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."

Comments

Re:Hand-marked is the way to go

[vandon]

That, coupled with a mandated recount in a random sampling of districts in each county after the election.

If you ever get a chance to watch HBOs "Hacking Democracy", you should watch it. It's mainly about electronic voting, but not just about electronic voting. It's about the non-transparency of present day voting.
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.

Re:Old paper ballots were fine.

[MtViewGuy]

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.

Re:Electronic Voting

[cluckshot]

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.