Posted on 11/02/2004 11:07:05 AM PST by Tolik
Below is a group of articles discussing different aspects of the electronic voting; possible problems and possible solutions. The article was written at least a few month ago. It's not a reporting of the problems on November 2, 2004 (yet).
Sorry, Your Vote Has Been: Lost, Hacked, Miscast, Recorded Twice
New electronic voting machines are supposed to prevent another Election Day disaster, but these paperless PCs could make hanging chads seem like a minor nuisance.
A breakdown of 2004 voting machines by county, and a few hotspots to watch
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/lgimg/0,21039,748736,00.html
[1] Maryland and Georgia use Diebold voting machines statewide that leave no paper trail. A Maryland judge rejected a paper-trail mandate.
[2] California: Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified insecure Diebold machines, and the attorney general joined a lawsuit against the company accusing it of making false claims about its machines.
[3] Nevada uses DREs retrofitted with printers statewide. Counties randomly select 1 to 3 percent of their machines and match paper records with machine totals.
[4] Texas chose its Diebold voting machines in meetings that were closed to the public. See video of one of those meetings at safevoting.org.
[5] Washington passed a law requiring all DREs to have a paper audit trail, but counties have until 2006 to comply.
[6] Florida: Based on the erroneous assumption that touchscreen machines were failsafe, Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued a rule in April barring counties with machines from performing manual recounts. In August a judge overturned the order.
* a type of punch-card system
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/generaltech/article/0,20967,714500,00.html
Sorry, Your Vote Has Been: Lost, Hacked, Miscast, Recorded Twice
New electronic voting machines are supposed to prevent another Election Day disaster, but these paperless PCs could make hanging chads seem like a minor nuisance.
By Annalee Newitz
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/print/0,21553,714491,00.html
It’s 2 a.m. on November 3. The polls have been closed for hours, but the election has yet to be called. Around the country, reports of snafus with new electronic voting machines have been pouring in; no one is sure how these problems have affected the results. In Maryland, machines failed to boot up, and voters were turned away for hours. In South Carolina, officials bought machines too late for adequate testing, and on many of the onscreen ballots, the presidential contest included names of candidates from local elections. Several Texas counties are thousands of votes short because a bug in the software failed to record Spanish-language ballots. Pundits are already clamoring for a recount potentially larger than that of 2000.
But this time, there will be no hanging chads to contend with. In fact, for hundreds of thousands of votes, there will be no paper record at all. Ballots cast on many of the new touch-screen machines disappeared into computer memory or onto smartcards, leaving behind no paper trail to audit. Officials can print the results that have been saved in the machines, but there’s no way to know if that’s an accurate reflection of the votes that people actually cast. Adding to the chaos, one network news reporter has received a tip that mercenary hackers were hired to alter the code of a particular brand of machine so that every 10th vote for Candidate A was recorded as a vote for Candidate B. Meanwhile, in Colorado, another group of hackers is boasting that they stole a box of electronic smartcards used to activate e-voting machines and reprogrammed them to allow multiple votes, just for fun—the way someone might hack a videogame. Or, in 2004, a presidential election.
This is a worst-case scenario, but it’s not a fairy tale. When one third of the country’s voters walk into booths containing electronic voting machines this November, many of them will have no idea if their vote is being recorded accurately or if it is being lost to malfunction or fraud. “I don’t think the technology exists to make entirely trustworthy [electronic] voting systems,” says Stanford University computer scientist and e-voting expert David Dill.
Why? Put simply, e-voting machines are computers, and as we well know, computers sometimes fail. When those failures occur, there is often only the highly fallible digital record to rely on, because adding a paper trail was deemed too expensive or unnecessary. Several grassroots groups are working to prevent an election-swinging symphony of disasters like the scenario above, but there’s just no way to fix, test, and secure all of the tens of thousands of e-voting machines in time. This presidential election may well be a crapshoot. Welcome to the age of high-tech voting.
