Hardware Hacking a Voting Machine in 4 Minutes

goombah99 writes "Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org has acquired an actual Diebold Acu-vote ballot scanner. Rummaging through King County's trash, she managed to get her hands on some of their tags and seals. She has since demonstrated a successful penetration of the seals without breaking them ... all in under 4 minutes with no training or technical skills required. There's a nice how-to with photos over at Verified Voting New Mexico." More from goombah99 below. "The demo is particularly relevant in light of the recent experience in Ohio in which there were large discrepancies between the electronic record and the paper trail, and also since many counties still permit the machines to be taken home by individuals before voting day (as a means of distributing them to precincts). These 'sleepover' machines were involved in the contentious narrow-margin San Diego Election, and are in continued practice in many states. Moreover, it's common practice for counties to contract out deliveries to third parties, such as in New Mexico where in one election, unlicensed delivery drivers took the machines on an unauthorized field trip and only got caught when they crashed the delivery truck after a stop at Hooters. The good news here is that the penetrated Diebold system in the photo essay is an optical scan system. It's not a touchscreen electronic voting system, so there is a paper trail. What hack really shows is that without mandatory random spot checks on the paper ballots, these may be as potentially vulnerable as the touchscreen direct recording electronic voting systems. It's perhaps worth noting that the open source voting system being developed by the Open Voting Consortium features a 100% reconciliation of every single paper ballot with an independent electronic record."

Comments

What about hacking paper ballots?

[CPE1704TKS]

I hate Diebold and electronic voting as much as anyone else, but has there been any attempts to figure out exactly how easy it is to rig fake paper votes? There's a lot of effort put into showing the weaknesses of electronic voting, but what are the weaknesses of paper voting and how do they compare against e-voting?

Re:What about hacking paper ballots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's how it goes (I've experienced it firsthand):

The various parties have a representative sit in each room and oversee that proper pratices are taken by all the officials and voters, and that no tampering takes place. At all times they are privy to the process, EXCEPT WHILE BALLOTS ARE MARKED (obviously). When I was one of these people I even had to follow the box around when the election officers helped people in wheelchairs by bringing the box outside (the building was not wheelchair accessible).

Proper practices are this:

Prior to the booth being opened the total number of ballots are accounted for, and their serial numbers recorded. The cardboard ballot box is built (from the provided cutout) and taped with security tape.

Each person has a voter card or is eligible to vote. They are provided one ballot and their name is stroked from the list. They mark their ballot and fold it in private. They present the folded ballot to the elections officer. The officer then removes the "receipt" portion, which only has a serial number on it, stores it aside, and then they hand the ballot to the voter. The voter places the ballot into the ballot box. Repeat as necessary.

At the end of the election, the ballot box is opened. The ballots are counted in front of the party representatives, and any ballots anyone isn't happy with are contested. Contested ballots are recorded as contested. Damaged/misused ballots are accounted for. Serial strips are checked against the number of voters and the amount of votes in the box to ensure there are none missing / too many. All information is recorded. The box is resealed with new (different) security tape, this time also sealing the section one drops the ballots into, all documents are sealed, EVERYONE involved (including the representatives) signs all the envelopes and the tally sheet. Once everyone is happy (if there is much to contest, this may take HOURS) the ballot box is driven to the head office for the city and held for a period (I believe this period is YEARS).

Should there be enough contested votes that it would throw the election, there are recounts, recounts, and more recounts.

The nice part of this process is it provides third party verification at all times. Since all parties are assumed they may have their own interests in throwing the election, by allowing all parties on the ballot to sit there and watch EVERYTHING, no one party has the opportunity to throw the election. They only have the opportunity to delay it and whine a whole bunch.

It takes a bit more work, but by golly, find me a "crack" for that system and I'd be happy to see it work.

Oh, and yes, if someone contests all the ballots, recounts can be held indefinitely until someone gives. Did I mention during this entire time nobody is allowed to leave the election room, even if it is for the facilities or for food/water? And, of course, nobody else is allowed in. Permission is usually given if all the parties co-operate, but serious filibusters are nigh impossible.

Ok

[Billosaur]

So it's easy to compromise the security of a Diebold voting machine -- news? This has been going on for a while in one form or another ever since Diebold got into the business. I'd have been more shocked if they would have found that you couldn't force it without breaking the seal.

If states/counties are smart, they'll avoid Diebold like the plague and stick to the old voting systems until a virtually fool-proof system can be designed and built. In the meantime, this won't have much effect on voting, since fewer and fewer people vote all the time.

BTW, that website with the detail is a trociously put together.

