSPARENCY means that the software operating the system can be monitored at every step; that people can witness all of the processes and/or access them online.
"Many challenges remain in building a usable, reliable, and secure E2E-VIV system. They must be overcome before we use Internet voting for public elections. Research and development efforts toward overcoming those challenges should continue," this state-of-the-art report notes.
"It is currently unclear whether it is possible to construct an E2E-VIV system that fulfills the set of requirements contained in this report. Solving the remaining challenges, however, would have enormous impact on the world."
Americans living overseas and military there all want to vote online since the alternatives have been so arduous and unreliable, often so delayed that votes don't arrive in time to be counted, dependent on overseas mail, systems which are in many cases unreliable. As an expat professor in Europe, Kiniry chose to vote online but in the process sacrifice his privacy, signing a disclaimer, in order to be as sure as he could that his vote would be counted.
Others also want the ease and convenience of Internet voting. The cost of an IV system will be many millions of dollars per year not only to build it but to obtain the license--"just a 4 times a year service for a couple of million dollars for a medium-sized district," Kiniry said. The guarantee is similar to those in the rest of the industry, nor is there a penalty for IV software that turns out not to work.
The path toward effective, transparent, secure IV is "incredibly difficult." We know HOW to go there but need to find the path, which will require 5 years with 10 PhDs working together to build a system. "Once that path is constructed still many difficulties remain," said Kiniry. "It would take years before we could build a system some would trust. I'm not doing it. No one has the resources to do it. A small number of people know this." SCYTL might be able to with their large amount of systems at their disposal, but not as vigorously as their publicity states it. Now the typical large IV firm employs a staff of 100-200. These include Smartmatic, SCYTL, ES&S, and Hart Intercivic.
Smartmatic, an international company whose information technology according to some is owned by Venezuela, where it was first assembled, partnered with Cybernetica, the vendor in Estonia, to work on a next-generation IV product. One is needed in Estonia, where Professor Halderman visited to test the IV machinery and found its security deficient. IV is still in use there--with Switzerland, it was a pioneer in initiating the systems, though only parts of the population use it. In Switzerland it had to be withdrawn from several cantons because of security issues also.
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An all-around expert in every aspect of computer voting, from cryptology to programming and much more, Dr. Kiniry has also been an activist for all of his adult life.
How did he first become interested? Like many of us, because of the Florida 2000 debacle--he grew up in Florida but at the time was a grad student at Caltech. When he was 17, he was dedicated to the cause of equal rights of "non-straights" and atheists. He was active in the Boy Scouts until the organization "behaved badly"--then he resigned his ascent toward Eagle Scout status, while trying to make scouting "get better." Today he works toward free election software with the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others. "Religion, sexuality, and privacy" are his causes, he said.
As an academic in the Netherlands, which has had DREs since the mid-80s, Kiniry and colleagues successfully and easily examined them and hacked into them, finding that the machines were not appropriate for elections. The experts testified this before parliament, also specifying the preconditions for adopting new forms of electronic voting. In 2004, these systems were "junked." Dr. Kiniry also worked with others toward the same goal successfully in Ireland. He said that the younger generation of parliamentarians in The Netherlands and Ireland have short memories and want to bring back e-voting in place of the paper and pencil they switched over to.(!)
There is no e-voting in Denmark, where he has also taught at the university level. In 2011 the government promised it, but again, with others, Kiniry fought against it, again testifying before Parliament among other venues, so the government halted any plans in that direction.
He is an Independent partisan and thinks both blue and red are equally responsible for the state of this union. "All parties equally bad in terms of their desire for power," he said. "I keep fighting for good elections for our government too."
He praises Galois, "a very sharing company," for its outreach to the public by translating its services and bottom line into language we can comprehend. Galois is currently working on 25 projects concurrently.
The company is "nonhierarchical," "a flat organization in which the CEO has no more power than the interns," said Kiniry. Any employee, from intern to CEO, can attend any meeting and any employee can veto a decision. All activities are transparent, even salaries. Kiniry refuses to work on a project with even a "sniff of weapons."
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