From Bad Paper to No Paper
Ironically, it was the ambiguity of the old-fashioned paper trail that forced officials to put their trust in electronic machines. After the 2000 election hung literally by a chad, Congress passed the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA). It included a $3.9-billion payout to improve the country’s voting infrastructure, with most of that aimed directly at converting those pesky punch-card devices into shiny new e-voting machines. The catch: States that wanted a piece of the pie would have to upgrade before 2006. Historically accustomed to a chronic lack of funding, state elections officials were eager to bring the voting process into the 21st century. “There was a mad rush to go to [e-voting machines] in the wake of HAVA,” says computer scientist Michael Shamos of Carnegie Mellon University. “But people didn’t know the machines. They didn’t have a clue.”
When local officials turned to the government for guidance, they were met with bureaucratic buck-passing. HAVA outlined no technical guidelines for the new machines. Instead it created a body called the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) to do that. In June of this year, the EAC created another group, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), which is just beginning its efforts—the group met once in July and once in September. Election officials wound up with a lot of acronyms, a pocketful of money, and no advice on how to spend it.
Without a formal process for vetting machines, officials in nearly 30 states were charmed by presentations from top e-voting vendors such as Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and Hart InterCivic, which were happy to step in and provide their own brand of expertise. For them, HAVA meant sales.
The most popular e-voting machines are called direct recording electronic devices, or DREs. They usually look like large flat-screen computer monitors, sometimes with a few navigation buttons along the side. Eager to get away from the confusing “butterfly ballots” of 2000, officials were excited by the idea of voting machines with easily readable touchscreens that anyone could use. What could be simpler than stepping into a voting booth and touching the places on a screen where you want to make a check mark? On most models, there is even a big “vote” button to press to submit your ballot. The “direct” part of DRE means the votes go directly into the computer’s memory, but companies such as Diebold and ES&S assured state officials that their proprietary software and foolproof designs would make the election run smoothly, even without a paper trail.
In virtually every state, officials failed to invite outside technical experts to participate in the process of e-voting machine selection. (The voting rights group Texas Safe Voting Coalition discovered a videotape of a meeting of voting officials and Diebold representatives in which one confused official is heard saying, “I just want to make sure this machine can add.”) Without input from the tech-savvy, elections officials did what most consumers do when they go to an electronics store to shop for a new gadget: They listened to what the salespeople said and hoped they were telling the truth.
The Code Hits the Road
To be fair, the vendors hadn’t really lied about their systems; they had just neglected to mention that the machines could crash the same way a home PC does. But elections officials found this out soon enough. In 2002, ES&S’s popular iVotronic machines didn’t register 436 ballots in a North Carolina election, and the same machines failed to record more than 100 votes in this year’s Florida congressional race. In the morning hours of a primary election this past March, voters were turned away from 55 percent of voting sites in San Diego because of battery problems with Diebold machines. (The machines were back online within a few hours, but it’s impossible to know what proportion of the stymied would-be voters ultimately returned to cast a vote.) And in a New Jersey election in June, the vote-tabulation computer could not read data from smartcards that had recorded votes cast on Sequoia AVC Edge machines. When workers tried to read data off the cards, the system showed zeros.
Last year two computer scientists—Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University and Dan Wallach of Rice University—investigated the proprietary software code that runs Diebold’s best-selling AccuVote-TS machine, which had been naively posted to an insecure FTP site and subsequently disseminated on the Web.
Rubin and Wallach found that there were no safety mechanisms in the software to prevent people from casting unlimited votes. Shocked, they wrote that the e-voting machine was “far below the most minimal security standards.” Later a state-funded Maryland study revealed that Diebold software was designed to run on a version of Windows that was out of date and therefore extremely vulnerable to security breaches. Earlier attempts to upgrade the machines to a newer version of Windows 2000 caused the Diebold software to crash.
What officials would have discovered if they had consulted experts like Rubin and Wallach earlier is that “computer security” involves more than keeping machines in a locked room (although it means that too). Software is deemed secure when it can keep doing its job correctly even when users feed it unexpected information or it’s under attack from a hacker or virus. Computer security specialists comb through line after line of code, checking for dangerous glitches—anything from poorly written commands that cause the machine to stop recording votes when it reaches a certain number, to an error that just makes the machine crash randomly.
