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Avi Rubin and More on Electronic Voting
jgo writes "Johns Hopkins Computer Science professor Avi Rubin, posted his experience as an election judge on his website. It's an interesting read and exposes some potential security problems with electronic voting. At one point he held in his hand the five memory cards containing all of his precinct's votes." Rubin had posted his experience in the primary election earlier.
"At one point he held in his hand the five memory cards containing all of his precinct's votes"
whats keeping him from replacing one/all of them with doctored records. He complains that the voting machines could be tampered with, but there needs to be more safeguards than just the code.
How hard is it to add a little printer? it would be much more conspicuous replacing a four-foot stack of receipts with ones from the back of your van.
Human mistakes could affect results in voting machines.
The voting machines should be supervised by robots...with shotguns
From Professor Rubin's account: "If we continue to use the kind of insecure DREs that were used in this election, it is only a matter of time before somebody exploits them. And the worst part is that we may never know it." [emphasis added]
It seems that no one really wants to come forward and raise this as a serious concern for this election, despite the fact that it's entirely plausible. Unfortunately, it seems highly unlikely that anyone who dares cast doubt on this election will be regarded as objective.
With stuff like this already being detected, and such weaknesses in the system (one man being able to "lose" or otherwise destroy or alter all votes in an entire precinct), non-open source electronic voting is a dangerous situation.
We're on the verge (or way past it) of the average citizen losing all power and control within their country, and electronic voting is just another step.
The only hope is for citizens and groups to adamantly insist on open source, safety procedures, regular audits, and paper trails. Unfortunatley, I see few if any of those things happening anytime soon.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio.
Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna.
Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
How's this for a way of safely conducting electronic voting...
Give everyone a GUID, a complete random key of sufficient length that you can't simply guess and get a valid GUID. Mail it to them.
When a person votes, their vote is stored against their GUID, in a publically accessable database. Anyone can check that their vote has been correctly counted by looking up their GUID in the table.
Voting would effectively be pseudonymous instead of anonymous. (With a new pseudonym for every election).
When all of the votes are on one machine, one person can contol the votes. We need checks and balances.
With a manual system, it takes hundreds of people to count the vote. Sure, it takes more time, buit I can wait. Sure there may be a few people with nefarious intentions, but those few people might be able to throw a precinct, not a whole state (or country!) Usually when hand counting, two or three people count anyways, so there's even more checks and balances built into the system. Our country is built on checks an balances. We need that in the voting system as well.
I truly belive voting problems are the number one issue facing our country. If can't trust the vote, then we don't have a democracy. If one election can be stolen, the next one will be stolen as well. Very slippery slope.
Please watch this free 30-minute film about black box voting machines.
We have all been scared about Diebold and other black box voting machines, and for good reason. Apparently one of the central machines from Election Systems & Software Inc. tallied 115 votes for Bush in a certain county, while another machine tallied 365 votes for that same county. Which one was right? There is no way to tell, because "it is too hard" to add a printer to a counting machine. It is not like they have been doing that for 30 years. But who needs to do a recount when the machines are infallible, right?
Most infuriating of all is that Republican Senator Hagel, the former Senate Ethics Director, resigned after admitting that he owned Election Systems & Software! That's right, the same voting machine maker that 60% of ALL VOTES in the U.S. are counted on, the same one that provably miscounted votes in Ohio and other states, and the same one that refuses to print receipts to recount these votes. No wonder legislation trying to require printers on voting machines is taking so long to get through congress when congressmen can vote themselves into office without a paper trail.
Probably old news by now, but what the hell, editors can dupe stuff, why shouldn't i?!
/ 10083861.htm C T/MGArticle/NCT_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=10317 78939157&path= g litch_1.html a per/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html
(found on dailyrotten.com)
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local
http://www.wnct.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WN
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/02/HNevote
http://www.nbc4i.com/politics/3894867/detail.html
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/ep
We walk into a grocery store and usually buy stuff instead of stuffing it in our pockets and running. We know it's wrong to leave without paying.
