democratic safeguard<\/a>, allowing voters to shield their selection from anyone who might try to influence or intimidate them into voting a certain way. But Springer\u2019s test showed that he could use AI to find out who people voted for, using Georgia\u2019s public election records.<\/p>\nGeorgia\u2019s state elections board held an emergency meeting on Thursday morning to discuss how artificial intelligence has made it easier to identify voters through their ballot code, leaving people more vulnerable.<\/p>\n
Georgia\u2019s outgoing secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, locked down the tabulation data that someone might use to identify a voter, ordering any public release to redact the ID numbers after an election, which \u201csubstantially address[es] this flaw\u201d, said Ben Adida, an MIT-trained cryptographer and the founder of the election technology non-profit VotingWorks, as he addressed the board on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Election workers make a record of every voter who comes through a polling place. Voters then choose candidates on a touchscreen, which then prints out a paper ballot. The voter feeds that ballot by hand into a scanner to be tabulated.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen a voter inserts their ballot into a tabulator, a digital record of that ballot is created. Think of it as a row in a spreadsheet. One row is one scanned ballot. It\u2019s often called a cast vote record, or CVR for short. In order to later retrieve the CVR, the tabulator assigns a unique identifier to each CVR at the time of scanning.\u201d<\/p>\n
The flaw shows up in how the machine records that ballot, Adida said. The identifying is not actually random enough.<\/p>\n
Using AI, the early-voting list and the cast-vote record file for each county, Springer, the Princeton researcher who says he\u2019s never been to Georgia, could recover the voting order for 1.52m ballots, or 98.9% of in-person ballots in 114 of the 139 counties he examined.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn some of Georgia\u2019s counties, I can determine the exact ballot cast by every voter at the vote centers \u2013 ballot secrecy is entirely lost,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
In places with few voters on any given day, like tiny Heard county, Springer said: \u201cthe agent was able to match the majority of the 650 early in-person voters to a specific ballot, and the rest to within a single swap.\u201d<\/p>\n
About four years ago, election security researchers had discovered a flaw in the software used by Georgia voters that could connect a voter\u2019s identity to their secret ballot.<\/p>\n
The fact that ballots have an identifying number assigned at all is a product of the political paranoia attending Georgia\u2019s elections. An ID number for each ballot addresses a fear of unscrupulous election workers double-stuffing ballots through tabulator machines. But if the order of ballots can be paired with other information, like sign-in data when a voter checks into the precinct, or perhaps Flock camera imagery that shows when someone entered a building on a slow day, then that ballot can be synched up to a voter\u2019s name.<\/p>\n
Representatives of the secretary of state\u2019s office say they have been shouting into the wind for help with this problem for three years. Requests for money have been bound up in the long-running political feud between Raffensperger and conservative legislators positioning themselves in the orbit of Donald Trump and 2020 election skeptics. (Raffensperger has remained a top Trump target after refusing to overturn his defeat in the state\u2019s 2020 presidential election.)<\/p>\n
Spokesperson Robert Sinners sent a litany of emails and phone records showing requests for an appropriation to upgrade Georgia\u2019s voting system, to no avail. The governmental affairs committee secretary, Tim Fleming, now the Republican nominee for secretary of state, was on the receiving end of many of those requests.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have presented numerous plans to the legislature for this \u2013 not, not just a patch, but an entire overhaul of the software to fix up any known vulnerabilities,\u201d Sinners said. \u201cGuess what we were gifted with from the legislature? A big fat goose egg.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fleming did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
Other states use Dominion software for their elections. Every other state has either patched the software or withholds vulnerable voting data from public inspection.<\/p>\n
Georgia law has two competing imperatives. The Georgia constitution explicitly requires a secret ballot, and the law protecting ballot secrecy in Georgia is among the strongest in the country. However, Georgia law \u2013 with revisions driven by the election disputes of 2020 \u2013 also demands transparency for election records.<\/p>\n
Elections board member Salleigh Grubbs raised that latter point as she circulated a draft proposal that would call for poll workers to hold ballots in a tray before voters cast them into the machine, to shuffle the printed pages out of order as a way to defeat the problem. Grubbs said that Raffensperger\u2019s fix \u2013 redacting the ID numbers in the cast vote record \u2013 violates the law.<\/p>\n
But county elections officials and other board members \u2013 including Janelle King, a conservative Republican \u2013 dismissed the proposal as equally problematic.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are asking our election officials to completely retrain everybody that has been a part of this process up until this point on how to administer the election,\u201d King said. \u201cI also have major concerns about dropping our ballots into a secured box and then having other individuals scan my ballot. How do I know that in the shuffling something doesn\u2019t fall out? I mean, I just have some major concerns about whether or not we are creating more problems while we are trying to address a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
With early voting around the corner, changes to processes now are \u201ca day late and about $30m short,\u201d Sinners added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When voters cast their ballots, their votes are supposed to remain secret: from their family, their neighbors, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-618798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}