Pretty poor reporting here, but let me see if I can get this straight: Georgia ballots weren't truly anonymous, but contained enough identifying information (through these ID numbers) to be correlated to individual voters.
Here's the most important thing:
> Georgia’s 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 “substantially address[es] this flaw”, said Ben Adida, an MIT-trained cryptographer and the founder of the election technology non-profit VotingWorks, as he addressed the board on Thursday.
But if the unredacted data still exists anywhere, it's still a massive liability. It can still be leaked by unscrupulous people who have access to it, or disclosed to other unscrupulous actors via coercion. The flaw hasn't been fully addressed until the data is expunged and the system is updated to avoid creating it in the first place.
By the way, if I'm reading between the lines correctly...it appears the flaw has nothing to do with "AI," which is why I've called this "poor reporting." The academic who discovered the exploit either used an LLM in their research, or simply demonstrated that AI models have enough knowledge to give out the steps to do the exploit. If the LLM is somehow integral here, that is very poorly explained. My guess is either the author or editor decided to make the story about AI, to ride the current wave of "dangerous AI" hysteria, and then stuck it into the story everywhere they could.
So nothing to do with AI, their anonymization scheme seems to be flawed and somebody figured that out. But AI is a better scapegoat than whoever designed the system
Pretty poor reporting here, but let me see if I can get this straight: Georgia ballots weren't truly anonymous, but contained enough identifying information (through these ID numbers) to be correlated to individual voters.
Here's the most important thing:
> Georgia’s 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 “substantially address[es] this flaw”, said Ben Adida, an MIT-trained cryptographer and the founder of the election technology non-profit VotingWorks, as he addressed the board on Thursday.
But if the unredacted data still exists anywhere, it's still a massive liability. It can still be leaked by unscrupulous people who have access to it, or disclosed to other unscrupulous actors via coercion. The flaw hasn't been fully addressed until the data is expunged and the system is updated to avoid creating it in the first place.
By the way, if I'm reading between the lines correctly...it appears the flaw has nothing to do with "AI," which is why I've called this "poor reporting." The academic who discovered the exploit either used an LLM in their research, or simply demonstrated that AI models have enough knowledge to give out the steps to do the exploit. If the LLM is somehow integral here, that is very poorly explained. My guess is either the author or editor decided to make the story about AI, to ride the current wave of "dangerous AI" hysteria, and then stuck it into the story everywhere they could.
So nothing to do with AI, their anonymization scheme seems to be flawed and somebody figured that out. But AI is a better scapegoat than whoever designed the system