 Our next talk, which will be held by Luk and it's about online elections at universities and how to prevent them. Luk is a student himself at the University of Göttingen and I'll give the floor to him right now, have fun. So, thank you for the introduction and thank you to all those who are interested in listening today. How to prevent online elections and why you should was an alternative title for this talk. But let's get started with the topic. I'm not going to go into too many details, also not about certain products. I am not a legal nor a political expert, I'm just a student of computer science. So thank you first of all to the speaker of the resolution for electronic elections of the key KIF 46.0 and many other individuals who have helped me create this presentation. So a few words about myself, I study in Göttingen and I'm also active in the student council and we've been seeing the first signs of online elections being introduced before the pandemic started and also you can contact me via my email address, which I've posted and I've also uploaded the slides. Let's start with articles in the German constitution and it says that all state authority is derived from the people. It shall be exercised by the people through elections and other votes and through specific legislative, executive and judicial bodies. This also means that if we have doubts that the election is running as it should, we have the right to make sure that it is and investigate and this is what my talk will be about because if the integrity of elections is lost, the whole democracy is threatened. Let's start with a relevant XKCD. I'll give you a minute to have a look at it and after that I'll continue with my presentation. So essentially what this comic is referencing is that software isn't trusted by software developers themselves often times and they often times express doubts about it themselves. So let's get into the history of online election at universities Wikipedia says that the first online election was conducted in 2000 at the University of Osnabrück. It was mandated by the federal government actually because they wanted to have a trial on whether online elections could be a viable option for federal elections in Germany. Other universities also started using online election but only in recent years, only the University of Jena is a bit of an earlier example with these 2011. Now let's look at the electoral principles which include that members of the German Bundestag shall be elected in general, direct, free, equal and secret elections. What does that mean? Secret should be relatively obvious. Actually the person voting should know their vote and the votes are cast in closed wallets and also there's a voting booth that is not to be seen from the outside and independent means free means that it's free of pressure so there shouldn't be electoral advertisements in the voting booth. General means that everyone has a right to vote actively and passively independently of their income, of their origin as long as they are citizens. All citizens have the vote to write generally and equal means that all ballots are equal but that also concerns passive election rights so that means that everyone who is eligible to be voted is equal as well. And then there is the publicity which is not in the constitution but was later introduced by the government which means that the voting process must be traceable and transparent basically. This means that for me if I vote or am voted I can always get insight into the process and keep track of how many people are voting and that everything is going according to the regulations. And I can also, anyone is able to help count the votes and can sign up as an election helper. Now let's continue with the advantages and disadvantages of online voting. I think it's obvious that during a pandemic organizing a vote is incredibly difficult so online voting has advantages there. So I totally get why you would want online voting in a pandemic. Also the participation will increase which I will come back to later than environmental protection because you save paper. So this is where online votes should have an advantage then temporal like you save time not just the ones who are voting but also the ones who are organizing the vote save a lot of time because voting booths are often staffed by volunteers that have to invest a lot of time and even if you do mail vote voting the envelopes have to be opened and that is a point in favor of online voting and then there's also cost savings which I will also come back to later. Of course you can vote from anywhere and a factor that is often forgotten. If I want to change my mind that isn't really easy to do in a paper wallet because crossing out has to be done a specific way and it's sometimes not easy to interpret whether when a person changed their mind they actually crossed out their vote or if the vote is invalid. Digital democracy I put that in brackets. It's an argument often used by advocates of online voting but I don't really see it as an advantage because if you wanted direct democracy you could change the electoral process as a whole and not just make it every four years but maybe every year or even more frequently. Accessibility is a very important argument in favor of online voting. It's easy to imagine that people with disabilities have advantages with online voting but because people with disabilities are also sometimes disadvantaged in paper ballets. Then the election period which may be extended and prestige because if this neoliberal block chain thought that you would want to have your elections online let's come to the disadvantages. The main disadvantages is security. No computer system is secure therefore no online voting system can be secure. Of course paper votes are also insecure but it gets so much worse with online voting because the responsibility in the end goes to the end users and end devices used to vote. That can't be a good thing because it adds so many attack vectors all at