Why do votes need uber security check technology? Whatever happened to scrutiny by peers?
IMO, paper ballots are best because it is just tougher to destroy them. But, we should get receipts showing how we voted for our own records.
But, trying to turn the entire election process into zero possibility of error or fraud undermines the election itself and goes against the ideals of our society. People in general are honest - and those that aren't get caught eventually by honest people.
Suggesting that 'one person' should not be able to hold an entire precincts' votes just doesn't make much sense. People are often responsible for others. I suppose twenty people should all carry a piece of the nuclear football too..
--- We need more Ron Paul!
There is a question, of course, about how long you might be locked up for doing so.
The scary part isn`t the stuff that you can trace back (i.e he exchange some of the memory cards for some containing results in favor of Candidate A or B), but stuff you can`t nor detect, nor trace back.
Remember, NO LOGS of the voting process are kept on these machines. Think of "Irregularities" in the code that add a vote for Candidate A when a certain vote pattern is met. Or as Mr Rubins said, physical tampering allowing you to "one could change a few bytes in the ballot definition file and votes for the two major Presidential candidates would be swapped. In that case, none of the procedures we had in place could detect that votes were tallied for the wrong candidates."
Great. Maybe this time no one abused the system. But think long-term; in 50 years, when e-voting will be predominant and everyone will be confident in it...
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
that Open Source is not going to be able to address.
The reality is that electronic records of the vote require the humans trust the machine. Open Source or closed, the binaries on the machine can not be directly examined, rendering the nature of the code used a moot point.
Voting by machine is voting by proxy. We must trust the proxy and cannot observe its operation. Subtle manupulations of the vote will go unnoticed, unless we keep paper records and perform mandatory audits.
This means the only electronic solution is one that records the vote on a ballot that both humans and machines can read. Those ballots can be machine counted and audited as we have always done.
What's the point really? Why not just use paper ballots and make them easy to use and read by both machines and humans and spend the money reforming the process to make it fast, taking humans into account.
Remember, there are plenty of old folks willing to do their civic duty. We can get fast and trustworthy results with a far smaller investment than we have made on electronic solutions to date.
This is not a hard conclusion to come to. The fact that it is ignored means those in power WANT IT TO BE THAT WAY.
It's wrong and we need to demand change continiously until we get it; otherwise, we lose our democracy.
Blogging because I can...
I'm as much of a geek as anyone here, but there are some problems that cannot be solved by technology. I don't care if the voting machine is open source, voter verified, paper backup... whatever, when the votes are counted on a machine, there is more chance for abuse. Single point of failure,
I am a voting Luddite. Vote on paper, count on paper. Distribute the load.
The idea is that the voter can verify that the printout matches their wishes. The printout is the master copy, not the internal count. The latter is just more convenient -- for the voter and for the tallier.
By adding a printer, you're conceding that the electronic voting machine may not innately be able to provide complete confidence in the result.
No piece of non-trivial software can ever be considered bug free, and therefore, no software ever deserves complete confidence. For that matter, hand-counting shouldn't have your complete confidence either. People make mistakes; shit happens. That's the whole reason for QC.
By conceding that the electronic voting machine's results cannot be trusted, you're saying that you have no basis upon which to reject a request for a recount of the paper receipts. In other words, you're back to hand-counting paper votes each time.
You should have no basis upon which to reject a recount. The paper ballots are the masters. If there is a serious challenge, then they should be recounted. But in any case: you should verify a selected sample of the machines' votes in every polling station to make sure that they are giving reasonable numbers. This is just the application of industry-standard quality control procedures to voting machines. It boggles my mind that electronic voting was ever considered without them.
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
H.R.2239 and S.1980, discussed further here, will amend the Help America Vote Act (an act designed to ensure consistent voting systems that meet certain standards be available to ALL voters in ALL jurisdictions), such that there is "a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy" attached with each and every ballot cast by every voter.
