Evoting in the News

key45 writes "Just a few days after California rejects Diebold E-Voting machines, and Ireland bans e-voting too, the Information Technology Association of America (which represents election equipment makers and other technology companies) released a poll showing that the majority of Americans trust those machines. The war for public opinion is on!" Reader theRG writes "The U.S. Election Assistance Commission held hearings on May 5 about the pros and cons of electronic voting machines. They debated whether or not machines should have paper trails, and what standards should be set. Meanwhile, NPR reports on California's recent decertification of Diebold machines and on one Ohio county's switch from punchcards to electronic voting." And finally, our own OSDN has a report from the election commission meeting: Joe Barr writes "Thom Wysong has a report at NewsForge this morning on the first public meeting of the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Questions like whether or not a voter verifiable audit trail and open source should be mandated for e-voting solutions were the order of the day."

Comments

Ireland didn't ban e-voting

[batgimp]

Ireland didn't ban e-voting. We merely postponed it. We've already had e-voting machines used in an election two years ago (in a few consituencies on a trial basis). This summer, the Irish government tried to introduce e-voting in every county, and was met with protests. It was taken completely by surprise, and set up a commission to look into the matter and report back with a recommendation. I'm pretty sure that this commission was just set up to reassure the "Luddite" public, and tell them that everything was ok.

To everyone's surprise, the commission said that there wasn't enough time to guarantee the accuracy and security of the machines, and that their introduction should be postponed until such things could be guaranteed.

So, it hasn't been banned, just postponed.

League Women Voters Opposes Paper Trails

[Luyseyal]

The League of Women Voters opposes voter-verified paper trails. More.

-l

War for public opinion

[bobv-pillars-net]

Personally, I spent Tuesday (local election) passing out the following flyer:

Will Your Vote Be Counted?

Diebold

• Produces the "Accuvote" touch-screen voting machines used in Virginia and at least 36 other states.
• Made over 40,000 internal company files, including passwords, encryption keys, source code, and user manuals, available to internet hackers worldwide.
• For a step-by-step guide on how to modify the votes in a Diebold-controlled election, see www.equalccw.com/dieboldtestnotes.html
• Despite Diebold's promises to tighten up security after two independent investigations in July and September, a third investigation in March of yielded the following quote:

  Diebold

  "basically had no interest in putting actual security in this system," said Paul Franceus, one of the consultants. "It's not like they did it wrong. It's like they didn't bother."

• In the the recent California audit, Diebold's own lawyers admitted that their client had "probably broken the law." Frustrated investigators asked whether Diebold was lying, or only "trying to be misleading" in their answers. Here's what Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Election Systems, had to say for himself:

  We were caught. We apologize for that.

Direct Recording Electronic "DRE" Machines

Though Diebold has gotten bad press lately, (it's costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign "contributions" to stay in business), their competitors are no better. Any DRE machine would be just as vulnerable to error, tampering, and fraud. Because they do not produce a permanent record of each vote, modern computerized systems are no better than the huge mechanical lever machines of 1890. Because there is no reliable way to even detect errors, the results of any election using these machines is open to question.

Voter-Verifiable Audit Receipt

For at least ten years, security experts around the country have recommended the use of a Voter-Verifiable Audit, or "VVA," to guard against these problems. If passed, Voters Confidence and Increased Accuracy Act would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper printout of each vote. This "VVA Receipt" must be made available for each voter to check before being securely deposited into a sealed container. The paper ballots would count as the actual votes, taking precedence over any electronic tallies in case of doubt.

Urge your Senator and Representative to support the Voters Confidence Act, also known as H.R.2239 (in the House), and S.1980 (in the Senate.)

How to Buy an Election

"How do I know if the machine actually recorded my vote?" The fact is, you don't.
Representative Rush Holt (NJ)

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.

There are literally hundreds of ways to tamper with the vote when computers are doing the counting. Here are just some of the possibilities: Hire a programmer to create a "back door" program in the voting software which can alter the vote count on demand. In Fairfax County, Virginia, during the 2003 elections, voters in three precincts complained that the machines changed their votes. Testing showed that a machine seemed to subtract a vote in about "one of a hundred tries." At least two close races may have hinged on that one percent "error." Replace the vote-counting software through last-minute technical "service upgrades." Most recently in California, thousands of election computers were "upgraded" just before the election, replacing the certified software with newer, un-certified versions. Monopolize some critic

Re:War for public opinion

[OWJones]

[Shameless_Plug]
I'm a member of the National Committee for Voting Integrity, which includes Avi Rubin, Rebecca Mercuri, Peter Neumann, Bruce Schneier, Marc Rotenberg (from EPIC), Cindy Cohn (from the EFF), and other people whose names I'm sure you'll recognize (well, and then me :)). Check out our written testimony to the EAC for some talking points and arguments for a voter-verified paper ballot (VVPB).
[/Shameless_Plug]

As a nitpicky (but important) aside, make sure you avoid the word 'receipt' like the plague. A receipt is something you get at the store that you take home with you, whereas a ballot is your vote and something you leave at the polling station. We support paper ballots, but oppose receipts. From the context of your text, I'm sure you meant 'ballot', but there's already enough FUD flying with vendors claiming that we are naive enough to support receipts that people take home with them, opening the election process up to vote-buying and vote-coercion schemes.

What really bugs me are reporters that use the word 'receipt' when we explicitly say 'ballot, not receipt.'

Cheers.
-jdm

Re:Wouldn't you need a biometric for e-voting

[Luyseyal]

You vote at the poll on the machine. The machine records the vote locally (and later to the poll team and later to the central office). The machine prints out a scantron. You check the bubbles are right for your vote and put it in the box.

The machine vote is the main vote, the scantron is just a backup. The backup will later be used to check the machine vote. Due to printing errors, there will be statistical anomalies taken into account and some will be checked by hand.

Hackers would have to fool two separate, complementary systems: machine and optical scan.

You would NOT have the ability to verify your vote over the Internet or ex post facto as this breaks secret balloting.

-l

Follow the Money

[billstewart]

State and local election officials like this stuff because the Feds voted billions of dollars in FREE MONEY for them to buy the machines if they call before midnight tonight! And no, they didn't realize that they were going to be under extreme scrutiny; they were pretty much blind-sided by it, because all the election officials grabbed for the money real fast, before the computer security crowd noticed what an incompetent scam the stuff they were buying was, and much of the negative press has happened precisely because the stuff had serious problems after it was deployed. Apparently lots of politicians were surprised that computer people overwhelmingly distrust this stuff - after all, we're the folks who keep telling them that computers are cool and that they ought to buy more of them.

John82's point that elections officials don't want to be the next ridiculed Florida Elections Commission is appropriate also, but a big factor is that the Republicans in Congress and the Bush Administration wanted to be perceived as "Doing Something" to fix the big embarassment that they came into office with. (Oh, and also the Diebold folks were big Republican contributors, so they of course wanted to help out their friends.)

One big advantage of competently designed electronic voting machines is accessibility for blind people, which is a real problem with most voting systems. This lets the election officials help out blind people, and others with limited sight or hand-eye coordination (e.g. old people.)

Re:how in the world does this matter

[GPLDAN]

It happened in 2000.

Click here

What they are doing with removing votes recently.

How they are preparing to use E-voting to do it again...

And to the guy who modded it flamebait....Fuck you