Computer Scientists Rally for Reliable Voting System

Kim Alexander writes "Silicon Valley computer scientists, led by Stanford professor David Dill are asking Santa Clara county to purchase a new computerized voting system only if it provides a voter verified paper trail. Their concerns are based on the lack of adequate testing of these voting systems, and the fact that the software is closed-source and proprietary. Requiring a voter-verified paper trail will mitigate many of these problems. Dill's 'Resolution on Electronic Voting' has been endorsed by prominent computer scientists from all over the country, including Ron Rivest. Counties all over California and the US are going through a similar process. Patriotic nerds who want to do something to help protect our fundamental right to vote with confidence that our votes will be counted can help by contacting their state and local reps, writing letters to supervisors and getting informed!"

Comments

The scariest argument against computerized voting

[Lord_Pall]

http://www.bestoftheblogs.com/2003_02_05_bestof.ht ml#90279110

This is an article about Chuck Hagel who is a nebraska representative. He ran for office and won in a very close run off, and controls a large interest in the private company that counted the votes in his runoff election.

The majority of the information in the above blog came from http://blackboxvoting.com/, which is a book about the future of electronic voting.

Just some fairly creepy stuff that's turned me off towards any sort of private computerized voting.

Hear hear!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a vote if I can't hold the ballot in my hand, look down and see "Al Buchanan" in the PRESIDENT column and say "1 for Al!".

The ballot needs to be:

Machine generated from a touch screen like device.
Machine and human readable.
Signed so as to be verifiable.

The ballot reciept, that's placed into the voting machine, is a random private key, handed to the voter before voting that is used to sign the ballot and ensure integrity. The voter can then take the receipt/key with them and use an Id number to check that their vote was actually tallyed.

This allows machine counts of paper ballots. It allows manual, human auditing of ballots and tally. It allows machine and human recounts of the ballots. It preserves the voting record for the election on something besides magnetic media. It allows "quick summary" for those willing to rely upon the stored, machine versions of the votes before physically counting the ballots.

This is the only way. You MUST have a piece of paper you can go back to and find a vote. Anything else is simply unacceptable.

And, no, it's not over the internet, but we know that will never fly anyway.

The objection does not go far enough

[originalhack]

The fundamental issue is as follows....

Consider 2 elections. In one, you and I and everyone else have exactly a 75% chance of having their votes counted. In the other, the affluent young technocracy has a 99% chance of having their votes counted and the poor, old, or low-tech population has a 95% chance of having their votes counted. At first blush, the seond electiuon sounds more fair, but it is very clear that the first is totally fair and the second is terribly biased.

The problems in recent elections were not caused by technological failures. Dangling chads and the like are just a smokescreen and the recounts bore that out. The problems in elections are a lack of uniformity within the areas in which votes are pooled. Since the votes for president are done by electoral votes rather than popular vote, it is not necessary to have the entire country have identical machines and ballots, but this does need to happen at the state level. When I walk into my polling place, I should see an identical machine to every other voter in the state (randomly selected from the state pool). All the state ballots should be identical to every other ballot in the state. All the county ballots should be identical to every other ballot in the county, etc....

To do otherwise not only fails to solve the fairness problem, but it disinfranchises people for whom a mouse is a household pest.

Electronic Gambling Machines have more oversight!

[semios]

What scares me is the fact that Electronic Gambling Machines have more oversight than these Electronic Voting Machines. Gambling institutions that provide electronic gaming are subject to random searches where the eeproms will popped out and verified that no tampering has been committed.

However, when it comes to protecting the foundation of democracy we can't even be given access to the source code as it is a "trade secret." Here's an example of this privatization of democracy:

In the West Virginia case [where an election supervisor, a candidate, a prosecutor, a county commissioner, election workers and the voting machine vendor were all sued by a group of candidates who believed that they had been cheated in the election], although the criminal charges were dropped, the judge had not allowed the jury to see a demonstration by the plaintiff's attorneys' computer expert, Wayne Nunn, PhD, a project scientist for Union Carbide who had designed multimillion-dollar computer networks.

After a nine-hour examination of the CES (now Business Records Corporation) computer system in question and in the presence of the CES president, the system's programmer, and others,

"Nunn, with one punch card, added ten thousand votes to the total of one of the candidates in a mock race for president". [ The New Yorker , November 7 th 1988, p. 68]

Nunn subsequently gave a deposition under cross-examination and revealed seven ways in which the system could be deliberately caused to miscount votes, including by manipulation of the toggle switch on the front of the machine to alter vote totals and by inserting a set of secret Trojan Horse commands into the source-code software as described earlier. So it can be done. But can it be detected and prosecuted?

A methodical expert analysis of the company's source-code could have been the key to determining the existence of fraud, but CES officials asked presiding Judge Charles H. Haden II, of the United States District Court, to block Nunn from inspecting their code on the basis that it was a "trade secret". Ultimately, the judge ordered that Nunn alone be allowed to view it, but without the computer he needed for a proper system analysis.

Nevertheless, he discovered "trap doors", "wait loops", and Christmas trees" which could all serve the same end of undetectable vote fraud. According to the New Yorker's Ronnie Dugger, after viewing the code for several hours,

"Nunn was prepared to testify that a ?debugger' in the BT-76 program, while enabling a programmer to make repairs in the program, was also a Trojan Horse; Haden excluded such testimony".

Nunn was allowed to testify that "he had concluded that the program had been altered during the counting".

The jury was also barred from seeing Nunn demonstrate how he could alter the vote count.

The case of Wayne Nunn being allowed to examine the proprietary source-code of the CES system is an extraordinary exception. The fact is that very few individuals outside of the computer vendors have ever been allowed to inspect the source-code of that or any other election equipment company. This was confirmed by Eva Waskell, the director of the Elections Project at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility in a 1993 report entitled "Overview of Computers and Electors".

Many court cases involving allegations of fraud were brought against vendors of electronic systems. There were no convictions. Was there ever any proof of tampering presented? No. Part of the reason for this may be that during the litigation the plaintiffs were never given access to the vote tabulating program, and hence there was no opportunity for anyone to establish evidence to either prove or disprove the allegations. [Emphasis added]

We should point out that even if the court allowed the plaintiff's experts to inspect the source-code, there would be no proof that the code provided to the court was, in fact, the selfsame code used in the particular election in question. Federal election officials say that a few states are mandating that the source-code be placed in escrow so that it could be examined in the event of a particularly "fishy" election result.