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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."
Why not simply anonimize the data but leave the potential for anyone and everyone to verify the results?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
The big advantage is that electronic voting will make election fraud, much easier to hide and so, less embarrassing for the free world's leading democracy.
Karma: Bad due to google bombing - Robert Watkins woz 'ere.
I don't understand the worries about electronic voting machines; they are just so convenient. I'm building one myself that uses the "poll" section of SlashCode, so that my fellow neighbors can vote (and comment) with out leaving their webTV's.
As they say in Hudson County, NJ... "Vote early, vote often".
In an amazing upset, the winner was not even running. It appears that Linus, maker of the well known Linux operating system has won the Presidential election. Of special note is how he received four hundred billion votes...
Why are these machines connected to the outside world? Why can't all the polling locations be on a LAN?
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
If these machines really are insecure, then the John Hopkins researchers should just hack themselves into the Governor's office. Then it would be a simple matter to introduce better voting machines.
All voting software and results should be subject to scrutany by the OSS community. All fraud is shallow when subjected to so many eyeballs.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
But, it does make for a good story.
Sounds alot like every other voting system.
My experience with poll workers is that they are serious and committed folks. But they are not the most savvy with computers and that may be the biggest security challenge.
Why not just install cheapo receipt printers into the voting machines and keep a paper tally that would be easily verifiable if need be. This would be good for an audit, and a statistically proper number of voting machines could be audited to insure valid electronic reporting. Although crude, a paper record is nice in it's resistance to tampering (at least electronically). At work we've got a dot matrix printer hooked to the door's ID card reader. There ain't no hacking that without physical access.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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=
If we truly believe that open-source tends to provide better security, we should be developing open-source voting software. I'm sure it would take a while to get much notice from the government, much less "certification", but we could start a grass-roots campaign for adopting it through, say, universities in student body elections (a target screaming for being hacked) or maybe even local elections.
I'm pretty sure the parent of your post meant something similar to this method: you go vote very much the way you do now (by presenting your id and signing a sheet of paper)...then you assign your vote to a number (that is not associated with your name in any record) and you make those numbers public, so that you can check against them. I think this system is also good because you can check certain numbers (for example 10,354 voters showed up at this voting location, so there should have been exactly 10,354 vote numbers assigned)
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
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,
"The 2000 Florida presidential election showed the shortcomings of the current system."
The main shortcoming of the system is that it allowed Florida State Supreme Court justices to try and change the election rules after the election occured, and it allowed lawyers to lie in court in a wasteful attempt to overturn the election.
It works. The only thing we have to accomplish is prevent the sore losers from trying to mess things up.
I dont know why they'd implement a vote DB using Microsoft Abcess. Still, if they REALLY wanted to, they could implement this system.
1: DB exists with basic vote rules.
2: User walks up to votebox.
3: Person hired to do polls check idetity (so that they can legitly vote)- enables 1 session for user
4: The votes are tallied by unsigned long int incrementation counter for each "Politican". Be aware, the machine knows exactly what this user votes for.
5: An MD5sum is made for the whole vote session, along with printing the md5 and votes cast on 1 small piece of paper.
6: The MD5 checksum is stored in concurrent use of the data.
Some people may think there's a security hazard in step 3-5 as the poll worker can probably see what the MD5sum might be. That could be solved by saying to the user 'press any key at random. this is NOT part of the vote"
Just an idea.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0308/S00014 .htm
Computer Voting Expert Ousted From Elections Conference
Lynn Landes
freelance journalist
www.EcoTalk.org
Denver CO Aug 1 - Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, a leading expert in voting machine security, had her conference credentials revoked by the president of the International Association of Clerks, Records, Election Officials, and Treasurers (IACREOT), Marianne Rickenbach. The annual IACREOT Conference and Trade Show, which showcases election systems to elections officials, is being held at the Adam's Mark Hotel in Denver all this week.