once. DDOS for example could hinder people from voting or sniffing would be an option even if the software is encrypted there is still the theoretical risk that network traffic could be infiltrated and sniffed in a way that you could find out who voted when and you could use those results to get further insights. Post scripting is also an option for example if QR codes are involved for voting for certain people of course log ins could be resets in the data center or Troy ins could be used to find out who is behind credentials and also very important wholesale fraud. The whole election process could be manipulated in offline elections especially in paper ballots. You have less possibilities of fraud of course you can corrupt people you can threaten people extort people but still it's not possible in the same way as in online elections. And also online voting attacks are less traceable in the end. Then we have phishing and should be obvious why that would be a risk. And also well if you don't trust the organizers of the vote. If the organizers of the vote are acting malicious it would also become possible to find out who voted. So now let's come back to publicity and elections being public online voting systems are black box essentially. It would be easier to have online votes if the concept of secrecy wasn't required. And there are a few problems that go along with that paper ballots with paper ballots you have each person has one vote and that makes it more traceable. And also election booths have usually more than one person and even if there is doubt I can recount the election there are several mechanisms that try to safeguard the election and with online votes sometimes they are they are not as effective. For example they say hey an IP address must not be must not be recorded because that might lead to some stability to figure out who was that. But there is no way to recount and the whole system is not transparent for new people. And usually there are certificates and the question is is everything configured and in the end some only specialists can understand it and why can't configure that there needs to be an IT security specialist in every vote action. So if a manipulation is hard to detect if it's if there might be a manipulation possible then there is a loss of trust into the election itself and that unimportant political argument it's very useful for to use online elections for corrupt systems because it's so easy to manipulate and at that point we have the lead back to the universities. I think universities can open doors to the society and it's very critical if universities do something that can be preferred by autocratic regimes then the usability might be more complicated with voting machines in northern Europe had to be repeated because some people did not click on OK. With our election there was a timeout and with the test election with data from last year you can see perhaps you can't see it. It's a long list and it's very hard to view several are several ballots one after the other that are only separated by this these white borders and you need to scroll down to the end because in the end you have to select to go forward and the end everybody scroll through everything once or they press the end button but it's not it's not easy to see what happens then there are another disadvantages it's it's hard to do an error correction in the president's election there usually people will there and in our English the English translation said test in the header but perhaps somebody sees that and says just a test election and they don't know whether that's the real election or not. So even with proper normal elections there might be errors but yeah it's with online election it's it's it's possible that there are local parties and you might get a post on social media and get and are influenced to vote for a specific group so the most important necessary requirement is trust and trust is we don't want to trust a person and we can't trust with a on an online election here are the opposition something that's required here the general selection letter voting by letter and online might be better the online election older persons might have problems the equality I had an issue with the online election because the lists are shown very differently with a paper vote of course there are also lists on the top at the bottom but you can see them all in one view and in this case it's not possible you can't have an overview who can be elected that was improved for this the real election but it was still quite complicated and the secret election is complicated because there are so many attack surfaces so again the online election it's a remote election not a presence presence is more connected with a voting by letter but it's it's it's a bit cheaper than voting by letter rather than with a paper ballot shortly for the law system the there was the requirement to the publicity and the pool liars the online election creator says that voting are not voting machines are not allowed but the all online elections are used to run on computers because you run it on your own computers and servers somewhere and in a server center are required to run the election so apart from this effect that it's done over a distance everything is means that it's still election computers and that the the the terrain again well the syringe in court had a decision in 2013 but it wasn't sufficiently it wasn't sufficient for online voting but prosecution said that they basically said that lay men and women would be able to count the election and will see what the courts will decide in the end so now let's advance a little bit quicker publicity is only for political elections that is what the courts said but I don't feel that way because I see university elections equally as democratically important than political large elections well let's compare online and offline voting offline voting as close source there is now it's about the online voting systems used in university and this is a we have