NYT Says Paperless Voting A Serious Problem

joshdick writes "In an editorial today, the NYTimes comes out strongly in favor of a paper trail for all elections, supporting a recent lobbying effort by Common Cause and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to pass H.R. 550. 'Electronic voting has been rolled out nationwide without necessary safeguards. The machines' computers can be programmed to steal votes from one candidate and give them to another. There are also many ways hackers can break in to tamper with the count. Polls show that many Americans do not trust electronic voting in its current form; such doubts are a serious problem in a democracy.'"

Comments

the paper trail......

[professorhojo]

What I find interesting is that Diebold makes probably MOST of the ATMs that people use on a regular basis, so they actually do know how to make secure and reliable machines on secure networks (at least secure and reliable enough for banks) with the most intense paper trail systems known to man and beast.

The question, then, why did they suddenly begin making machines that had absolutely NO paper trail? This makes no sense at all to me. It would have been NO problem for them to include such a facility in their voting machines. And in fact it may well have cost them more to take it out.

So - were they given specifications to remove the usual papertrail devices? If so, from whom were those instructions issued? Maybe someone can help me out with a tinfoil hat theory involving some vast ___-wing conspiracy?

Oh - and I believe Bev Harris is the official 'go to' girl on this topic: http://blackboxvoting.org/

Re:the paper trail......

[lostwanderer147]

I'd love to be able to pass all of this off as just a bunch of FUD, because that's what it seems like on the surface. The problem is that if you go deeper, something is actually there. /. search is down, so I can't find the articles quickly, but in the wake of the last election, there were numerous stories about problems without a lack of paper trail, including one man who claimed to have been commissioned to, and did, build a prototype of a machine that would say on the screen that a vote for one candidate had been registered, but then tally a vote for a different one. IARC, the software behind it would calculate what percentage of votes it would change based on real-time voting data. The problem with a paper trail from an electronic machine is that the same thing could happen, and the machine would print out a reciept verifying the message on the screen, but still mark the vote the other way.

However you look at it, and however many problems there are with machines, having no paper trail makes these problems infinitely worse. So the question is, FUD or not?

What the U.S. can learn from India

[guyfromindia]

Reproduced from http://slate.msn.com/id/2107388 ------------ Remember the Cold War tale of Soviet and American scientists racing to solve the problem of writing in zero gravity? NASA spent a decade and millions of dollars developing the high-tech Astronaut Pen. The Soviets solved the problem another way: They used a pencil. The story turns out to be (mostly) urban legend, but the lesson holds true. Sometimes less is more. That seems to be the case as the world's largest democracy, India, and the world's most powerful, the United States, scramble to solve another technological puzzle: How to count votes accurately and transparently. While we in the United States agonize over touch screens and paper trails, India managed to quietly hold an all-electronic vote. In May, 380 million Indians cast their votes on more than 1 million machines. It was the world's largest experiment in electronic voting to date and, while far from perfect, is widely considered a success. How can an impoverished nation like India, where cows roam the streets of the capital and most people's idea of high-tech is a flush toilet, succeed where we have not? Continue Article For decades, Indians cast their votes by marking a paper ballot with a rubber stamp.* It took days to count the votes and months to sort out the allegations of fraud. Fifteen years ago the Indian government commissioned two companies to design a simple electronic voting machine--one that was inexpensive, easy to use (even for the illiterate), and tamper-resistant. The result is a machine that looks like a cross between a computer keyboard and a Casio music synthesizer. (See a picture of one here.) In fact, it's not much of a computer at all, more like a souped-up adding machine. A column of buttons runs down one side. Next to each button is the name and symbol of a candidate or party. These are written on slips of paper that can be rearranged. That means unscrupulous politicians couldn't rig the machines at the factory, since they wouldn't know which button would be assigned to which candidate. Also, the software is embedded--or hard-wired--onto a microprocessor that cannot be reprogrammed. If someone tries to pry open the machine, it automatically shuts down. After much testing, India adopted the machines for nationwide use this year. Voters show a paper ID card and then cast their ballot by pushing one of the buttons. A light glows red and a beep is emitted, indicating that a vote has been registered. Should trouble arise (and in India it often does), an election official can push an override button that shuts down the system. Indian elections are prone to "booth capturing." That's when thugs take over an entire polling station, tying up election officials while they stuff the ballot boxes with vote after vote for their favorite candidate. The electronic machines don't solve this problem entirely, but they help slow down the bandits. The machines are programmed to record only one vote every five seconds. Unlike the machines used in the United States, the Indian machines are not networked. Each one has to be physically carried to a central counting center. This takes more time, of course, but reduces the opportunities for mischief. Someone who wanted to throw the election would have to fiddle with thousands of machines, one at a time. Tampering with each machine is what some computer scientists call "retail fraud." "Wholesale fraud" is when someone rigs the software from the outset or meddles with hundreds of machines at a central tabulation center. Both types of fraud are troublesome, of course, but to different degrees. The Indian machines are vulnerable to retail fraud but, because of the basic design, are much less subject to wholesale fraud. American machines, by contrast, may be vulnerable to wholesale fraud. Our machines are far more complicated and expensive--$3,000 versus $200 for an Indian machine. The U.S. voting machines are loaded with Windows operating systems, encryption, touch screens, backup servers, voice-gui

And the optical scan machines aren't much better

[grimwell]

Our friends at BlackBoxVoting.org have uncovered some serious flaws with Diebold's optical scan machines, too.

"This is really the most important thing," Harris said. "Yes we can hack the poll tapes [and the central tabulator]. But what we've learned is there is a 'built-in' [on the individual machines] that provides the mechanism to hack any election on the poll tapes in the Diebold Optical Scan System."

"It is something that should be looked at in a congressional Investigation," Harris said.

"It's probably not an accident," Harris said, "because you can look back through the source code to see that [Diebold] went through some programming contortions to keep this thing there. It had to have been expensive for them, frankly."

"When we saw the way they designed it [the 'built-in']," Harris explained, "Harri [Hursti, computer expert] said, 'We have the Holy Grail.' The elections people are very concerned."

Hursti is said to have confirmed that the built-in hacking program 'lived' in the memory card of the "ballot box" on individual election machines, according to Harris. "What this means is that the program operates on the votes. You can change what's on there; it's just a disk," Harris said.

"So when the optical scan machine asks it to count the votes, instead of using its own program to count the vote, it asks the ballot box how it should count, and that is what's so bizarre," Harris explained.

Full article is available at: Online Journal.org

Photos of election rigging

[Dr_Ish]

During the whole election process in November I was able to study the tabulating machine software. What I found scared the hell out of me. I have put up an account, along with photos of a real election databased being rigged. It is available at http://www.ucs.ull.edu/~isb9112/election/ I for one was not surprised that the exit polls didn't match the recorded values. Any steps which can be taken to reduce the possibility of such cheating should be applauded.