Ask a "Star" of HBO's Voting Machine Documentary

Herbert H. Thompson, PhD ("Hugh" to his friends), is one of the people featured in the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy, that Diebold tried to keep from airing. Hugh is a long-time Slashdot reader who called me to volunteer for this interview — on his own, not through anyone's PR department. Here's a YouTube excerpt from a CNN Lou Dobbs show with Hugh in it. (Find more articles by and about Hugh here. And perhaps check this brand-new MSNBC story about e-voting, too.) Hugh suggests that you give him "your wildest questions about what went on behind the scenes and how safe the e-voting systems actually are." Let's take him up on that challenge, hopefully while following Slashdot interview rules. Note to Diebold and other voting machine companies: We welcome comments and questions from you, same as we welcome them from everyone else. If you feel you are being vilified unfairly by Slashdot readers, please respond and set the record straight.

Comments

paper trail?

[ummit]

This is a really basic question and it seems I should know an answer, but it never seems to be discussed: Why are the electronic voting machine companies generally so dead-set against emitting verifiable and auditable paper records? It can't just be cost, because they could and would just pass that on to their customers.

Re:paper trail?

[Thansal]

It can't just be cost, because they could and would just pass that on to their customers.

Sort of a follow up, how do the states/districts decide what machine to go with? Is it a standard "go with the lowest bidder", is this why we see such shoddy machines going into action? Do the decision making organizations tend to have specific features they look for? Anything else you would like to share about the decision making processes that you have seen?

Thanks for doing this also!

Re:paper trail?

[jj00]

Pittsburgh (Allegheny country) had a public review of 4-5 voting systems (Unisys, Sequoia, ES&S, and Diebold) that I attended. Of all the systems I saw, ALL of them had an option to produce a paper trail. Some were inherently better at paper trails than others - such as the bubble-fill versions, but they all had some sort of option.

Most of the salesmen there seemed to steer you away from the bubble-fill devices, stating that they were cheaper up front but would cost more in the long run with paper costs. I still liked them the best. They have multiple ways of recovering from problems - built in paper trail, still work under power outages, and anyone that can play the lottery can use them.

I took some pictures if you're really interested.

Re:paper trail?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Yes, such laws do exist. (They're apparently why you can't get the raw voteing machine and punchcard ballot reader output to examine for statistical signs of vote tampering, too.)

But the point of the printed reciept is NOT for the voter to take it home. The point is for him to put it in a ballot box. Then it's no longer in his possession, so the laws to prevent vote-buying don't apply.

The printed "reciept" is actually the official ballot, and subject to recounts and audits. The voting machine becomes simply a ballot marking aid - which can opportunistically take a count as it operates. The machine's count can be used for rapid return reporting, but only becomes the official count if there are no challenges and the precinct doesn't happen to be randomly selected for auditing.

With a spit-out printed ballot added to the voting machines, the rest of the current software can remain in place. With an audit trail any fraud can be detected and corrected. (Further: With random sampling and the inevitable recount requests in close races and those where fraud is suspected, it is LIKELY to be detected.)

In the absense of the ability to untracably corrupt the count, voting macine fraud attempts become much less likely - and a path to prison rather than to political power.

Largest Inherent Flaw?

[eldavojohn]

In your opinion, what is the largest inherent flaw within electronic voting systems today? Diebold's been in the news of having many potential problems ranging from securing the physical hardware to the ability to hack the software or firmware. I'm sure you're quite prepared to pose a case against implementations but can you think of a more intuitive scheme (encryption, network layout, verification scheme) to protect against "hacking our democracy?"

Here is my question...

[Noryungi]

Let's assume for a moment the 2006 US House/Senate election goes this way: Republicans keep control of both through a series of smallish victories, Democrats gain a few seats, and the results are explained away in the mainstream media as "fluke results", "margin of error", etc...

How do you prove that foul play (hacking) has been involved?

Do you even have a plan in place to check the results?

Please note that this is a very serious question. There was a saying, a few years back, that said a novice hacker is someone known in a small circle, a confirmed hacker is someone who is known all over the Internet, and a great hacker is someone who is totally invisible.

What if the election was subtly hacked, in a way that left lingering doubts (51%-vs-48% kind of results and all that), but no solid proof?

OSS?

[Xzzy]

Does the HBO show spend any time discussing the three "sides" to the debate? E-Voting, open sourced e-voting software, and paper voting? The last Slashdot article on this topic, when Diebold's complaint was announced, spent some time on this. The worry being, the debate is nothing more than "e-voting good" or "e-voting bad", ignoring the possibility that "open source e-voting" might be a viable middle ground.

How do you think open source could fit into this issue? Or should it?

Re:OSS?