.[1] Don't believe people who make it seem like companies like Diebold are resisting. They aren't. They'll build - and sell - whatever municipalities will buy.
Please, simply support this legislation.
Additionally, the electronic voting manufacturers, such as Diebold, already have the ability to add permanent, individual voter-verified paper audit trails to their products
The roadblock, as it turns out, is often local election boards. First, the new paper verification systems NEED to go through the government certification process - remember, it's the e-voting watchdogs who are chastising non-certified patches/updates being put into place; the paper audit systems need to go through the same certification process. Further, many municipalities can't understand why they should be forcing paper audit trails; after all, they think, they are just getting away from paper ballots - why should they be arguing for paper ballots (and all the headaches that go along with them, ON TOP of the headaches they already have from learning to deal with e-voting), so why should they go back to them?
Folks, so many people are involved in elections at so many different levels that there is literally no way that any central entity could rig an election across an entire state. Experts dealing with e-voting don't even have this on their radar. Their concern is more errors and failures. E.g., most of Ohio is still punchcard as it is (the majority of the 35 counties moving to e-voting pushed off the transition until AFTER the election because of problems), and someone like Diebold doesn't even have access to this equipment after the fact. Yes, an unscrupulous election official or enterprising hacker might be able to breach individual machines and potentially even a county - it's possible. But the likelihood of something like that happening on any significant scale, ESPECIALLY without being caught (the articles we're talking about here actually prove that the audit processes, be they what they are, do work) is very, very low.
That said, we absolutely should be ensuring that there is a permanent, voter-verified, paper record. It is absolutely critical to our voting process, even if the software is still proprietary on these systems (though it, too, should be open for public inspection). But the permanent voter-verified paper record alone eliminates the chances for any widespread fraud with the counting process itself, and at the very least makes any fraud easily reversible and/or detectable.
Contact your representative and senators, and urge them to support the above bills. It will be a lot more productive that imagining fantasies about Diebold "handing" Bush the election. (If ANYTHING remotely like that happened, there are a shitload of professors, campaign staff, scholars, journalists, and researchers who know a LOT more than you do who would be all over this in a heartbeat. Kerry's $300 million, two-year campaign didn't just roll over for no reason. Bush won, whether anyone likes it or not, and it wasn't because electronic voting handed anyone anything. The POINT here, is that instead of inventing wild conspiracy theories, we should be ensuring that there is voter verification and a permanent paper record for all future elections, because HAVA will require a shift to electronic voting for everyone - before that happens, we should make sure that it's veri
The machine doesn't just print out a paper record internally; what voting rights groups are asking for is a voter-verifiable paper trail: the voter can inspect the paper record of their vote. This paper record goes into a ballot box, just like a normal ballot. If the result is disputed, it's possible to have a paper recount.
Of course, this is still subject to security problems -- e.g. what if an election judge discards some of the paper receipts? -- but they are problems shared by traditional paper balloting. The thing is, it's a lot harder to get a corrupt election judge in every precinct than it is to get one corrupt programmer in every voting machine company, so widespread rigging is more difficult and easier to discover.
Avi Rubin. The only thing more perfect would be if he'd given this report to an online TV station, it could be Rubin.Avi then.
I'm gonna change my name to Mpeg Smith in honour of him.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Why are we introducing the chances for errors into our most important civic institution? This is insanity! As another poster wrote there is no reason that a printout will accurately reflect how the machine handles your input, it's only showing you what was sent to the printer. We have so many other obfuscating problems as well, like magnets and code tampering and using phone lines to transmit results.
.5% in the polls. It'll be 10 people and 10 ballot boxes per precinct - tops. Wood is not expensive so don't go there.
/. so you've got more insight than most folks.
The real problem is taking the physical stylus out of the hand of the voter. I would only consider eVoting for disabled persons, and I would think the majority of them have few problems.
1) To avoid fraud, why not submit the ballot into more than one ballot box. One for each candidate on the ticket. If democrats and republicans have their own ballot box - they'll likely have the same number of votes - the incentive to cheat is removed without duopoly.
