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Deathblow To a Voting Machine
SiggyRadiation writes "According to their newsletter (my English translation here), the Dutch group that 'doesn't trust the voting computers' has won a round against the industry and the civil servants that seem hell-bent on reintroducing voting machines — NewVote, made by SDU — that the Dutch minister of the interior has suspended. Apparently SDU provided 5 slightly different samples of its machine to the Dutch version of the NSA (well... the very humble Dutch version anyway) for testing purposes. Of those five, four machines emitted radiation in such a way that the votes cast could be monitored. SDU's NewVote received its final deathblow when it became clear that the one machine that stayed within the radiation limits used a green-on-red color-scheme for its screen. And that would be a small problem for the 4% of all men that cannot distinguish between red and green."
In fact, during the general assembly elections of november 2006 a lot of counties decided to revert to old-skool paper and pencil voting because of the same issues. Wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl has done some excellent work!
I know you're kidding, but they are referring to electromagnetic radiation, which can be monitored with Van Eck phreaking.
I remember reading about this in a Neal Stephenson novel (Cryptonomicon) some years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking I guess thats what they mean by "radiation", and wikipedia seems to confirm it.
"NewVote received its final deathblow when it became clear that the one machine that stayed within the radiation limits used a green-on-red color-scheme for its screen. And that would be a small problem for the 4% of all men that cannot distinguish between red and green."
Good heavens. As a a person with good old-fashioned red/green colourblindness I assure you that this statement is false.
There is no way that 4% of men can't distinguish between red and green. There's some difficulty in some circumstances, but a green on red colour screen on a voting machine would almost certainly be readable. They'll use high-contrast hues.
The vast majority of red-green colourblindness results from a cone deficiency. In some circumstances it's difficult to make out some differences, but if I see a red shirt, I know it's red and not green. Green lettering on the red shirt would likely be completely readable.
However, I seldom see purple. Usually it looks blue to me.
No, no, no! That's not how voter-verifiable paper trails work! If you let the voter keep the piece of paper, they can use it to show how they voted (to collect a payment for their vote, or avoid being beat up or fired). If the piece of paper can't be visually read by the voter for them to know what it says, it isn't "voter-verifiable" any longer and doesn't allow immediate detection of fraud. Nobody wants to let the voter keep a piece of paper. (Well, almost nobody. There are some proposals where the paper is only readable using separate equipment which the voter is only allowed to access when alone, but that's a corner case and has problems of its own).
Instead, VVPT systems have a traditional physical lockbox. Think of the paper as being something behind glass; the user looks at it, validates that it says what they want it to say, and then press "yes" or "no". Press yes? It's deposited in a lockbox which can be secured via traditional methods. Press no? It's marked as void, or shredded, or whatever. It's not the voter's responsibility or burden to track the paper; rather, it's kept in the voting system for use in audits and recounts. (Audits being a very important thing -- having the ability to audit means you can take a sample of the physical ballots, check whether the proportions match what the electronic counters said, and know whether you have a big enough problem to require a larger recount).
This is still an improvement over pure paper ballots because you have the usability and accessibility enhancements associated with electronic voting, but the enhanced auditability associated with a piece of paper which a voter has looked at and approved.
We want them gone because their integrity and reliability are in question, not whether they meet the "ADA" (or equivalent in other countries) requirements or that voter privacy might be violated.
In fact, having a machine that specifically reads voter responses for the purpose of comparing them with the machine's reported voting results might be an EXCELLENT thing. If the tally's don't match, we'd know something was afoot.
Well, not much of a phrase
(but consists of actual family names like naaktgebored (borne naked) and zeldenthus (seldom at home) )
A Dutch citizen group "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" ("We do not trust voting machines"), released a report performing a secuirty review of the the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B voting systems. Chapter 6 (page 14) covers "Compromising emanations" (i.e. TEMPEST). The Nedap machines are DRE systems, but are not a traditional touchscreen. They use an electromechanical touch sensitive full-face ballot interface (similar to the Shouptronic). However, the TEMPEST issues were not related to the input features, but rather the small LCD screen used to verify votes. Similar to many optical scan voting system readers.
While the subject of compromising emanations is one that deserves attention, ultimately what allowed relevant information to be interpreted from the emissions was that a major political party's name contains an accents, an extended ASCII character (Christen Democratisch Appèl) resulting in an emissions variation, something less likely to be a serious concern in the United states.
"Radiation"
Do not think your standard definition for radiation. Think more like spurious emission. It doesn't mean the voting machine runs on Plutonium... These types of emissions are released at some level from all electronic devices. It only becomes a problem when the emissions escape the device housing.
Report
Check out the full report. It's a pretty interesting look in this one particular voting machine.