Observer Pans Touchscreen Voting Test

riversidevoter writes "I recently observed the Logic and Accuracy 'test' given to the touchscreen voting machines in Riverside CA. Riverside County uses voting machines and software from Sequoia Voting Systems. The voting kiosks do not produce a voter-verified paper trail. As a computer programmer familiar with software testing, I was really disappointed at what I saw." Read on for his critical observations of the demonstration.

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'...."

Comments

Unfortunate.

[i_am_syco]

If they don't do it right on the first try, e-voting won't ever take off.

this is the most serious threat to America

[treat]

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?

A piece of paper and a big X

[KNicolson]

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?

Re:Accuracy could be easily assured...

[rhysweatherley]

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.