Mercuri believes that her credentials were revoked because of her position in favor of voter-verified paper ballots for computerized election systems. "I guess in a very troubling way it makes sense that an organization like IACREOT, that supports paperless computerized voting systems, which are secret by their very design, would not want computer experts who disagree with that position at their meetings."
Dr. Mercuri said that her credentials were approved for the first three days of the conference. She attended meetings of other groups and visited the exhibitors hall. But it was only on Thursday as she sat down to attend her first meeting at the IACREOT that President Marianne Rickenbach took Mercuri out of the room and told her that her credentials were being revoked. Rickenbach said that Mercuri had not filled out the forms correctly. Mercuri protested, but was refused reinstatement.
David Chaum, the inventor of eCash and a member of Mercuri's 'voter-verified paper ballot' group, had his credentials revoked on the first day of the conference. On the second day his credentials were partially restored. Chaum was allowed to visit the exhibitors hall, but not attend the IACREOT meetings.
Rickenbach was unavailable for comment as of this report. Mercuri can be reached at the Adam's Mark Hotel through Saturday.
Let's give the voting machine contracts out to the makers of the slot machines. If anyone knows how to make an electro-mechanical device that is fraud resistant, it's those companies. Plus, just for fun, they could leave the little wheels with pictures of fruit on it. :)
Print out receipts.
That way, you vote electronically, you have your receipt, and you throw it in a box before you leave. Random audits of polling stations with those results compared to the receipts.
Just another failover idea..
Somebody (cue 200 replies) help me out here: why wouldn't you go open source for something like this? Other than some company with hands in the governer's pockets (and vice versa), I don't know a single good reason to give a private corporation control over the methods used to conduct democratic elections. Hacking and fraud by voters aside, what about fraud by programmers? Debugging tons of code is hard work - stealing an election is just a matter of a couple of "errors" in the right procedure; that 6% difference in a close race (or .2%, as in the last Presidential election) could be made to disappear, with nobody the wiser.
As for paper audits: if the perpetrators are smart, nobody would ever even suspect that we needed to audit an election...
My $.02
Web Design & Software Development
IMHO, anyone intending to fraud the elections would be aiming his ammo not at the voring machines, but rather at the counting machines. I can imagine that those are far easier to secure, but it's easier to bribe/bypass/eliminate 5 or 10 security guards at the center of the system rather than a few hundred guards at the leaves of the system... Why doesn't anyone ever question the security of the center of the system ? Especially with the most corrupt people being exactly there...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
In a stunning upset, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon of Springfield, USA has been unanimously elected President of The United States of America. In an interview this morning , President-Elect Nahasapeemapetilon stated that replacing the ATM machine in his Kwik-E-Mart was the best idea he had since deciding to serve green Squishee's.
Springfield citizen Homer Simpson was asked what he thought of the new voting system, but apparently he entered the Kwik-E-Mart to vote, and then saw the hot-dogs and forgot why he was there in the first place. "Mmmmm. 3 day old frankfurters [drool]" was his only comment.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Why do americans have this obsession about making everything more complicated. If you want a reliable solution to a problem use Occams razor. The simplest solution is usualy the best.
Voting on paper is cheap, reliable and it's very difficult to commit fraud, (a large number of people has to be involved), if you set it up right.
... we have just to develop a better overall system of government selection. Based on credentials and the ability to serve? Based on ethics?
Perhaps just dump voting for people for voting on policy. With today's tech, there is no reason we couldn't have a system of government that let's everyone have direct say in policy and lawmaking.
Basically trade a system that doen't work for one that could... for a distributed government system, where voters make policy, instead of corrupt individuals influenced only by money and power.
1) Encrypt everything and place everything on a WAN that is not connected to the outside world.
2) Generate a unique/random PIN for each voter at the moment they walk into the polling station. Lock out that name/SSN from any further votes once a vote has been cast.
3) Utilize a small in-station camera that can be matched against a vote in case of alledged fraud.
While I know that item #3 will cause some privacy concerns, all image data could would be removed once the polling station closes.