In addition to being made reliable, software has to be protected from being altered by malicious hackers. What if somebody plugged another device into the e-voting machine and reprogrammed it to shift election results? In a truly secure system, it’s very difficult for someone to make changes without being detected.
Because none of the major vendors of e-voting machines release their code for security testing, states and counties are forced to trust vendors’ own assessments of their machines’ reliability. But the DRE companies have the same problem their clients do: cash flow. There’s not a fortune to be made in voting machines. The primary customers depend on government money, and even with HAVA, that’s in short supply. Independent security audits are notoriously expensive—auditing a single make of machine might run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars—and without customers or a federal mandate demanding them, the return on this kind of investment hasn’t been worth it.
To spare that expense, some have suggested that voting machine code be made “open source”—that is, available to anyone who wants to check it. (The theory behind open source is that the more people who test the code, the better it gets. OpenBSD, an open-source computer operating system, is widely agreed to be one of the more secure operating systems in the world and is used by several government organizations, including NASA.) So far, none of the major vendors has agreed to release its code to the public for fear of competitors stealing trade secrets.
Bev Harris, a voting rights advocate and an early critic of DREs, suggests that the current state of software insecurity has left us with a “black box” scenario: “You send your vote into a machine, but you don’t know what’s happened to it.”
Making E-Votes Count
There is one widely accepted and simple solution to the black-box problem, and it is already being employed by other computers involved in high-stakes transactions, such as ATMs and credit-card readers: a paper receipt that ensures an accurate physical record of your vote. In e-voting-speak, this is known as a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) or, sometimes, the Mercuri method. Popularized by and named after Harvard University research fellow and computer scientist Rebecca Mercuri, the VVPAT system requires DREs to include printers that produce a paper receipt under glass. Voters review their choices, hit “OK,” and the paper falls into a lockbox. After the election, officials have something tangible to count.
Earlier this year, Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller made a deal with e-voting-machine vendor Sequoia to retrofit the state’s DREs with printers that produce a paper trail using the Mercuri method. (Most current DREs were built without printers to keep the machines’ cost down.) During tests, paper tallies revealed that votes cast in Spanish on two ballot measures had not been recorded into machine memory. Without a VVPAT, this may never have been found. The machines’ first statewide real-world use, in a September primary, was widely heralded as a success.
Another, less expensive remedy is to identify any problems in a machine’s code through extensive aftermarket testing by volunteers. “Logic and accuracy” tests take place a few days or weeks before an election. Typically, several machines throughout the county are chosen at random, and two volunteer testers (often a Democrat and a Republican) are assigned to each one. One votes, while the other notes how the tester voted and how the machine recorded the vote. The records are then compared for anomalies.
On Election Day, random e-voting machines are taken out of the polling places throughout the day and subjected to a more rigorous version of this test. This “parallel testing” ensures that the machines haven’t been tampered with since the last test or that hackers haven’t programmed them to behave differently only on Election Day.
These kinds of security measures are currently voluntary, but the forthcoming federal guidelines are expected to make them mandatory. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a standards-making group for electrical engineering and computer sciences, has created a task force to come up with just such a guideline, which members of the EAC hope to adopt. But the IEEE effort is moving slowly because of internal bickering among the task force, which includes both voting rights activists and representatives of some of the largest voting-machine vendors in the country. At issue: whether a paper trail should be part of the mandate. If it is, vendors will have to recall existing machines to graft on printers, at significant expense to the company or the state.
Saving the 2004 Election
While officials argue about protocols, computer scientists, legislators and concerned citizens are doing what they can to avert a 2004 Election Day digital debacle.
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, in consultation with experts, came up with his own security guidelines, announcing in April that all voting machines in California must produce a paper audit trail or conform to 23 specific conditions before the presidential election. These include allowing the state access to the machines’ source code, as well as parallel testing.