A Negative Negative

[w33t]

Here's a ridiculous idea.

Have the voters fill out a scantron-type ballot. And then have the voter/user feed that ballot through two different voting machines made by two different manufacturers.

This way there would be a paper record and two, seperate databases to compare to each other.

This would double the effort (or perhaps square it at best) for hacking and would allow manual recounts from random sample districts to test the accuracy of the two machines.

Re:My Perception Has Changed Again

[Anonymous Coward]

If again, you are willing to make voting a matter of public record.

My boss is a hardcore Republican. I am probably a moderate Democrat. I avoid political issues with him even though he repeatedly brings them up and complains about "typical Democrats."

He's not a nice guy and I could easily see him overlooking a raise if he knew I voted Democrat in the last two presidential elections. He could, of course, claim it was something else even if it wasn't. Do you want me to suffer for my political views? Do you want your family, friends & coworkers to know who you vote for? Some of the people I spend my life with have different opinions than I do. This is fine but I don't want the situation exacerbated.

Re:There is only one problem with electronic votin

[thePig]

Not always.
In India, the introduction of EVMs reduced the election expences by a magnitude of 10.
Also, since there is a huge potential number of votes (upto 500 Million), it can reduce the time taken for the counting by a huge amount.
Another point to be taken to consideration is that there was a lot of invalid votes (when people unknowingly pressed the marker between two candidates in the ballot) esp in places where illetracy is abound. In some places, the invalid votes was more than the difference of votes beween the winning and second candidates. The EVMs meant that invalid votes are no longer an issue.
Also, there was an issue wherein a group of people will barge in a polling booth, and stuff some hundreds or thousands of ballots to the ballot box and run out. This invariably caused either
(a) wrong counts or
(b) re-voting in that booth.
Now this is no longer an issue since there is a time limit between votes and if too many votes come in, it goes in to lock mode(i dont know whether the second option is used now, but the first one is still there - time limit is around 20 seconds or so).

So I guess, it is needed, in many enviornments.

Re:My Perception Has Changed Again

[SQLGuru]

I agree that voting records should not be public. I had the "honor" of my first gubanatorial vote being in Louisiana. My choices were Edwin Edwards (convicted crook) and David Duke (grand-poo-bah of the KKK). None of the above was not on the ballot. I'm sure a lot of people don't want anyone to know who they voted for in that election.

(BTW, if you aren't up on your Louisiana political history, the crook won.)

Layne

Re:My Perception Has Changed Again

[aplusjimages]

My brother-in-law was working for this insurance company during the 2004 election and he sported a John Kerry sticker on his personal car. Well a customer saw him walking to his car during work and confronted him about it and asked him to remove it, but he refused since he owned the car and it had nothing to do with the company he worked for.

The next day at work they held a company meeting and asked all employees to remove any political stickers from his car. He thought it was total crap until he saw that a majority of the employees were Bush supporters.

I know the feeling of having to hide your political beliefs. I live in Bush Country and everywhere you go its anti-liberal this and stupid dems that.

The terrorist don't have to work too hard to take away are freedoms because we will do it to ourselves just fine.

The vote is already subverted

[myowntrueself]

You can make the process of voting, the counting of the vote, secure, you can introduce all the technical and physical security you want.

But the vote is *already* subverted by a social engineering attack which is practically unstoppable; media coverage of politics.

This subverts democracy at the earliest stage; right where the voter forms the desire to vote one way or another.

If you think this is bullshit consider advertising.

Billions of dollars, shekels, yen and pounds are spent on the advertising of products. Does it work? Well I think that it would be foolish to assume that its money wasted.

If advertising works for things like consumer products, foodstuffs, whiteware etc, shaping the way that people spend their money, why wouldn't it work for shaping the way that people spend their vote?

A vote is just an item of currency that everyone has just one of and gets to spend it every so many years. Shaping voting patterns is exactly the same as shaping spending patterns.

Problem is, without a crack-down on media presentation of politics its impossible to stop this kind of subversion. And if that were to happen, what would be the point in having a democracy in the first place?

I don't think that democracy can exist in the modern world. A better term for what we *call* 'democracy' would be 'mediacracy'.

Re:My Perception Has Changed Again

[BobTheLawyer]

Definitely agree, but I'm not sure it is more error prone. With a sufficient number of eyes checking each ballot, and representatives of the candidates scrutinising the checking, it's actually quite difficult to make a mistake. I've attended several counts in the UK with 40,000 or so ballots being counted: when there's been a recount, the margin of error has been very small or even zero.