Tux
Check out the great Linux PC I'm selling!
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
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
I'm as much of a technophile as the next guy, but there are still things in this world that require the paper trail.
One has to ask, what is the problem that we are trying to solve with electronic voting? Is it cost? I don't think so. Elections only happen once a year and the results are far too important to cut costs while lowering quality.
What we want to do is increase the quality of the elections by assisting the voters in filling out the ballot correctly. With the automated UI the voting results can be checked against business rules... that is, if you're only allowed to vote for two judges then you can only check off two on the ballot, etc. It provides instant instructions and instant feedback.
But regardless, you need a paper backup to do audits on the election. And most importantly, as we learned in Florida, that ballot must be in a human readable form which can not be easily damaged through normal handling.
The best solution I've seen suggested is to have an automated UI which queries the voter for responses, but the end result is then printed on a laser printer to a ballot sheet. The ballot sheet lists the names, with markers that are filled in(or line drawn between two arrows) to clearly identify the selections.
The voter may then review their ballot to insure it is marked as they wished it to be, and if so take it to a secure optical scan machine just like we use today.
One benefit of this system is that it provides a backup mechanism in the event of failure. That is, if the machines are not working the voter can still cast their ballot with the good old fashioned pencil. The automated UI system is there only as a convenience item.
Any system which only records results in an electronic manner is subject to corruption. The results have to be on paper for auditing and verification purposes.
Cost shouldn't be an issue, this is far to important to the stability of our democracy.
Georgia Secreatary of States Position on H.R. 2239
Cathy asked that I pass on her message to you. Please do not hesitate to call if I or Cathy can be of any service.
Ann Rosenthal
Campaign Director
404-728-NNNN
Mx. Xxxxx,
Thank you for your e-mail regarding proposed H.R. 2239.
The passage of this legislation would be extremely damaging,
both to Georgia?s new electronic voting system and to those
which other states around the country are putting into
place. The legislation is based on a lack of understanding
of the operation of our machines and the software which
supports them. In fact, in discussing this legislation with
Congresswoman Denise Majette, I suggested that it should
more accurately be called the Voter Delay and Loss of
Integrity act.
After you touch the names of all candidates you wish to vote
for, the computer itself gives you a summary of your choices
and enables you to change those choices before you leave the
voting booth. That summary screen is the opportunity for
voters to verify their votes, and adding a paper receipt,
which presumably would be printed out while the voter waits,
would add delay (as printers are very susceptible to
breakdowns, paper and ink shortages, and other problems).
Additionally, after a paper receipt is printed, the voter
would have no ability to make further changes to their vote
without a very complicated adjustment to the voting machine,
which most poll workers would not be well-equipped to
accomplish. Additionally, placing a paper receipt into a
voting box or other instrument would add tremendous
potential for fraud, as pieces of paper have been known to
disappear from voting boxes in overnight and can otherwise
be very easily manipulated. Such ease of manipulation does
not exist with the new voting machines.
The second primary objection to the proposed legislation in
H.R. 2239 is that all software used in the voting machines
would be disclosed and available on the internet, which
would open up the integrity of our voting systems to every
interested hacker around the world. Once it is disclosed,
any hacker, any person interested in manipulating the
machines, would have access to all of the security built
into the software code and could then with ease manipulate a
state or county?s system if they could gain access to the
equipment. We have the source code available in a secure
escrow account, and our office can access it any time we
need to check the integrity of our systems. And each and
every unit used for voting in Georgia -- more than 22,000
individual units -- is individually submitted to logic and
accuracy testing before every election.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can answer any
additional questions on HR 2239
Cathy
The article talks about one problem that was their 5 years ago and was still there when reviewed. This was claimed to be fixed years and in fact was never fixed. Without open source voting machines, there is no way to gain the absolute confidence of the public, and a hacker somewhere is going to prove my point. You may think the newest version of an operating system is a big target, but it's nothing compared to the vote that decides who runs the worlds lone superpower. The only question is who will get the most votes in 2004, mickey mouse or daffy duck?