California will also offer a “paper or plastic” choice at the polls. Voters will have the option of using a paper ballot instead of the e-voting machines. In other places where voting rights activists feel the machines are unreliable, they are encouraging people to vote using absentee ballots.
In addition, battles are being fought on the legal front. Eight Maryland citizens filed a suit seeking an injunction against their state’s use of Diebold machines, while several groups, including the Verified Voting Foundation (founded by Dill) and Citizens’ Alliance for Secure Elections, have argued that an Ohio suit challenging election security could be resolved if state officials would mandate the use of paper audit trails. The Texas Safe Voting Coalition has been working with the American Civil Liberties Union to force the Texas voting examiners board to open its meetings so that the public can monitor the choosing of e-voting machines. And two bills that would require e-voting machines to have paper audit trails are making their way through Congress.
On Election Day, a group called TechWatch, made up of computer scientists and other volunteers, will monitor e-voting machines across the country. When trouble strikes—machines crash or suspiciously large numbers of votes for one candidate show up in a low-traffic polling place—the problem will be posted to the group’s Web site, and a TechWatcher will be dispatched to document the problem and attempt to fix it. After the polls close, the group will have a detailed picture of which machines failed and where security may have been breached. If there’s a recount, TechWatch can use this evidence to determine whether concerns about voting machine accuracy in particular areas are well founded.
These stopgap efforts are heartening, but according to Diebold-exposer Rubin, the inherent instability of the current crop of DREs makes it impossible to guarantee a smooth election. “At this point,” he says, “either the machines will work, or they won’t.”
Global Electronic Voting
While some developing nations have embraced e-voting machines, more developed European and Pacific Rim countries have been much slower on the uptake.
By Annalee Newitz
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/generaltech/article/0,20967,714509,00.html
A decade ago, Brazilian Minister Carlos Velloso, president of the Superior Electoral Court, made a speech in which he promised a nation free of election fraud through the use of e-voting machines. Although there’s still room for debate about whether Brazil’s rapid move to e-voting solved all their electron-fraud problems, since 2000 the country’s elections have been conducted entirely on electronic voting kiosks. The self-contained devices can run on batteries for up to 12 hours and are sufficiently rugged to be deployed both in the Amazonian jungle as well as the streets of São Paolo.
Other nations, including Venezuela and India, are also casting their votes electronically. Using e-voting machines with paper audit trails, Venezuelans successfully conducted a runoff election earlier this year, the accuracy of which was validated by international observers, including former president Jimmy Carter. Indian elections featured machines with a special “close” button that allows poll workers to stop the machines from recording any additional votes in case somebody tries to take over the poll booths and engage in electronic ballot stuffing.
While these developing nations have embraced e-voting machines and modified them for their particular needs, more developed European and Pacific Rim countries have been much slower on the uptake. Japan, which has traditionally considered votes legal only when they are written in the voter’s own hand, has allowed e-voting machines in a few small, local elections. But the South Korean government has said that all its elections will be conducted electronically starting next year.
Last year, the European Commission released the results of a study on voting systems that use the Internet and cellphones. Although there were initial difficulties with software installation, participants in the study reported that these bugs were ultimately ironed out and that the final test election they conducted, in Sweden, went off without a hitch. No European nations have yet held official elections using the electronic systems.
Perhaps the most intriguing e-voting technology—at least from the perspective of software security—hails from Australia, where the Australian Capital Territory Electoral Commission is pushing for the use of open-source software in e-voting machines. You can download and audit the software yourself on the commission’s Web site. Even Avi Rubin, the U.S.’s most vocal critic of security in most e-voting machines, can’t complain about this one.
Vote 2012
Computer scientist David Chaum suggests that cryptography could solve e-voting security woes in the future, and many experts agree. Here’s how Chaum’s system works.
By Michael Moyer
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/generaltech/article/0,20967,714504,00.html
1. When you go into the voting booth, you’re presented with an ATM-like screen that lists the candidates. Choose one by tapping that person’s name. A message confirming your choice appears at the top of the screen.
