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Observer Pans Touchscreen Voting Test
riversidevoter continues: "WinEDS, the program that is used to count votes, was only tested in a pre-election mode. The software was not tested in the configuration that it would be in on election day.
In addition to that, people signed a form that said that they had verified the results of the test before the test had finished running. Mischelle Townsend, the Riverside County Registrar of Voters, told Salon that the form that people signed was just an attendance form. But the form clearly states 'We the undersigned declare that we observed the process of
logic and accuracy testing of voting equipment performed by the Riverside County
Registrar of Voters, as required by law and that all tests performed resulted in accurate
voting of all units tested, including both touchscreen and absentee systems.'
You can see a copy of the Salon article here. You can see a copy of the form that people signed here.
I also believe that the observation group that witnessed the test was given a misleading description of Sequoia's system. For example, the fact that the votes are transferred from the DRE to a SQL Server database to be counted was never fully disclosed to all the members of the group.
Also, the sheer number of times that the phrase 'proprietary operating system' was used, among other things, helped to create the impression that Sequoia's system is not as reliant on Microsoft Windows as it really is.
I have created a website about this issue; please take a look at it.
On the website you can find my report on what happened that day (which outlines several problems I haven't mentioned in this posting) as well as some supporting documents. There is a letter and a note from Mischelle Townsend in which she mentions mailing the results to people or having the test results be picked up 'afterwards'...."
If they don't do it right on the first try, e-voting won't ever take off.
People are so crippled by the more expensive == better heuristic they don't notice when the rug is being pulled out from under them. Electronic voting should be unconstitutional.
This electronic voting is the most serious threat to America that we have seen in our lifetimes. Most here realize that no computer voting system can be secure without serious efforts that are not even being hinted at here. Compromising the secrecy of the vote offers many ways to secure these sysetms. A more reasonable compromise would be a voter-verified paper ballot that is re-inserted into the machine.
Since the most basic steps to provide security are not provided here, it is clear that the intention is to make a system that has completely compromised the validity of US elections. For some reason the mainstream media has not taken note of how serious an issue this is. The people involved in the current electronic voting plans can not be trusted AT ALL. They either want to subvert the voting process themselves, or want to create a system that is easy to subvert at a vastly lower cost than current systems.
What can be done to raise awareness of this issue? How can people be convinved that we need elections that are not trivial to subvert? Is the American public so apathetic as to make this an impossible task? Are we completely doomed?
Seriously, what OS isn't known to hackers/crackers? Fact is, the more obscure the OS the more interesting it becomes to crack.
The old question/answer "Why did you do it? Because it was there." tells the story of what will happen regardless of the OS chosen.
I'll admit that the script kidz may be able to hack-the-vote with a MS SQL server backend but I would hope that the network used (or whatever format of data transfer) would be a little more robust that a windows box in a DMZ.
But I'm sure that with a few days of coding it could be released from the bonds of M$... it is just SQL, right?
Voting technology doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
Sure, it may take a few hours to count all the votes, but they're verifiably countable and recountable, and seem good enough for most of the other countries in the world. Why does there have to be an electronic solution to this non-problem?
The accuracy problem cannot be fixed by voter receipts, since most voters will not know how to verify them. It can only be fixed by ensuring that the votes can be re-counted using some mechanism other than the computer that first recorded them.
Use the computer to help the voter prepare the ballot, print it out, and then have the voter hand carry it to the ballot box.
The computer can keep a running tally, but at the end of the day if the tally does not match a hand count of the box contents, then the ballot box is the only correct representation of the will of the voters.
It is easy to teach the average monkey to keep an eye on the ballot box for tampering, and to hand count the contents. Teaching the average monkey correct computer security skills is impossible, so that source of problems must be factored out.
This is what I love about these electronic voting discussions - people always come up with these solutions, and then ignore the fundamental principle of designing voting machines: it must not be possible, under any circumstances, for an outsider to verify your vote independently. Now, that sentence is worded poorly, so I'll give an example of the problem with this proposed system:
1. CREEP announces that they'll give $200 to anyone who votes for person X
2. Joe Public says "OK, I'm in"
3. Joe Public votes for X and remembers his PIN number
4. Joe Public goes to the local CREEP office and tells them their PIN, their VRN, and who they voted for
5. CREEP, using the freely-available hash function, creates their hash using the supplied information
6. CREEP then checks the list and sees if the vote was recorded
7. If yes, $200
Now replace "CREEP" above with "The Mafia" and "$200" with "the life of your family." Now you see the problem.
My proposed solution has always been the following:
-Vote on a computer (with a well-designed interface), which records votes and prints out a receipt with the name of the candidate and a simplified 2D barcode on it.
-Have a poster on the wall inside the boot saying "if you voted for X, your barcode should look like this"
-Deposit the recipt in the ballot box on the way out, as usual.
This allows us three counts: the machine, the barcodes, and the names. Any political party can request a count based on the barcodes, and if it's close they can get one based on the names on the ballots. As far as I can tell, this system is - at worst - no more prone to fraud than the current paper-based one. And you can't buy votes, since no personally-identifiable information is stored on the receipts (which voters can't keep anyways).
There's probably a logic gap in my solution: any suggestions?
Cue The Sun...
Greetings,
Recently, there has been a rise in the number of stories in the press surrounding the topic of electronic voting. I live in Oregon where we have chosen to vote by mail. At first, I wondered exactly why my State chose this route because electronic voting seemed to be attractive for a number of reasons.
After reading the various news stories and web postings present on various Internet web sites and forums, I have come to the realization electronic voting in its current incarnation is a highly suspect process.
The majority of voting machine manufacturers today wrap the inner workings of their machines inside contracts and licenses designed to cloak their products in secrecy. These cloaks when combined with the current state of intellectual property law make it difficult for the American people to understand and discuss the nature of the machines and their potential effect on the democratic process.
The American people need to engage this issue with all the facts at hand. The spirit of the law is not in line with the letter of the law in this case. The action of your students is commedable and worthy of your support.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." --Stalin
The right to vote is one of the founding principles behind our great nation. Changes to this process will have nationwide consequences on our society that we might not understand, but for the actions of a few people concerned about preserving the trust inherent to the core of the democratic process. These changes will affect each and every one of us and should not be made lightly or without due consideration of all the facts involved.
I urge you to consider the nature and purpose of the student actions along with the potential issues at hand before rendering your decision.
Respectfully,
( name )
Blogging because I can...