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Virginia Begins to Worry About Voting Machines
nonsecurity writes "Remember the unheeded stories about possible fraud with new electronic voting machines? Well it seems that someone is finally now taking notice. The Commonwealth of Virginia has been ready to take the leap with electronic voting machines, which many experts say are wide open to potential voting fraud.
Like other jurisdictions, Virginia had been shrugging off the concerns. But the Washington Post is is now reporting that Johns Hopkins Computer Scientists have been studying the issue and have found that the machines might be easily hacked and election result tampering is a very real concern. And apparently Virginia is listening. With next year's elections promising to be full of fireworks, it's good to see that people are finally taking notice of the issue."
Anonymising the data makes it hard to ensure that everyone casts only one vote. Consider Slashdot polls an example.
There are possible ways around this, based on cryptographical methods. Take a look at this, for example.
India's been using electronic voting since
1 32 01701
years and the next general election will
be all-electronic with 800,000 electronic
voting machines.
http://sify.com/news/politics/fullstory.php?id=
Jolted Over Electronic Voting
Report's Security Warning Shakes Some States' Trust
By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 11, 2003; Page A01
The Virginia State Board of Elections had a seemingly simple task before it: Certify an upgrade to the state's electronic voting machines. But with a recent report by Johns Hopkins University computer scientists warning that the system's software could easily be hacked into and election results tampered with, the once perfunctory vote now seemed to carry the weight of democracy and the people's trust along with it.
An outside consultant assured the three-member panel recently that the report was nonsense.
"I hope you're right," Chairman Michael G. Brown said, taking a leap of faith and approving Diebold Election System's upgrades. "Because when they get ready to hang the three of us in effigy, you won't be here."
Since being released two weeks ago, the Hopkins report has sent shock waves across the country. Some states have backed away from purchasing any kind of electronic voting machine, despite a new federal law that has created a gold rush by allocating billions to buy the machines and requiring all states, as well as the District of Columbia, to replace antiquated voting equipment by 2006.
"The rush to buy equipment this year or next year just doesn't make sense to us anymore," said Cory Fong, North Dakota's deputy secretary of state.
Maryland officials, who signed a $55.6 million agreement with Diebold for 11,000 touch-screen voting machines just days before the Hopkins report came out, have asked an international computer security firm to review the system's security. If they don't like what they find, officials have said, the sale will be off.
The report has brought square into the mainstream an obscure but increasingly nasty debate between about 900 computer scientists, who warn that these machines are untrustworthy, and state and local election officials and machine manufacturers, who insist that they are reliable.
"The computer scientists are saying, 'The machinery you vote on is inaccurate and could be threatened; therefore, don't go. Your vote doesn't mean anything,' " said Penelope Bonsall, director of the Office of Election Administration at the Federal Election Commission. "That negative perception takes years to turn around."
Still, even some advocates of the new system are thinking twice. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which pushed for electronic machines to help visually impaired and disabled voters, says the Hopkins report has given them pause. They're calling on President Bush and members of Congress to convene a forum of experts to hash it out. "We have become concerned about these questions of ballot security," said Deputy Director Nancy Zirkin.
Her group and others supported passage of the $3.9 billion Help America Vote Act in November. Of the $1.5 billion appropriated so far to replace old machines, rewrite outdated equipment standards, encourage research to improve technology, train poll workers and update registration lists, about half has been released. And that has all gone toward buying electronic machines, which cost as much as $4,000 a piece.
"These vendors are everywhere," said David Blount, spokesman for Mississippi Secretary of State Eric Clark. "They're besieging everyone."
The remaining money is to be released once an Election Assistance Commission is appointed. By law, the board was to have begun work in February. But the names of the four commissioners, two from each major party, have yet to go to the Senate for confirmation.
The stakes are high. The 2000 Florida presidential election showed the shortcomings of the current system.
A subsequent Cal Tech/MIT report found that of more than 100 million votes cast nationwide, as many as 6 million weren't counted because of registration errors or problems with punch-card and lever machines. One study found that of 800 lever machines tested,
That is far easier said than done. See, for instance, Bruce Schneier's explanation of why secure electronic voting is a hard problem.
The Johns Hopkins study isn't the worst of it. There is apparently a second report by some people who took a more detailed look at how the software stores data. It turns out that the format is MS Access, security is based on obscurity and that audit log entries aren't numbered.
http://www.equalccw.com/voteprar.html has links that go into more detail on this subject.
Cheers,
Coward 132-213