a monopoly situation there because poli as is the only company offering this online voting system it uses a blockchain a local blockchain that is and of course they're saying that the election catalog and the ballot box are independent but they don't give any proof I basically have to trust them and I don't want to do that the contract elapsed in March 2021 and this is about the cost you have to use a certified software it costs about 20,000 euro per electing person so if you take into account that many people aren't even voting in universities this doesn't really make sense but because even if you paid people at the polling stations it would still be less than the cost of an online election I'll skip that there were a few issues with the university online election so there was one possibility to vote locally in person and there was a problem with the verification the counting took the time took too long it was announced that it would be 10 minutes but in fact it was hours it took hours and hours and the results were also a bit confusing because some of the electees were only had like two or three or one vote and of course there's no possibility to calculate who could have been that then there were some erase conditions in JavaScript concluding there's no prestige let's get back to the participation which actually increased but during the seven days where you could vote 24 hours a day participation increased after reminders were sent but also the number of invalid votes increased and if you watch this trend for a longer time for an institution that has been voting online for a long time you can see that it this trend only persists as long as the online voting system is new now I'll get to the end because I don't have much time left I'm really sorry for that concluding I don't want online voting at universities it might be an option long term but not short term so thank you very much for your attention and my opinion is obvious here no thank you now we can't hear drinks now we can she's reminding you about the pad where you can ask questions so we already have one question do you think there's a chance to prevent the law from declaring a system as secure well there is a catalogue with a very superficial rating and superficial conditions like for example a condition would be that one person can't vote multiple times so I think the German federal office for security in information systems would be the best organization to start with because it will be difficult to get our parliament and to get into this and I think I think that the government will be cautious about declaring certain systems as secure another question which approach do you find promising for preventing online elections I think being on time is critical if you want to prevent this from happening we should have been there and made contact earlier for example in Jena where they've been having online voting systems since 2011 also I think presentations online presentations like this one are very important and also baby steps ask for a proper process ask for a postponing of the system yeah that sounds good sorry technology is a bit against me this evening there's another question incoming and people are also typing still the question was posted in English why do you think universities can't just enforce for election systems to be open source or even have open source software and components because of the principal public money public code I'll respond in German so I would turn this around and say it's not good software just because it's open source and even if the software was open source it would be questionable still so I'd say it's similar then zoom and other issues just if you have a system it will be used people will resort to the most available option so certification will also be expensive yeah what can student councils do once online voting is introduced what we did is we were promised test elections in 2019 that never happened and that is when we as the student council decidedly spoke out against online elections because of the pandemic we were put under a lot of pressure by different sides and it's even more special in Göttingen because in Göttingen the elections are organized by the an academic committee and it really depends on whether the student body or the university as such conducts the elections and I'm never sure whether our arguments reach people or what people are motivated by but I think it's never wrong to just talk about it and get a discussion started there's we're at the end of our question rope so are you telling me to continue presenting well yeah time is also getting to an end which is sad because this is such a diverse topic where a lot still needs to be discussed so there's a lot of thank you messages coming into the pad one one last thing I posted our complaint online which you can find at the end of the announcement as a PDF so if you want to get inspired you can have a look at it perfect that would have been my last question whether you anything any last words to add so if you want you could also show a few more slides all right I have a five-step plan for a more detailed response but there's always the possibility to speak with people and also to include marginalized groups and minorities which is very important and there are a few organizations ready that are talking about this topic and also getting legal legal advice is very important and getting the student body to engage with the topic and also to veto such systems and also there's the option of suing or filing official complaints but I can't really say anything about that because I'm not a legal professional yeah that's really complex a complex legal issue because yeah you have to know which paragraphs and which articles of the Constitution are applicable and which laws and which pandemic extra conditions are applicable yeah and we already have concrete online elections coming up but and this is also legitimizing the online voting process this is a very good final conclusion thank you for being here