2) Allow all candidates nationwide to be on the ballot if they garner
Here's a nice page to Federal Contact Information http://www.eff.org/congress/ - tell them what you think - you're on
Stuff that matters.
Paper Ballot
Ink pen
Ballot Box.
Cheap, reliable, fair, honest.
Let's assume the worst-case scenario (from an effort point of view, not from an accuracy point ov view) and say that the votes are challenged every time and the paper ballots end up having the final say. How has the electronic counting helped?
Given that computers are less prone to make careless errors (OK, they don't make careless errors), even if they might be more prone to systematic errors, they give you a number to compare against. Let's say that the computer told you it had printed out 2,523 votes for Bush and 2,427 votes for Kerry. When the vote-counters counted it, however, they counted 2,525 votes for Bush and 2,425 votes for Kerry. The first thing that one should assume is that the vote-counters miscounted, and should recount. If a second recount (by different people) got the same result as the first human count, then we have a problem. The error could be: (1) the computer mis-counted, or (2) the computer mis-printed. Unfortunately, either one is possible. However, since the voters would be encouraged to look at their ballots prior to them entering the box, it would seem more likely that the computer mis-counted, in which case the human count should trump the computer count.
However, notice that the computer count still helps. It gives us a number to compare against. If the human count on the first count matched the computer count, there is little reason to suspect that both counts are wrong. (Although, theoretically, the computer could still have mis-printed and mis-counted in a matching way. This would be an unlikely accidental error, and a very risky deliberate hack since the voters can verify their votes before they go in the box.
Of course, this only works if the printed version can be viewed by the voter prior to it going in the box.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
It seems like the major benefit of the electronic voting machines is that they provide a good user interface. Much better than your standard ballot. I think you could just have an interface that prints out a ballot. Then the voter could validate the ballot if they wanted to. Then have another machine do the counting.
You are arguing that the existance of a paper record would result in all elections being recounted. This is false. The point of an electronic system with paper ballots is to provide very quick results in most cases while still allowing for recounts and audits in special cases. At least one state requires electronic machines with paper ballots, and it works well, so your concern is misplaced. There are rules for recounts and audits, they don't just happen.
But without paper ballots, a significant fraction of the population will lose confidence in election results. (Go over to the dailykos blog if you don't believe me.)
With paper ballots, false concerns about elections can be rejected as false and this increases confidence in our democracy. What is do bad about that?
Shotguns are prone to failure. Then people will demand a re-shoot. The only verifiable solution is to equip the robots with laser beams. Frickin' laser beams, of course. On their heads.
When I was in Germany I asked the people I was staying with how they could tell us Americans and Canadians apart.
"Oh, that's easy! If I find you in the morning passed out in my garden, you must be Canadian."
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
..is obvious. The tally is not human readable. It has to be filtered through the computers programming. Programming can make any output reflect any input. The amount of money and power that is represented by controlling the US government is simpy staggering. It is the largest potential jackpot a criminally bent individual or group can approach. The temptation is overwhelming,and now *they* have the complete technical ability to achieve that goal and to get away with it, the perfect crime.
A traditional paper ballot in a locked box is human readable/countable by anyone who can count at the end of the day. It requires very little in the form of specialised skills or hardware. It is very inexpensive. Challenges can be mounted and results verified quickly and transparently. Once you get into machine reading, whether tabulated bubbles or punched out cards or pure digitial like with the diebold machines-then you have your potential problems, and with the last few elections we can see we have new problems, and they look a lot more like "on purpose" troubles than accidental. They especially look on purpose given the revelations of what was found on diebolds website and published, and with other anecdotals showing some rather distrubing intent as to election honesty. The consortium pushing electronic closed source computer voting is a who's who of the mega-profits from tax money and governmental contracts military industrial complex. This is three serious alarm bells to anyone really thinking about this subject.
The old way had it's faults, but computerised has introduced faults above and beyond that can not be addressed without trusting what is inherently untrustworthy by it's design criteria.