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NIST Condemns Paperless Electronic Voting
quizzicus writes "Paperless electronic voting machines 'cannot be made secure' [pdf] according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In the most sweeping condemnation of voting machines issued by any federal agency, NIST echoes what critics have been saying all along, that due to the lack of verifiability, 'a single programmer could rig a major election.' Rather than adding printers, though, NIST endorses the hand-marked optical-scan system as the most reliable."
Now might be a good time to point people in the direction of Punchscan.org, previously chronicled on Slashdot here
I worked as an election judge in MD, and in the district I worked in someone who came in complained to me that the roll-call judges were just asking for name, then telling the voter their address and just asking "is that correct?". This voter said that she had been trained as a challenger and that was one of the first things they were told to verify. So I brought it up with the roll-call judges (I was working as a unit judge) and they said they hadn't received any real directions that they were supposed to be asking for BOTH items (name and address), so they just asked one and then verified the other. The two chief judges didn't seem to worry about it much, but I think they did change to asking voters for both items for the rest of the day. I never heard any real clarification on what the real rules are though.
Note that MD does require you to present ID the first time you vote in the state from the rules I read. Note sure how the roll-call judges know that or not though when looking at the voter registration machine.
--David
One of the things they cover is about the manditory 3% or 4% recount to make sure they don't need a full recount. The problem lies in the fact that the ballots selected are not random. The law specifies that the 3% is "randomly self-selected" by the district/state elections clerk. This means that out of 10,000 ballots, they pick and choose 300-400 ballots to have public volunteers recount.
The public volunteers suspected that the ballots were picked specifically to match the final percentages so there would be no recount. Most of the ballots were grouped together by party lines as if they picked out a certain number of (R) ballots, a certain number of (D) ballots, and a certain number of (I) ballots but forgot to shuffle them together.
The headline of the post makes it seem like the NIST thinks that paper trails are the answer. That is not their conclusion, in fact they say the current paper-trail systems don't work.
"The NIST is also going to recommend changes to the design of machines equipped with paper rolls that provide audit trails.
Currently, the paper rolls produce records that are illegible or otherwise unusable, and NIST is recommending that "paper rolls should not be used in new voting systems."
via http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3860#more-3860
We really should just use optical scan ballots. That is a paper trail voters have to verify, and the ballots can be meaningfully recounted. Then Diebold and the other vendors should be sued for knowingly selling defective products--possibly fraudulently.
Only one thing though: the 2000 election fiasco was caused by punched card ballots, not mark-sense paper ballots. That's why most voting jurisdictions are using mark-sense ballots nowadays, if only because they can be both hand-read and machine-read.
I have a job reviewing the software that runs the elections. As a result I have several of the packages in question on my machine. The auditing I do has nothing to do with the election security. It is technical. None the less; I have looked at the security issue. I agree with the critics entirely. Electronic Voting without a proper paper trail is a sucking security hole. The Diebold software has several leaks in it including USB drive access. I have reviewed on package I would trust and it does use a paper trail. In general the critics of this methodology of voting without paper trails are more than correct.
Any election even with a paper trail, should have several other controls built in. The development of regionally accessible voting is a good step. This is where you can vote anywhere the election is being held. It makes stuffing boxes kind of hard. Another method needs to be 3 way tally. The voting totals need to be local, reported to a regional and to a central authority and the results compared. The paper ballots should automatically be recounted by machine and a certain number of them sampled for hand recount. The custody of the paper ballots should be under ARMED WITNESSED GUARD at a central location such as the State Agency. It should not be under the control of local officials. In general the election oversight agency of a State should be most carefully constructed with agents who are not subject to political whim for employment.
I have worked as an election official in the past. The number one concern of any citizen in an election should be that the election tally's and results are properly handled. A Former County Commissioner from my district was wrongly not certified for election because of probate Judge who was dishonest and it took a federal suit to over turn his ruling. He was placed in office about 13 months late after the hack the judge certified wrongly had pretty well looted the office. Election stealing is a very real issue and one of the highest concern for people with an elected government. In the election in question, the Probate Judge certified a box as valid when it had 1100 more votes (all cast were for one candidate) cast than the box had voters.
I cannot emphasize enough that any machine voting system that does not track with a proper receipt system and with other major controls is simply a machine to steal elections more efficiently. Such a system makes stealing easy and removes all evidence that it was stolen.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Also, the way the punchcard and ballot booklet were loaded into the machine, the holes and the arrows didn't exactly line up. You had to guess which arrow was closest to the hole you wanted to punch. I remember thinking at the time how easy it would be to vote for Buchanan instead of Gore, although I had no idea how many people would fall for that.
I know I voted the way I intended because I held my punchcard up to the light afterward to make sure I'd hit the correct hole. But the elections office had never advised anyone to do that, and it wasn't part of the standard voting instructions. (Polling places also had prominent signs that said "No talking," which caused some voters to believe they couldn't ask questions.) Nobody had ever heard of the word "chad." I doublechecked the ballot only because it was so confusing.
If a person is so stupid that he cannot understand simple instructions, then his vote would likely not have been an informed vote: no vote is certainly better than an idiotic vote.Hey, it's Florida. We have a lot of older people with bad eyesight and impaired mobility, plus people whose first language isn't English. None of this is synonymous with "idiotic" or "unsure of which candidate they want in the White House." Voting isn't meant to be a dexterity/logic puzzle; in fact, U.S. law specifically forbids literacy tests as a prerequisite for voting. All an election is supposed to do is to record the intent of the voter, preferably as seamlessly as possible.
Actually, there's another problem with paper trails that nobody seems to have yet picked up on. Federal law requires voting records, including paper trails, be kept for 22 months. But most of the ballot printers on the DRE machines use thermal paper rolls for the paper trail. The printing will degrade on these after a few months, or if the paper is exposed to heat they will become entirely illegible.
Either way, this could turn out to be a major problem if next summer some election official goes to check the paper trails from this past eletion and finds a cabinet full of blank rolls.