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

because without a verifiable paper trail...

[holden caufield]

you can never be certain when duplicate events can occur.

Re:because without a verifiable paper trail...

[catchblue22]

Elections can be stolen with paper ballot elections. However it is far more work to do so than with a fully electronic election. To steal a paper ballot election, especially if it isn't close, you would likely have to create a large number of fake ballots manually, and then selectively replace your victim's ballots. When there are many hundreds of thousands of ballots, this is a huge task, and cannot be done quickly. And to really cover your tracks you might want to shuffle the ballots, so they are not sorted by choice. Scrambling a deck of 52 cards is hard enough. Imagine hundreds of thousands of ballots. And of course all of these changes would have to match with the vote tallies. Any errors will be obvious, and could be considered evidence for voting fraud.

Contrast this with electronic paperless voting, where a single piece of software can replicate itself through many voting machines, as was shown possible by two Princeton professors. This code can then invisibly alter votes, and then eradicate itself after use. The fraud in this case would be undetectable.

I agree

[Bobo_The_Boinger]

Having worked as an election judge in Maryland, which is now using Diebold machines, I just don't trust them. I have seen the printed tape shown at the beginning and end of each election, so I know the machine told me that it took X number of votes, and that that total matched my hand tabulated total from who went to each machine, but how do I know that when the button for candidate X was pressed, the machine actually recored it for X. I don't know. No one knows. And furthermore, there is no possible WAY to know after the voter leaves the machine.

It is a stupid system, and I am proud that someone with more authority than me is saying so. I believe all the politicians who decided that touch screen voting was a "great idea" should be voted out of office ASAP.

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Several voters who lacked the most basic intelligence in comprehending the shockingly simple instructions on a paper ballot voted in Florida

Do you actually understand what happened? Do you know how punch ballots work? "Shockingly simple" isn't even funny as a joke. You're given a ballot card with perforations that mark off squares. You're given a round pointy piece of metal. Instructions: Poke out a square hole with a round stick. "Hanging chads" are of course rampant, and for decades, they have been a known problem with a well-established solution for determining whether you voted or not: If the chad is hanging by only one or two corners, you voted whether or not the machine can read your vote. Cue the 2000 election, and Republicans whining about Gore's whining for a hand count for hanging chads. Cue retarded insults like yours that ignores the fact that hanging chads have been around for decades with an established procedure for dealing with them. Cue the supreme court canceling the recount, without any constitutional authority to tell Florida how to run an election or to demand Presidential election results on any particular day prior to the electoral college's ballot.