1) How fast does it really need to be? Most paper counting can be done by that night, or at least the early hours of the next morning. It allows people to get worked up with anticipation for a while ;)
2) I agree with your comment about getting people involved with the counting. I've thought of this myself: the more volunteers involved in the counting, the more people who are actually involved with the election. I see involvement like this as a means to help fight increasing voter apathy. In the long run, I think electronic voting will increase voter apathy, and thus decrease democracy.
The good old mechanical lever-type machines we had (:-( )in Marion County since time immemorial still look like better security design *and* better user interface design than anything else I've seen, be it paper or electronic. Definite visual and tactile feedback, Braille- and multilingual-capable, no electricity required, no system crashes, no possibility of erroneous multi-marking, and the counters locked inside a steel case -- what more is needed? (Okay the counters could be electronically readable via authenticated secure channel from a central tally office, but what *else* would you have?)
In January, 2002 the State Elections Board approved two closed source touch screen voting systems, the ES&S Votronic DRE and the GBS Accu-Touch EBS 100 DRE.
This spring I raised the system integrity issues with the Board, and persuaded them to revoke the certifications.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
This just goes to show you what you get when you let hysteria drive your decisions.
Punch card voting machines are very reliable and secure, but because of some whipped up hysteria and misinformation, we're scrapping a perfectly good system for a nightmare boondoggle.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
The article mentions $3.9 billion that was appropriated by the Help America Vote bill, and that Virginia is spending $55 million on 11,000 voting machines, which works out to $5000 per machine. That seems a bit pricey for a computer with a touch screen, doesn't it?
I assume that the Help America Vote law leaves it up to the states to procure their machines how they see fit.
How much could it possibly cost for university researchers (like the ones at John's Hopkins) to write an open source system for voting that could run on commodity hardware?
Perhaps the government should take $10 million of that $3.9 billion, fund the research, and GPL the result. Let the code be vetted in public.
Am I missing something?
I have worked as an Chief Election Officer for the past several years and have a few thoughts on our transistion to the new machines.
:)
For those who don't vote in Fairfax county, the machines we have been using in most precincts is the Shouptronic 1242, which was phased out last recently due to new voting regulations that stipulated minimum accessibility requirements (for the visually impaired) that the Shouptronic couldn't meet as well as maintenance issues for the aging machines.
I am certainly wary of the new machines we have coming down for the next election in November, which use the WinVote software and appear physically as large laptops.
The initial checking in of voters won't change the next time around. They will still have to state their name and current address, be assigned a number (for counting purposes, not associative purposes) and be issued a colored state sealed "machine enterance index card" which is relinquished to the officer supervising the machines themselves before they are allowed access to the machine.
The new machines use a phone line (modem) to remit results to the registrar and are portable enough to allow us to physically move the machine to the curb to assist physically-challenged voters (curbside voting law).
The number of conditional paper ballots we'll have to use will be lessened -- a good thing and I see that for the most part it will help in accuracy.
I see problems in a couple of areas however. Most people vote maybe once every one or two years, so their familiarity with the machines wanes over time. Completely change the machine and there will be a lot of people with a bunch of questions and uncertainty, which will initially present an appearance of confusion (and may be enough to get some lawyers on the case if they see an opportinuity). Secondly, with untested technology, it will be difficult to gauge the number of problems with the machine -- misaligned touch screens, software crashes, static discharge, space aliens, seasoned citizens, ingenious fools, etc.
In a month or two I'm going to be going back for training on the new equipment. I also believe for those citizens voting in Fairfax county, the Government Center has a sample machine available for those who want to become familiar with it.
A system for securly transmitting certified results to the county should work well, but I am really concerned with any kind of Internet voting. That's where I believe the greatest potential for fraud exists.
-Crolis
P.S. I got a heck of a lot of comments after 2000, since my first name is "Chad".