2. This confirmation is actually two paper receipts, pressed together and then illuminated from behind. Each receipt by itself is an unreadable grid, but when properly aligned, the name you have chosen appears.
3. The receipts show an apparently random array of boxes, but look closer. Wherever a letter should appear, one receipt is black, the other white. Viewed together, the letters are gray, while the background contains a random pattern.
4. After voting, you can take either receipt, but as you open the door to get it, the other drops down into the machine to be used in case of a recount. Your receipt contains your vote, but it’s further encrypted to prevent vote selling.
5. When you get home, you can make sure your vote has been properly counted. Enter the unique serial number on your receipt into a Web site that lists the tallied votes, and an identical copy of your receipt will appear.
6. In addition, any voter will be able to verify the results of the entire election from their home computer. Elections officials will be required to post the encrypted votes, along with “keys” that can selectively decrypt certain votes. This allows individuals to check that every vote matches up with an encrypted receipt without being able to tell whose receipt it is or which candidate the vote is for.
This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of good stuff that is worthy attention. I keep separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson, Lee Harris, David Warren, Orson Scott Card. You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about).
I swear, we have used the optical scan system here for years and do not know why it is not used nationwide. Ya get a piece of paper, mare it with a pencil, they are hauled downtown and scanned, counted, etc. If any problems arise, drag em all out and do a manual count. Paper backup with puter count is the way to go.
However, I do miss going into the old machines, closing the curtain and pulling on levers. Then swinging open the curtain with the big lever with a clang, which added a finality to it all.
dummy.....mare=mark
NOVEMBER 02, 2004
An estimated 30% of the U.S. voting population in 27 states and the District of Columbia will use electronic voting machines in the election, in which Republican President George W. Bush faces Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry. The list of states at least partially using e-voting machines reads like a who's who of critical presidential swing states: the big three of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, plus Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.
With most national polls showing a statistical dead heat between Bush and Kerry, problems with voting technology could play a major role in the election. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have thousands of lawyers ready to swoop into areas where there is voting controversy. Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation, agrees with pundits who say it could take several days for the U.S. to sort out the winning presidential candidate because of potential problems with e-voting machines.
The Verified Voting Foundation and other groups critical of e-voting machines, often called direct recording electronic machines, or DREs, say voting officials have no way to double-check votes cast on the machines. DREs don't give voters any indication of what's going on inside the machines, and because the machines being used in most states today don't produce paper trails, voting officials have no way to conduct independent recounts, critics say.
"Election officials are not able to show us the work," said Andy Stephenson, associate director of BlackBoxVoting.org, a group critical of e-voting machines.
While e-voting proponents note that ballot stuffing is not a new trend in U.S. elections, e-voting technology could allow large-scale cheating by changing a few lines of code, Stephenson said. "It's the scale of the stuffing," he added. "It'd be a hell of a lot harder for you to carry in a bag with a million [paper] votes. It's the economy of scale."
Although voting didn't open up in all 50 states until today, early voting has been available in several states, and problems with voting technology have already been reported in 16 states, according to the Election Incident Reporting System, operated by the Verified Voting Foundation and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Volunteers reporting e-voting incidents have identified 96 separate incidents, including 44 in Florida and 20 in Texas, as of yesterday, according to the EIRS Web site. No other state had more than five e-voting problems reported.
Among the alleged incidents in Florida so far: voting machines crashing and causing long lines, and voters reporting that they had voted for Kerry but had the machine show them they voted for Bush during the review process. That process allows voters to correct mistakes. More than 300 volunteers will monitor elections for e-voting problems for the Verified Voting Foundation, Doherty said.
But the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), which counts e-voting machine vendors among its members, called e-voting among early voters a "success."
"Returns suggest nothing but the accurate and secure operation of electronic voting machines," ITAA President Harris Miller, said in a statement. "In fact, what we have seen is that the early voting phenomenon, supported by electronic voting systems, continues to grow. People like it, and they have the opportunity to do it because this innovative technology provides election officials with the ability to support numerous ballot types at precincts set up at shopping malls, government offices and other high traffic areas."