[Speare]

Before I poo-poo the idea, let me say I like the idea of OSS implementations of anything the government does: they pay for this implementation in my dollars, so I might as well get a chance to see how it works. But this does not make the system more secure.

Even with OSS, you're relying on an assurance by some clerk at the polling station that the code you've audited at home is the code that drives your voting choice from fingertip to election commission. You can't SEE software, and as this crowd knows, rootkits can virtualize the whole machine to appear to run one thing while really doing something else.

The only way for an individual to audit their vote is to see their vote on a tangible artifact, be it marks on paper, holes in paper, colored beads or whatever works in your village. It's already bad enough that you can't follow that vote artifact out of the voting booth into the counting center, and watch it every step of the way, but with many eyes from all vested parties along the path, you can have a small sense of security in this process.

Pen-and-paper voting

[NetDanzr]

What, exactly, is the argument against pen-and-paper voting? It seems to me that everybody wants to migrate to voting machines - electronic or mechanical - but so far nobody has explained to me what's wrong with good old-fashioned "put an X next to your candidate's name" voting.

Re :Pen-and-paper voting

[Black Parrot]

> What, exactly, is the argument against pen-and-paper voting? It seems to me that everybody wants to migrate to voting machines - electronic or mechanical - but so far nobody has explained to me what's wrong with good old-fashioned "put an X next to your candidate's name" voting.

The "problem" is that it doesn't shuffle enough of your tax money into corporate pockets.

Re:Pen-and-paper voting

[???]

1. Handicapped access.

It demeans the real challenges faced by individuals with handicaps to suggest that we need to diminish the reliability of our electoral system in order to encourage their participation.

2. Printing costs.

Costs for paper / pencil only systems are significantly less than for electronic systems, particularly when election administration is centralized (see Canadian electoral system costs). This is even before you consider that electronic voting equipment is being amortized over an absurdly long period of time (far longer than their estimated useful life. I would bet there will be a lot of counties writing off systems after the next cycle that still have significant unamortized book value).

3. Storage costs.
Storage costs are increased with electoral equipment. The equipment itself needs to be stored and takes more room than paper ballots. Further, the equipment typically has more stringent environmental requirements (temperature, humidity, etc. control) for the storage facility than paper ballots. Paper ballots need to be stored for less time than equipment. Paper ballots can be destroyed once disputes relating to them have been settled, and only have a useful life of at most one electoral cycle. Equipment must be stored throughout its useful life.

4. People.

It takes candidates' representatives and two officials from the authority conducting the election to count ballots in precinct. These are individuals who are already involved in the process, observing and administering (respectively) the conduct of the voting process of the election.

5. Quicker results.
We know who our Prime Minister is before bed-time EST on election night. How about you? Vote counting is a highly parallelizable activity.

Regardless, is it appropriate to set cost and speed above accuracy and security in elections administration?

Why is it so hard?

[gorbachev]

As a software engineer I'm constantly amazed at how incompetent Diebold and other companies making e-voting applications appear to be. This stuff is not rocket science at all, but fairly uncomplicated, basic software engineering.

Why do you think it's so hard for Diebold and other companies to come up with solutions that work well? Is it a stubborn unwillingness to listen and learn from critics, shere incompetence, or something else?

On Open vs. Closed Networks

[the-banker]

It has always seemed to me that the real Achilles heel of e-voting is the networked approach that most vendors have taken. With a networked approach, fraud can be perpetrated on a mass scale if entry is gained at one weakness.

As a former election judge, I have enough experience to know that rigging a paper election is a daunting, nearly impossible task, as there are litterally thousands of ballot boxes that would have to be compromised for any sort of advanagte (on a state or national scale).

Are these concerns balanced (or even discussed) when officials are purchasing equipment? Do local Board of Elections have not only the expertise, but the concern to ask the right questions? And how do BoE directors react when they hear about your concerns and research?

A simple solution?

[Brickwall]

To me, the only 'benefit' of e-voting is the speed of counting after the polls close, which seems pretty small compared to the problems that have surfaced. That said, I wonder what you think of this possible solution:

After the voter makes his selection on the e-voting machine, the machine then prints out a piece of paper with the voter's choice on it. The voter reviews it, makes sure it's correct, and then exits the booth and deposits the paper ballot in an old-fashioned ballot box. When the polls close, we have an instant count but if the result is challenged, we have the old-fashioned system to do a recount. Note that "hanging chads" and other such nonsense wouldn't apply, as the machine would print the voter's choice - no question of "unclear marks" or "multiple selections", or other problems that exist with manual ballots today. It seems to me this would satisfy both camps, without requiring a massive rewrite of the software, and minimal physical changes. (These machines must have a port somewhere that a printer could be connected to.) Any thoughts?