CA Proposes Rigorous Voting Machine Testing

christian.einfeldt writes "During her successful campaign for California Secretary of State, newly-minted California Elections Czar Debra Bowen spoke repeatedly of the need to use free open source software in voting machines to ensure the integrity of California's elections. Now that Secretary Bowen is acting on that campaign pledge, closed-source voting machine vendor Diebold worries aloud that rejecting its black-box voting machines could snarl California's elections. Diebold's concerns come at the same time that it is suing Massachusetts for declining to purchase those same voting machines." Quoting: "California's elections chief is proposing the toughest standards for voting systems in the country, so tough that they could [have the result of banishing] ATM-like touch-screen voting machines from the state. For the first time, California is demanding the right to try hacking every voting machine with 'red teams' of computer experts and to study the software inside the machines, line-by-line, for security holes."

Comments

novel idea

[gEvil (beta)]

Thoroughly test the voting machines before deploying them? Wow! Why didn't I think of that?

Re:novel idea

[TheMeuge]

I smell a "Diebold sues California" /. headline coming.

Re:novel idea

[gyroid]

If a state selectively purges voter rolls, supplies too few machines for specific precincts, or uses law enforcement and batteries of volunteers to challenge or intimidate voters, the accuracy of the machines doesn't really matter.

One principal of a democracy

[saibot834]

One principal of a democracy is that everyone can verify the counting of votes.

Now unless you teach everyone how to program I don't see how you can preserve this principal.

Unaccaptable failure rate?

[Firethorn]

31 machines out of 340 districts? How many were in each district?

Heck, from what I've read, they've had problems with more than 10% of the diebold machines.

At least with an automark type system you still have the paper ballots to fall back on, even if a voter might require assistance to fill it out.

When a diebold type device malfunctions you have the potential for lost and/or erronous vote information, not to mention that NO votes can be taken.

e-voting must be as strong as paper

[davidwr]

Properly monitored paper ballot voting system is about as good as you can get for the average person. It's main weakness is that it's not private for people who cannot see or read the language of the ballot and for people who cannot mark the ballot for whatever reason. The fact that you must go to a voting station rather than voting from home is also a disadvantage.

Any replacement system must preserve the strengths of a paper ballot.

This means

• Open specifications
  
• validation and verification of all equipment and procedures concerning the vote

In practice, this means the voting hardware and software must be open to public inspection. The same goes for the procedures used by voting officials.

It also means to the extent possible, the entire process must be observed by interested and neutral parties. Obviously the actual voting must be done in secret but anything that doesn't reveal an individual's vote should be observed. Those things that cannot be easily observed, such as actual electronic count, must be repeatable by another method, such as a hand-count, with the same results.

Funny thing

[WindBourne]

is that we seem to keep learning and re-learning that lesson. Back in the 1960 election, there was a lot of evidence that indicated that kennedy won chicago by having the dems cheat. Many systems were put in place to prevent that cheating. Now, with the new current system, the evidence is even more overwhelming and yet, we are back to trying to prevent cheating. In particular, it appears that Ohio, Florida, and even texas had massive amounts of voter fraud during the last couple of elections. I guess that our society will be doomed to re-living the same problems over and over as long as we have politicians like rove ( and the dem == before).

What we need is a slot machine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Any electronic voting machines should be regulated to at least the same level as a slot machine. But for some reason we apparently believe that handling the $20 dollars we want to gamble in a casino is more important than the results of an election.

A casino would never field a slot machine (even a 1c machine) that was as insecure as a Diebold voting machine.

The security model for a slot machine is rock solid. The hardware and software (source included) must be submitted and approved by each jurisdiction. The security model ensures that if even one bit in the software has been corrupted, the machine ceases to function. The cash-in and payout of each machine is redundantly logged. The machines are completely power tolerant, meaning you can cut the power at any time; when the power is restored the machine will come back up in exactly the same state that it was in before power loss. The machine can print tickets (for a paper trail), as well as talk securely over a network.

Basically, all the requirements we'd like to see in a voting machine are the same that a slot machine already conforms to. There's no reason to re-invent the wheel here, most of the work has already been done.

Treason

[loftling]

I think that attorneys for the government should be able to demand to see source code for all the machines already deployed. If source cannot be produced (or it does not compile to the same machine code present on the voting machines) then those responsible should be rounded up and tried for treason. Seriously: at no point should *anything* related to how these machines tally votes have been regarded as a secret: that's simply not how voting works in the US.

I believe that California shouldn't have to demand transparency, I think that we citizens have implicitly expected transparency all along.

Donate to the Open Voting Consortium, they've been working with Debra Bowen and many others to fix the system.

Re:Good idea

[Coryoth]

The next step would be to check and make sure that the intention the code works with is the intention the people desire. And this is why formal specification should be used. It provides a middle tier between implementation code, and English language specification. Verifying that the code properly implements the formal specification can be done programatically and independently quite easily. In turn, validating the formal specification, by comparing it to the peoples desires in terms of a English language set of requirements is easier than trying to compare coed to the requirements, since it is only intentions that are formally defined, with no issues of implementation to complicate the matter. Stating your intentions in an unambiguous way, via formal specification, ought to be an obvious first step for anything where the need for assurance is as high as it with electronic voting.

Re:Pre-Hacking

[mOdQuArK!]

Well, it'll cost the taxpayers a fair bit to do that kind of testing properly - looking at it that way, you'll get a dollar value of how much the taxpayers think a corruption-resistant democracy is worth!