Most problems with early voting have not been caused by e-voting machines, added Bob Cohen, senior vice president of the ITAA. "What I've heard and seen is the issues have more to do with voter registration and people showing up and not being on the voter logs," he said. "Our contention is [e-voting machines] are very accurate."
Although there were some reports of crashes of computers holding lists of voter registrations in the first days of early voting in Florida, that problem wasn't related to e-voting machines, Cohen said. "That's not a voting machine," he said. "Certainly, computers crash."
One remedy to voting controversy is a landslide election, said Doherty, whose group is monitoring potential e-voting problems. A large turnout could swing the election and undercut any problems with e-voting machines, Doherty said. Some pollsters and political scientists are predicting a record turnout for a U.S. presidential election.
"If there's overwhelming turnout for one candidate, the problems with the machines are lessened," he said. "The more people who vote, the less likely there will be problems."
As for counting systems, that's another matter. They should be automatic but not include any programmable logic. The counts should put non-volatile, readable, date stamped, transparent coatings on every ballot on every read that preclude future tampering (such as completing blank fields). Every ballot should be handled with a chain of custody validated by all participating parties.
It ain't that hard.
Ditto. We used optical scanners in my district in Maryland. I have no idea why they had to rush to install a new unproved system instead.
I understand the need to replace punch card, but scanners reported to have the least problems. So no paper back up for Maryland.
Is this the magazine that promised us flying cars for the past 50 decades?
I feel better. The encrypted system they recommend is functionally identical to what I have been promoting since 2000. The only thing I would add is that the paper audit trail should be on a single, continuous roll of paoer.
Good to see that Ohio is using the punch card system that worked so well in Florida in 2000.
Uploading the results to a website is where some people fear outside manipulation of the count could occur.
Push for death penalty (sedition) of those who would work to cheat from the inside of a polling center (the volunteers). Stiff prosecution of those who vote multiple times, dead names, felons, etc. would also disuade fraud.
If we are not going to have tough penalties the Rat Machine will continue to cheat as they have for the past centuries.
Install black box video cameras to monitor the poll workers. I trust them less than I do the thieves who check your luggage for "explosives" at the airport (and have been known to steal). Cameras can put an end to crime.
Bev Harris is a big DU poster and subscribes to a theory that George W. Bush and Diebold are conspiring to forever block Democrats out of elections.
That she is accepted as a "credible/nonpartisan" source in the MSM while John O'Neil was not speaks volumes.
They had a crisis and rushed to plug the holes. His and your offers are much better. I am positive the country can come up with a secure and working solution, but we need cool heads for that, not high emotions.
Thanks for the ping. Anyone using an electronic machine without a paper backup is a fool or a crook. Period.
Any software can be made fairly reliable, with self-auditing features built-in, but anything a smart guy can program a smarter guy can beat.
There was never anything wrong with the punch cards, the machines are non-partisan and botched votes are strictly the fault of the voter and are non-partisan. Recounts are simple, and fast, and non-partisan. The idea that punch cards are unreliable was a con, and only worked because the press and the DNC worked together to sell the idea.
If a district decides to go with electronic machines, you must allow the machines to be audited by all parties, there must be a paper backup, the chain of custody of the backup ballots must be secure, and there must be independent exit polling to reveal possible fraud. If the exit polls don't match the official numbers within a certain percentage, or if its close, you count the paper ballots. If they differ from the machines, you schedule a new vote for that district.
It's a hard questions: who Maryland has more: fools or a crooks?
I was very much surprised to learn one day that we have NO paper trail. !!??!!
There is also another but related issue. Many states don't require ANY identification card. How is that not being an invitation for crooks?
I sure like that system of voting. I dont trust the machine I just voted on. The dreaded DIEBOLD. Even the name is scary. It was easy, with big writing and big green lights for those with bad eyesite but NO paper trail.
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