Inside Electronic Voting Machines

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Inside Electronic Voting Machines

Posted by michael on Tuesday July 8, 2003 @08:21AM from the vote-for-buchanan dept.

Alien54 and several other people wrote in about a couple of stories published in a New Zealand webzine: an examination of an electronic voting system, and some less interesting political speculation about it. Diebold voting systems are in fairly wide use, and apparently provide zero security to keep election officials from writing in whatever election totals they want.

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Abuse potential by Roark+Meets+Dent · 2003-07-08 08:26 · Score: 5, Interesting

It should be required that machines use open-source code, and some mechanism be provided for public inspection of the machines to verify the code hasn't been altered, some sort of checksum mechanism.
Electronic voting in U.S. by grennis · 2003-07-08 08:28 · Score: 5, Interesting

Here in Georgia we had an electronic voting summit in Savannah and examined products from eSlate, AccuVote-TS and the iVotronic.
The short story is that they were all very flashy and glitzy, but all had severe problems with security and/or usability. We eventually decided to run a pilot program in last year's off-year election and try out 5 of the most promising machines in a real-world election. The final winner will be used across the state in 2004.
No more hanging chad, but I think we are going to have a whole new set of problems to deal with.
Need paper trail by El · 2003-07-08 08:33 · Score: 5, Interesting

Any computer data can be quickly and easily changed. The best solution I can think of is to print out two paper receipts for each vote, one to go to the election commission (for manual recounts) and one to go to the voter. Each receipt would contain a random code which the voter could then type in on a web site to verify their choices have not been changed. Of course, most people wouldn't bother to verify, but it only takes one person to catch vote fraud.

--
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
This article raises an excellent point by ikewillis · 2003-07-08 08:33 · Score: 5, Interesting

The primary drawback of electronic voting systems is that they aren't automatically self-documenting. Hardcopies of all electronic votes could be produced, however the act of punching a card is much harder to do surropticiously than printing a modified or forged vote to a printer.
The only solution I can suggest for an all-electronic voting system would require extensive use of cryptography. Every voter would have to register a public key and every vote would be cryptographically signed. This would require a database of public keys outside of any political influence and it would also require that voters keep their private keys secure, both of which are enormous problems.
Given these drawbacks, an antequated punchcard system doesn't seem quite so bad...
Re:Wow... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-08 08:53 · Score: 5, Interesting

It doesn't have to be the Republicans themselves. Just people who would benefit from them being in power.

It may interest you to check campaign contributions from executives at Diebold. They seem to like to give quite a bit of money to the Republicans. Just a quick taste:

Walden W. O'Dell
Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer, Diebold
2/14/01 $2,015.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
12/17/97 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
1/30/01 $3,950.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
8/16/01 $500.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
12/17/97 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
6/30/00 $1,000.00
DEWINE FOR US SENATE